Ah, yes, it looks like Spring may be on our doorstep. March most certainly came roaring in "like a lion" lashing us with crazy winds and stormy weather. Personally, I'm looking forward to the end of March when, as the old saying goes, it goes "out like a lamb". I don't think I will ever get used to tornado warnings! Just sayin'.......
Anyway, not everything related to Spring is scary. I picked these daffodils from the little area near our woods to cheer up our kitchen. Just seeing their sunny faces when I enter the room makes me smile. Each Fall I plant a few more bulbs in the same flower bed and every Spring the blooms show up. Huh! Imagine that!
The bulbs I planted the first couple of years after moving here are now doubling and tripling so within a few more years we should have a bed full of yellow blooms. You've got to love a return on your labor like that.....blooms that return year after year without any work on my part.
While the weather was nice and sunny we decided to muck out the barn. That meant penning the two girls in the small pasture while Joel made the trips back and forth to the compost pile. Somehow Saber and Shadow got into the pasture with Joel. Those little scoundrels.
With each trip Joel made on the tractor he had a sweet puppy patiently waiting for his return. These are the funniest dogs.
As soon as we had the barn cleaned out it was time to let the cows out of their confinement. Buttercup has absolutely no problem waiting at the gate, but Baby Belle would rather not get so close to me. Hmmmm, I'm going to have to work on that a lot more this Spring.
Buttercup really loves a good head scratching. She moves her head around trying to communicate exactly which area of her body would like some attention next. Who ever knew how much I'd love hanging around these animals? Certainly not me! If you had told me 5 years ago that I'd be playing with cows, kittens and alpacas I would have said there was no way. And yet, here we are, having the time of our lives learning about farm critters.
I finally had my camera inside the barn on this particular day and now you can see the manger that we built a few months ago. It works so well and has helped me avoid walking down the slippery slope of the pasture all winter long.
We did have one small issue, though. See the metal gizmo in Joel's left hand? Um, yea. Somehow Baby Belle had that thing caught in the ring portion of her halter. What in the world? We finally figured out that she must have rubbed herself up against some old fencing in the long pasture leading to the front of the farm and dislodged the metal as it attached itself to her halter.
See the ring in the photo above? That's where the metal was attached. Let me tell you, she gave us quite a little rodeo trying to corner her and get ahold of her halter so we could attempt to remove the metal from her. It took a lot of effort and two sets of pliers to finally open the ring on the metal and get it removed.
I sure am glad that's taken care of as we were concerned she could have hurt herself with such a heavy duty piece of hardware attached so close to her eye. Ah, yes, just one more small adventure in our quiet little lives.
And so I'll leave you with this parting shot of me coaxing the cows out of the pasture. I sure do love my life here!
Still working on becoming the cow whisperer,
Bah-ha-ha-ha!
Debbie
