some problems solved

Donna and Max

More cow news. Indi found the neighbours’ cow, that was lost for so long, out on the road and managed to get it into the yards.   Then she and her boy friend got permission to take it straight over to the butcher.  It was pretty wild, and impossible to handle or contain, so our community is heaving a collective sigh of relief now it has gone.

Donna is doing a good job with her calf, Max, and he now takes enough of her milk that we do not have to milk her.   This is also a great relief. Max is growing very fast and we have castrated and dehorned him so we are happy to let him grow on for a bit.   The trouble is that the grass is dying off really early this year with the lack of rain.   Everyone is cutting hay early because of fire danger and there is not going to be a lot of it.

Bo, Pip, (Al’s wife) and I met in Healesville last week for a party meeting.   Once again we have agreed on small consumable gifts, preferably home made except for the children.    We have decided to have salads this year because the vegetables are always cold before they get eaten what ever we do. The idea is to have a smorgous board and let everyone pick what they want.

I went for the month’s shopping trip yesterday and ordered two free range turkeys that we can eat hot or cold when we get a better idea about what the weather is going to be like.   Last year we ate outside in the ruins, which was very nice and easy.   Bo has just had her works party in the ruins.   All the employees from the restaurant and the brewery came along and Bo provided a meal. Everyone seemed to be happy and several people camped the night here. Indi cooked them pancakes for breakfast.

Morgie did the cooking for the party more or less unaided. He is only 13 but he managed like a professional. All the steaks came out well at the same time as the warm breads and everything else. I was very impressed.   The camp kitchen is proving to be very useful. 

Bovine news

We were all set to send Donna, the Ayrshire cow, off to market today. She must have known because yesterday she had a change of heart and began allowing her calf to feed from her. Edd says Max looked embarrassed when his mother finally began to lick his hair into shape. He was accustom to her knocking him out of the way whenever he came close.  We can now milk Donna once a day and we hope we can sell her with her calf.

We are gradually completing the list of assets that we need to supply to the lawyers for the class action. The amount of stuff we used to have is totally horrifying. No wonder I struggled to look after it all.  There are pages and pages of stuff and I cannot imagine how anyone is going to deal with it. At least when it is done it is some one else’s problem and I can finally forget about it all. Edd and I had stuff left from our early childhood. I was aghast to find out the present day price for my Dolmetch recorder that I must have had about 60 years!

I have tried very hard since the fires to avoid getting over loaded with belongings but we still have a problem with letting things go and as a result get bogged down with work. Other people’s stuff also tends to collect here. Al came yesterday and made sure the boats were OK.   Al and Simon had put the boats in the large polyhouse so that they could be repaired, but once it was broken they no longer had any protection and were in danger of getting more damaged.

Our new neighbours came up again this weekend and we had great excitement when a friend of theirs landed a small plane on Hargreaves Hill!  It was a pretty risky venture dodging power lines and coping with rough paddock landing on a hillside, but it came and went with out disaster. The plane gave all the animals an enormous shock. The goats must have believed that they were being attacked by an enormous, albino eagle! The noise also flushed out Craig’s missing cow that had been hiding somewhere on their land! We were all very relieved to clear up that mystery.  All round the cow situation has now stabilized.

Next we must prepare for Xmas. Time is going much too quickly and I will be in difficulties if I leave things much longer! Everyone else in the family is equally busy so goodness knows how we will plan our mid summer feast. I also think that Bo is having a work party here soon, but I have no more work related events planned.

mystery of the missing cow

Maxin his shelter we made by the stock yards

flowers in my private jungle

Donna, the Ayrshire cow, has now recovered from the birth trauma but will not accept her calf, Max. Twice a day we have to milk out two quarters and then tie her feet so the calf can suckle on the other side. It all takes quite a time even though Edd has now got the milking machine going again.

For the first two week her milk contained antibiotics so we could not use it but this it is OK now so I am making cheese. The plan is to sell Donna because this is all rather more work than we can handle. We should have enough goats’ milk to feed Max, but we will need to teach him to drink from a bucket.

One problem remains. Our neighbour, Craig’s cow was in the paddock with Donna having broken through our fences. She was quite settled there so we fed her with our cows whilst we waited for Craig to fix a fence at his place.  When the vet left after the birth trauma I looked around for Craig’s cow but she had disappeared. We expected her to turn up, but this never happened. We searched the hill and Craig searched his land, but basically the cow just vanished!

Cows are rather large things to just disappear and even after checking with all the neighbours we have no idea where she is. We did hear gunshots on the hill where she was born, but our new neighbours there say a builder was shooting at rabbits with a rather too large gun. The mystery remains.

Apart from cow milking sessions we have also been handed another big problem. We are involved in a class action to try and reclaim some of our losses from the power company that has been blamed for the fires in 2009. The lawyers have asked everyone to supply a detailed list of what they lost costing new for old at present day prices. That means looking up the price of everything. So far I have done 15 pages on spreadsheets!

It is all very upsetting because it brings everything back to mind. After the fires we all sort of thought that over time things would be back to normal. This did happen for houses on small blocks with out land, but for farm blocks we began to look for what we considered a “new normal”. Quite a few of us have achieved this and though we realise that our lives will not be the same as we had before we have come to terms with what we have. Others like Brian could not get to this stage and have sold up.

Anyway, this is a horrible job whatever way you look at it so I have decided to get it over with as quick as possible and forget it. I have worked for hours for the last two weeks and I am getting somewhere. I cannot see how the lawyers can check or deal with all this information so I am not expecting any results any time useful.  Obviously we had far too much stuff because with the host farm we had three houses fully stocked as well as the farm stuff.  In some ways I am relieved not to be responsible for it all any more.

On a happier note we are now getting strawberries and raspberries for breakfast and snow peas. The first zucchinis are about ready too. I so look forward to the first ones but by the end of the season we are over them.

Drama on the school camp

November 2 2015

The school campers have gone home now for the long weekend of the spring racing carnival and the rain has set in. The plants need it after the warm sunny week of the camp but right now I don’t.  Last Thursday Donna gave birth to a bull calf. She was up and walking round in the morning and the calf had been licked off but I had a sort of feeling that something was wrong. This turned out to be true. One of the young lads , who was especially good at stock work, checked her at lunchtime and found her collapsed under a tree looking very sick indeed.

The school group helped Edd get the calf up into the goat shed whilst I phoned around to try and get a vet. It was not easy to find anyone, but Yarra Glen sent up a young woman who turned out to be a godsend. By the time she arrived the cow had a huge prolapse but Edd and a teacher had managed to get her supported in a better position and the kids had fetched straw bales to prop her up and water.

The vet organised everyone into a working team and we gave the cow calcium and magnesium into a vein and then subcutaneously. The teacher then supported the mass of bloody matter that had fallen out and the vet slowly started the difficult job of stuffing everything back inside the cow.  She has since admitted that she could not have done this without the help. The amazing thing is that whilst struggling to do this she also talked to the school group and explained everything.

The first effort failed when the cow moved unexpectedly. She is so heavy that I was knocked flying off the bale I was sitting on trying to hold her head up. The second try was more successful and the vet used tape to stitch the cow back together. The teacher and I helped press against Donnas skin to hold it all in place whilst the vet gave her a second injection to stop her pushing. Donna was then given antibiotics and we just had to leave her to try and recover. Luckily she had enough strength to get onto her feet and we could walk her slowly up to the yards.

The little calf was very weak and for the first day all I could do was force-feed him goats milk. Luckily he started sucking on Friday and by lunchtime we were able to put the cow in the bale and he started to feed from her.  This made a very happy ending for all the kids who had worked so hard to save them. Donna has not really accepted the calf but she allows it to feed from her twice a day in the bale whilst I milk out the extra four litres.

The next problem was to get the calf, Max, a shelter. We had an old stock crate outside Edd’s shed that was the right size so we moved it next to the yards and made a roof and protective wall from corrugated iron that the kids had salvaged from the old chook yards. A huge thunderstorm hit when we were doing this but we just kept working until we could get the Max under shelter in a bed of fresh straw. I towelled him down and then went down to the house to change my clothes because I was soaked to the skin.

The worst problem on the school camp could be blamed on an avocado. One poor girl cut her finger badly whilst chopping it for the evening meal and a teacher and I had to drive her to Maroondah hospital where we met her mum. She needed surgery to repair the damage so we had to manage the rest of the camp with out her. Everyone was most upset because she was such a good cook.