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.