454

Hi Everyone,

                        Once upon a time in the open pastures at Shepherd’s Hill Farm a heifer was born to a cow named Maggie. It was May 1st, so we could think of no better name than “May” for the new born calf. May grew up to be a fine cow, and one day we bred her to our bull named Roy and nine months later May gave birth to a heifer in June—and we called her June! The next year she calved in April—and you guessed it we named the heifer April. The following year it was March, and then there was February—we called her Feb for short. The same year she had a bull calf in December and we called him Deck. A year later May calved again in December and this time it was another heifer that we named Decci. May gave us one more calf before tragedy stuck and she died—but she had lived 10 whole years and blessed us and others with many new milk cows. One of those cows is still in our milk herd—and that is Decci! She has blessed us with two heifers so far (Merci—French for “thank you” because she was born Thanksgiving week, and Autumn—because she was born in the fall). A week ago Decci gave birth again. Clayton and I were milking the cows Sunday morning and I asked him if he had fed Decci yet. He said “no” and as I looked over the cows left to bring in to feed and milk I didn’t see Decci. We realized that Decci didn’t come in with the herd, but must have stayed behind. After breakfast we drove down to the cow field and we found Decci with her 2022 model. He is an adorable little bull with the cutest of markings and the sweetest of personalities. He loves to sleep—as most babies do, and he likes to sleep in privacy. He is known to find a section of weeds and curl up in the middle of them and fall fast asleep. Once he was found on the far end of the property sleeping where no one could disturb him—at least not until Mom and Steve stumbled upon him while they were looking for the greenest pasture to put the heifers in. One day I arrived at the milking parlor to start milking and I found the little bull calf in the milking area getting some loving from Clayton. He would come and visit us while we milked most days. Then on Thursday we got a phone call from a husband whose wife had bought two heifer calves from us back in the spring and he wanted to surprise her with a bull calf for Christmas—and he wondered if we had one. We sure did! Decci’s little bull calf would be a week old by Christmas and after a week on his mama getting all the colostrum he wanted he would be ready to go to a new home to be bottle fed. The calf was supposed to be picked up Christmas Eve, but complications arose and it would be after Christmas before the husband could pick up the calf—so I took a few pictures and sent them by email and they found their way into a card and into the wife’s Christmas stocking. I heard today that she was most ecstatic and was delighted with her husband’s Christmas surprise. I wonder what they will name him.

We had a calf born last Sunday, and one born this Sunday—but a lot of other things happened on the farm between those two births. Papa spent Monday planting some more winter grass seeds. Mom weeded in the garden some, and Clayton and I picked up the green bean plantsSheSh that we had pulled up on Saturday and put them in the compost bin. Then we weeded the two rows and added compost and wood ash to one row in order to get it ready to plant carrots on Tuesday. For my birthday Mom bought me a tilther—well it is half mine and half hers. The tilther only tills up the top 2 inches of soil and helps you to mix your amendments into the top soil. The neatest thing about the tilther is that it doesn’t have a motor—it is ran off of a battery operated drill, a very ingenious invention! Clayton and Mom put it together and then on Monday I was ready to try it out—and everyone was ready to see how it worked. When I first pulled the handle to start it the tilther began to come backwards toward me—the drill was in reverse gear. We got it switched to forward and it worked pretty good, but we were having troubles getting it to turn off after I let go of the handle. Clayton studied it and was able to fix that problem, and thankfully he was able to fix the next problem too—I couldn’t get it to go forward in the dirt. He realized that I was holding the handles too low to the ground and once I lifted them up the tilther was off and racing to the other end of the garden bed. How nice it was to not have to break up the clumps of compost by hand! Come Tuesday I was able to go back and plant the bed with carrots.

Winter was determined to arrive COLD this year and we had a lot to do to prepare for its arrival. Steve and Mom spent hours putting the sides back up on the garden tunnels. Finding the strips of plastic in our very messy garden shed deemed to be a very big challenge. In the end the only thing that they could do was to totally empty out the garden shed and organize it as they put everything back in—which helped them tackle two jobs at once. They found the missing plastic, and they got the garden shed neatly organized. I was inside working on receipts when Mom came in and wanted me to bundle up and go to the garden with her. I thought that she just wanted to show me the sides up on the tunnels, but boy was I surprised when she opened the door to the garden shed and I saw the transformation.

While Mom and Steve were hanging the tunnel sides I was harvesting lemons, and Clayton was opening hotwires for Papa so that he could plant some winter grass seed in the heifer fields. When Clayton got back we grabbed two rakes, a large tarp, and the Gravely and headed up to the chestnut field to get as many leaves as we could. We have been working hard to fill one of the compost bins with a mixture of chestnut leaves and cow manure—and it seems that something seems to always get in the way of us accomplishing our goal. I am sure that a little here and a little there and we shall accomplish this soon—I hope!

The first day of winter was on Wednesday and the forecast was looking pretty COLD. We were supposed to wake up to weather in the 20’s on Christmas Eve so come Thursday it was all hands on deck in order to get everything cozy and warm. The bulls needed to be moved to the front field where a big hay rack was, and the heifers needed to be moved to the back field where their hay barn is. Moving the bulls went like a fairy tale, but moving the heifers was a nightmare. I think that Steve and Papa chased one little heifer around and around the field for an hour—but to no avail. Then later that day Mom, Papa and I went back out and our first attempt didn’t look like we were going to have any better success, but the second attempt found her in the back field with the other heifers. Papa cleaned out the old bedding out of the sheep barn and spread out new straw bedding and filled the hay rack up with hay. Mom and Steve finished attaching the sides to the last tunnel, and Clayton and I picked all the lemons off of the Ponderosa lemon tree in the garden. The Meyers lemon tree at the house is loaded with lemons—but they are not ripe yet. We had spent a few days here and there harvesting lemons and by last Tuesday most all of the low lemons had been harvested. Clayton and I now had the job of removing all the lemons over our head and out of our reach. The best tools and buildings are those that have multi-purposes—and around here there is no better tool to get lemons out of a tree than a small hooked shepherd’s crook that we use to catch lambs and sheep by their leg. So instead of hooking lambs, we were hooking lemons. We snagged all the lemons that we could reach with our crooks, and then we needed a very tall ladder to get the remaining lemons. When all was said and done we had a total of 15 five gallon buckets and crates of lemons. Now we await the juicing party.

There is always plenty of work to be done here on the farm and we are always saying that we never have enough time or hands to get it all accomplished—but every once in a while you have to stop and take time to smell the roses. In the month of December though there is one thing special to do that you cannot do any other time of the year. The whole month of December we wanted to go see Christmas lights—but we all got sick and we were having a hard time finding time and remembering that we wanted to go see lights. Then Thursday morning Clayton asked about seeing the lights and we realized that Thursday night was our last chance before Clayton left to go home for the holidays and Christmas was over. So that night as soon as we got the dishes done we loaded up in the van and drove a good 45 minutes away to see 12 million lights at the Suwannee Lights in Live Oak.  It took about 30 minutes to drive through all the lights as we oohed and awed. They had Christmas music playing all throughout the little drive—with the music matching the scenes you were looking at. We drove through with our windows down. To our surprise and thankfulness, just seconds after we finished the light tour and arrived back on the main road heading for home it began to pour down rain—and it rained most of the way home. We were so grateful that it didn’t rain while we were looking at the lights.

Friday morning Clayton helped me milk the cows and then because Penny was visiting her mother we had to help wash the dishes also. Then Clayton packed up and headed south to visit his family. My brother David stopped by for a few hours to visit. After lunch it was just the three of us again and we still had quite a bit to do to get ready for the winter blast of freezing cold temperatures. There was a lime tree to move into the garage, and an orange tree to move into the garden shed. Papa went to town to purchase some gas heaters for the two lemon trees—but they didn’t have any available (they said that the northern stores sold them, but not the southern). We had to move the bay trees, fig trees, a few small lemon trees, aloe plants, and all the tender plants from the greenhouse into the poultry kitchen. Its walls are so insulated that it never gets cold in there. I think that it is warmer in there than in our house. It was going on 5:00 when we finished, and Papa still wasn’t back from town, and since Clayton wasn’t here either I headed out to separate the calves for the evening. The calves use one side of the sheep barn and the sheep use the other—the hay rack is in the middle so they share the hay pile. The calves tore up the panel that kept them from climbing in on top of the hay and when I went to feed them one of the calves attempted to climb inside the hay rack. I shooed it out and then came back to the house and grabbed a drill and some random pieces of wood and went back to the barn to fill in the gap the best that I could. Nothing was cut to fit, so I just pieced them up the best I could. In the end I think that I covered the hole enough that no calves can get inside. Once we were inside we went over the list of everything that we needed to do before the big freeze and realized that we hadn’t harvested the cabbage—but we had no energy left! I checked on the garden tonight and the cabbage looks like the cold hasn’t touched it at all. I cannot say the same about the broccoli. The spinach looks great, and the collards are a mix of wilted and just fine. We woke up to 22 degrees on Saturday and 15 degrees on Sunday. We have three more nights of 20’s and then we shall see just how everything has fared. I do know that the lemon trees have been hit—but hopefully just hard enough to cause them to lose their leaves but not hard enough to kill them.

Saturday the temperatures never got out of the thirties and for the first time in the last two years we fired up the wood burning stove in our living room. Our afternoon was spent cozily in the living room staying nice and warm. I haven’t had a free Saturday afternoon in a month and I was planning on relaxing on the sofa the whole afternoon—but I remembered the pile of ironing that was growing bigger with every passing week and since I had time I decided that instead of relaxing and watching some farm YouTube I would iron and watch some farm YouTube. Mom has been spending her down time shelling pecans.

Today was Christmas Day, and it was a little bit of a different Christmas for us. I am still coughing a lot and Mom is struggling with her heart since she got sick last—so we were not able to go to church, but Papa was well enough and so he got up at 5:00 and did his chores so that he could go to church. Mom and I got up around 7:00 and fixed breakfast—and the outside temperature was 15 degrees. It thankfully warmed up pretty quick and was in the 30’s by the time Mom and I headed out to milk. I set up all the milking equipment while Mom did the dishes. When I brought in the cows to be milked I noticed that Macy was mooing softly and looking around and walking with a slight waddle—and her udder was as tight as a tick. Macy was in labor on the coldest day of the year! Thankfully by the time she gave birth it had warmed up to around 40 degrees. She gave birth to a very cute little heifer and Mom and I both came up with the same name—“Merry”. She is such a cutie and Macy is a good mama. You can see them on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/shepherdshillfarmfl.  Our morning excitement was more than just freezing temps and calves being born—one of my air hoses that make my milking claws work froze and I could only milk one cow at a time. When you milk nine cows you want to be able to milk two at a time not just one. The air hoses filled up with condensation and the air was so cold that the water inside the pipe froze and wouldn’t let any air flow through. I was almost done milking before the ice had thawed out and I was able to use my second milk tank. Papa was home by 2:00 and then it was time to cook dinner. Although it was Christmas, a big meal was not on my menu. I cooked some potato and leek chowder and Mom and I fixed a fresh garden salad. While we ate my sister Nichole showed up and we reminisced of a Christmas long ago when Papa had come down with the flu Christmas Eve day and we ate grilled cheese sandwiches. The whole family (but me), came down sick with the flu and Nichole said that she remembered how dreary it was in the house and how sick she felt. I asked her if she remembered anything else, for she was only about 8 years old, and she said that she remembered that I had boiled everyone’s toothbrushes to kill the germs. Then that night when they went to brush their teeth the bristles fell out in their mouth and everyone was mad at me. I was forbidden to touch anyone’s toothbrush after that—but the incident sure made for some good laughing memories over the years.

I hope that you had a very Merry Christmas and that you took time to remember the reason for the season: Matthew 1:23 “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”

Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare