Farm News 06-19-05

Sunday morning, after chores

Coyote Steals Christmas
Thursday morning I went out to do morning chores and found no sign of Christmas. Alas, there was evidence that a coyote had come in the driveway, snatched up the world's best looking turkey, and carried him away.

Coyotes tend to grab a bird and carry it 20 to 50 feet, then stop, kill the bird, and then continue on their way. I found the first pile of feathers by the barn and the second at the edge of the road. It must have been a sturdy coyote to carry off that turkey.

We all miss Christmas. He was a fine, funny friend.

Calvin

Have I mentioned that Calvin is back? He is somewhat unreliable, a condition I attribute directly to the possession of a driving license. Before a teenager has a driving license you generally know where they are: in the back seat, pointedly ignoring the driver, while they are being chauffeured to the fifth place in three days. Once a teen has a license he pretty much disappears except for feeding and laundry.

Thanksgiving: Seven and Holding

Seven little turkey poults hatched under Thanksgiving and Nyn produced a litter of bunnies. Shotgun and Marmalade, 8 week old kittens, came to live in the barn. Ayte's dozen bunnies are weaned, now, and Ayte has been bred again.

Calvin and I removed the seven poults from under Thanksgiving, a process she did not care for, and put them in a warm box for a few days. They began drinking and then eating after a day or so and I moved them to a small house with an enclosed run. After they are a week old I might let Thanksgiving take over their care, again.

Shotgun and Marmalade came from a reader. It is unlikely that Martha, our old barn cat, will produce any more kittens. After a surge in mating activity this spring she has settled down in post-menopausal comfort. She hasn't raised any sort of fuss with the new kittens, a change from her normal behavior.

Landscaping

A reader writes:

What's the etiquette for removal of religious statuary? In my newly purchased home there is a Mary on the half-shell in the back yard, complete with waterfall, which must go. But I don't know if there are rules about the disposal of that kind of thing (like with an old flag.) I don't want to inadvertently commit sacrilege and piss off all the Italian neighbors, you know?

Jeannette, a neighbor, once assured me that while in elementary school she really, honestly, truly was warned of the dangers of shiny shoes. She is German Catholic, not Italian Catholic, but so is the Pope. So, I took this problem to Jeannette.

Jeannette has a thing for restoration. She says that a first class paint job makes statuary a lot more pleasant to the eye. She went on for about twenty minutes about the art of painting religious statues, achieving the proper tinting in faces and such. Finally, I got her back to the question of how to get rid of it. I thought her solution was quite ingenious.

Make up a flier offering the statue for sale at auction or for a set price, the entire proceeds of which will go to the local parish church. Flier in hand, go to the neighbors on both sides of you and across the street, show them the flier, and ask their opinions. Distribute the flier through the neighborhood and drop off some at the Parish Office.

If you decide to have an auction then ask one of the neighbor kids to act as auctioneer. Serve tea and cookies at the auction, introduce yourselves to everybody, and join the neighborhood. Don't discuss Roe v. Wade.

Beets and Peas

Paula is thinning the beets, bringing in nice baskets full of small beets. She plants both red and gold beets. She recently made a potato salad with about equal parts potatoes and gold beets. It was quite tasty.

The peas are growing on trellises made of cow panel this year. Each panel is 16 feet long and stands on three steel posts.





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Farm News 06-12-05

Sunday morning, after chores, 72° and raining

The Contorted Filbert

My favorite tree on this place is a Contorted Filbert located in a planter box at the north deck. It has two seasons of interest, winter and early spring. It is at its very best when coated with ice. There are several pictures in the photo album of it in the winter.

As I understand it, the Contorted Filbert is a chaemera, a mixture of cells of two different types. It probably arose as a shoot at a graft junction, which meant it was probably close to the ground where it could be easily layered. It doesn't bear nuts, and they probably wouldn't germinate anyway nor come true, so the only way to create new plants is through vegetative propagation.

One can cut live twigs, give them proper treatment, and sometimes end up with plants that are clones of the stock plant from which they were cut. The cut twigs are called cuttings and they are the source for the most common methods of commercial production of trees and shrubs. There are some shrub rose cuttings in the cutting bed right now.

Layering is accomplished by bending a low-growing branch so that it will dip into the ground. Depending on the plant and other factors, you concoct a process you carry out on the parts of the twig that goes under the ground. Some plants require several years before they will develop enough roots to support the tip as an independent plant. I'm layering some Birch trees but have no roots, yet, after a year in the ground.

Finally, there is grafting and budding, whereby one convinces one kind of plant to grow on top of another kind of plant. Most fruit trees are grafted as are tea roses. Pencil sized twigs are cut at the same angle, then joined together, and wrapped with tape. If done correctly, the bottom of the lower twig will grow roots, and the top of the upper twig will grow leaves, flowers and fruit, and at the junction they will grow together.

Budding is similar to grafting except that a sliver of wood containing a single bud is used to create the new upper part of the plant. The stone fruits, cherries, peaches and such, are fairly easy to bud and offer a fairly rich set of possible combinations. The most common cross-species budding is peach on a Bush Cherry rootstock. The resulting plant is a peach like the source tree, but slightly dwarfed.

The upper part of a grafted tree is genetically identical to the tree from which it was cut. The lower part of the tree is identical to the tree from which it was cut, too. There are few combinations of upper and lower parts that will work. For some trees, the only way to grow new ones is to graft it to the top of an interstock, which has already been grafted to a rootstock. There are two cherry trees south of the south deck that are double grafted. Both graft unions are noticeable bulges with changes in bark texture.

Sometimes, new shoots will appear growing from a graft union. Usually, those shoots are either identical to the top or the bottom. Once in a great while, though, a shoot will appear in which some of the plant cells are grown from the lower plant, and some from the upper. It is not a hybrid, where the two genetic lines are mixed in each cell, it is a chaemera, which contains two kinds of cells from two different genetic lines. That is why the Contorted Filbert contorts, the two kinds of cells grow at different rates.

Filberts, or Hazelnuts, in general, are fiendishly hard to grow from cuttings. They are usually propagated by layers but when you have a dog that tends to chew on the lower branches, layering is quite difficult. On the Contorted Filbert there are several air layers. An air layer is exactly like an ordinary layer in the soil, except that the soil (actually, peat moss in this case) is wrapped around a twig and then enclosed in a plastic wrap. Air layering seems to offer the best chance of propagating this tree. Although I have searched the web and many books, I have never found a mention anywhere of how to propagate the Contorted Filbert. Perhaps that explains the high prices of small plants.

The air layers have been on the plant for about six months, now. There are also air layers on several other kinds of trees and shrubs that were done at about the same time as the Contorted Filbert. This would all be very scientific if I could remember where I put the layers.

Interesting Book: The Ancestor's Tale by Richard DawkinsThis is a book for dedicated Darwinians. Reading it during the great Kansas Debate on Evolution was appropriate. It's not an easy read, I spent several months on it, but it is worth the time if you are interested in how the species developed.



Cows, Vet Students, and Prisoners
Submitted by Dr. M., my heart surgeon

Veterinary students must do clinical rotations of all sorts. My current 3 week rotation is Production Medicine. This rotation involves traveling hither and yon in Georgia visiting farmers and cows. This past week the rotation sent me, 2 classmates and 2 clinicians to south Georgia to look in on the beef herd and the dairy herd at the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville. For those old timers out there, this is where the original "The Longest Yard" was filmed. Georgia, being in possession of plenty of land (it is the largest state east of the Mississippi) and at a prison, plenty of labor, endeavors to produce all it's own milk, beef and vegetables for the inmates. This not only saves the state money ( $1.5 million in milk alone last year) but contributes to rehabilitation of the prisoners. The College of Veterinary Medicine can then take students down to the property and teach them about beef and dairy herd management. For cows, this mostly involves ascertaining the pregnancy status of the cow. Milk production is dependant on dairy cows giving birth then milk, and beef production depends on cows giving birth and calves gaining weight.

The setup generally involves the prisoners or the staff (they have a real staff of dairymen at the dairy) moving the cows into a chute and making them stand still while a student works at the back end of the cow trying to determine the pregnancy status. This process can be made more interesting in all sorts of ways. Beef cows are feral animals; they stand in a pasture and graze and they only see people when something bad is going to happen (weaning, pregnancy checking, shots). So, beef cows are rather buck wild shall we say and can hurt themselves and their calves in the rounding up process. Their agitation is only increased by inmates who are cattle prod happy (something rather frowned upon by the veterinary establishment taught by Temple Grandin, PhD) and by the ubiquitous "cattle dog".

Real cattle dogs have been bred for generations to get cows to do what they want. They do not tolerate any guff from the cows, and look disparagingly at the people who think they are helping. However, just because a dog is in possession of teeth and testicles does not make it a cattle dog. The cur that was "helping" with the cows managed to send the cows the wrong way, and then once they got into the chute, try to nip them while they were in the chute. It's bad enough that a cow can kick you and break your leg, but to have it kicking at a dog while you are armpit deep in the manure factory is rather troublesome. But we students managed to pregnancy check around 250 cows on our first day, and there were no broken bones on our end.

Dr. M. failed to explain exactly what goes on when “. . . a student works at the back end of the cow trying to determine the pregnancy status.” The student must stick his/her arm up the cow's ass clear past the elbow, then, feeling down through the gut wall, try to feel for a fetus in the uterus. I'm sure that a bunch of cons were having fun watching Dr. M. stick her arm up cows' asses.

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Farm News 06-05-05

Sunday morning, after chores



A Warm, Damp Morning

There is nothing like a nice, warm, moist morning, fresh with dew and birdsong, to make a man's scrotum itch. You just know that tiny Deer Ticks are crawling up there and attaching themselves to you.

Of the three common biters, chiggers, ticks, and mosquitoes, only mosquitoes are insects. Chiggers and ticks are both arachnids; not spiders but their first cousins. Like spiders they have eight legs.

They don't lay eggs under your skin, the itching is due to a foreign body reaction to their saliva. The best treatment is to not scratch the bites. Big help.

Ting (cont.)
Whoops! I failed to finish the tale of Ting's displeasure with my behavior. As I mentioned last week, Ting has learned that the most vulnerable parts of a human are their shoelaces. A vigorous attack on the shoelaces will almost always result in victory.

This is a situation similar to what is going on in Iraq: 'victories' are being achieved all over the place because everyone defines the results of what they are doing as victory. Temple Grandin, in Animals in Translation, discusses how some of the animal behaviors arise and why it is almost impossible to change them. She uses B. F. Skinner's term for them, 'animal superstitions'. Somehow, attacking shoelaces became embedded deep within her psyche.

So, every evening I pick up Ting from the top of the cat feeder and put her on a roost. Every morning she attacks my shoelaces. Meanwhile, the world continues to turn. Ling flutters out daily to grab a bite to eat and, acting like she's about to have a case of the vapors, says, “Oh, I must rush back to incubate my eggs!”

She's a faker, of course. She and Ting decided to save on housekeeping by sharing a nest. There must be twenty eggs in the nest, which I can't reach. Ling can't cover all of them at once, so she sets on some for a day or two and then the others for a day or two. Like most of the strategies cooked up by the Somerset Twins, this one was doomed to failure. If chicks are going to hatch from eggs, they hatch after three weeks of incubation. After five weeks of incubation it has begun to sink into Ling's head that something is not happening that should be happening.

Early in the week she tried walking around the barn yard, scratching, clucking, fluffing out her feathers, and acting like she was caring for a clutch of invisible chicks. It was a convincing display and would have convinced me she was a mother if there had been a single chick in sight. After a day of make-believe motherhood she went back to incubation, a move which the eggs are far past being able to appreciate.

If we are fortunate this experience will exhaust the Somerset Twins' mothering instincts for the year and they can return to their non-existent stage lives. Their standard performance art piece, 'Aleatory Elements in Chicken Lives', is bad, but still better than 'The Dedication of Mothers.'

Tinkerbelle Goose

Saturday morning I went to the barn as usual to do chores, and, as usual, I called out, “Tinkerbelle,” as I came into the barn. Saturday, there was no answering honk. At about one year of age, Tinkerbelle passed on, probably of pneumonia.

Tinker hatched with a crooked right foot and was never able to walk well. She lived in the barn instead of living with the other geese. This spring she built a nest and deposited an egg in it, then started incubating her egg. It never hatched and Tinker lost a great deal of weight while incubating and not eating. Early last week I removed her egg because I was worried about her health. I guess I was too late.

Tinker will be missed by her friends, especially the Somerset Twins, Trusty and Tessie, Christmas, and me.

Broccoli

We're having a very nice first cutting of broccoli. The late frosts didn't hurt it very much at all. The White Cabbage Butterflies are busy, though, and there are lots of green caterpillars to be found. The cleanest treatment for caterpillars is BT, the bacteria that gives them a diarrhea, if you can imagine giving a worm diarrhea as a clean way to do anything.

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