Filed under: Cows
- Lilly
Meet Lilly, the latest addition to City Girl Farm. She is a Jersey cow who calfed a couple of months ago. The calf died and she started moping and not eating. She has been moved four times this year and had come to the dairy farm I got her from from a family who just had her for their personal use. She went from being a pet to just being part of a herd and never really settled in.
I’m optimistic that we’ll get her up and running at full speed within the next few months. She’s the kind of cow a dairy farmer needs to get rid of because she’s producing about a third of what she should and eating the full amount. A normal dairy operation simply does not have time to spoil one of the cows. We, on the other hand, do! And we’ll have fun doing it. I’m having visions of Brie, Mascarpone, Ricotta, Quark, Butter…..and chicken feed. 🙂
Most people think of chickens as being among the benign farm animals, but not so! Today I went out to feed them and saw a gopher skin on the floor of the coop. The gopher had been opened up like a hard candy and his skin discarded like a cellophane wrapper. It looked a little like a miniature bearskin rug. The chickens had eaten everything out of the skin and that caused me to wonder about egg carton labels that claim their chickens are “vegetarian fed”. I guess ours are vegetarian fed, too, because the feed I give them is 100% vegetable matter. If you count what they feed themselves, though, I doubt anyone who raises chickens can honestly claim they are “vegetarian fed”—unless they post guards to make the bad chickens spit out the bugs and rodents they ingest. Just sayin’….
Filed under: Cats
Kittens were born in the middle of September here at City Girl Farm. We picked up the momma cat a day or two before she delivered her babies. She disappeared pretty much when she got here and I thought she just didn’t want to stay here. A couple of days later she came out and she was so small I thought she was a completely different cat! I didn’t recognize her. There are three sets of pictures in this gallery: the first were taken as soon as we discovered their hideout, the second ones were taken once their eyes were open and the last ones were taken today. We’re guessing they’re about seven weeks old.
Six days later, this is what it looked like here.
Morning after the blizzard
Snow drifted by the coop
Out the front door
Sunrise on Friday
Snow drifted in front of the house
Fall…We blinked; we missed it.
The City Girl Farmer 