We Need to Talk About Noelle.

I think a year of raising animals on a farm with only 3 fatalities out of around eighty critters*  makes me somewhat of a farm animal expert.  So here is my one piece of advice for all the folks out there who want to to live on a farm with all of those cute cuddly farm animals that are featured in your kids' picture books:  Do not anthropomorphize any farm animal that will end up weighing as much if not more than your car.

Many of you will remember the photos of a two month old calf we brought home in the back of our mini van.  She was adorable and small enough that the husband and I could easily hoist her in and out of the car.  I re-purposed an old sweater and turned it into a calf blanket.  We took her for daily walks in the pasture and hugged and kissed her constantly.

Fast forward six months and we have a very large, spoiled, sociopathic teenager on our hands.  While it was very cute a few months back when she would come running up to us to taste whatever green thing we had picked from the garden, it terrifying when a 450lb beast comes barreling up to you in order to snatch the beet greens out of your hands.

The scariest thing is she is really stealth for her size. There have been days when she is nowhere to be seen as I silently walk up to the garden hoping to avoid notice and then all of a sudden I feel her hot breath on my neck as I am opening the gate. It's creepy. Her playfulness was charming and easily managed when she weighed 150, but now it is kind of like living in a maze waiting for the minotaur to appear.

I try to convince myself that the gentle nudges she gives me in my butt as she follows me down the hill are her way of saying, "I love you.  Please pay attention to me!"  and not that she wishes she still had horns so she could send me flying through the air.  My trepidation is somewhat warranted given the fact that she likes to mount the horse and tried to hump the husband when he mistakenly bent over while in close proximity.  Luckily he was able to rebuff her advances before she actually made contact.

So, is she serial killer cow in the making?  Is this just a phase she is going through?   Have we managed to treat her so much like a human that she actually thinks she is one of us?  Thank god I am farming in the internet era.

When we first got Noelle, I joined a group called, "Keeping a Family Cow".  This is a chat group for people who have one or two cows and are not running a full fledged dairy farm.  Surprisingly, there are a lot of people out their who also have cows who try to hump them.  Seems all of the love and affection we showered on her as a baby with no mama cow around to set her straight, made her imprint on us and she really does think she is human.  I guess the wrestling matches the husband had with her early on were not a good idea.

What should one do with a cow who thinks she is a person?  Send her to dairy boot camp.  I now spend about 15 minutes every day training my surly bovine recruit.  She must stand still while  I put her harness on and she must walk like a lady.  She must lift her legs for me and no chasing me down the hill.  All of this is done with the help of a bamboo stick and a very firm voice.  The first day I had to hit her with the stick she shot me a look of complete shock and betrayal and yes, I do know that I am STILL anthropomorphizing her.

We are both starting to fall into our roles of farmer and farm animal instead of mother and daughter.  It isn't easy when she does something super cute, but I am trying to stay strong.  May the force be with me when we breed her and there is another beautiful little calf to bottle feed.  I am sure I will fall in love all over again.


*I am not counting the 10 guinea fowl who disappeared in this statistic because I like to think that they declared an intifada against the deer ticks and are living a beautiful spiritual life somewhere in the woods surrounding the Farmette.

Sleep Tight Little Chickens

Saying the weather in Central New York is unpredictable is kind of like saying women find Ryan Gosling mildly attractive. It is an understatement.  We went from 85 degrees to a frost warning to back up to 90 in a week.

As much as I hate to admit it, one day in the not too distant (probably next week) future I am going to wake up to snow on the ground.  No more messing around. It's time to process the rest of our meat birds and move the pullets in with the dragon lady herself: Chicky Rivera.

I hate to use the term, "process" because it sounds like I have some sort of Tyson chicken factory when in reality we put the bird in a cone, slit its throat, scald it and then throw it into our homemade chicken plucker; aptly named the "Mudda Plucka." I guess that sounds a little more grizzly than, "processing" the birds, but my personal belief is that keeping thousands of chickens in a tiny cages until they are killed is a whole lot more grizzly than the way we are doing it.

Since I am back to work it is going to be up to the husband to put the rest of the meat birds in the freezer.  Given his dislike of butchering chickens, I think we may have a very full chicken house soon.

The two problems we immediately needed to solve were how to introduce the twenty-one pullets and one rooster named Gregory Peck (thank you CM for the name) into Chicky's lair and what to do about letting them outside during the day.  When you have three chickens roaming the neighborhood it can be kind of a sweet bucolic scene, but looking out your window and seeing 25 carpeting your front yard may be our tipping point from amusing city people turned farmers to THOSE people in the eyes of our neighbors.

The husband got to work on fencing in a large area around the chicken house so our feathered friends can just exit their little door in the morning and happily forage in the wooded area all day, thus ensuring harmonious relations with the neighbors.

Once the fence was installed, all five of us lined up outside of the chicken tractor to move them one by one into their new digs.  They were not happy to go and I can't say as I blame them.  For anyone who knows chickens, introducing new ones into an existing flock is about 1000 times worst than being the new kid in junior high school.  Even though it was twenty-two against three, chickens are not so bright and the bullying was sure to be severe.  The Taj Mahal was being turned into a Brooklyn tenement circa 1900.

The new tenants did not venture outside the entire next day.  By day two we had to go in and throw their fluffy butts outside.  I littered their playground with melon rinds and the corn cobs from the previous night's dinner to entice them to remain outside.  I then spent the next hour watching twenty-two chickens run away from Chicky Rivera whenever she got within two feet.  I think she probably made it known the night before that she is the fearsome slumlord of the tenement.

We were quite pleased with ourselves and the new setup.  After a year of raising chickens perhaps we had moved from dilettante to competent poultry farmers.  The pride quickly faded as I looked up a couple of hours later to see one of the Cuckoo Marans walking up the driveway and another in the herb garden. Seems we forgot one little thing about keeping chickens in a simple fenced in area: They can fly.

We got everyone rounded up and contained again and they seemed content to stick close to home.  When I went out around 8 pm to close them in for the night, I realized we forgot something else: Chickens like to sit in trees.  This time it was the Australorps and Golden Comets.

I made Prince come out with a flashlight so I could try to grab them.  I tripped and stumbled over the rocks and tree branches until I captured a couple.  One was a little too high up for my diminutive self to easily reach, so I stood tiptoe on a rock directly underneath her just praying she didn't poop right then.  I managed to grab her and put her safely into the chicken house.

It has been a week since we moved the group into their new digs and they seem pretty happy.  For the most part everyone goes inside at night, though I did see one of the tree nesters in the backyard when I woke up the other day.  It is impossible to get a head count in the dark every night.  Relations seem to have gotten slightly better but the seas do still part if Chicky Rivera decides she wants that watermelon rind.  The only one who remains a little skittish is a Faverolle named Fifi.  She is a tiny, sweet and slightly crazy little girl who gets picked on a lot.  Of course she is now my favorite.

WAAAAAHHHH

As my best friend just posted on her FB page, let's just call today August 32nd live in denial. Honestly, I much prefer the crisp cool air and the fiery hued leaves of autumn, but there is just something about summer that I don't want to let go of and it isn't just because I have to go back to work in two days.

Summer is the delicious time when we get to spend way too much time together as a family and I can pretend the boys are going to be young and innocent forever.  It is a time for spending eight hours at the lake on a ridiculously hot day or playing Stratego on a rainy afternoon. It is the time for learning how to ride a bike. (Yes, Scrappy is riding!) It is a time for finding crazy looking bugs and caterpillars and toads at the back door. It is a time when the kids know to get themselves a snack around 6pm because Mommy is still in the garden picking vegetables for a dinner that won't be ready until 9 or my personal record: 11pm.  It is also the time when we all get to pile into the king sized bed and watch a movie after the 9:00 dinner.

Every summer is a reminder of how one September in the not so distant future, those (mostly) adorable kids will head off to college and work and lives of their own and their childhood summers will just be Popcorn Bowl memories.  I am pretty sure those memories will be of searching for crabs at low tide on Plum Island or swimming in their friends' pond or making a movie or playing tag in the dark or geocaching or maybe even of butchering chickens.  The Popcorn Bowl will probably not be full of memories of  doing homework packets, math drills or even tennis lessons, so round about week three of vacation, I pretty much gave up on the notion that the kids were going to have any sort of schedule.  The summer bucket list went right out the window and we slid down the summer slide.  I'll admit, there was more Xbox than I would have liked and I am feeling a slight twinge of bad mommyitis that James Dean only read four books and that we are not all going on tour as the newest classical guitar playing family sensation, but all in all, it was a great summer.

So as their backpacks hang full (that's right, I actually managed to finish back to school shopping BEFORE school started and now that I am onto the teachers' little game of putting unattainable items on their school supply lists; next year I am ordering all of the white and orange folders I can find online in May and selling them in front of Office Max for $2 each over Labor Day weekend.) I bid another summer adieu and get ready for homework, swim lessons, soccer games, instrument practice, bed time schedules and a lot less time hanging with my kids.

Thanks summer 2013.  I am looking forward to your return as summer 2014.