Baymule’s Farm

Branching Out

Deeply Rooted
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As a lamb, bottle rams are adorable. However, they grow up with no fear or respect for people and see people as equals and something to dominate. They dominate by ramming and bashing their opponent. Two Rams bashing heads together is ok, their skulls are built for it. A Ram bashing people can result in broken bones and serious injury. In the name of safety, Spot will lose his testicles.
Makes total sense. Your practical explanations of events like this are such a valuable education for a city kid like me. 😉
 

AMKuska

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I will probably sell Spot. It would be irresponsible of me to let some unsuspecting person buy him as a ram and later get hurt. As a wether, he will go to slaughter. If I decide to keep him, I’ll take him to slaughter for my own family’s consumption.
I' m glad you're making the responsible choice. It's tough, but I think both Spot and his owners would end up suffering if he was released willy-nilly into the world.
 

baymule

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Saturday I got some tractor time. When I had the front fence put up last December, those guys finished up in the dark, using headlights. They backed trucks up and rolled out the wire that was leftover. I thought nothing of it, figuring I’d straighten it up later. When later rolled around, it was raining so much that I didn’t want to rut up the yard with the tractor, never mind get soaking wet. It rained for months, roads all over the county were washed out and flooded. My road was terrible. I had to leave my car at church on the paved road and drive my Kawasaki mule through the mud and flooded road. Plus the constantly wet conditions and heat caused a parasite bloom that had me fighting with all I had, vet bills and still I lost 11 out of 31 lambs. Needless to say, rearranging rolls of wire wasn’t my priority.

The rains finally stopped, heat hit the stratosphere and weeds grew up in the wire, almost over my head. I made the executive decision to not kill myself in a heat stroke, but to wait for frost to kill some of the weeds back.

Saturday was a beautiful day! I put pallet forks on the tractor bucket and lifted up a roll of wire, that was all alone in its own private weed patch.

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I turned the tractor around,set the bush hog on the ground and scraped dirt with it. Then I laid out two 4x4s with concrete blocks as stops. I turned the tractor back around and rolled out the wire.

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I scooped up another roll out of the weed patch next to the first one and rolled it onto my newly prepared spot, until I had moved them all.

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Then I turned the tractor around and mowed and scraped the dirt with the bush hog.

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I had to be careful not to hit my truck with all my maneuvering about. Carson was laying in the shade of the truck, supervising.

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Then on to another patch of overgrown eyesore. There was 2 partial rolls of wire, plus a disc attachment for the tractor, plus several stacks of T-posts and scattered heavy wire. Not being able to see the heavy wire ensured that I was not going to clean up this mess with the bush hog. I’ll have to do that by hand. What a mess.

Finally I had all the rolls of wire neatly stacked.

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I took the forks off the bucket.

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Then on to my next chore, moving dirt. In an effort to raise the level of dirt inside the shelters, to help with the mud issue this winter, I had 2 shelters in Coopers pen to put dirt in. Couldn’t get right up to the shelters without tearing down the pen, so I dumped dirt over the fence. I dumped 2 bucket loads for this shelter.

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I dumped 3 bucket loads for the other shelter. Then I parked the tractor and shoveled every bit of that dirt into the shelters. It’s Monday morning and my shoulders are still a little sore.

Going to go buy feed this morning. I’m getting a super bag, about a thousand pounds. That means I’ll be scooping feed into
two 5 gallon buckets and dumping then into metal trash cans and some 55 gallon barrels.

Gotta go feed Spot before I go. Carson loves his trips to the feed store. He always gets lots of adoration and dog treats.
 

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baymule

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I’m meeting a lady at son’s house this afternoon. I hope she buys a bunch of this stuff that I have nowhere to put.

While going through boxes, I found something I’ve been missing for quite awhile. I exclaimed, “I FOUND YOU!!”

It was BJ, but not.

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In 2002, on one of out trips home to Alabama to see BJs mother, I picked up a brochure that featured a 7th generation potter who ground the clay with a mule and mill stones and used a wood fired kiln. So we went to go see. Very nice couple, we poked around in their shop and I spied a face jug. He explained that in the 1800’s when a lot of people couldn’t read or write, things were stored in jugs. Some was good, some wasn’t so the faces either had a smiling face (good) or an ugly face (bad). Well of course I wanted one. We watched him turn a lump of clay into a jug. He asked, “What do you want it to look like?” I pointed at BJ and said, “Him!” And so he did.

Of course he had to let the jug dry, paint it and fire it. We paid for it and left. A couple of months later, it arrived. We got a kick out of it. It’s been packed up since our moving to Lindale, and me moving here. 10 years. I found it yesterday. ❤️
 
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