Sunday, June 07, 2009, 21:06
The Molasses Cure
Saturday morning it was 48 degrees and drizzling. Not a hard rain, but a cold rain.
And the rain made my job of feeding the horses just that much harder. Isabelle was fine, but when I got down to the barn to feed Kajun, the old fellow was shivering. He had been standing out in the rain, and once he was in the barn, the shivering took over.
Any horse owner will tell you that you never want to see a horse shiver. And certainly not a horse that is 27 years old (that's the equivalent of a person in his early 80s). And not a horse with a heart condition so that his circulation is not what it once was. And not in June when it's supposed to be warm. And not when there's a drought and there's no pasture to speak of and the only hay you've got left isn't that great because eating hay would help him warm up. And not when you're nearly out of horse feed except what you've got in the bucket to give the old man for breakfast.
I gave Kajun his horse feed, and while he was munching, and shivering, I looked through the couple of bales of hay we have left to see if there was something that might appeal to him.
Then I struck upon the idea of getting some molasses. I had a bottle of molasses in the kitchen cupboard about a third full. So I went to the house, filled it with water and shook it up. By the time I got back to the barn, Kajun had finished his feed.
I crawled through the fence.
"What do you think of this?" I asked. I held the open bottle toward Kajun's nose.
He wanted to eat the bottle.
"Now, look here. I'm going to drizzle this on your hay," I said.
Kajun eagerly followed me to the couple of flakes of hay I had found that looked all right. I poured some of the molasses over the hay. He started licking at it and then he began sorting through the hay to see if there were some strands he would want to chew on.
Putting molasses on hay that's not so great is a trick I learned growing up on our dairy farm. That was back in the years when we were getting plenty of rain and sometimes it was hard to put up good hay. Over the past 30 years, precipitation has been gradually getting less and less, it seems like, if the snow totals in the winter are any indication.
It's kind of an ironic thing. You need the rain to make the hay grow, but when it's raining frequently, it's hard to get the hay dry so you can bale it. When there's a drought, and day after day after day is perfect haying weather because the hay would dry in only a day or two at the most, there's not enough moisture in the soil to make the hay grow, so you don't really have any hay to cut so it can dry.
When I was a kid, Dad would buy molasses at the feedmill by the gallon and bring it home in a small barrel. We would fill buckets with molasses, and using a "drizzler" that Dad devised out of an old piece of board, we would dip it in the molasses and walk along in front of the cows and drizzle it over the hay that wasn't so great. If the hay had been rained on a few times before it could be baled, it would not be that appealing to the cows. Drizzling molasses on it made it quite a bit more appealing.
During the molasses drizzling process, you had to make sure you didn't get it on your chore boots. If you did, then every calf, dog, cat, cow and pony on the place would be eager to lick your feet. If you accidentally got it on your pants or your chore coat, same thing.
Once the cows realized there was molasses on their hay, they were happy. Dad was happy too. He felt terrible in the dead of winter when the hay was poor and the cows were hungry. Sure, if you didn't have enough good hay, the cows went down in their milk production. But Dad wasn't so worried about the milk as he was that the dairy cows in his care were hungry. They were not just milk-producing things that walked on four legs. They were his friends and a part of his family.
I know just how he felt.
The molasses did the trick, and Kajun ate his hay. Randy worked Saturday morning, and on his way home, he stopped at the farm supply store and bought more horse feed. When he arrived home at 1 p.m., I took more feed out to Kajun. It was still drizzling and cold, but once he figured out what I was up to, he trotted into the barn to eat more feed. He had stopped shivering by then, thank goodness.
My sister and brother-in-law live about 40 miles away. The ground is heavier where they live with more clay in the soil so it holds moisture better. They also have gotten a little more rain than we have. With any luck at all, my brother-in-law will be able to bale some hay soon. And when he does, I'm going after a pickup load.
It looks as though we will be buying all of our hay this year again. A friend of ours chopped our hayfield for his cows. His pasture does not look any better than our horse pasture, and his cows needed something to eat. Our hayfield, as it turned out, was full of June grass, too, in addition to the allyssum (toxic to horses) and yellow rocket. With any luck at all, chopping off the June grass and the weeds before they went to seed will take care of most of it. But if we don't get a substantial amount of rain, the field won't recover to the point where we will be able to bale it for Kajun and Isabelle.
Oh, well. Like Dad used to say -- it's always something.
LeAnn R. Ralph
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Friday, June 05, 2009, 22:12
A Trip to the Arbor
For two days earlier this week, Little Sister worked on calling her kittens. They are six weeks old now. She had moved them from the north side of the barn to the south side.
We've got a few bales of hay left on the north side but not very many. We've got more bales of straw on the south side.
I don't know if Little Sister moved her kittens because there are more places for them to hide around the straw bales or if because she, herself, was born on the north side of the barn four years ago.
Anyway, Little Sister convinced her four little kittens to move across the barn. They have started to eat some kitty food, and I have been softening their kitten chow with organic milk and mixing some canned kitty food with it.
About a month ago, we started buying organic milk in the grocery store from a farm called Castle Rock Farm. Personally, I think they ought to put a warning on the label, because whenever I've got the bottle open, the cats in the house are very interested in the milk. They never paid the slightest attention to the milk bottled in plastic bottles.
The organic milk tastes good, like "real" milk. Plus, it is not homogenized so the cream gathers at the top of the bottle.
And that's another thing -- it is sold in glass bottles. You pay a deposit the first time around, and then you return the bottles when you buy more milk.
Anyway, the kitten chow softened with organic milk and mixed with canned kitty food has been popular with the little kittens. Little Sister has got two girls and two boys -- two are gray and two are black. The one that was sooooooooo tiny when they first came out of the test turned out to be a tom, much to my surprise. Now that he's been eating solid food, he is starting to catch up with the others.
The other day, Little Sister began calling her kittens again. She would call, and then she would walk across the barn. The kittens would ignore her, so she would go back and call them again and walk across the barn.
This went on for two days before the kittens decided that maybe they should listen to their momma.
Little Sister was trying to get them to go out to the grape arbor with her. Many years ago, Randy built an arbor for a wild grape vine growing in the L-shaped space north of the barn between the barn wall and the lean-to. There are also some ferns growing back there and some Periwinkle I planted not long after we moved here 14 years ago. It is a quiet space, cool and breezy when the wind is out of the south and blows under the barn wall. In fact, I have often wished I could fit under there because it certainly does look pleasant indeed.
On Wednesday, after two days of calling, the kittens went with their momma to the grape arbor.
It was their first excursion into the great outdoors outside the barn (even if it was just under the barn wall to get there). At one point while I was working around the barn Wednesday morning, I heard a kitten calling a "lost kitty" meow. Whoever was lost must have found the others because by the time I got into the barn, I couldn't see anyone who was lost.
By evening, the kittens were back from their trip to the arbor and were tired and hungry.
It is amazing how fast they grow. Six weeks ago their eyes weren't even open, and now they are making trips to the grape arbor.
Drought
It has been two weeks since I mowed the lawn. By now, under normal conditions, it ought to be two feet high, and I should be considering using the tractor and the hay mower, letting it dry and baling it.
Instead, I am only going to have to mow in the shady areas up behind the house and a down by the garden and behind the barn. And even at that, it's not too terribly tall where it's shady. The west side yard is turning brown.
According to a drought report I read, we are down 10 inches of precipitation since last summer. But the report did not take into account that we have been down on a precipitation for four years prior to the last summer. It is going to take a long time to get everything soaked up again.
Instead, we have been experiencing bright, sunny and windy days, and although it has not been too hot, the wind has caused everything to dry out faster. The other thing is that the drought seems to be spreading west from west central Wisconsin because now the Twin Cities and most of Minnesota is turning dry too.
This does not bode very well for my garden. Unless it rains enough to catch some water in the pails I've got sitting under the roof of the lean-to down by the garden, I won't have much to water with.
LeAnn R. Ralph
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