Maybelle gets New Digs

Our bottle baby Maybelle the spoiled Simental calf is getting bigger so we decided to expand her horizons a bit and we finally finished the enclosed fence line behind the barn. When we moved here the place was pretty barren and there was only a perimeter fence around the back pasture but nothing for animal handling and absolutely nothing to enable us to use the barn so we have improvised, we have planned and changed our plans and what was a blank slate has now become a useful barn yard. In retrospect we are glad we could start from scratch and do it the way we wanted it...but it has taken a lot of work and if you have looked at the price of anything made of steel you know it isnt cheap. We ended up doing cattle panels on the far side of the barn to match the panels on the side closest to Judy's trailer and we added a holding pen made of corral panels out in the lower pasture that connects to the barnyard pen behind the barn. Confused yet? It took us a bit to figure out how we could get animals from the pasture to the barn in winter or bad weather and we had to consider septic leach lines, buried electrical lines, and aesthetics. We like what we have come up with.

We connected the lower pen with the upper pen with a couple of corral panels so now Maybelle can move from the upper pen to the barn with no issue. She immediately started running from lower to upper and jumping around...it was really fun to see.

This is Maybelle behind Jesse's headstone (he wont mind I am sure) and she now has an oak grove to play in, she is close to the other calfs and she has lots of room to run and play.

She is such a fine looking young lady.

We are in the process of weaning her but Judy is a softy and keeps giving her the bottle.

We have taken to just sitting on the porch of the pole barn and just enjoying our little homestead. We can see the orchard, the truck garden and of course as you can see...Maybelle in her new pen.

We dont have much, dont need much but what we do have is very peaceful and we like it.

Rose the Farm Dog and Maybelle are playmates and Rose keeps good watch on her.

Judy has a good view of her calf from her living room too.

And while we were doing all the fencing we found this patch of wild asparagas....

And this patch of wild asparagas next to the barn (yes its edible)...

And this Rhubarb patch we never knew about before.

We added another sorting corral further in the pasture so we can treat the cows and segregate them if needed.

We found these panels on sale and got a further military discount...its never expected and I dont look different at businesses that dont give military discounts but when they are available its very much appreciated. We live in a very patriotic and pro military part of the country...we like that.

We anchored the panels with T-Posts wired to the corral panels and we are pretty happy with how it came out.

There was zero fencing here when we moved in a year ago......