Knowing by Heart
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Read the Blog
  • Get the Book
  • The Whitney Journals
  • Remembering Lee
  • Archived Blog Posts

Blog Posts

These columns were originally published in the Kings County Record between 1984 and 2016.
The illustrations are by Alice, most of the photographs are by Lee

Barlaam Edmund George, Esquire

11/7/2016

Comments

 
Picture
(c) R. L. Whitney, 2010
© R. L. Whitney.  Originally published on June 3, 1997

Barlaam Edmund George, the steer of record in the barn, is growing restive.

This is not entirely news since he has been “restive” practically since the day, a few days after he was born, when he tried experimentally to hop with both back feet at the same time and did not fall flat in the process.  He has not looked back since.

We have raised calves in all sorts of ways. We have
raised them with their mothers, we have raised them with visiting privileges, we have raised them, after the first few days, to drink from a bucket.  We have never used a “nipple pail” although we have been told firmly that it is the only way to do things.  We wouldn’t presume to disagree but our calves have apparently never read those books or talked to enough other calves to get this fixed in their minds. 

(There is a good deal of hand-wringing about the indisputable fact that city kids have no idea where milk comes from.  I have news.  A calf that has been properly raised doesn’t know either.  Put mother and a bucket in front of him and he will go for the bucket every time.)


When we rebuilt that part of the barn intended to hold the stock - this was years ago - we designed the space so that there were three Jersey-sized stanchions for cows and two small stalls for calves.  There were times, when there were a goodly number of children still at home, when there were two cows milking and there were times when all three stanchions had their occupants. 

For reasons that are not clear to me the calf stalls did not get used all that much.  Over the years the stalls tended to fill up, not with calves, but with empty feed bags, the garbage can that held barn cat chow, odds and ends of electric fence wire too long to throw out but too tangled to be worth untangling, plastic buckets that had lost their bail handles but were only cracked about half-way down the side, and a fine wooden hopper-type chicken feeder we never used for feeding chickens but kept supplied for the cats from the afore-mentioned garbage pail.  Calves tended to be kept in the big box stall where they had been born and where they had lots of room to whee-ha around.

For some reason Barlaam was invited to try a stall out for size.  The stalls have a nice high manger in front of them which is handy for keeping hay within munching distance as well as locating a milk bucket so that the calf can show his appreciation by snorting and blowing, but most of the milk (well, a lot of it) stays in the bucket.

Barlaam seemed to find the stall quite acceptable.  He enjoyed drumming on the sides of the stall with his hooves, a particularly satisfying manoeuvre because every time he would whack the boards the barn cats, who were clustered around a milk dish on the walkway behind him, would leap about five feet in the air and come down running for cover. 

As Barlaam grew the stall became smaller, until finally, my wife and I decided it really was time to get him into a stanchion.  I had put the moment off much longer than I had intended to because a steer in a stanchion is usually an untidy mess and Barlaam in his stall was remarkably tidy.

To my surprise he did not give us a lot of trouble.  The last calf (also a steer) who had spent his early life in one of the stalls had felt strongly that if he was going anywhere (in that case “out on grass” was where he was going) his stall should come with him.  Barlaam did do the classic cow-who-does-not-approve-of-the-turn-events-are-taking routine by collapsing into an untidy but immoveable lump at one point.  After a bit of deep breathing, however, he was up and even succeeded in crossing the gutter, with assistance.

So now he is out at least as far as a stanchion.  The next big event in his life (and, inevitably, ours) will be his introduction to the out-of-doors and the electric fence.  Another milestone. I always hope the experience will be uneventful, but it rarely is.
Comments

    Words & Images

    We moved to our farm in Sussex, New Brunswick from Toronto in 1977, only moving away in 2014. 

    For over 30 years of our life there, I wrote a weekly column for the Kings County Record in Sussex chronicling the little events that are the heart of ‘daily life’ in a small place in the country.  These blog posts are drawn from those columns.

    The weekly column became, over the years, a series of bench-marks or surveyor’s stakes to record the contours of the place we lived, its dreaming hills and fertile valleys, icy chasms and swift-flowing streams. 

    While I no longer live on the farm, we continue to share the columns from time to time on this blog.  And very soon you will be able to read my book!  To be published in December 2019.  

    ----
    Images on the blog are drawn from my own photography,  and my wife Alice's artwork.  We occasionally resort to other people's images when nothing we have on hand suits the content of the post.  

    Archives

    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    September 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    February 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016

    Categories

    All
    Appalachian
    Back To The Land
    Beetles
    Birds
    Cats
    Chickens
    Children
    Chokecherry
    Christmas
    Cows
    Crossword Puzzles
    Dandelion
    Dogs
    Farm
    Farming
    Fruit Wines
    Garden
    Geology
    God
    Hagarenes
    Haying
    Hinduism
    History
    Homesteading
    Kittatinny
    Livestock
    Moab
    Murder Mysteries
    Pennsylvania
    Pets
    Politics
    Psalms
    Rhubarb
    Seasons
    Shenandoah
    Spiders
    Spring
    Strawberries
    Toronto
    Tuscarora
    Virginia
    Weather
    William Cobbett
    Winemaking
    Winter

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Read the Blog
  • Get the Book
  • The Whitney Journals
  • Remembering Lee
  • Archived Blog Posts