Quilts and Thoughts…

Did you ever watch the Griswold Christmas or Griswold Family Vacation? The movie hasn’t yet been made for Griswold Family Ranching, but it could very easily star my family. My daughter coined the phrase yesterday after we spent hours trying to catch two young calves with freedom on their minds.

It is best to keep new calves to the property pinned up for a few days before they are allowed to roam the pastures because they need time to acclimate to their new surroundings. That makes sense, so we let the grass grow in the 8,000 sq. ft. garden and filled the trough with plenty of cool water. The temperature was over 102 yesterday when they arrived and we lost a few pounds of perspiration just opening gates and getting them from the trailer into the garden holding area, but they were safe.

Hmmm…in retrospect, I don’t think I should have referred to it as a “holding area”, because within twenty minutes one of them had jumped the fence and was looking for “Momma”. It certainly is a trying time for a calf to be separated from Momma and be dropped into a new area, so we were ready to give lots of TLC, but they weren’t quite on the same wavelength. I wanted to give them a little time to adjust to the garden and the temp to drop below 100, but NO, they didn’t want to wait!

The other one was looking for a spot to escape, but she stayed inside, and we were off trying to corral the jumper.

Hubby got into the pick up and I was on foot. Imagine this young calf (about 6 months old) frantically trying to find Momma in a huge field. Now imagine this…two old fogies trying to catch the calf in a huge field. It was not a pretty sight!

After multiple efforts, we decided to wait for backups to arrive. While waiting, one of the grandchildren decided he could offer them food and they would follow him. Not so! The jumper proved she is ready to set the world record and bolted over the fence onto the road. After driving up and down the road looking for her for quite a while, I glanced into the pasture across the road and sure enough, she had jumped that fence and was in the field with someone else’s cows. What a mess!

In all this confusion, the second cow jumped a fence to get out of the garden and she was running the fence line to find her partner in crime! Naturally, we then set out to get her back inside the garden. To make a long story short…she jumped the fence onto the road. Back into the cars and trucks. Four of us trying to get the vehicles positioned to capture her, but she then jumped a different fence onto another area of the neighbor’s pasture.

Today is a new day. They are both together in the neighbor’s gigantic pasture and the Griswold Ranchers will try again.

The neighbor was so great. He got quite a few of his cows (huge herd) to go into a pen and those two rascals of ours went with them. Then it was just a matter of opening and closing gates to direct them into the back of our trailer.

We fixed up every fence we could think of in their line of sight. Bought sweet feed and put it around in different areas of the garden (to keep them interested). I gave them some feed while they were still in the trailer and I don’t think they knew what it was…they sniffed, but didn’t eat for a while. This stuff smells really good! Molasses and corn and whatever else is in it must taste great.

We’ve crossed our fingers and hope they like us and the donkeys enough to hang around! Stay tuned for Griswold’s Ranching II!