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Well, we have two new calves, one bull and one heifer calf. Cath and I are proud that we actually pegged the correct due dates (within a week). Mostly. I am still the luckiest cattleman ever in that both births were unattended, but went off without a hitch. The one snag has come from an unlikely place: the names.

Being Blue Line Farm, we have a tradition of naming our cattle after Chicago El stops who’s names begin with that year’s ear tattoo letter. Thus, we have Thorndale, Uptown (not technically an el stop, but it was name her after the neighborhood or name her “UIC/Halsted”, Van Buren, etc.  This year’s letter is W and for the first time, we have actual choices. It’s confused the heck out of us. We’re used to having to pour over CTA maps to find an El stop we can use.

Rather than agonize over it, we thought we’d throw it out to you guys, our friends and readers. Here are your choices:

• Western (3 stops!)
• Wilson
• Wells
• Washington
• Washington/Wells
• Wabash (3 stops!)

Pick any two names and let us know your favorites! Hurry though! The calves are already becoming known as “the two red ones”!

Well, it must be Raccoon season again. I’m getting lots of hits and emails on the “Pepsi of Death” pages. I’m also missing a lot of cat food in the mornings, which means I need to set out the live trap to catch the raccoon(s) or opossums that are eating it over night.

Live Trap

For those of you dealing with raccoons, I recommend a live trap. Don’t get the small squirrel sized ones. You’ll need the larger kind. They cost a few dollars more (about $50 if I recall), but they’re more likely to actually trap an adult raccoon or possum. I just leave a trail of cat food running into the cage and it usually lures them right in. When I trap them, its usually right next to a box of old stereo equipment that’s on their path from the barn to the cat food in the stable. Raccoons will grab ANYTHING that they can reach while in the cage, so I’ll need new cables if I ever want to use my old record player. Keep that in mind when you place your cage.

Once you’ve trapped a raccoon, you need to either kill it or let it go. If the former, there are a variety of methods I won’t go into here. Besides, it’s a LIVE trap. You don’t need to kill it. I recommend letting them go in the Allegan State Forest, but anywhere that’s more than 3 miles (some say 7 miles) away from your house should do.

Fly Bait and Cola

That said, the thing that everyone wants to know is: How to Make the Pepsi of Death(tm). Please keep in mind that, while effective, the fly bait in the Pepsi trick may be illegal in your neck of the woods. Or it may only be legal on your home property. Or maybe no one will care. Suffice to say that you need to be aware of these things before walking into the state fish and wildlife office  asking about fly bait to kill raccoons.

The Secret Recipe

Actually, there is no “recipe”. Just get some fly bait (it usually comes in a cardboard tube like Parmesan cheese only the contents are blue and granular) and some cola (it doesn’t have to be Pepsi). Get a cereal bowl that you never ever want to eat out of again. Cover the bottom of the bowl with fly bait. Really spoon it in there. Then, fill bowl with cola. Stir up with spoon you never ever want to eat with again. Set it out for raccoons. Find dead raccoon(s) about 3 feet from bowl in morning.

That said, there are refinements. One, I use a disposable plastic bowl. Two, I use a disposable plastic spoon. That’s not very refined, but this whole method is a glorious improvisation. This is the Git R Done school of problem solving here. You won’t find this in kit form.

Will your pets get into it? I don’t know. My barn cats don’t. My chickens don’t. For some reason, opossums don’t seem to either. Just raccoons. Maybe that’s the beauty of the Pepsi of Death solution.  Maybe I’m just really lucky. I don’t have any dogs, so I don’t know if they’ll go after this stuff or not. Please use caution in case your neighbor’s dog likes to wander over and drink Pepsi out of bowls you’ve left out. While it would be interesting to find out in a scientific, controlled experiment sort of way, you don’t want to be the one conducting that research!

The End

An old farmer taught me this method. It really does work. The raccoon will completely finish the whole thing. Then, they will expire less than 10 feet away. Some folks will be upset with you for killing a poor raccoon, but your kids will find a whole, dead raccoon less traumatic than finding gory chicken parts scattered all over the barn, so tell them you did it for the children.

By the way, dispose of the raccoon properly. I recommend burying the thing if you can. No sense in poisoning a turkey buzzard, too. At the very least, bag it up and throw it in the trash can. Make sure to warn your wife if she happens to be away on vacation so that she doesn’t come home a few days later and go to throw things out of her car when she gets home and opens the trash can to a couple of dead raccoons that have been ripening in the 90 degree sun for 3 days. Trust me. You don’t want this to happen. I just know that’s all.

When all is said and done, I prefer my live trap. It gets opossums and raccoons and is more humane. Unless you let them go in the parking lot at work and they run out into the street and get run over by a car. Trust me. You don’t want this to happen. I just know that’s all.

So…I’ve got these horses I’m “boarding”. They’re eating me out of house and home – much more than the cattle. We took them in for someone on the premise that we’d only charge for hay and that the owner would arrange to have it delivered. So far, only one lone round bale has shown up, like a giant 400 lb tumbleweed, in the front yard. I’m beginning to get concerned that our good deed isn’t going to go unpunished. One of the reasons that we haven’t bought horses is that they are expensive to buy, feed, and maintain (supplements, gear, shoes). Now I have three of them out there shooing the cattle away from the bale feeder like aggressive cousins at a wedding buffet.

There is a lesson to be learned here. An ethical one at that. That lesson is that while Michigan law states that after 30 days it is considered abandonment and the boarder can legally take possession (so to speak, the boarder already has the animal), but that isn’t necessarily the neighborly thing to do to someone down on their luck. I figure the ethical line gets crossed somewhere between 30 days and 6 months. This is simply NOT the kind of thing that happens to you in the city. For one thing, you can’t really park a horse on a city street without a parade permit. For another, you probably don’t have room in your city lot yard for all the hay you’d need even if you could get the parade permit. I’d love to see someone down at the alderman’s office trying to get a fistful of temporary parking permits for their friend’s horse.

The kids love having the horses around and they’re definitely more friendly than the cattle. At least, the horses let you pat their nose even if you aren’t holding a bucket of grain. Kids love Disneyworld though, but its expensive and you can’t really live there. We’ll see how this turns out. I’ll keep you posted.

(For the squeamish – This might not be a good lunchtime read…) It is done. I killed, plucked, prepped and cooked our annoying rooster. The axing was annoyingly barbaric, but after doing the whole process, I’d rather do that than pluck them. Plucking was *really* annoying. I don’t think I soaked the bird in scalding water long enough or the water wasn’t hot enough. I ended up cutting the wings off rather than trying to pluck that many feathers one by one for zero return on meat.

Of course, the rooster got his revenge Sunday night. Two hours in the pot and it was still the toughest chicken I’ve ever eaten. The white meat wasn’t too bad, but the dark meat was…um….chewy. On the plus side, I hadn’t made chicken and dumplings from scratch before, so it was a good chance to try things out. Savannah was more excited to know that her evil archnemesis was boiling away in the pot than eating the dumplings though, so we’ll have lots of leftovers.

This being the first time we’ve also butchered one of our animals instead of outsourcing the task, I should wax philosophical about it. Cath pointed out that unlike most kids, ours aren’t afflicted with thinking that food comes from a grocery store. The underlying text was “Ok, farm guy, you’ve proved your point. Now, can we move on?” I think she was just peeved that the rooster was so tough. Personally, I was agog at how long it took to pluck the chicken. I can’t imagine having to do this every time I wanted some chicken fingers. Most people would go vegetarian rather than spend Saturday morning dealing with it for a Sunday dinner. I’m sorry if that’s not suitably philosophical. After a small attack of nerves right before swinging the axe, I kind of stopped thinking about it.

Of course, we have 8 broiler birds ready as well. I may farm them out for time constraints, but that seems like cheating. The 13 turkeys present a real issue, however. They all need to be ready for Thanksgiving and last year it cost me more than I’d like to get a turkey done for Thanksgiving – $10. Why? The weekend before Thanksgiving is the first weekend of hunting season. No one wants to deal with turkeys when they can be gutting deer for more money.

In any case, just remember that if your chicken is over 12 months old, it ain’t good eatin’. Nice broth though.

Yaro gave birth to her first calf yesterday (Friday), a 60lb heifer we named Uptown. For those of you wondering why we would name an animal that, consider that the alternative was “UIC-Halsted”. You’re supposed to tattoo a code on the cattle’s ears. Every year has a letter assigned to it. Last year was “T”. Thus, we named our bull calf “Thorndale”. This year, it’s U. You don’t have to name your animal after the year letter, but it’s a fun exercise for us. Besides, Thorndale was better than “Thirty-Fifth/Archer”. We’re also trying to name them after El stops, you see.

For those of you familiar with the Chicago Transit Authority’s train lines, you’ll realize that there is no “Uptown” stop, but we felt the cheating was acceptable since UICHalsted would have meant I’d have to retell the above paragraph 9000 times. Ugh. Joe Walsh once said of “Walk Away” that “If I’d known I’d be playing this song the rest of my life, I would have written a different song.” I chose to write the different song from the start….trust me…it’ll make sense later and you’ll have this zen-like moment of clarity on the ride home and then the brake lights in front of you will come on and you’ll lose it. Eventually, you’ll realize I am a genius, too, but that might come after the ride home.

In any case, she’s a healthy, beefy little heifer who seems very bright and alert, just like her Mom. Cath is beaming and I’m ecstatic that I can keep her since she’s not related at all to our new bull. If we’d had a bull calf, we might as well have named him “TBone” or “FreezerBeef”. Explaining it to the kids next year would have been difficult, too. “Tbone? He’s what’s for dinner!” Now I can postpone that conversation a little while longer.