Our New Bull has Arrived! We Call Him Tex.

good morning everybody welcome back to living traditions homestead it is an exciting day here on the homestead we've been on the search for a new bull for our herd of cows for quite a while now and just recently we actually found the bowl that we wanted to purchase and today he's going to be delivered it's a great day to have a bowl delivery because it is sunny and warm one of very few that we've had recently yeah today it's supposed to be a nice day and then another week of rain but it is gonna be a beautiful day we've got lots of big plans today to get work done but this morning we're preparing for this bull to show up now if you've been following us for a while you know that last year we purchased some additional land we also purchased with the land the cows that have been living on this land for a long time at the time there was a bull with that herd of cows but we got rid of that bull because we wanted to be able to keep back some of the heifer calves that we had this year the girl calves this year and we didn't want them to be related to the bowl so that means we needed to replace the bowl so that we can once again get the cows pregnant the cows we have on our farm right now are a limousine herford cross we absolutely love these cows we like the cross we love their temperament and actually we just like their color i know that's dumb to just like their color but we do right and they seem to be excellent mothers which is a big uh plus for us here um and like sarah said their temperament is really good we can go up and we can pet just about all of the cows um you know they're not friendly like a pet but they're but they're friendly enough that we can get around them we don't feel threatened by them because they're such large animals so we looked at a lot of different breeds of bulls we saw several different breeds that we really liked but ultimately we decided to go with a hereford and keep the hereford limousine cross as our breed of choice one particular characteristic that we knew we wanted in a bowl was that they be pulled which means that they're naturally born without horns we don't have a lot of experience yet with cattle we're still learning and so having to dehorn calves is not a skill that we are ready to learn and we really feel that hornless cows are safer for us at this time so we're excited to be bringing a pulled herford bull onto our farm now the bullet we're going to be getting is two years old he is a registered hereford we had him all checked out at the vet we actually met the person who who owns him at the vet last week and the vet checked everything out they did a sperm test so we know that he's good infertile they measure the circumference of his testicles to make sure he's growing at the right rate to make sure he's right on where he should be for a two-year-old and a two-year-old should be perfect mix for our cows he should be able to take care of all 10 of our cows no problem so you guys there's one thing that we need to do before the bull arrives and that is to move our cows we're actually excited to share with you that we've been working on training with them and so we're excited hopefully it'll work again this morning when we show you but we've been training them to come when we call them they're getting used to us and things have been going really well so let's go move the cows so they are in the right place for the bull when he arrives all right so this is the gate that we're going to move the cows through this morning now we're hoping that you know our training with them is going to pay off because we just moved them into that front paddock yesterday which means they still have a lot of grass out there but that's rose's paddock we really just moved them there because it's kind of on the rotation to get back to where we actually want them so these are the rain these are called range cubes or you know cattle cubes this is what we're training them with and what we're really trying to do is get them used to the sound of a bucket shaking and us calling them to so that they'll actually go where we want them to go not so much that they have a mind of their own and just want to stay where they are so this will be a good test to see if our training's been paying off we've been feeding them every morning just you know for 10 cows this little bit but they seem to like it and it seems like they're excited to get them every morning so let's open that gate up and see if they'll come through [Music] let me open it all the way first before you call them come on cows come on cows come on come on cows let's go [Music] [Music] come on coach come on kyle come on come on come on cows here you go come on come on cows come on [Music] for all the cabs here five of them yep one two three four five cabs count the cows one two three four five six seven eight nine ten ten in hudson and hudson all right everybody's here well looks like that was a success everybody's here everybody's moved over and now all we have to do is wait for the bull to arrive we should be arriving within the next 15 minutes or so i think so we'll go back up toward the main gate and watch for him to arrive with the bull and see what happens when they get here all right bubba welcome home [Music] little text icon is that what you call them all right text it is in [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so so well i think that went well it looks like he's followed some of the cows down the path over the hill here where they go to get water looks like everybody's getting along uh looks like you know right now they're just mostly interested in eating all this grass that's growing so that's good i didn't see any you know tussling of any kind so we're gonna let them settle down for a while see if they come back up the hill if not we'll jump on the utv in a little bit we'll head down the hill and try to find them and just see how everybody's getting along while we wait for the cows and the new bull to come back up here we want to show you a project that we've been working on here let's go take a look what we've been doing this area back here is the one acre piece of property that we have put a double fence around to keep the deer out and we're using the inside area of this fencing as a chicken moat so that the chickens you know lay their eggs and at night they'll be in their hoop coop but during the day they can run around all the way around this one acre parcel to look for bugs and eat leaves and grass and all that kind of stuff well we set this area apart for an orchard which we planted already just some brand new trees this spring we're going to be putting blueberries and some other berries in another area but this front area here we have reserved for garden space and so kevin and i decided that since we have some extra plants not a whole lot some plants left over that didn't sell at the farmers market and we don't need in our big garden we'll put an experimental garden here for the first time ever so this is a big deal to us for a couple of reasons the first is that this is the very first garden that we're planting here on the farm now for those of you who haven't been following us for a long time about a year ago we were able to purchase some additional land to expand our farming or our homestead so we have two pieces of property now they're pretty close to each other close enough that we can go back and forth several times a day without any real hassle we consider this this new piece of land which is a lot bigger than our other piece of land to be our farm and we that's just what we call it so that we can say we're doing this at the farm and we're doing this at the homestead so we have the homestead and we have the farm that's how we keep them separate so if you hear us refer to things that'll help you guys understand a little bit about where we are so this is the very first garden this is kind of our test at the farm to see how the ground here is and see how things will grow so yesterday sarah and i tilled all of this up we put up the trellis and we planted all of these plants we planted a bunch of tomatoes and peppers now the cool thing about these are these are all of the plants that didn't sell at the farmers market this year so it's a variety of different things but in past years in all honesty these probably would have gone to waste i mean we we offer some to other people you know neighbors and things if they want them just to come get them but it seems like every year we're left with some that either nobody wants they didn't sell and we just didn't have room for so this year we were able to plant all of these and we'll have some extra things to preserve over the course of the summer and of course some extra tomatoes to eat so that never hurts either so again this is about a 50-foot row and the other experiment that we're doing that we're excited about and the other exciting thing about this is that we're trying to grow this in a little bit different way if you have watched our gardening videos on our big garden that we do at the homestead we plant a lot of times with these trellises but we'll plant on one side of the trellis and every row will have its own trellis down here we're trying something a little bit different to see how it works this year and see if it can save us a little space and a little work so we're planting on both sides of the trellis instead of planting our tomatoes 18 inches apart like we normally do we're planting them 24 inches apart but then we're staggering on the opposite side of the trellis so we'll be tying the tomatoes to both sides of the trellis and we'll see how that works again because this is an experiment these are all extra anything we get off of these we'll just consider a great blessing and extra on top of what we already have it doesn't matter if the experiment doesn't go as well as we planned but you guys i really think that this is going to be great other than that we planted them exactly the same way we did our other tomatoes we drilled a hole we put a handful of rabbit manure down in the bottom and planted them all the way down the row i can tell you when i tilled this up that this ground is a lot more rocky than the round than the ground that we have in our normal garden area but it's not like a lot of big rocks it's more gravelly almost and i actually think that it might be really good drainage so i'm excited to see how this works over the course of the summer we'll keep giving you guys updates on this so you can see as well and who knows maybe one year all of this behind me is going to be our new garden well while we're over in this area i think now is a good time to update you guys on how the orchard trees have been doing that we planted this spring so let's walk over by them and i can show you just how well they're doing well these trees are doing fantastic now it was just this spring after we did all of these fences this chicken moat fencing that we planted this orchard we have 14 trees here and this project was actually sponsored by stark brothers which is a fantastic nursery here in missouri they actually ship all over the country and they have fantastic quality of trees all of these were bare root trees they transplanted very well i spread some blood meal around all of them which is a fantastic organic fertilizer and they're really responding well we don't have a single tree that hasn't leafed out so that's exciting and encouraging we've planted a variety of different types of fruit trees we have apple peach pear sweet cherry sour cherry and plum there are a couple other things that we don't have planted yet that i really would like to try here they were actually out of stock when we were ordering our trees i want to try some apricot trees and also fig trees maybe mulberries i'm not sure we're excited to expand in this area so you've seen kind of the garden area that we have set aside in here earlier you've seen the orchard area that we've set aside in the middle and then on the very far side we have plans to have some really really amazing berry bushes so let's just walk down there and take a look at that space so this area over here that we have reserved for berries and such it's about 120 feet this way and about a hundred feet this way so really nice sized area for sure we're gonna do at least one full row of blueberries maybe two rows of blueberries raspberries and blackberries we might split one row of but we're also really excited to put in some grapes we haven't decided what varieties but we're so excited to put grapevines in here so those are all projects that you can look forward to seeing on our channel we're not sure if that's going to start this fall or next spring but we're really excited to get started on that we're thinking about it you guys know that we're planners we've already been talking with stark brothers about the things that we wanted other things we want to do in this area and they're excited to work on those projects with us as well well it doesn't look like the cows have come back up so the bull must be with them so let's jump in the utv and see if we can go find out figure out where they are well we found them the whole herd is over here looks like they're trying to take advantage of the shade it's pretty warm out today it's about 82 degrees and sunny so it's one of the first really warm days that we've had so i think they're just trying to stay as much of the shade as they can during the day but you can see that we've got a lot of grass here for them so this is a great place for them to hang out for the day this is a pretty big paddock here that they're in right now so they've got a lot of grass to eat over here let's get closer and see if we can see the bull now i didn't tell you guys but the owner the previous owner of the bull told us that the bull has been called tex apparently his dad's name was big tex and they've been calling this one little tex but we're just going to call him tax so we're going to keep that name for the bull all right let's go closer and see if we can get a better look and see how everybody's doing so it looks like the cow that he was kind of hanging out with when we got over here this cow right next to this tree we've nicknamed her peppermint and she was the second cow that we had this year to have a calf so there's a really good chat she could be back in heat right now and so that could be why he's paying more attention to her because the previous owner kept a bull with this herd all the time you know other than the the five that already have already had calves we're not sure who is pregnant and who was wasn't bred in the first place so there's five of our cows that are kind of up in the air right now we're pretty sure most of them are bred but there is one that i think was not bred at all by the previous bull and so hopefully tex here will take care of that now our plan with tex is to keep him with the cows here for the next three months then we'll move him back out after that time he'll kind of live off on his own until next year when we want him to breed them again that way we're not having calves all year long like we are now we'll have an actual calving season we're hoping to always have our calves in the spring so that they can take full advantage of the you know green grass and everything else the moms can be eating green grass to be able to produce lots of milk for their calves so it looks like everybody's getting along well he's actually laying down now so he doesn't seem threatened by us at all all in all he seems like a very calm bull and we're happy about that um we're just gonna kind of let him chill out we'll make sure we're checking on them we've checked all of our fences everything looks good we don't think there's any way that anybody's going to get out and honestly i think he's going to be so preoccupied now that he has 10 ladies to take care of that i don't think he's going to want to go anywhere anyway if they stay here i think he'll stay here too well this has been an exciting day on the homestead this has been a process we've really been debating about when the right time to get a bull was what the right breed would be but we really think we've made a good decision by getting techs and bringing him here to the homestead it's also exciting to actually do some gardening here on this part of our property we'll see what the soil brings for us and how it works out so it's a great experiment to have this summer we're glad that you guys got to spend the day with us today we hope that you enjoyed seeing everything around the farm and the homestead if you're enjoying our videos don't forget to hit that subscribe button and give us a thumbs up and remember that as always the absolute best way that you can help us is by sharing our videos on all of your social media to other people that you think might like them as well until next time thank you so much for stopping by our homestead take care and god bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 113,693

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing

Id: mEA0s4NUuD4

Length: 20min 16sec (1216 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 09 2021