Saturday 13 June 2009

Oh Nuts!

Well I've been following a blog called The Pioneer Woman for
some time now, and it's really worth checking out, Ree who's blog it is has
the most wicked sense of humour and takes the most beautiful photos
and also has some fabulous recipes on there, so go and have a look.

Anyway back to the story, I was checking out one of her posts where she
is talking about calf nuts, lovely thing to be talking about, but a fact of life
on the land, that if you don't want all of your boy calves to grow up to be
bulls the calves have to be ....you know!......castrated.

Looking at Ree's photo's all of her balls are hairy, so I'm not sure how
it's done over there, they must cut the whole thing out, hair and all.

Here most of the time the dogs are sitting next to the cradle with their
mouths open hoping to catch a morsel, but the last
couple of times the men have saved them for tea....
Mmmm Bush Oysters they call them in Australia, and I have to admit
as kids we quite often cooked them in the fire or on the branding
furnace, but these days I can think of better things to eat. With
the last lot of branding I think they saved about 200. We do it a bit
different to Ree's family as we don't count the balls at the end to see
how many we did, we usually have someone marking as they go
through as we have both heifers and bulls going through the calf
cradle at the same time, as we also vaccinate, earmark and brand
and dehorn and tag and if they are bulls cut as they are going
through the cradle.

We had a visit from our Adelaide training team when the branding
was finished and Angela who is a real city girl was facinated to see
our bush oysters. Of course John had to hand her a couple of big ones.
I should have taken a photo of the big dish full.

Now Angela can blame this one on me. I just had to do a pretend like you
are eating them shot. What a sport, hey!

Mmmmmm yummy.

Anyway check back tomorrow I've got another card to share.

Cheers,

Kristy

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