A new puppy!

Last week was an exciting week for us. We drove down to Virginia to pick up our new puppy from the breeder. He is totally adorable (as you can see in the picture above that his breeder sent us before we picked him up). He is a Slovak Cuvac named Bo, and he is just 2 months old. This little guy is an unusual dog. You can read about his breed here. What attracted us to him was that he shares our Slovak background (Charlie and I both have Slovak mothers). His breed originated right in the area where my grandmother was born. Slovak Cuvacs are known for protecting livestock, particularly birds and cattle. Because he is a guard dog (but not an attack dog bred for vicious behavior), his kind was nearly wiped out during WWII, because invading armies in Slovakia killed the guard dogs as part of the invasion. Slovak Cuvacs are known to be very brave; they are one of few dogs that will stand up to bears and wolves. Since there are very few wolves anymore, no one really needs that kind of firepower in a dog anymore. Also they like to guard groups of children so this is really the perfect dog for us.

So we have our work cut our for us. We have to figure out how to train this little guy to do several things. The first priority is to teach him to do his business outside. Thank god we have no carpets. Actually he makes it outside about 85% of the time, but he has maybe one or two accidents per day. Next we have to teach him to respond to our commands so we can get him off leash at home. Right now the only command he responds to properly is sit. When I can teach him to come to me when I call, then I can start letting him off leash. Lastly, I need to teach him to guard the animals, and this is going to be the hard part. Right now he is afraid of Josie, the cow, and he wants to chase the birds. And since he is teething and chewing on everything in sight, I don't dare let him near the birds. He also fights with the cats. Since Bo and the cats are presently indoors I figure that will come to an end shortly when they simply get used to each other. The cats are afraid of him and they freak our when he drinks their water (which he is fond of doing even though he has his own.) Eventually Bo will spend more and more time outside and that will lessen the conflict with the cats as well.

We realized yesterday that wild blackberries and wild raspberries are in season and we started the picking and canning yesterday. I canned four small jars of raspberry jam. I have about 3 or 4 lbs of wild blackberries in the fridge that we picked last night and I'm going to can today. I visited my sister who lives up in God's Country, PA (it really is God's country because she lives in a town called Corry near a fairly large Old Order Amish settlement.) While I was there we did a lot of shopping the in Amish general stores and I finally got myself a food mill. I was able to remove, not all, but most, of the seeds from my raspberry jam with that tool yesterday.

Unfortunately, when Charlie woke up this morning, he was all swollen with some sort of allergic reaction. He looks like Rocky in the 13th round against Apollo Creed. He walked around all morning saying "Cut me Mick! Cut me!" We have no idea if he was bitten by something while we were out in the field yesterday or what. This situation retooled our plans for the day, because grass cutting was out of the question.

The weeds are threatening to totally overwhelm us. We are fighting the good fight. We spent a good portion of Saturday weeding and in addition to back ache and sore hands, I got a ferocious sunburn on a the sliver of my back where my shirt did not properly reach my jeans. Lovely eh? Well it hurts like hell. I'm sure any real farmer would be laughing his or her ass off at what a ridiculous thing it is that we let the weeds get so out of control in the first place and then to add insult to injury we did all of the weeding in one day and it was a hot one at that. Live and learn, that is what we're on this farm for anyway, right?