I told him how the cow ate the cabbage!

On this beautiful, and I mean BEAUTIFUL, Saturday morning, I was rooting around in the garden and began to wonder how much longer it will be before the cabbage are ready to harvest.  We generally eat all we can and then make sauerkraut.  I'll post how we do this once the cabbage are ready. 

So while I was looking at the cabbage below, you guessed it...  Our two Jersey cows, Daisy and Rosie meandered up and put on their best begging routine.  They look at you with those big liquid eyes and sad looks and can be the most effective panhandlers you've ever seen in your life.

Looking at one of the cabbages in the garden

So what else could I do but pull off some of the healthy leaves off the bottom of the cabbage heads and feed them to the cows over the fence.  You can see old Rosie craning her neck up over the barbed wire fence that lines the top of our garden fence.


Beggars can't be choosers

Well, they made quick work of making the cabbage leaves disappear, so I went back to get more.  They were pretty funny, head-butting one another in competition to get the next leaf.  You would've thought by watching this spectacle that we don't feed our cows and that is hogwash, as they had just eaten some good hay and some Dairy Ration only 30 minutes ago. 

Rosie and Daisy jockeying for the biggest cabbage leaf

 Rosie, on the right, is being a gluttonous pig, but Daisy, on the left is making her presence known by sticking her nose in the middle of things.


A handful of fresh cabbage for the cows

Rosie can be a real piglet, eating all of her food and Daisy's too, so I saved some cabbage especially for Daisy. 

Thanks for looking out for me!

As I was watching the girls eat the cabbage, I was reminded of the old saying, "I'll show him how the cow ate the cabbage..." and began to wonder where exactly that saying came from.  Thank goodness for Google.  At www.word-detective.com I found the answer and a very interesting one at that!

The saying, "I'll tell him how the cow ate the cabbage" simply means that you're going to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.  According to the website above, this is a folk saying that originated in the South and came from a joke from the 1940's.  It goes like this:

A circus had arrived in a small town, and one morning one of the elephants managed to escape. The fugitive pachyderm made its way to the backyard garden of an elderly (and very near-sighted) woman, where it began hungrily uprooting her cabbages with its trunk and eating them. Alarmed by the apparition in her garden, the woman called the police, saying, “Sheriff, there’s a big cow in my garden pulling up my cabbages with its tail!” “What’s the cow doing with them?” he asked, to which the woman replied, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you!”

So the phrase means to tell someone something they don't want to hear - like the woman in the joke refused to do. 

Our girls enjoyed eating cabbage this morning and continued to hang out by the garden fence in hopes that I would toss them some additional fresh produce.  Soon they saw that their begging was not going to yield additional produce and they made their way to the rye grass paddock and began to eat things other than cabbage.