CLASSIFIEDS

Healthcare Employment Opportunities

*Director of Marketing – full-time management position

*Director of Obstetrics – full time nursing management position

*CRNA – work 3 weeks on and one week off with above market rates!

*RN Float Nurse – .6 FTE Premium Pay Weekender position and a .75 FTE evening/night shift position. Employment Bonus Eligible!

*ICU RN – .9 FTE evening/night shift position. $4,500 Employment Bonus Eligible!

*OB RN – .9 FTE evening/night shift position. $4,500 Employment Bonus Eligible!

*RN Emergency Department – .6 to a .9 FTE p.m./night shift position open with 12-hour shifts. Employment Bonus Eligible!

*RN – .5 FTE p.m. shift position in our Nursing & Rehab Center

*Certified Nursing Assistants – part-time positions available in our Nursing & Rehab Center on day, evening and night shifts, $3,000 Employment Bonus included!

*Behavioral Health Therapist – seeking a part or full time LCSW.

*Hospice Chaplain – per diem position working 5 to 10 hours per month.

*Occupational Therapist – full-time OT position working in Home Health and in the Schools.

*Physical Therapy Assistant – .8 FTE in our Home Health Services Department.

*Physical Therapy Assistant – .8 to 1.0 FTE combination position working in Home Health and Outpatient Services!

*Speech Therapist – .6 FTE Day shift position.

*MRI Imaging Technologist – .5 to a 1.0 FTE day shift position. Up to a $5,000 Employment Bonus, prorated based on FTE!

*Imaging Technologist – full-time night shift position. Up to a $5,000 Employment Bonus, prorated based on FTE!

*Imaging & Lab Technologist – full-time position working 4 -10 hour day shifts in our family practice clinics.

*Respiratory Therapist – part time day and evening/night shifts available.

*Med Tech/MLT or CLS – .5 FTE position in our lab department.

*Operating Room Technician – .8 FTE day shift position. $3,000 Employment Bonus eligible!

*Patient Access Specialist – .5 to .6 FTE p.m./night shift & a .8 FTE night shift position!

*Clinic CMA or LPN – .8 FTE day shift positions in our Dodgeville Specialty Clinics & our Barneveld/Mt. Horeb Family Practice Clinic.

*Environmental Services Staff – full and part time p.m. and night shift positions. $1,000 Employment Bonus!

To find out more detailed information about all open positions and to apply, go to our website at www.uplandhillshealth.org

Upland Hills Health, 800 Compassion Way, Dodgeville, WI 53533

Reflections from Lost Horizon Farm — Attire on the Farm

Each edition, retired dairy farmer Barb Garvoille brings her musings on dairy farm life from her own years of experience on Lost Horizon Farm with her late husband Vince “Mr. Farmer” Garvoille. This mooving memoir focuses on 1980-2000, join Barb as she rises with the herd.

Cattle make manure that they walk in, run over, lay on, and drag their tails through; they are never totally clean. Unlike more fastidious animals that will toilet in a particular corner or area, cows eliminate anywhere. From time to time, a cow may cough while eliminating and propel excrement in an amazing trajectory. Urine from the cow travels a good distance from the animal to the ground, flows in a voluminous stream and can create an expansive spray pattern. Keeping these facts in mind, a person can understand that working with cows is not an occupation for those who cannot tolerate getting dirty.

Generally, farmers have two categories of clothing: farm clothes and town clothes. Farm wives may have two corresponding types of laundry baskets also. I did!

Clothes usually started out as town clothes and, as they aged or developed flaws, became farm clothes. It matters little to the producers in the enterprise — the cows — if a person's clothes match, are in style, or have a few holes. To the cows, it is all about human approach and attitude. Waterproof, high topped, steel-toed rubber boots were the best choice for milking and for farm chores. This type of footwear could be easily slipped off and rinsed out. That needed to happen when cows defecated in one's boot (The initial warmth was pleasing in the wintertime!). Leather boots with a good tread offered better support, but they would get wet in the milk house, and the acid in the manure would make the leather deteriorate quickly. Rubber boots would last until they split, usually in the spot where they were bent when a person milked. Steel toes benefitted human toes and the rest of the appenage when a cow shifted position and unintentionally stepped on one’s foot. When a person was milking, clothing had to be loose enough to allow a wide range of motion but not so billowy that it might get caught on a piece of equipment or frighten a cow. Whatever was worn would not come out of the barn clean. When a person was bent over in the stanchion putting a milking machine on a cow, she might swish her tail and its switch would brush a swath of moistened manure across one's back. Sometimes a cow would have been laying on a cow patty (also called a chip). When she was urged to get up for milking, even if one then brushed most of the manure off, the person would still be obliged to slide past a dirty flank. Cows would be eliminating at various times; whenever a person was near the cow's posterior, one stood a good chance of being splashed or splattered. When feeding or pushing up feed in the manger, the friendlier cows might stretch forward to nose a person and so inadvertently decorate one's clothing with a bit of regurgitated cud or bovine drool. When bottle feeding calves, the sucking process would cause generous amounts of bubbly, sticky, milky saliva to accumulate on

The Sauk County Gardener

Starting Sweet Potato Slips

“My dream is to become a farmer. Just a Bohemian guy pulling up his own sweet potatoes for dinner.”

— Lenny Kravitz

Here we are on the brink of March and hopefully, spring weather. Although the weather in the Baraboo Bluffs is not very spring-like yet, there are some plants I’m starting now for my garden. This year I want to start my own sweet potato slips. Normally, I would purchase my slips, but I happen to have a sweet potato on my counter that sprouted. Seeing as Mother Nature has taken the lead, I’m going to try and start my slips instead of buying them. I also have a little gardening buddy (a.k.a. my grandson) who likes to help me with my gardening projects, and this is a simple and fun project for kids.

There are a couple different methods to start sweet potato slips and March is the perfect time to start them. A sweet potato slip is simply a rooted sprout from a mature sweet potato. The traditional method is to suspend a sweet potato in water. To use this method, you’ll need a jar and some toothpicks. Inspect the sweet potato to determine what is the root end. You may see tiny roots on one end of the sweet potato, and it will typically taper to a point. This is the end you put into the jar first. The other end is the sprouting end. Insert toothpicks into the sweet potato so the sprouting end is suspended above the jar. Then, fill the jar with water and place it in a warm, sunny location or under grow lights on a heat mat. Keep the water level mid-way up the potato and change the water weekly to keep it fresh. Roots will develop first and then the sprouts will start to form. Once you have sprouts 5-6” the bottle nipples. The saliva would get on a person's hands and end up being wiped on one's jeans.

Jeans were a wardrobe necessity. Although durable, repetitive bending would be hard on the garment's knees and the crotch. Fortunately, cows never laughed when a person's jeans ripped up the middle during a milking! Long before it was a fashion trend and people paid money to have jeans that looked faded, worn or torn, farmers had jeans with holes, rips, and discolored splotches. Chlorine-based sanitizers took the color out of fabric, iodine and manure made lasting stains, and failing to clear a fence or a calf panel or sliding too close to an exposed bolt guaranteed ragged garment rips (and sometimes skin abrasions or punctures too).

Hats and gloves needed to be plentiful and varied. There were leather gloves for fencing chores, yellow cotton gloves accentuated by red cuffs (bought by the box and referred to as “chore gloves”) for most other activities, and heavily lined insulated gloves for driving tractors and doing outdoor tasks in wintertime. Lost Horizon Farm had an extensive and somewhat historic collection of summer farm caps and winter stocking hats from seed com and implement dealers. It was best to have headgear that was either tight fitting or tied down because a head covering that blew into the barnyard and was trampled or that sailed under a piece of machinery and was run over was never quite the same.

The prime requirements for a cold weather barn coat, jacket or coverall were tall, you can separate the slips so they can be transplanted. Using this method, it should take about 6-8 weeks to produce slips.

Another technique is to start sweet potato slips in soil. Select a container with drainage holes and fill it with potting soil or seed starting mix. Consider using a rotisserie chicken tray (for one potato) or a foil cake pan (for multiple potatoes). Moisten the soil and then nestle the sweet potatoe(s) into the soil so the potato is covered about half way. Use the lid to catch excess water. Keep the soil moist as the roots and sprouts form. Place the containers in a sunny, warm window or on a heat mat with grow lights to help speed up the process. Typically, it will take about a week for the sweet potato to root. In a couple more weeks, you’ll start to see sprouts grow from the top. Once the sprouts are 5-6” tall, carefully remove that it was both warm and washable. These items were the heftiest, and their weight was not just due to their insulated construction.. Because it was impractical to launder winter outerwear every day, over time they accumulated the “barniest” of clothing accouterments. A source of bemusement to us was an acquaintance whose formerly tan coveralls were so soiled and stiffened with manure, grease, and oil that we were convinced that they had never seen the inside of a washing machine and probably stood up by themselves when removed! them from the sweet potato by twisting or cutting off at soil level.

During extremely cold weather, Mr. Farmer would don an extra lengthy stocking hat with holes for the eyes and mouth and a roofed opening for the nose. Wearing this winter wardrobe item, he looked like a bandit ready for a heist. When hauling manure on very windy days, a turn could bring a wind-assisted shower of manure from the implement’s beaters toward the tractor operator. To be prepared for such conditions, Mr. Farmer strapped on a supplemental piece of headgear with a heavy duty clear plastic shield that could be pulled down over his face. Mr. Farmer then attained the look of a surgeon in the operating theater.

Barb has called Lost Horizon Farm, just north of Spring Green, her home for the past 43 years. She is fond of all creatures (including snakes). Her joy stems from being able to be outdoors every day observing and treasuring the plant and animal life on her small piece of this planet. She loved milking cows and is proud to have been a dairy farmer.

For either method, the slips will not have any roots once you’ve removed them from the mature potato. Remove the bottom leaves and place the slips in a jar of water to “root” them. They should start to develop roots in a couple days. Using heat and light will speed the process. Keep the jar full of fresh water. The slips are ready to plant once the roots are several inches long. When it’s warm enough to plant outside and the danger of frost has passed, they should be planted 12-18 inches apart and about 4 inches deep. One potato can produce a dozen or more slips and each plant will produce 3-5 potatoes. Figure out how many potatoes you’d like and then let the potatoes continue to produce sprouts until you have as many as you wish to grow. Enjoy this fun project and get a leg up on your spring garden.