Yes, I’m here.

I haven’t written much lately … I’ve been quite busy, doing one thing or another, recovering from a cold, struggling to sleep, catching up on sleep, working, all sorts of things.

So I’ll just jump in with a bit of a generic update.

The past couple of days I’ve done a bunch of outside work, because Winter is Coming. There’s almost always snow before Halloween, so I have to get a move on if I want to get these things finished before I have to pull everyone in off pasture! With fewer animals, though, we are able to still have everybody out grazing, which is awesome. Some years I’ve had to start on hay by now, to spare the pasture from overgrazing. We’ve still got lots of grass, so that’s wonderful.

I’ve been making bigger changes, as the remaining four sheep are going to be gone by the end of the month: Cherub, The Boy’s 4H lamb (who is now 7!) will be going to a friend’s house for her retirement, and the remaining three will be turned into sausage. Two are Icelandic, Lambie and Jellybean, and I plan to get their hides back and make sheepskin rugs from them … I know for ‘city folk’ that may seem awful, but they are simply gorgeous pelts and I want to be able to fondly remember them and keep my toes warm at the same time. And we love the sausage our butcher makes, so it is a good way to honour the gift of their lives.

Since we won’t need a separate sheep area this winter, then, I removed some fences from the winter pen, making one larger area. I used the nice tall fence  wire to fully enclose the barnyard, removed one gate (which I will need at the Self Serve Cow Buffet), and built the alleyway entrance to the aforementioned Cow Buffet. My Farm Helper will have to come put in the rest of the posts for that feeding area, but it’s almost ready to go, which is good - then I can have my hay delivered and roll the bales in. (We are doing this, if you are curious what I mean by Cow Buffet.)

Basically, we will be able to have the bales dropped in the driveway, roll them into the feeding area by hand (they are easy to roll when they first come off the truck, it’s just impossible once they freeze in place!), remove all the bale string, and run electric wire in front of the front row. The cows eat the bales, then we move the wire backwards when they have cleaned up what they have dropped. No more pitching hay into a feeder, no more trying to get bales up the hill in the winter, just a self-serve Cow Buffet. The space we are using for feeding is what used to be my garden – the quack grass is unconquerable with the energy and resources I have, so this is a better use for the space. Besides, come spring, the area will be trampled down and matted with manure and hay and straw … and I can feed a few pumpkins and zucchini to the animals in there, then close the gate. This spring I fed Sasha a pumpkin in the barnyard, and we got two pumpkin plants in the spot where she’d left some seeds! I can put a few potatoes in as well, because potatoes will grow quite happily in a pile of straw, so I can at least have a few things growing in the nicely fertilized and cow-and-donkey-weeded space.

And donkeys really DO eat thistles! I watched Miss May purposely munching down on thistles in the pasture yesterday, which is just FANTASTIC.

I also tightened a couple of weak/broken spots in the fences, so that I can be sure the winter pen is reasonably snug (come spring everyone wants OUT ON THE GRASS and they will push if the fences are weak). I have also thought some more about my winter watering plans, though I haven’t done anything with that yet, I’m pretty worn out from all the work I did so far!

I took Miss May for a walk down the gravel road today – she did pretty well, stopping a few times to make sure ewerything was safe, and even though a truck came down the other end of the road, everything went well (my neighbours are very good about slowing down around stock!). We both can use the exercise, and it’s good training for both of us as well. I can see that training a donkey will be very good for me: donkeys need a lot of time to ponder things, to be absolutely sure everything is safe before they proceed. They freeze when they aren’t convinced of their safety … a response I completely understand. It’s my job to be empathetic and encouraging, to show Miss May that whatever she is seeing is safe: For instance, she didn’t’ want to walk through the narrow gate by the water trough for some reason. It looked unstable, perhaps, or too skinny. So I tied her to the post and let her look at it for awhile, I walked through several times, and tried to coax her through, and let her stand by the post when she said she wasn’t ready yet. Eventually she decided it was all right and came through. The next day when I took her through, she didn’t even pause. Donkeys have great memories!

I’ve been reading a lot on donkey training – and I measured Miss May again today to confirm her size and weight: she is 48” at the withers (12 hands) and about 700 lbs, which means I can ride her! Only with a very light saddle, and only after we get some solid ground work under our belts, but it is a possibility!

So I spent the day researching, looking at saddles and tack and learning about ground driving and surcingles and lunge lines and bitless bridles.

It’s all very exciting.

Oh, and when we got back from our walk, I put Miss May in the pasture with all the other animals. Everyone was totally calm about it, having been able to get to know one another through the fence for the past couple of days. Then when I went back outside later in the day and called her, Miss May came running right up to me! Yay!

She is such a great animal. She likes to stand there and have me scratch her chin and hug her neck. I’m so happy she came to live here!

Barter

Today I went on a road trip to Rocky Mountain house, and this is wht I came home with!

I left behind a cooler full of beef, which we had in surplus … the lady who posted this milking machine said it was in her barn when she moved in, and the barn needs to come down (oh, yes, it most definitely does) but the equipment ought to be put to good use if someone could get it cleaned up.

I went for the milker – which is a Surge bucket milker (top picture), complete with the claw, the pulsator, surcingle, and (most importantly) the vacuum pump (bottom left). I had been looking into setting one up – a friend had a bucket I could have, but I needed to buy a pump and the shells and claw (and possibly the pulsator), which was going to be about $300, near as I could figure. So I started looking for a full-meal-deal kind of thing, and found this!

The head catches (bottom right) were in the barn and the lady said if I could use them please take them … so we got them unhooked and here they are! A can of Tremclad will deal with the rust and then I’ll install one of them in Sasha’s milking stanchion. They work by trapping the cow by the neck, bascially: it opens (the one on the right is open) and the cow puts her head through to get to the food you’ve set on the other side, then you latch it shut and she can’t back out because her head is wider than her neck – but the opening is plenty wide enough to keep her head through comfortably.

Sasha is pretty good without the catch, but it’s going to be very useful for training milk cows. It’s the kind of thing I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to buy, but having it is sure nice!

The milker cleaned up very nicely … I need to get air and milk hoses, and new insertions for the teat cups but that should be about it. The vacuum pump is really dirty (and too heavy for me to lift out of the car by myself, so I need to wait for The Boy to get home so we can unload it) and needs a bit of work and probably a new belt, but the lady said it had worked the last time she powered it up so we shall see.

I’m off to do some research!

Another week for George, and a new sheep feeder

George the calf has has his two summers and a winter, and it’s time for his ride to the last stop before the Big Pasture in the Sky. However, he was originally scheduled to go last Friday … but there was a snag at the butcher’s and they needed to rebook to this Friday … and then today when we went to hook up the trailer to the borrowed truck, we found that the hitch ball was the wrong size (and very firmly stuck in place). So, we just rebooked for next Friday when the Cruiser will be home, which we know for sure has the right hitch. George can mow the pasture grass for one more week.

So, instead of heading to the butcher I built a sheep feeder. I’d been doing some research on different feeder shapes, again. The one we’ve been using wasn’t bad: it’s essentially a piece of hog panel stapled to the fence posts with a piece of plywood tied to the back on an angle, making a sort of V shaped trough into which the hay is pitched twice a day. The only problem with that set up is that the bigger sheep climb up on the panels and reach over to eat, which is hard on the panels and sometimes pulls the staples out, and the smaller ones stick their heads right through the squares on the panels and occasionally (or frequently, depending how stupid the particular sheep is) get stuck there. Yanking them out several times a day gets old fast (but they STILL put their heads through).

I was also hoping to find something that could hold a little bit more at one shot, so that I can maybe get down to one feeding per day instead of two. I settled on something like the Premier fenceline feeder, as I think the angled base will help the hay settle to where it’s easily accessible, and with higher sides, I can get it pretty full.

I built a small one in the ‘sleeping pen’ today as a test run, and it worked out pretty well. It wasn’t even all that difficult.

The Boy assisted by cutting a hog panel in half the long way, with the side with the smaller openings being reserved for the base of the feeder (the other piece is actually attached underneath, to serve as a fence and prevent anyone from escaping under the feeder).

The front and back are made from fence boards screwed into fence posts: the back posts were already there, they were part of the original fence, and the front two posts were added today and not pounded in as deep so that the front of the feeder is high enough that the sheep can’t climb up on it (or jump over it).

Two thicker boards (2x4s, well, I think one is a 2x6, but whatever, it’s the 2 that matters) are screwed to the inside of the posts, the front board higher than the back, and the cut hog panel piece laid on them. Fencing staples are hammered over the wires of the panel to hold it to the boards, and then thinner boards are screwed to the inside of the fence posts going up the front and back of the feeder, creating a big trough. I left gaps between the boards to allow air circulation, save on lumber, and let me see how full the feeder is without having to go outside and peer down into it.

Here is a sheep’s eye view:

I can probably lower the whole thing a little bit, most of our sheep are pretty short. I’m also going to cut the hog panel one more ‘square’ up from the bottom on the next one, making the angled base a little bigger in area.

The hay is going to fall through and collect on the ground under the feeder, but the sheep will eat that stuff too – they do quite well eating off the ground, actually, if they don’t end up lying in it. We’ll see how these go – the plans actually call for a tray underneath to catch the hay as it falls through, so that’d be another option (I figured the ground made a perfectly acceptable tray … we’ll see).

This is a small one and won’t hold very much hay at one shot – hopefully if I extend the bases on the long row of feeders I have yet to build, I can widen the whole assembly a little and get a bit more in at one time.

It’s really hot out today, but it was good to get this done. I’ve wanted to have a feeder next to the sleep shelter for some time now, because we can use that area as a catch pen (with a little creative fencing, which is on the list of things to do before winter as well). If you fill that feeder, everyone will run into the pen and then you just slam the gate before they figure out that you are trying to catch them in there. Sheep are very easily bribed with food.

Okay, that’s enough hard work for one day … I’m going to go rest now!

New watering strategy for the stock

The shape of the pastures and barnyard is an evolving thing, still. I would like it if we could just figure it out and stick with one good, workable design … but we are farm rookies, really. Every year we discover something else that sounded like a good idea until we had to live with it for a whole winter.

The impetus for this current change is that I wanted a way to have the water trough ‘downhill’ from the house, so that the water cubes we have to capture rainwater from the roof can be hooked up to the trough all summer and keep it filled without any intervention from us. Lots of fresh water, no work for the humans, that’s a good deal, right?

I also wanted it positioned so that in the winter we don’t have to run the water heater’s extension cord through the barnyard. It gets stepped on, unplugged, and generally abused when it is in the way of animal traffic, so there needed to be a way to go around. The spot downhill where the water could go for the summer would work well in that regard, but there’s just one problem: sharing.

In the past, we’ve kept the sheep and cows completely separate all winter. They run together in the summer, sharing the pasture, and they get along just fine (the calf chases the sheep around sometimes, but it’s all in good fun), but in the winter it is important to feed the two separately, or the cows will bully the sheep away from the hay. Also, after the lambs arrive there definitely needs to be a place to get away from the Big Creatures.

What we did before was keep them completely separated, with the water trough under a fence so that one half of it was available for the cows, and the other for the sheep. This works, mostly, but there are always headaches of one kind or another.

The solution (well, the solution we’re going to test out this winter) will be to have the water in the new watering pen area, and everyone will walk over there to get a drink. It isn’t very far from the feeders and shelters, and keeping the animals walking a little bit in the winter is good for them, so that’s a feature, actually. The cows will have their winter shelter and pasture area,  like before, and the sheep will have theirs … and there will be a passageway into the sheep pen the sheep can fit through but the cows can’t. That way everyone can get to the water, and the sheep can go wherever they like … and get away from the cows when they need to.

Today I got the fence up around the new watering pen – The Boy had gotten one end fenced and most of the posts put in, so all I needed to do was stretch the wire and staple it on, put up the gate and pound in one additional post. I always end up redesigning the solutions when I’m outside working, and as I was moving fences today I realized that with one small shift in the position of a gate, I could eliminate a whole lot of work and at the same time meet the requirement that the animals be able to get from any of the pastures back to the barnyard and watering pen. As it stands now, they can get from any of the three main pastures to the barnyard area, which has shelter for them from the sun or from a summer storm and has access to the water area as well. We have a fourth pasture that will have to be treated as an extension of it’s neighbour for now: it needs some more fence work done on it to be sheep-secure anyway, so there’s no urgency there.

The good news is that for the remainder of the summer, the water should be a low-maintenance thing … as long as the water barrel is full and the float valve doesn’t get knocked loose, we’re good to go. There are some finishing touches necessary – the float valve needs to be screwed in place, the fence needs barbed wire run along the top and bottom (we have discovered that woven wire alone does not stand up to the cows, dogs, and sheep – they lean on it or wiggle under it and in no time it’s bent and useless), and there’s one spot at the end where the wire didn’t quite reach that needs some boards put across it for reinforcement. However, what did get done is a good day’s work, so now I can sit down and knit with a clean conscience.

Sunny day, more fence repairs.

The weather forecast is FINALLY calling for some rain this week, which is good - we have had no rain but a few little sprinkles not worth putting a coat on for since our last snowfall, which is just plain weird. And the grass needs some rain to clue it in that it's time to GROW!

However, today is a sunny day and a good day to work outside. And Pasture A is just getting to the ‘edible grass stage’, and Pasture C where everyone has been for the last few days (since it seemed cruel to keep them locked up any longer in such nice weather) is looking pretty used up. With rain coming, today was the day to do the work so The Boy and I went out and repaired the fences in Pasture A and got everyone moved over. The fence we fixed today is one of the first fences we ever put up, so it was pretty awful. Some wire had to come down, a few more posts had to be pounded in, and then we strung barbed wire instead of woven wire along that side, as it's really hilly and it's almost impossible to get woven wire to go up properly with hills and dips. You need a LOT of strands of barbed wire to hold sheep in though, and the posts have to be really close together (even more so with all the darned hills and dips), so it was a lot of work. Went out at 11 or so, came in around 4. I am a little sunburnt and a lot tired.

But, a job that needed doing has been done. And I ache and feel very worn out but at least I was productive so I feel good on the inside. And the critters now have decent grass to eat, and access to their shade and water, and the fence reallocation plans are gradually evolving in my head. The goal is to have a setup that allows access to water and shade from every pasture, with alleyways and access gates to optimize traffic flow and minimize infrastructure headaches. Yeah, it’s an ongoing, evolving process, but it’s slowly coming along. A few new ideas started percolating in my head today, I need to do some drawing and see what might actually be made to work.

Now, though, it’s rest time. My audio book and knitting await!

Saving trees from brush hogging

Not a best seller like Saving Fish from Drowning, but hey.

Trees that are too near the road and/or under the powerlines will eventually be brush hogged – mowed down by a great big mowing machine that essentially mulches everything in its path. So, digging up trees from that space beside the road or out from under the power lines is a way to save their lives … and an inexpensive way to landscape our property.

We need more trees. We really need a good wind break along the north border, behind the house, as the wind usually comes from the northwest and it’s been shown that a proper wind break of heavy trees can actually reduce your power bill considerably. Plus, when you drive up to our house it’s not really very attractive – the front of the house faces south, so you arrive at the “back” of the house, where all you see is a plain row of windows and nothing very inviting. Trees and some better landscaping (and tidying things up) will make it look much better, and it’ll have the added advantage of breaking up the wind.

So, I decided to go out and gather up some trees to start the landscape project. I’ll need to plant some more and make the belt a little thicker, but for starters, I took the quad and the trailer and headed down the gravel road looking for trees (particularly evergreens) that were in the brush hog zone. I found quite a few, actually, including a few larger trees that had escaped last year's mowing and grown to a decent size. With the trusty tree planting shovel that my sister used for four summers of back breaking work, I dug up trees and loaded them into the trailer.

 

Boy oh boy do I love having the quad. I know, I always said we didn’t need one, and I was so very wrong. Especially as my energy levels go down and my body can’t do as much, having a tool that lets me go longer distances and haul heavy loads without using my body’s limited resources is just wonderful. I blessed the neighbour who gave it to us again today as I worked, believe me.

So, a load of trees came home, most of them with considerable soil still around the roots. None of them had travelled far, and the soil is pretty similar, plus I figured keeping them covered in damp earth while they were being transported would be good for them. Once home, The Boy helped out by removing the fence that was along the north border (not a very good fence, it wasn’t sturdy enough to hold anything in and mostly just got in the way) and then I started digging holes and planting trees.

I also went across the road to where the power line comes up to our house and dug up a few large poplar trees from underneath the wires. It’s nice to have a few trees that are tall when you are starting out, so it’s not just a row of teeny seedlings.

This is right by the driveway, you can see the rocks that mark the edge of the culvert that goes under the access from the main road. I put a few little dogwood trees down there near the culvert, as they like moist soil and the ditch stays reasonably damp. The nicest, tallest evergreen went right at the corner – maybe we’ll get some solar Christmas lights for it this winter. The other trees are staggered along the north edge of the property in a bit of a zig zag pattern rather than a single straight line … I’ve been reading permaculture books and straight lines just aren’t a natural thing, plus I want to avoid creating a wind tunnel when the wind is coming from the west, so breaking up the tree line a little is important. Besides, grouping the trees in little clusters will provide more visual interest and eventually give me little mini climate zones where I can grow smaller shrubs and maybe even flowers – though since the grass is actually quackgrass, whatever I grow has to be reasonably easy to mow around, so probably bushes and shrubs which can stand up to having the weed whacker run nearby will make more sense than flowers.

I found some big rocks and set those out next to the smallest trees so that I don’t accidentally drive over them or mow them down. I also moved the Blue Sign (the county address sign) down to the edge of the driveway and put a couple of large poplar trees on either side of the posts that hold the sign. You can’t really see those trees in this picture, but they’re there. I think I’ll try to plant some morning glories or another climbing plant under the sign and it’s supporting posts, and see if we can get something to grow in all that grass.

It’s still pretty rough looking, but it’s an improvement. The Boy and I also raked up all the leftover hay from the yard and he hauled it to the garden where it will serve as perimeter mulch: in the Ongoing Battle Against the Quackgrass a solid mulch at least a metre wide around the area you want kept clear is the next thing to try. All that mouldy hay has gotta go somewhere, so that seemed like a good place for it. The trees all got a good long soak from the rain barrel hose while I raked up mulching hay, too, as they need lots of water after they’ve been transplanted and I could just move the hose from one tree to the next as I worked.

After a day like this, I’m all out of strength … thank goodness for Advil, or I might be unable to move. Still, it was a good day for this kind of thing: the weather was pleasant but not too hot, I needed a sweatshirt on most of the day, but nothing more than that. Hopefully most of the trees survive the transfer … but if not, at least we’re not out any money, and Mother Nature will provide us with more if we’re patient.

Tomorrow’s adventure … probably the new wood shed. Stay tuned for more spring excitement!

Spring is crazy busy on a farm

Springtime is nuts around here.

The weather has been a bit crazy – it’d warm up, then we’d get a heavy wet snow blizzard, then it’d warm up some more … the winter felt like it went on for absolutely ever this year. Of course, last week, after having most of the snow melt and some beautiful work-outside-kind-of-weather days all in a row, we got another late storm, super windy and wet and snowy … so of course we had twin lambs born that morning, and then another single born that afternoon! The twins were very cold and had to be brought in to warm up, tube fed colostrum (they were too chilled and weakened to nurse) and given a boost of oral glucose to get going, but they did perk up and are back with mama who loves them both, thankfully. All the lambs born that day are boys, haven’t come up with names for them yet.

On the warm day before the storm, I went outside and did some work on the front steps: our patio door opened out onto a low temporary deck that’s been there since the house was built, and it was time to replace it with something sturdier (and with less of a steep drop when you stepped out the door). I’ve been reading permaculture books lately, and so I had the thought of putting some garden space right outside the door for herbs and things you’d like have within reach of the kitchen. This led to the idea of a set of raised beds with steps in the centre, and so with stuff I found around here already, I was able to build something that works. Today I gave it a few coats of stain, so it doesn’t look like the scavenged and mismatched wood that it actually is. I do still need to add the trellis supports for climbing plants (I saw a climbing strawberry plant that I think would be really neat, or perhaps a grape vine, to take advantage of the extra warmth up here by the house). The beds are presently mulched with straw, and my Easter lily got planted though the snow may have done it in.

On the left side of the bottom bed there are some twiggy things: I went to a workshop hosted by the county on starting trees from cuttings, and learned how to start willow, dogwood, poplar and aspen from cuttings. The twiggy things there are rooted cuttings that are in some pots of soil so they can develop sturdier roots (not just the ones they put out when they are in water), and then they’ll be planted around the property. Free trees! From local stock! Perfectly adapted to our climate! There’ll be more on this topic soon, I have some big plans (those permaculture books got me thinking)!

Today was a day to work on fences. Our infrastructure is still evolving – not something I’m really all that pleased about, I’d like to have gotten things more settled by now, but, it is what it is, and as we change the way we do things, we keep finding better (or hopefully better) ways to deal with the shape of our land and what’s on it. The wind tower has three big guy wires that keep it stable, and the animals rub on the wires, loosening them. Today’s job was to adjust the fence line so that the entire wind tower and its guy lines are enclosed by fence (actually that’s not quite true – one of the anchor points is still outside the fence, but there’s another fence going in that will protect it). The Boy and I took down some very ragged and damaged fences then put the posts back in, tightened and attached new woven wire, and cleared up a lot of the mess of broken fences, leftover posts and destroyed gates that had accumulated in the general vicinity. We also mounted some ‘lamb stoppers’ along the fence and gate: there were some gaps big enough that small sheep could pop out through the fence, and I need to know that the lambs will stay inside the fences before I start planting my garden!

Lamb stoppers are just chopped off bits of trees nailed to the fence to make the gaps too narrow to fit through, even for a little sheep:

Nothing fancy, but I think it’ll work. The price is certainly right.

There’s a lot more fence work to be done, but what we did today should mean that we can keep everyone reasonably well contained until the pastures are green enough to let them out to graze. We have some more water and pasture access changes to make, so there’s a few more big fencing days ahead still.

Ah yes, pasture. Since the grass isn’t ready for grazing yet, we’ve still got everyone on hay. We’re all out of the hay we had delivered, but there are some bales in the pasture that belongs to our neighbour that we are able to use – they’ve been sitting there for a couple of years, but when I was out there last week, I noticed that though they’ve been sitting a long time, they had been baled when the hay was nice and dry and so they are not mouldy or anything. They still smell good! The Boy and I took the quad and the big trailer and headed over there to load up.

A Boy and his Dog … and a haybale.

I rode on top of the hay wagon on the way home. :)

It’s just grass hay, nothing spectacular, but there’s plenty of it, so we feed generously and everyone seems reasonably content.

I’m rather stiff and sore after all that work, but tomorrow I have a baby shower to go to so I’ll have some enforced relaxation time before I get back to the outside work.

A farmer kind of day

Go outside for morning chores – it’s a bit windy, but not too bad. Put hay in all the feeders, chase a couple of sheep back to where they belong, and notice twin lambs have just (JUST) arrived.

Get mama Cherub into the barn with her babies, and get her some hay and water.

Go check on Mackenzie the guardian dog who has been limping badly for three days. Notice that today there’s a small wound on the sore leg – didn’t see that earlier, maybe he’s been licking at it. Worry more because bone cancer is very common in these big dogs, and that’s a prime location for the tumours to start. Trim the fur off the area, put some antibiotics on it, and ponder.

Notice that the smaller of the twins is shivering and doesn’t seem to have been dried off very well yet. Take him inside to towel him off and let him warm up a little, let the cats take turns licking his fleece.

Return him in a little lamb coat to his mama – but the lamb coat must smell of whoever wore it last because mama doesn’t like him wearing it. Take it off and hope mama’s mood improves. Remember that she is usually cranky right after delivery but smartens up over the next day or so. Lecture her a little while trimming fleece off around the udder so the babies can find what they need.

Head inside and call the vet. Yes, they can see Mackie today. Well, the last time Mackie went to the vet he busted out of the crate he was in, then had to be dragged in the back door of the clinic because he refused to go inside. The Boy and I get the van ready, and drag Mac out of the dog house where he is hunkered down. He doesn’t want to walk. We drag him partway to the van and he figures out what we want, and trots along beside us in his three legged way. I get in the van and haul on the leash while the boy hefts the dog’s rear end up and in, and we are off to the vet. Mackie actually relaxes and lays down.

A blizzard has started. Visibility is awful, the ruts in the road are grabbing the tires, and there’s ice underneath. We make it to the vet’s office.

We let Mac out of the van and he actually *walks into the vet clinic*. No fuss, nothing. He even gets on the scale (143 lbs, he is a BIG DOG). Doctor Sarah looks closely at the wound and sees that there are, in fact, two tiny puncture wounds – one very deep (the one I had noticed this morning) which is bleeding fairly well now that Mackie has had a chance to warm up, and a shallower one about a centimeter away: she figures maybe a weasel or a stoat got him. Defending the sheep from weasels? The Reluctant Farmer thinks it must’ve been one of those dangerous vampire gophers, but whatever it is, it’s just an injury not bone cancer and I am tremendously relieved. Mackie gets his vaccinations while he is there (I am still shocked that he cooperated with the whole trip, I think it must reflect how much pain he is in for one thing, and also that he’s come to trust us more, for another). Antibiotics are prepared for us and we head home in the snow.

By the time we reach the house, the snow has let up, though it looks like we have more on the way. We bring Mackie inside and feed him warm dog food, brush is matted fur a little, and give him his meds, then let him outside as he is panting in anxiety – he hates being in closed spaces and has been known to dig his way out of the barn. I feed everyone, check on the animals again and see the baby lamb still looks chilly. I put the coat back on him, which Cherub isn’t thrilled about, but he’s cold and she needs to deal with it. I also get her up and help him get a bit of milk – if she rejects him I need to know for sure he got some colostrum in his first day, and he needs a boost of energy. He seems all right, so perhaps he’s getting some milk but best to be sure.

Finally, I can sit down with a mug of coffee and get warmed up and ponder what I intended to get done today … oh yeah, weaving. Well, animals first. Now that I’m in though, maybe I can head up to the loom.

That’s life on a farm. I love it.

A Day in the Life of George the Calf

Mama and I slept in the barn last night. I think maybe we’re supposed to do this every night, but I dunno, I only got here yesterday morning, so this was my first whole night in the outside world.

The barn is dark. There is lots of straw on the ground, and there’s this skinny place where I fit nicely and then Mama has lots of room on her side of the stall. She had some crunchy stuff in the food bin at bedtime from the Person who comes in here all the time to check on us, and Mama definitely seems to like that crunchy stuff. I dunno why she would want that, milk’s good enough for anyone.

I get all my milk from Mama. The front two milk dispensers are hard to eat from though, they are so huge they fall out of my mouth. I just keep trying until I get one of the back ones, they work way better. In the morning the Person came and put Mama in the skinny place where I’d been sleeping, and gave her more crunchy stuff in the food bin.

The Person put this thing on my head that pinched my nose when I pulled. I pulled anyway, ‘cause who wants a thing on their head? Well, I suppose Mama wears one but mine’s blue and hers is black and I think hers is nicer. The thing had a big rope attached and the Person tied me to a post up by Mama’s head. Mama could see me but she kept bellowing for me to come closer. I didn’t wanna come closer, I wanted to pull the stupid thing off my head. I kept pulling and pulling but it never came off. It’s weird.

The Person got milk out of those front dispensers that didn’t work for me. She has hands though, and thumbs, and that probably makes it easier. Mama did some kicking and fussing but the Person just tied her kicking foot to a post and talked to her and said it would be better once she was done and really it was all okay and the baby was right there and I suppose she meant me. Because I was right there. Mama bellowed anyway.

After the Person poured the milk into a covered bucket, she took the thing off my head and put me back in the stall. Maybe if I’m good while she milks, then I get the thing taken off my head? I’ll have to see if this happens again tomorrow.

Mama got let out of the skinny place and then the Person opened the gate to our stall and … MAMA WENT OUTSIDE! She left me there! It was all nice in the barn, I couldn’t see why she would go out, but there was this tall green stuff and she wanted to eat it. I guess she doesn’t just eat the crunchy things in the food bin. Anyway, Mama kept bellowing so eventually I went out with her, and it was nice and breezy.

Then it got hot. It got really hot. I just lay there in the grass sleeping and panting. Mama ate a bunch of the green stuff and had some water, and every time a cat or dog came near she chased them off.

The Person came out a few times and talked to Mama, and she came and stroked my side and talked to me, but I dunno what she was saying. I just wanted to stay where I was and not move, it was too hot to do anything.

After it cooled off in the evening, the Person came back and put the blue thing back on my head. I dunno why she keeps bugging me like this, it was comfortable in the grass, and I didn’t want to go to the barn. I didn’t even want to stand up. She wouldn’t leave me be, though, so eventually I stood up and then she pulled on the rope and I just had to walk to the barn, even though I didn’t want to! The Person put me in the stall and took the thing off … so maybe if I am good and go in the stall the thing always comes off? Hmm. Mama didn’t have a rope pulling on her, she just came in by herself and ate the crunchy stuff in the food bin and the Person shut the gate and brought Mama more water. Mama let the Person scratch her head. I don’t get it: Mama chases the dogs away if they even look at me, but she lets the Person put that stupid blue thing on my head. Why does she let this Person near me when nobody else can come close? It’s a mystery.

Well, I suppose the barn is where we sleep again tonight. I wonder if the Person will come in the morning with more crunchy stuff for Mama and make me wear the stupid blue thing again.

Probably.

Oh well, once that part is over I can go outside with Mama. That’ll be nice.

I think now I’m gonna sleep though. It’s hard work being a calf.

Weird spring blizzard: the perfect day for lambing

Very early yesterday morning I woke up in need of a glass of water, and I heard rain on the windows.

“Great,” I thought, “that’ll help wash away some more of the snow, and since we’re down to bare ground in a lot of places, it will go quickly.”

I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the rain had stopped. Oh well, sunshine melts snow too.

Then I looked out the window.

All that arrived in just a few hours. Whoa. I was very glad not to have to go anywhere in the car, not with that heavy wet stuff all over the roads.

I flipped the switch to make sure the batteries were charging from the grid power and got the dishwasher going: with all that snow a power outage was probably coming and although there is enough solar power to keep us quite comfortable for a good long while, it’s best to be topped up before a storm if you can. We did have power outages off and on all day, though they were all short lived.

The next thing I thought was “some sheep is going to decide that today is the perfect day to have a lamb”. Storms and bad weather don’t bother the Icelandics much, so it could happen. Sure enough, The Boy came to the door and said “can you come deal with this lamb please?” I was just getting into my coveralls when he appeared at the door again, this time holding a tiny little lamb. “Here,” he said, “deal with this one first. It got out of the  pen and couldn’t figure out how to get back in, so it’s kind of cold.” Sure enough, the little lamb was shivering, and when I stuck my finger in his mouth it was cool, but not as chilled as some we’ve had to work with in the past. He was trying hard to suck my finger so I knew he’d be okay once he warmed up, so I put him on a wool rug (which is actually the felted coat of one of the Icelandics, who didn’t get shorn in time) in front of the fireplace and headed outside to check on his twin. The other lamb was up and nursing and doing fine, so we put him in the barn with his mama and I was able to get a bit of milk in a jar for the chilly lamb. The lamb greedily drank the colostrum from the oral syringe, though he was still shivering. I put a heated barley bag over his chest and belly and he went to sleep, peaceful as anything, with the cat sniffing at the milk droplets on his chin.

Once the lamb was good and warm, I helped him to his feet. He immediately started butting at my leg, a sure sign that he was ready to see his mama again, so I got into my outside gear once more and took him out to the barn. The ewe wanted nothing to do with him: she sniffed him and seemed unimpressed, and when he tried to nurse she butted him away. Then I realized that there was a second ewe in the barnyard bellowing that “where is my baby?” sound – aha! We didn’t have twins, we had two ewes who had delivered at the same time! Sure enough, once that mama caught sight of her baby she was ecstatic, talking to him and licking him and quite happy to let him nurse. She needed a bit of a trim around the lower half so that the poor lamb could find his way to what he was after, but that mama was really calm, and just stood there chewing her cud while I did a quick haircut.

Today, all is well outside, we have two happy lambs with two happy mamas.

This mama is a Southdown/Columbia cross, and her lamb is clearly an Icelandic cross – the curly fleece and short tail are the giveaway there:

And the other mama is a similar sheep – a Columbia/Southdown cross, and her lamb is very clearly a Southdown baby … one of Jack’s last offspring.

Look at those big feet and that adorable face.

I do love my sheep. :)

Spring must be around the corner!

We have lambs! The two ‘early ewes’ (the Columbia and Columbia/Hamp cross) had their lambs this week … of course after several days of lovely weather, when it dropped to –31, they decided to have their babies. :)

We were anticipating just such an event, though, and were ready to warm up the babies and get their mamas into the barn for warmth and peace and quiet.

This morning, The Boy saw this out the window:

Love, sunshine, and peace.

Being a soft-hearted farmer

Sharon Astyk posted this today:

Blackberry is elderly, and there's a good chance he'll spend this winter the way he did part of last winter. Victim of the other roosters, and run down by the cold, eventually I moved him into a box in the woodshed with a bantam hen to keep him company. I don't really want a rooster in the woodshed for the winter, any more than I really wanted to go out in the pouring rain to gather up soggy poultry. But the chances of Blackberry going under the knife are nil. If the woodshed it must be, so it will be.

The real farmers who read this may well be rolling their eyes at me. This is proof I'm not a real farmer, right? After all, real farmers have to make their bottom line, they don't have room for all this messy sentiment.

…

Blackberry, however, is special. He is beloved. And the very fact that a rooster could be beloved, to me, seems a good sign - it means we are being attentive. We are watching closely enough, that we know our creatures well enough to develop relationships. And we know our economic realities well enough to know that we cannot allow relationships to emerge in every case.

I do want to stand up for sentiment in agriculture because I would argue that our industrial society discourages real sentiment, the emotion that emerges from knowing things, and exchanges it for sentimentality. This is an exchange that runs deeply to our detriment, in part because it enables us not to know things.

…

The love my children and my husband and I have for a rooster who gives back more than ordinary chickens is a way of expressing the love we have for our farm in general - fierce, protective, passionate. The whole thing is alive, and sometimes to keep it living we cannot do everything we'd like to. But we can pour out our love in selected places, keep an honest and just relationship with even the animals that don't get all our love, and pour into the land and its creatures the complex realities of our passion and sentiment.

Oh, yes.

I replied:

Around here, we call it 'winning the Immunity Challenge' (not that we ever watched Survivor, but we did get the general gist of the concept around the water cooler at work). There are some animals that just ... earn their retirement.

We have a hen, "Little Red", who is ancient by chicken standards (she was probably 2 when we inherited her from neighbours who were moving away , and that was 5 years ago), and she'll never go in a pot. When she passes on, she'll probably get a marked grave, of all things. Most of the other chickens we don't even recognize much less name - and if they die, well, the carcasses get tossed on the compost pile with minimal ceremony. But not Red. She is a character. Just the other day I was outside knitting and she actually jumped onto my lap! What a cool chicken she is. I’ll miss her when she’s gone.

And then there is the LGD who is getting on in years ... he will be given a dog house with plenty of straw and 'senior dog rations' until he breathes his last, even if he hasn't got it in him to chase coyotes anymore – because he has earned that through years of service to us and his flock. If his life becomes nothing but suffering, we will pay the extra to have the vet come out here to ease his passing, rather than subjecting him to the trauma of leaving his home, so that our guardian dog's last sight is of his beloved flock and his people. He, too, will have a marked grave, and we will cherish his memory for years to come.

The sheep ... well, they're too valuable as meat, even the ones we love - so the wonderful ewe with OPP will have a quick and merciful death at the hands of our trusted butcher and we will honour her life by making the best use of all of her ... maybe we'll ask for her horns so we can make buttons or something, but she has to go. It would not be a kindness to let her slowly suffer from lung troubles, and OPP does not affect the value of the meat - so we do her the most honour by making full use of all she has to offer us, and keeping her suffering to a minimum.

It seems silly, on the face of it, to care for our creatures so. We are soft hearted, but I don’t think that is a bad thing – it helps us to honour the animals in our care. I think it was your kids, Sharon, who said "all meat has faces". When we know the faces of our meat, when we honour them with a clean, quick death and our gratitude at the table, we do right by the creatures we are responsible for. When we grant retirement status to those animals we have a soft spot for, it's part of the same attitude: we remind ourselves that these creatures have value, that their feelings - even as animals - matter to us, and that we wish to give them the best care we can.

I think it makes us better farmers, if we care for our animals' comfort. It helps us 'hear' them when they voice their distress, because we are used to listening to them as ‘real voices’ – not just a mindless bellow. Keeping their feelings in mind when we design their shelters and plan their feeding ... caring that they have good lives - even if they are normally short ones - means that we are good husbandmen (is there a gender neutral term for that?).

Industrial scale farming has no place for caring for the animals. Real, family scale farming does. I think it’s a good thing.