Spring Flower

Well now. We are STILL waiting for poor Acorn to lamb. This is how she's looking these days:

Poor thing. I mean, how much longer is this going to take????

While we were keeping watch on Acorn, waking early, midnight barn checking, wily old matriarch, Copper, decided to go ahead and get the lambing over with.

In between the frequent checks, she birthed herself a nice little ewe lamb.

The kids have named her Flower.

A Watched Sheep...

Take a look at poor Acorn:

She is sooooo totally pregnant. I've been expecting her to lamb for five days now, checking every few hours all daylong, then twice at night and waking up extra early too.

And still, nothing. Except an uncomfortable ewe with a "What are YOU looking at?" expression on her sheepy face.

It appears that the old adage is true: A watched sheep never lambs

Acorn is our friendliest ewe. Also the ewe that has had the most "issues". We had to assist in her first lambing (two lovely twins!) and in her second (one 11 pound ram lamb with enormous horn buds) and then she was cast, developed a case of dry mastitis, a cut that happened at the peak of fly season (luckily she did NOT get flystrike). We gave her a lambing break last year but now here she is: huge and miserable all over again.

Hopefully, this will be an easy spring for the old gal.

As some of you might know, we drastically reduced our flock last year. Well, truth is, we'd planned to quit with sheep altogether. But we're just too attached to these old girls.

Here's current flock:

Matriarch Copper (she's 12 now!), young ram, Ewok, and flighty gal Penny. And of course, our dear Acorn (pictured and pictured and pictured above)

But any day now, this little flock will expand.

Sending Off the Roos

I'm all for the new, localvore, non-industrialized, back-to-the-land type of farming. Heck I AM it-- at least on a very small scale.

But it is what it is, which is to say: not pretty.

Farming (even vegetable farming) is, at its most basic level, about manipulating natural things so that they serve you. In other words "using" them. It is not really a quaint, idyllic pastime. It is messy and brutal, beautiful and hard and very, very real.

I have to re-learn this every few months here on Maggie's farm. Yesterday was a case in point.

Y'see, we had five too many roosters. They'd been part of the batches of hen-brooded chicks that blessed last spring. The ones that survived the fox attacks and hawk swoops. And they were now grown up enough to bully each other and stress out the hens and generally act like the feathered bags of testosterone they were.

We knew we should eat them. But Dan wasn't up for it after the last time, and I didn't want to try it alone. (Have I mentioned we are wimpy farmers)

So I put an add in Craigslist knowing that what I was too soft to manage, some other person could do with a quick twist of the neck.

Then I chased down those five roosters, feeling all the while so sad and sorry as only an absolute farming wimp can. In the crate, the cocky birds continued their squabbles, the weaker ones, crouching in the corners, the toughies crowing victory. "Soccerball," who'd turned out to be a beautiful feisty rooster was in there, and the soft ginormous "Mongo Rooster."

(LESSON LEARNED: Never name your rooster chicks.)

And then the guy came to get them and I felt..... awful.

I know. It makes no sense. They were making themselves (and the hens) miserable. They'd kicked our formerly-dominant rooster, Jaguar, out of the coop, they were all fight and fury, but I felt so responsible for their fate. I hoped the guy who bought them would give them a decent life/death, but I had no more control over that.

But I sold them. For $2 each. And washed my hands.

And then I moped about the way farming is not the bucolic wonderland that is sometimes portrayed.

In the Land of Poo

It's February Vacation (I believe this is a special New England Holiday, sort of a President's day/let's-not-bust-the-school-budget-on-heating-oil thing) and the kids and I have been keeping busy.

We have been to the library, done wood crafts, sand art, baking, Ice Skating and a Museum. And we have watched a few DVDs. (I try to limit the kids' "screen time", but this is increasingly like trying to hold back the ocean with a spatula.)

One of the DVDs we watched was Nanny McPhee Returns. In it, a pair of "sophisticated" city cousins are dropped off to stay with their poor, dirty, farming kin.

The cousins' car pulls into the farmyard, which is a typical, if somewhat exaggerated slop of mud and um, waste, and the boy grimaces, turns to his sister and says:

"We are in the land of poo. Duck poo, cow poo, goat poo..."

Well we here on Maggie's farm got a kick out of that.

Farming is inextricably tied to "poo". Poo in infinite variety, Poo that seems barely possible. Poo that has poo.

I often wonder what our suburban and urban visitors think of the free-ranging chicken#**&! strewn about the yard and the barn and (often) the porch

the sheep "fertilizing" away in the fields

the gummy newborn lamb butts that often need wiping (don't ask...). The three dogs alone create quite a stink (well, yes, the pun WAS intended).

I imagine we might indeed seem to be living in the Land of Poo.

But, then, poo is one of the inevitabilities of life. It happens. And on a farm, as I've said, it happens a lot.

I know from experience that you can shield yourself from from much of this poo if you live in cleaner, less animal prone places--especially if you don't have pets or young children. But perhaps moving to the country helped us come to terms with poo as much as it did with meat-eating and winter. We simply had no choice.

Whatever the case, my kids have been quoting Nanny McPhee with glee:

One will say: "Greetings, O covered-in-poo people. Do you speak English? "

And another will add "Yes, poo-man, we have come from far away, from the land of soap and indoor toilets!"

And then, stepping out into the poo-strewn snow of Maggie's farm, they will laugh and laugh and laugh.

Impending Doom in the Orchard?

This is our orchard in deep winter snow:

It breaks my heart, this orchard. It's beautiful and needy and slightly rundown. We can't take care of it the way we should. Blame a lack of equipment, know-how, and will. Yet it hasn't quit on us. Every year, the apples are a little less lovely, but they come.

It used to be that we had a bargain with a large, local orchard. They'd care for the trees and take all the apples we didn't use. But their methods were highly conventional. We here at Maggie's farm are flexible, pragmatic even, but we could not abide by herbicide. Or, frequent drenchings of pesticides. We grit our teeth and allowed the fungicide in the spring and that seemed a fair trade off.

But as our flock of Icelandic Sheep grew, we began to use the orchard as pasture. The sheep nibbled the lower branches. But they kept the grass low without herbicides. We were fine with that, but the fencing made it hard for the orchard folks to work and they got sick of all the limitations and just stopped coming.

That was two years ago. Our noble little orchard continues on, apples scabby and small, but still good.

This year, though, feels like a last gasp. How long before the trees give out altogether?

We've tried to find someone to care for the orchard. But we are just a little too remote, and the care is just a little too intensive, I guess.

Spring is coming (Hard to believe in a snowy month like this one).

Any ideas? What would you do?

Felted Penguin

I made this needle-felted penguin with our own Maggie's Farm wool. And here's the crazy thing: it was easy. Relaxing even.

Basically, you mat dyed fleece by poking it over and over with a small barbed needle until you get the shape and consistency you desire.

Here's a great little how-to video:

Maggie of Maggie's Farm

Maggie and her Sheep

Maggie is 14 now, a little tottery and hard of hearing. Her hips ache and she has trouble swallowing sometimes (due to an old stick-fetching incident) but when she is outside with her sheep, you'd never know. She bounds along before us, pacing the fence line with that infamous border collie "eye", all business as ever. Later, of course, she collapses under the coffee table, barely able to walk. But she wouldn't have it any other way.

She gets confused sometimes. Once, she wandered across the road and forgot where she was. She had such a look of relief when I came to fetch her, gave a sort of "Oh, I'm with you!" jump and ran home.

Old age, as they say,is not for sissies. But we can all learn a bit from the stoic way our Maggie faces her new challenges.

Maggie and Luka