Animal (Mis)Behavior, or King in Action

Hi Folks -
From the very moment of his birth, King has been ready to be head-ram-in-charge and I watched a step in that process a couple of days ago.

We had moved the sheep from the south pasture to the west pasture and reconfigured a small section of the west pasture to give Thor-the-ram a better pen with shade and some grass (at least until he tromps it out). In the reconfiguration we ended up using a couple of fence panels that did not have field fencing attached to them. We eyeballed the lowest panel rail and since it was 110 degrees outside already and we didn't want to take the time to attach the fencing in the heat, we decided that the lambs were surely too big to fit between the lowest rail and the ground.

When I went to the pasture the next time I could see King in the south pasture and wondered what was up: how did he get there, and why did he even want to be there with no good new grass and no water? I watched a minute and he baaaa-ed a few baaa-s and here came the other lambs to him on their knees under the fence in the only portion of the only rail of the only panel where that could happen. King was working to create his own flock!!

Needless to say I headed right out there with the wire and field fencing, put a little alfalfa in the feeders and watched them go back underneath to get to the sheep-candy treat. I quickly propped the field fencing in front of the panels and began wiring. At 112 degrees I liked the task even less than I did at 110 degrees. And as soon as the dang panels that were suppose to be here a dang month ago arrive from the dang feed store, the ram lambs are going to get separated out --King is waaaay to interested in being, well, The King, and I can't risk fouling up the breeding date a 2nd year in a row.

Thinking fondly of ewe -
The Shepherd

Words in the Mailbox

Hi Folks -
The mailbox photo has nothing to do with the subject at hand -- I just liked the boxes!

Today it's sheep words in my mind, so think about these:

There is rambunctious, rampage, ramble, ramification, rampant, and cram -- yup, those describe male sheep.

Then there is lambast, clamber, flamboyant -- and those words certainly pertain to lambs.

Next there is beweary, chewed, and strewed -- all describing ewes.

And then there are the random words such as bellwether and crook.

Or there is the description of Shepherd's Pie as "hash covered with mash." (What?? You have never tasted Shepherd's Pie -- tomorrow comes the recipe -- it's a ba-a-a-a-nquet).

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

1st Sheep Anniversary

Hi Folks -
Time zips right along and you can keep your fingers on only so many holes in the dikes, but there is a breather now and I am playing catch-up.

Both electricity and telephone are erratic in the area of the Wallow fire, so we are going to wait a few more days before going up. I have seen photos however, and right around Alpine, things don't look too bad. The upper two-thirds of the mountain immediately east of us has burned off; some areas have fared better and some worse than that. What our immediate area looks like remains to be seen. Rumors are rife and anger, oh my goodness, the anger is palpable. Now a blame game second to none will begin.

We worked with the sheep on Saturday reconfiguring fences to be able to move Thor to a shadier, cleaner location and to be able to get Shortcake (the beef steer) out of cow jail. The teen-age boys we have been hiring as farm helpers this spring and summer are gems -- they work like troopers and never give less than their best. I don't know what we would do without them; it's a dead cert we wouldn't be nearly as far along as we are. They are all off at Boy Scout Camp this week, so everybody gets a breather.

Thor was a little confused about why he was being moved -- in his little sheepy mind that should only happen when there are ewes available, but he took it in good stride and seems much better off with shade and grass -- ya think?? Besides any other little thing, it will do wonders for keeping his fleece clean, and since I (at least so far) refuse to jacket the beasties because of the heat, this is an honorable step to that end.

Shortcake bounded around positively thrilled with being out of jail, and I don't blame him. It's a pretty tight confinement for a big animal.

Today is the one year anniversary for my sending off the first installment of the first sheep purchase!! It's amazing to think that we are closing in on a year since serious sheep-ing began. We have the calendar fixed to do CD/tet vaccinations for the lambs, and then the ram lambs will be separated out of the flock because they will be old enough to possibly produce lambs of their own. Yikes!! August 20 the local buyer will be out to collect his lambs and leave us a new ewe lamb from Idaho. Miss Idaho will be a yearling pen-mate for our beautiful CVM late lamb Velvet since neither can be bred this year. And then the out of state buyer will be here to pick up her ram lamb and leave us two ewes that *can* be bred this year.

It's been an exciting year with a very steep learning curve. I am looking forward to the second year being just a little less of a roller-coaster ride.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Neither Rain nor Snow nor Sleet nor Hail . . .

Hi Folks -
The fire update from Alpine is lookin' great! People who lost homes were notified yesterday by the county sheriff, and people who lost lesser "outbuildings" were to be notified by certified letter in the next couple of days. No notification yesterday. Hurrah!! Fire is now officially 405,000 acres and 5% contained. I am so sad for the change in life this will make for everyone who lives in the area. Two comments I have read I find particularly appropriate: one woman innocently asked "what's mop-up?" On 400,000 acres -- mop-up would be the rest of the summer, darlin'. The other comment was from a 91 year old man whose family brought the first sawmills into the White Mountains. He noted that anything that grows needs to be harvested, and asked how the forest took care of that before the US Forest Service came on the scene.

On a different and far lesser note, I appear to have changed the "follower" setting on this blog in some way and none of the followers show up on the first page. So if that's -- ewe -- sorry! I'm working on it, but am a techno-challenged grandma.

Thinking of ewe all from the tops of the mountains to the heat of the desert -
The Shepherd

Up in Smoke

Dear Folks -
Darling granddaughter's visit came and went all too soon. We had such a grand time and for a day short of a week were treated to a child's perspective on life which is certainly kinder, gentler, and more direct than an adult's. It was lovely. But now it is back to the real world, and the real world is a hard place to be at the moment -- too much happening.

Our grandson coined the word "genormous," and that pretty much sums up the forest fire burning in eastern Arizona. We have had a family home there for more than 25 years, and this has been a sad, sad week as more than 300,000 acres have gone up in flames, and no end in sight -- zero percent contained more than a week after it began. The photo here was taken in Oregon, but our sentiments in Arizona are the same. The "boots on the ground" have been fabulous, and miraculously only a handful of cabins and other buildings have been lost but the forest, of course, is gone. The Monday-morning quarterbacks are going to have fun with this one for years but for me, the bottom line is the principle of choice and accountability taught in the teenage-girls program at our church: you can always choose your action, but you cannot choose the consequences. Through inaction and ignorance, years ago the political choice was made to ignore forest health, and now that those who made that choice are safely out of the picture, the rest of us pay the consequences.

On a happier note, I think our ram lamb St. George is sold! If that all works out, it would be wonderful. His lot will be different than King's, but he will be with somebody who understands sheep at an intuitive level, he will have lots of hay, and lots of ewes -- not a bad life for a ram, all in all.

Thanking firefighters everywhere, and thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Coop de Ville

Dear Folks -
Well, with the very much looked-forward-to week-long visit from a darling granddaughter, the days have sort of escaped me and I discover I haven't written anything all week.

We made excellent pasture progress on Monday (likely the last cool day until the first of November). The farmer changed out a bunch of water nozzles to put more water in some places, and less in others. Also repaired line breaks from trenching for electrical, built a permanent levee instead of the bags-of-mulch deal I had concocted, mulched and fertilized parts of the south pasture, and wrangled a couple of great crews of workers. One group were the trenchers to get the electrical line in, and one group cleaned out the beef steer's pen (and a huge atta-boy to them). I understand better now how the rock-hard floors of native African huts are constructed with cattle manure and tamping, just like Shortcake the steer did. Our guys were going at it with picks, hoes, shovels, rakes, and they did a great job. If we are lucky, we don't have to do it again until Shortcake becomes Beefcake.

Once Shortcake was let out to "freedom" though, he realized that there was a world outside his pen and there was no stopping him for a while - he kept hoppin' the fence. Finally had to add another panel and solidify the project. I now understand oh-so much better what my son-in-law meant when he said that you can *never* own too many panels. We had to have a few to build a temporary containment pen for Shortcake, and then another sturdy one to block off the break-through spot.

Today, we are adding in a few chicks of a different breed -- the newbies are Blue Ameraucanas that actually lay blue eggs! They are the brightest blue in the Spring, but still blue year round. So (knock on wood) we will have several shades of brown from the deepest browns of Cuckoo Marens to barely tinted rosy ones. There will be white ones from the oh-so-productive California Pearl Leghorns and everything in between including both green and now blue Ameraucanas. Who needs commercial dyes when we have the Coop de Ville?

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Patrotic Holidays

Hi Folks -
Since this is Memorial Day week-end, I have sort of been thinking about summer's patriotic holidays. And growing up in Utah, we had an additional one which was July 24, celebrating the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. It was a great occasion to use up all the sparklers left from Independence Day!

I find it sad, though, how few people actually celebrate Memorial Day for the purpose it was created. I remember going with both my parents and grandparents to "clean-up" cemeteries where ancestors are buried, removing wind-blown trash and sun-faded plastic flowers. I even recall my grandmother calling it "Decoration Day" which really harkens back to its origins of honoring those who died in our country's wars. My father served in the Korean War, his father served in World War I, my husband's father served in World War II, and other relatives served in other wars. The earliest military service to our country I can document was Robert Dunning who served as a soldier of fortune from 1675 frontier Pennsylvania in King Philip's War in New England. To them, and all others who serve and served, the most appropriate thing I can say is "thank-you."

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

King of His Own New Pasture

Hi Folks -
I got out to the sheep pasture today for the first time in a week and saw the new CVM lamb! She is something wonderful -- sooty coal black with a couple of tiny white dots under her eyes, a few white freckles on her helicopter blade-sized ears, and two reddish knees. She is tagged and tailed now and out in the pasture with mom (who is really glad to be out of the lambing jug). She was sorta the bonus lamb this year and what a bonus she is.

In other sheep news, the couple who bought the Tunis ewe lambs came out today from the other side of the Valley, and got to meet their new crew. They decided to take King as well and I think everyone will be happy with that choice. The buyers, because they are getting an excellent animal who will provide awesome lambs with great fleece; me, because the lambs are growing up and ready to be on their own; my granddaughter (who actually owns King) because this is her first big sale; and finally King, because he gets to move on to greener, flood-irrigated pastures and be in charge of 6 ewes! It would be really fun to see him as King of the Pasture (which I imagine looking something like the above photo ;)), and we might because he was sold with a possible breed-back so we can have another chance for his size and fleece.

Looking ahead to Monday, well, it's gonna be another "stuffed mailbox" day of farm chores. We are hiring a couple of crews and want to tear through an enormous list of things -- everything from digging a very looooooong electrical trench by hand (because there are buried sprinkler pipes), to raking pastures, fixing sprinklers, building an irrigation levee to keep the water out of the sheep shed, spraying weeds checking on trees -- as always, it's endless. But maybe, just maybe, by the end of this summer we can consider that things are "built" and we can move into maintenance mode. Here's hopin'!

But today -- hurray for lambs coming and going.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Haik-Ewe

Hi Folks -
Given the fact that our sheep seem to prefer being in the north pasture under the shade of the ever-spreading velvet mesquite tree, today's mailbox seems completely appropriate.

Now that "life on the farm" exists only as a cultural memory for most people in the United States, and they don't observe domestic animal behavior other than pet cats and dogs and a parakeet or two, sheep are represented as sorta stodgy and stupid. That's one reason that Shaun the clay-mation Sheep is so funny -- he flies in the face of what you are expecting a sheep to be. But if you dig a little deeper, you can find sheep creating art, and sheep creating poetry. So you are a non-believer here? I will let the results speak for themselves.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Frenchie's Lamb!!

Hi Folks --
It's official - we now have the last lamb of the season.

This morning bright and early, Frenchie (one of the CVM ewes) "hatched" a darling little black lamb, and the critically rare breed's numbers increased by one. With something like 500 pure-bred registrations nationwide, this is a Big Deal for our farm. My granddaughter (who is the actual owner) is over-the-moon excited about the new addition. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have changed Frenchie's opinion of people (dislikes them completely -- always has, and probably always will) and she has no interest in a mere person being in the lambing jug with her and the lamb. So we will lay low until jug time is over and then I am sure New Lamb will be handled and halter trained to a fare-thee-well. Personally, even though I am spinning Tunis fleece like mad just now, I am thinking how nice that black fleece is going to look with the grays of the other CVMs.

Thinking of ewe (and the new lamb!) -
The Shepherd

Counting Sheep

Dear Folks -
Here's something to hang the mailbox on! I couldn't sleep the other night and began . . . (ahem) counting sheep. That worked for about, oh, 2 minutes and then I began thinking about sheep in general. Well one thing led to another and I learned something new and interesting about sheep culture.

In historic times, a shepherd's first job in the morning and last job as night was counting sheep. At least in Great Britain, shepherds had their own language of counting which used a Base 5 system -- 5 fingers on a hand, and the other hand to grasp the crook. (We use a Base 10 system). This particular system and language coupled with knobs, notches, lines, and grooves created in his crook to act as an abacus allowed a shepherd to keep track of up to 399 sheep and, historically at least, there weren't many flocks larger than that. The language is at least as interesting as the concept. The count begins, "yan, tan, tethera, mether, pimp, citer, liter, ova, dova, dic." Adding in the numbers we know as 11-15 gives you yan-a-dic, tyan-a-dic, tethera-dic, methera-dic, bumfit. Then with a new group of 5, he would continue yan-a-bumfit, tan-a-bumbit, tethera-bumfit, methera-bumfit, and then Giggot. You can see how this goes -- Giggot will get each of the words added to it, and so on -- but the concept, the words, and cadence are fascinating.

And by the way, do any of you old movie fans find these words tickling a memory somewhere? It is a variation of this counting system that Eulalie Mackecknie Shinn of Music Man fame uses when she counts "in the Indian tongue" during her unforgettable Talent Show presentation.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Ideal Sheep

Dear Folks -
Over the week-end I received the 2011 Tunis Sheep Directory from the national registry. Very interesting to learn some new things about the sheep I love. Like rows of mailboxes, the breed must have certain characteristics, but is allowed variation within the standard.

The registry's list of ideal characteristics includes "pink skin" -- look at that rosy nose on Hunky! The standard also lists "white on crown of head and/or tip of tail" -- look at all the lambs, here and on the Farm's webpage! The twins (also an ideal characteristic) all have white caps and Harmony's (now missing) tail exhibits desirable white marking as well. Even King, the growthy singleton, showed a few white hairs when he was born. Because of the breed's "slight fat tail," standards call for not docking the tail too short. For whatever reason, tail docking has been a difficult thing for me to figure out. One of the CVM ewes we got from Cunnington Farms in Moab, Utah has an undocked tail which took a little getting use to - just very different looking for what you expect to see. The other extreme are tails docked so shockingly short that there is the real possibility of prolapse during labor and delivery of lambs. I finally found a printed ruling for our local county and state fairs that seems reasonable to me: the judge has to be able to lift the sheep's tail during judging.

It's interesting to look at the tops of heads of both rams and ewes and see where horns might have grown (that little curly looking place below on King's head). One of the original reasons I was attracted to Tunis sheep was because they are a polled (or hornless) breed. It's nice to read that the registry standards disqualify any horned ewe or ram and fault any ram with scurs (or vestigial horns). All in all, I felt very good about the sheep we have, the lambs we got, and I can project promise into the future. Not bad from one slick-paper publication.


Thinking of ewe - The Shepherd

Sandbagging, Arizona Style

Hi Folks -
Ever noticed how everything is hitched to everything else and if you mess with one tiny element all of a sudden you are dealing with something on a completely different page?

That sums up our pasture issues. Finally, I have no doubt it is going to work, we just have to get all the factors blended correctly, and right now the water part isn't blending with anything. For a year there hasn't been enough because we didn't understand just how much was necessary, thinking that somehow that the pasture was just a larger version of a suburban backyard. With that notion left in the dust so to speak, we all are willing to spray down what is needed to get things going. But now there is too much and our own little patch of desert is edging along to look like downtown Memphis with the flooded Mississippi River. And because of the water, we have now discovered that the sheep-shed is in the lowest spot of the entire property and this morning you could actually splash! inside the sheep-shed. Great, or not.

So I headed out to build a small levee across the end of the pasture in front of the shed and feeders. Determined to make this as simple as possible, it dawned on me that sandbags would the way to go instead of shoveling endless wheelbarrow loads of dirt to dump in a levee line. Then I went one step further and bought filled bags of mulch to use because we are going to have to add mulch to a portion of the pasture in an attempt to even out the water absorption in some areas. So in theory, all I did was deliver the mulch in a nice straight line. We will see how that all works out.

The sheep were a little perplexed, though. It became a visual barrier to them that they weren't sure about crossing. I added some grain and hay to the feeders and waited. They all lined up in front of the new levee with them on one side and the feeders on the other and watched and watched. Eventually Frenchie was the brave one and jumped across -- just like the visual you get for sheep leaping across a fence on the way to Dreamland. Once Frenchie went, they all did, and it was pretty funny to watch them leap back and forth across the plastic bags.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

The Good New$ is the Bad New$

Hi Folk$ -
Well, even after only 4 night$ of water, the pa$ture is improving, and $o as the title $ays, "the good new$ is the bad new$." It is good -- even great -- new$ that there is, indeed, gra$$ growing (and thriving, I might add), but bad new$ that progre$$ come$ a$ the result of a very $cary amount water pouring onto what will (hopefully) actually be a pa$ture. $till, the experiment will continue a$ $et up: 2 week$ worth of water $o that we have a product, and then we can begin experimenting with $caling back the amount of water needed to maintain what we have achieved.

The lambing jug with some fresh good-smelling shavings was set up today for Frenchie, and because I had pretty much given up the idea that she was going to have lambs, this is doubly exciting. She came to us "exposed," but not "guaranteed," so when we thought there were no lambs there was disappointment, but we knew it was a possibility. Only within the last couple of weeks have we come more and more to believe that it was really going to happen. It's a race to see if Frenchie will lamb before school is out, so that her grade-school owner can go on full-time Lamb Watch. Stay tuned!!

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Sticks, Stones, and Water Bills

Hi Folks -
Is it possible to have a traditional pasture in southern Arizona without having flood irrigation? A year and a half ago, I was sure we could do it with golf course-style turf sprinklers -- after all there are miles and miles of artificially greened surfaces on which people in orange plaid knee-pants smack with sticks at white puffs that in other times and places might be gone-to-seed dandelions. But now I don't know. I am coming to the conclusion that the amount of water spent on golf in Arizona might erase the national debt if it were applied to that end instead of to the sticks and dimpled balls game.

We talked to a "pasture consultant" (who knew?) on Saturday and his firm opinion was that it all came down to water (well, duh). First he said we obviously had too much and I had visions of a welcome retreat from last summer's triple digit water bills. But after digging in the dirt where there is no grass and encountering either silt or stone-hard clay, he decided sagely that perhaps, after all, the problem wasn't enough water. After an hour of further talking, we are going to pour water on the pastures for two weeks and see if we can get something more to grow and then at least we will have site-data either for or against the water idea. But water in Arizona costs the very earth. If you are lucky and have flood irrigation is isn't so bad, and if you are really lucky and own a golf course you can use reclaimed water which hardly registers (and for which, in a perverse way, you get "I'm Going Green" points), but in our situation all we can do is use city culinary water. On the up side, if we continue to water at the rate suggested, we won't erase the national debt, but we may erase any lingering debts the Town of Queen Creek incurred as a result of the real estate bust.

Thinking of Ewe-
The Shepherd

Dates and Mates

Dear Folks -
The last few days, I've been working to develop a better yearly calendar -- sort of a Farmer's Almanac to keep all the animal needs and activities straight. It all began because we have to move the breeding date from what we had this year to insure that the lambs aren't too old to show at the Maricopa County Fair next year 'cause, try as I did, we blew it for this year's dates. The fair rules base it all on the lamb's teeth -- if they have 'em, the lambs can be shown. If a lamb is missing even one, or have an adult tooth coming in, they can't be shown: simple as that.

Anyway, because the lambing date moved, the shearing date had to move as well. Researching the best way to do that, I got lost in the world of shearing and ended up looking at shearing information from Australia (the Queen of Sheep Country) as you can see from the mailbox I found.

Interestingly, Frederick York Wool-sey (no joke) invented Australia's first mechanical shearing device. You can read more about him here. The shearers were suspicious of the newfangled device and it took him a while to get his mates to agree to try it out. With a contract to shear 180,000 sheep he finally got 40 men to agree to use it and eventually each man could consistently shear 100 sheep a day with the new tool. Their rate pales though when compared to Jackie Howe, the Aussie master shearer. In 1892 Jackie sheared by hand 321 sheep in 7 hours and 40 minutes. His shearing medals were auctioned off in 2008 and brought $360,000 (AU).
Do you ever feel like there are whole worlds about which you know nothing? I regularly do, and this was one of them.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Saturday is a Special Day

Dear Folks -
See all those letters in the mailbox? Imagine those letters are chores to do and that is about what our Saturday looks like this week. Fifty-some years ago in children's Sunday School we sang a song that went something like this:


Saturday is a special day,
It's the day we get ready for Sunday.
We wash our hair and we shine our shoes
and we call it our Get the Work Done Day -- even if I don't have the words quite right, you get the idea. But what we have going on this week surpasses anything that the song writer had in mind or could imagine.

The Farm is a good distance from the house. For the record, it is 62.2 miles and, yes, sometimes we are certain we were crazy to take on a project that far away and even crazier to not come to our senses and quit, but because we have our wonderful family next door to the Farm to help, it is just barely possible. But because of the distance (and gas!) we have to cram every last possible thing into a Saturday work day, and that makes some Saturdays a little more "special" than others. For instance, here is the (known) chore list for Saturday:

1) electrician begins working on electricity to sheep shed so we can put fans in for the summer (115+ temps) and so there is light next year for lambing.
2) meet "the pasture guy" to get his input about why we can spray out many dollars of water but get no grass.
3) move panels to accommodate a change of sheep feeder location
4) trim trees
5) move hay closer to feeding stations since we can't get pasture grass to grow (see #2 above)
6) plant bamboo starts which means
7) add waterline and move panels
8) grub out tumbleweeds before they go to seed
9) map out where garden fence will go
10) add field fencing to a bunch of panels to keep the chickens where they are suppose to be
11) move sheep to other "pasture" (loosely used term -- see #2 above)
12) Drop off roving to fiber shop that is half-way between home and Farm (see yesterday's post). But in a way, this is a good chore because it will insure that we have to leave the Farm and arrive at the shop before it closes at 8 PM.

What do you think are the odds of getting all that done? Yup, that's about what I thought, too. So if you don't hear from me for a couple of days, you will understand why.

Thinking of ewe -
The (going to be very tired) Shepherd

Goodness, Gracious, Great Balls of Roving!!

Dear Folks,
Besides the second batch of the chicks arriving yesterday, so did the fleece I had sent off to Frankenmuth Woolen Mill in Michigan to be processed into roving. What I got back was fabulous -- great balls of creamy,lustrous, bouncy, "touch me, please" stuff that sets mind and fingers twitching with new project ideas and the hope that others will find it as pleasing as I do.

I took copious notes about each fleece before shipment and was careful to keep all fleeces separate (even though that costs more) because I wanted to see how each fleece worked up. I suppose the most interesting thing overall is that each fleece produced a slightly different shade of "cream." The take-home message for me was that a fleece is like a dye lot for commercial wool. If slightly different shades matter, you better have enough when you begin your project!

Thor's fleece makes me want to drop what I have to do today and sit at the spinning wheel for a couple of hours. Next year, his fleece is going to become a blanket, but this year I can fuss over the great yarn this roving will make. At each new step this last year, I have thought, "Okay, now this is why I have sheep." But for now, this gorgeous roving is THE reason I have sheep.

Thor's fleece sheared off at a little more than 8 pounds. Then it was skirted so the worst was removed. Then I selected some parts to wash myself and some to place on consignment as raw wool at Tempe Yarn and Fiber, a local yarn shop. The rest went to be commercially roved and I received back 3.25 pounds of lovely clean fluffy stuff.

A newly found cousin in Missouri told me about his Grandma Jessie bringing her storm-born lambs into the house to take up residence for a while near the wood-burning cookstove. I don't think there is a shepherd anywhere who doesn't love the sheep. At least most of the time!

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

Eggs, Chicks, and Chickens

Dear Folks -
Great-uncle Lee was an gentle old batch during the worst years of the Great Depression trying to turn a dime to live on, but never finding much more than a nickel.

For a while, one of his schemes was raising chickens which seemed a no-fail project because everyone needs eggs, right? But it was a vicious circle: chickens laid the eggs which were collected and taken to town and sold for just enough money to buy more feed to bring home to feed the chickens to lay more eggs to be collected and taken to town . . . well, you get the idea. His brother and family lived down the lane a ways and helped with the work in exchange for eggs and an occasional stewpot hen. Their share of the eggs, of course, were the ones that couldn't be sold for one reason on another: too old, brittle-shelled, no shell (yup, that happens), cracked, dirty, off color, or anything else. This was payment that didn't endear the project to the helpers, and 75 years later, the nieces still regard eggs with the sort of dark suspicion usually reserved for career politicians.

Well, we are in the egg business, too, but only by default. The eggs from our hens are a second order of business, actually. The hens were picked up as a pasture clean-up patrol which they have done amazing well for nearly a year now. Henny-Penny is a Barred Rock hen which, because of her black and white stripes, the grandchildren call "jailbird chickens." She and her crew came to us as a formed flock, and once they understood where they could get water and shelter, they have gone at the pasture with a vengeance . Our plan is to use the manure so amply provided by Daisy and her calf to fertilize the pasture, and what better way to do so than by having the chicken chain-gang go at it with beaks and feet. They scratch around through a pile of anything, gobble up everything that interests them and head on to the next scratching activity.

Good as the jailbirds and their friends have been, the pastures are large enough that we could really use more birds, and so this spring we have begun the creation of another, larger, flock. There was lots of planning and scheming last fall and looking at several hatchery websites to find just the right mix of birds. And then there was the need to create a larger nicer place for this flock to live than in a Craigs List dog run, and so we created the Coop 'de Ville. Yesterday all the little peepers began arriving by Express delivery to the local post office., and only the turkeys are left. It's, ah . . . "cheep" entertainment for the grandchildren to handle (oh so carefully) the little fluffballs and figure figure out new names for them. Ever wonder how a kid's mind works? Try these names on for size: there is a yellow and orange chick that was promptly christened "Cheese," and then the brown ones named "Toasty" and "Roasty," and a lovely golden one named "Nugget" -- which I hope is *gold* nugget, not *chicken* nugget. Hoppy is obvious, but Clod? Where did that come from? Since there are 40 chicks, there are lots of great possibilities ahead. And then we will get to the turkeys. But in the meantime, there are eggs to collect, feed to buy to bring home to the chickens who will make more eggs so that we can buy more feed to bring home . . . Well, you get the idea.

Thinking of ewe -
The Shepherd

The Daily Mail

I am from a generation who actually wrote and received first class mail -- personal letters! -- through the U.S. Post Office. Everybody wrote to everybody, and even though it would take days to exchange and comment on the news, there was just something about going to the mailbox and finding a letter there that brought the world a little closer. And the stamps -- Glory, Hallelujah --the stamps! They were beauties, and there was always a kid who collected the foreign ones which would then pile up in a cigar box somewhere under the bed, evidence of a place beyond home.

A good newsy letter is universally loved -- the more details the better. I especially loved letters from my grandparents, partly because they wrote about the minutiae of rural life. What is the name of that new baby lamb? Are you going to plant a summer garden or a fall one? Where did you finally find hay at a price that didn't break the bank? Did the old butter churn work, after all? And for heaven's sake, where did you find that pattern for recycling feed sacks into something useful? The form of the letter has changed, but the idea is the same.We have e*mail*, we still *post,*, we still *CC* (Carbon Copy from the typewriter days) and there is still rural news to be told and questions to be asked and answered. So with a nod to an older time, I will try to insure that there is an interesting letter to read in The Daily Mail.