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