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