Denise Domning's Blog, page 15

A Clean Barn

For the past almost three years I’ve wanted one thing: a clean barn. A barn organized the way it works for me. One that isn’t cluttered with stuff that, should the Apocalypse happen, might come in handy. It was slaughtering season that made it happen. Unlike previous seasons, this year I have at least 4 pigs, 2 (more) sheep, and a dozen turkeys to put away before December. I needed dedicated space in the barn in which to work.

Knowing what was ahead of me, I started working toward this moment the day Miss Piggy left us. Back then the barn was so cluttered we were tripping over this and sliding over that while we tried to work. Since that day, great banks of little gray organizer boxes filled with screws, nuts, bolts and washers that never ever got used departed. So did a garbage can full of used/recycled PVC–you know, that valve that still works but you had to cut it out of the pipe so you could save it and now realize that the ends you left on it are really too short to do anything with. Old fencing got donated to the Coalition for Compassion and Justice in Prescott. (Great charity, by the way.) Restore (Habit for Humanity–another great charity) got saved wooden doors and power tools that didn’t make any sense to me and I knew I would never use.

Back in early summer my sister and brother-in-law visited and I put them to work. They tore down shelves, dumped cute little metal boxes filled with saved (bent/rusted) nails, screws, bolts and other strange bits. Then they organized my gardening tools on the walls they cleared. We didn’t have to buy any screws to do this job. Both my ex-husband and my dear neighbor are addicted to screws that come with their own drill bit. LORD KNOWS you don’t want buy screws for which you already have a working drill bit. If I see a screw with a star-shaped opening in its head, I toss it.

Once my accommodating relatives finished organizing the tools, I brought down both garbage cans and asked them to empty the various boxes of plumbing bits, fencing bits, and more of those cute little decorative boxes. It took two garbage truck cycles to haul away all of that. (By the way, my garbage company does their own recycling so I like to believe what could have been recycled was.)

Over the past months I’ve done more emptying and organization. I now have a PVC area where all the different sizes of pipe, valves and fittings have their own boxes, although I’m still sorting those. I also made myself a set of buckets. One contains everything I need to fix PVC/plumbing. I should really just keep that one in the pump house. It’s always up there. The next contains the socket wrench, clamps and bolts I need to fix the gates the piggy girls keep taking down. The third contains fencing repair items–wire cutters, wire, zip ties (hey, sometimes they work) and baling twine (that definitely works). Rather than having to find everything each time I want to do a job, I just grab a the bucket.

Last summer I took apart several home-built items left from the previous regime. The wood was good so I wanted to save what I could. It was almost impossible–it took four different drill bits because…well, see above about screws that need their own special bit. I did manage to get a nice pile of 2 x 4’s, some of them either redwood or cedar. However, not all the screws came out and I refused to stack the pieces until they were clean.

That meant they stayed in the center of the barn until yesterday. Once again armed with two drills and four freaking bits, I set to taking out what remained. I’m sure there are folks out there that can tell me the quick and easy way to do this. I just figured I’d cut out what the drill couldn’t remove. I’m pretty good with a sawsall. That got old quickly.

When yet one more refused to come out, I cursed profusely (I’m pretty good at that, too) in frustration, then noticed my trusty hand sledgehammer behind me. Grabbing it, (and singing the Peter Gabriel song at the same time), I beat the heck out of the stuck screw. Lo and behold! It broke at the wood! All of a sudden a boring chore became fun and I beat out screw after screw. Sledgehammer!

By noon the center of the barn was almost clean. After that, I mucked out the room where seeds were once sprouted for winter cow fodder. That required taking down the plastic doorway strips–the kind they use on coolers–installed to keep that room cool and moist. Hoky Smokes! They were heavy. Even scarier, several very large and, thankfully, very dead wolf spiders came down with them. But the minute they were gone, the whole barn felt better. That room produced two useless heaters, about four dozen empty plastic bottles of Hydrogen Peroxide and vinegar, and one unexpected bag of seeds–intermountain pasture mix! Cool!

Then I moved the flooring that’s stored in there, rearranged the disassembled sliding glass door that I think might one day appear in my bedroom, and found more boxes of unhappy bent and rusted screws. This box may have belonged to my father. I think that was his writing on the top. But when I was done there was room in there for my compost tea brewer, which is where it belongs. Now it’s back in place, ready for next spring. That made space for me to store my mower, small shredder, and my cute little electric roto-tiller against the barn’s back door. They’ll stay there until slaughtering season is over.

Although there’s still more to swamp out and reorganize before the space is truly mine, it is a joy to be able to now see what I need. My barn!

Bobcat

Once again, the dogs treed a cat, this time a bobcat.  I knew the bobcat was hunting this area for two reasons.  First, my artist-friend Jacquie had sent me a photo of the cat that she caught lounging near the creek after eating one of her chickens. She was surprised that it allowed her to get so close. I wasn’t. A predator near the top of the food chain is less skittish, figuring it can escape or kill you if need be.

Then, the cat came to hunt on my property.  She took two turkey hens before the dogs treed her. And where did the dogs tree her?  In the giant cottonwood at the back of my property.

This tree is HUGE.  It takes four people (plus a child) with arms outstretched to encircle that tree.  There’s an active honeybee hive in it, and yes I’m certain they are honeybees. The hive started out in a branch, which broke back in 2011 taking approximately 60,000 bees down with it and ultimately causing the death of my neighbor’s horse.  The beekeeper who came to kill the bees (I was sad, but I really had no choice about that) said the hive in that branch was the third largest he’d ever seen. Little did we know that what came down was only about half the hive. When the bees swarmed two years ago, the swarm was so loud I thought someone next door was using a chainsaw. I thought I took a picture of it, but (as typical for me) it seems I didn’t.  It was more than four feet long.  Well, since then the hive that produced that swarm has moved again, deep into the dying trunk after yet another branch broke off leaving a six foot tall hole. The bump in front of the cat’s nose in the picture is where that hole is. Needless to say, while I watched the trapped bobcat, I was also watching the bees buzzing around her, thinking “You really don’t want to be there, girlie.”

As near as I can figure the dogs had caught onto the bobcat by the death of hen number two. Both dogs long ago learned to decipher turkey calls and they recognize the difference between the call for sky predators, about which they can do nothing, and ground predators. Yesterday, the ground predator call rose up from the back barn and both boys were off and running.  A few moments later I heard Bear’s “I’ve got you and you’re never coming down” bark.

Down I went to see what they had. By the time I reached the dogs Bear was moaning and barking as he circled the tree.  Not Moosie.  He was flat out trying to climb it.  He would get about four feet up the side before falling back to the ground.  Each time he hit the ground, I could see he was holding up his right paw.

It took me a minute to find the cat.  Unlike the mountain lion who was Moosie-sized if you didn’t count her tail, this little critter was about forty pounds.  Given that, she (I’m not really certain she was a she, but I choose to believe she was) and I were both certain that if she came down to face the dogs, she was going to die. Yes, my dogs might be injured, but she would certainly be dead, dead, dead.

As I watched, she tried making her way to the far end of the branch, which stretches across the ditch, making contact with a large walnut on the opposite bank.  But cottonwoods are tricky things. I’m sure she could feel the thinner branches creaking and snapping even under her slight weight as she reached the little stuff. So she came back to the fork, found the bees and backed off again.  Then the piggy girls came down to see what we were doing. I’m not sure if the cat knew the difference between the dogs and the pigs, but I’m pretty sure she recognized the pigs as “bigger than me and I really need to get out of here.”

That’s when I realized I needed to get her out of that tree without 1) the dogs killing her and being hurt in the process, especially with Moosie already on the injured list and 2) me pulling my dogs in only to have her come down and take a turkey on her way to safety  Can’t shoot a bobcat without some kind of license, not that I’m necessarily capable of shooting well enough to hit a small cat sixty feet over my head.

I plumbed the Web and discovered there was no help available, so I called the vet’s office to let them know I’d be bringing Moosie by later. By the time I’d done that, I returned outside to find the dogs on the porch. Moosie was trembling and almost unable to walk. I locked him inside–because he’s a dog and a dog wants to go with you even if it means agony–and went down to check the tree.  Sure enough, the cat was gone. Then I counted my few remaining turkeys. They were still with me.

Here’s hoping she’s made the same decision that the mountain lion did and marked this property as not a good choice even with all the food that roams it. As for Moosie, the vet says he strained/sprained/tore/overused his shoulder muscles trying to climb that tree.

That means he’s on the injured list for a week, and that means I’m facing another “week from hell” as I try to keep him from racing off to confront some other critter.  He’s already gotten away from me once this morning. He’s pretty darn fast even with only three working legs. Sigh.

Lickety-split

That’s what happened on the farm yesterday morning.  Creatures were moving at the speed of “lickety-split”. Let me step back and set the scene for you.

For the past months I’ve been urging my friend Su, the goat whisperer, to bring a few goats over here.  Or maybe some of her alpacas. My pastures are way overgrown because I don’t have enough animals grazing and what’s growing out there just needs to be eaten down.  She finally agreed and brought over three of her goats, two wethers (castrated males) and a young buck.

I have never wanted goats. They’re voracious eaters and they’ll eat everything, and are even more destructive than sheep.  But with my alleyways and their new handy panel gates (see last week’s post) I knew I could keep her boys contained if need be.

Much to my surprise, her goats are very well behaved, being imprinted on humans rather than goats. They’re also a little overwhelmed by the size of the area they’ve now got to graze. And they’re quiet.  They make these tiny little “maa’s”, almost too low to hear, especially for someone accustomed to listening to Cinco’s deep bass “blaaat” and Tiny’s annoying and never ending contralto “baa”.

Things got off to a rocky start.  As we led them down to their alley way, Moosie followed.  Everything about his demeanor suggested he was thinking they might be prey animals.  I very carefully pointed to each goat and told Moosie that it was “mine”.  Twenty-four hours later, after the newness wore off, he recognized that they were four-leggeds.  To Moosie anything with four legs and about his size is a potential dog, and a dog is a potential playmate. Let me just say that the goats were, and still are, very leery about this change of designation.  They’ve added Bear to their leery list, just in case he decides to act like Moosie.

The piggy girls were equally as fascinated by these newcomers and they swiftly discovered that the goats were terrified of them.  This resulted in each big girl–they’ve reached about 250 pounds now–racing along the alley fence to make the goats inside run.  I swear I could see them all giggle as they did it. The goats are still giving the pigs a really wide berth.

My hope was that the goats would become comfortable with Cinco and Peanut. I’d like to create a flock of boys so I can keep my two rams away from my ewes without them feeling isolated. I’m afraid that will make Cinco even more aggressive than he already is. For that reason I put the goats in the alleyway between the rams and the ewes. This was acceptable to the goats, because those sheep almost look like goats, don’t they? There has been a lot of nose-to-nose communication through the fence.

The first day I allowed the goats out of their alley to graze I kept the rams in my neighbors’ pasture, just in case.  These slender, graceful creatures with their legs covered in multi-colored stockings quickly gravitated to Tiny, Mari and the lambs, following the girls as they explored their new space. I kept their alley gate open just in case and, indeed, they high-tailed (literally) it back inside the minute they saw the pigs coming their way.

Still uncertain what might happen if I put two rams and a buck together, I waited until Sunday morning before orchestrating their meeting. As always, Peanut treated them the way he does every other animal on the farm–as if they were his best friends. Or rather he tried to.  He couldn’t catch them to introduce himself because Cinco was intent on running down those caprine boys and licking their fur.  Not their faces or the other end, but right in the middle of their bodies. The wool flew as he ran from one to the other, his tongue moving.  None of the goats acted frightened, only like this behavior was just too weird to be allowed. They outdanced him each time he got close until he finally gave up.

No head butting, no challenging, just licking.

I have to say I agree with the goats.  That was just plain odd. Then again, odd is what happens around here.

It’s her back right leg. She won’t put weight on it.

A final note.  It appears that little Mari is healing. This morning when she came to her feet she extended her injured leg out behind her, pointed her hoof, and stretched.  Yay!

 

 

U-bolts and Handy Panels

First a few farm updates. Tiny’s new little boys are doing great! After a couple of days offering a bottle of goat milk to little Patch, he started toying with a nipple. That’s a sure sign he was getting enough from Mama and didn’t need the bottle any longer.  A few days ago Tiny forget that she ever wanted to give him up. She’s even cuddling with him the way she does with the other unnamed lamb. More importantly, they’re the same size now, and still growing like weeds. They’ve started playing headbutts and love to bounce on anything that makes noise.

Next, Moosie stinks. Last night at about 9:30 the scent of skunk wafted through my bedroom window. Sigh.  I’m pretty sure he killed it because he acted pleased with himself this morning. One less egg thief to worry about.

Now back to how I can build anything with u-bolts, handy panels and baling twine.

In case you don’t know, handy panels are eight foot long, four foot tall, metal grid panels that are light enough for me to carry and just the right size to take home in the bed of my truck.  They have only one down side. Although the manufacturer makes the lower two rows on the panel half the size of the rest of the grid to deter chickens from crawling through them, the makers have not counted on my determined chickens.  They ignore rows one and two to climb through either three or four. Thus, if I want to keep chickens trapped on one side of the panel, I need to line it with something else, like the fencing I just cut out to install these new panels.

Helper pig–she ate the nut

Earlier this year I divided my middle pasture into alleyways.  With a mountain lion hunting the property,  I wanted an area near the house where I could confine the sheep at night while they still grazed. That pasture became six long alleys, five of them twenty feet wide, the sixth being just over ten feet wide.  So far, the idea has been worth the effort.  This is especially true now that Cinco has become such a pain in the whatever-he’s-hit-lately.  However, over the summer the piggy girls altered the layout a mite.  While they ignored the long, internal lines, they managed to lift the bottom edge of the fence fabric at the end of each alley. Not far, mind you, but enough that smaller critters, chickens mostly, were able to duck under them.  Until this week, that had been a simple annoyance, requiring me to go out and push it back down, sometimes tying it in place with (you know it’s coming) baling twine.  Until this week, the sheep–more specifically Cinco–either hadn’t really noticed the gaps or weren’t interested into doing the belly-crawl needed to escape their alley.

Then in the course of last week Tiny’s lambs were born and little Mari went into heat. That put too much estrogen in the air for either Peanut or Cinco to ignore.  First, they escaped to chase Tiny and her new babies around, headbutting the lambs so they could get close to her.  This resulted in Cinco catching me with my back turned while I chased lambs. He didn’t hit me hard and all would have been fine except that my feet slid in my shoes (see the story about the li’l pink crocs regarding my problem with shoes) and I twisted my ankle.  That night, Cinco hurt Mari.  I suspect he headbutted her in the hip during his proposal. Neither her hip nor her leg look or act broken.  She has a cold nose, is eating well, and manages to hobble around, but she won’t put the leg down.

Notice the careful half-hitch knots on that twine.

The only reason Cinco got to her was because he belly-crawled out of a pig hole.  So yesterday, I installed the second set of handy panel doors on the alleys.  Of course the piggy girls came to supervise.  They inspected the weedwhacker, leaving it muddy. They dumped my supply bucket, tasted all the tools (leaving them muddy), stole my gloves, then one of them ate the metal nut from one of my u-bolts.

Despite the interference, I got the panels in place.  The girls gave it their best shots.  Nothing moved.  Hah!

Yup, handy panels, baling twine and u-bolts.  I’m building a chicken coop out of them this winter.  Just watch me.

 

 

Surprise lambs

Okay, they weren’t precisely a surprise.  I could see that Tiny was pregnant.  But as of yesterday she didn’t look nearly as tubby as she’d looked with her first lambs, so I figured there was another month to go.  Moreover, there were none of the signs I’d seen the first time–the loosening of the vulva, the drooping of her belly–except that yesterday her udder went “poof” and became a balloon.

At 4:15 AM this (Sunday) morning, I heard her bleat. Once. This after a night when the coyotes, and therefore the dogs, were excessively active. I woke up twice, listening to the pack warbling, their noise just a little fainter than Moosie’s bark and a lot fainter than Bear’s bark.  That Moosie was barking said he thought whatever was happening was dangerous.  That Bear was still barking from the porch said that he didn’t agree, and saw no reason to move if it really wasn’t going to turn into a problem.

As I listened, I went through the animals and their containment.  Yes, the turkey barn was closed and locked.  Yes, the chicken coop was shut, all three doors locked. Yes, the sheep were locked in the orchard, surrounded by sturdy chain link.

As for piggy girls, the last I saw they were snuggled down in the straw in the same spot where they were born.  The door to that area was wide open, but at this point, those girls are pretty much predator proof.  Thanks to my friend Lu, I recently measured them to figure out how much they weighed.  As Lu instructed, I took two pieces of baling twine, stretched one piece from behind the biggest girl’s ears to in front of her tail and cut it (then tucked it into one pocket), then took another piece and wrapped it around her hearth girth–just behind her front shoulders.  After snipping that one to size and putting it into a different pocket (very good advice), I came into the house to measure my twine. Once I had my measurements, I squared the heart girth, then multiplied the squared girth by her length and divided by 400.

I gotta pause here. That formula is one of those pesky, weird things about life that troubles me. Who sat down to figure out how to use these two numbers to come up with a weight? And how in the world did they come up with what they did, and why does that work? It’s a mystery for sure.

Much to my surprise, my biggest girl was closing in on 225 pounds! She was the first born and the one that looks the most like a Hampshire.  She’s got a neck on her like an NFL center.

Excited, I went back to weigh the smallest one, Little Blue-eye. She’s one that delicately sips from the hose, making little slurpy “this-tea-is-too-hot” sounds as she does.  She was at 175! Hokey Smokes! I knew they were getting big, but I lacked any sense of how big.

As for any predator trying to take one of them, let’s just say that the other day the pig-pack decided to enter the orchard while the sheep flock was in there.  The next thing I knew Cinco had politely excused himself and retreated around the corner of the orchard. Apparently, he’s head-butted them one time too many and they have convinced him it’s wiser to not do that. Yeah, they’re probably predator-proof, especially with two big dogs certain to come help out in the fray.

Back to 4:15 AM and Tiny bleating.  Because I only heard the one bleat and it wasn’t followed by Moosie barking (he’s a better predictor of a threat than the big guy), I didn’t go down until there was light enough to see.  That’s when I heard the faint little baby “baa”.

Sure enough, she’d dropped a pair of little boys between 4:15 and 5:45.  By the time I saw them, she had them cleaned and one of them was tiptoeing around. While I returned to the house for a towel, just to be sure they were dry, Moosie paced outside the orchard, desperate to get in. Honestly, that dog is a born midwife.  The minute I opened the gate, there he was cleaning the newest one, Tiny letting him do it without complaint. I toweled them off, made sure they were moved into the sun, then cleared out the other three sheep (and one persistent dog) so mom and babies could have some bonding time.

An hour later she’d finished up and the little guys had found their bounces.  Welcome lambikins!

Planting Day

Ya-HOO! I completed enough of the sheer drudgery work on my list that I took the day today to plant my first winter garden.  The drudgery included putting the dirt back into the hole for the plumbing fix Al and I did a few weeks back. The fix is holding and it’s now safe to refill the cavern. After that, I emptied the dirt from the somewhat smaller but wider cavern where Al and I fixed plumbing two years ago. The rubber coupling had shifted and was leaking.  In this case, all the PVC between the walnut tree and the pump house wall needed to be cut out.  It literally turned two square-edged circles on its way from the tank to the pump house.  So I cut away all the dead piping that had once been part of an irrigation system, making room for an almost straight run of pipe from tree to wall.  As it ended up, I still needed that rubber coupling.  Even with a 45 degree elbow, the two pieces of pipe didn’t meet. I haven’t yet refilled that hole, in case it leaks. I am NOT moving any more dirt than I absolutely have to move.

Then, because I was still in the pump house, I addressed the slow drip off the second arsenic filter.  This required a call to tech support–I wanted to be certain I couldn’t break it–then the removal of the plastic piece that connects hoses to the filter.  I discovered what happens if the screws aren’t quite tight enough when that cartridge is reinstalled.  Let’s just call that my morning shower.

After that, I filled dirt in the trench near the barn. Mind you, I didn’t finish moving dirt.  I just moved more of it. I’ve got a pact with myself about spending five minutes every day on the trench.  I figure by Christmas it’ll be filled.

Look at the dirt they’ve made!

Then I installed a fence and gate to section off the northern half of the orchard garden.  This is the area that the piggy girls have cleaned for me.  It’s also their favorite place to lay in the morning because the sun hits it shortly after rising, making it a perfect pig-sunbathing spot. This is also why I didn’t plant in the orchard today. I want to be absolutely certain they can’t open that gate before I put the effort into preparing the garden.

Speaking of the girls, they are getting BIG! I need to measure them, but haven’t yet managed to balance all the bits to make it happen–you know, find the baling twine and the scissors at the same time, then get one of them to stand still long enough to measure her. Oddly, as big as they’re getting, they’ve slowed down on their food intake a little. This suggests to me that they’ve found something they love in that back pasture and are filling up on it instead of eating processed food.  They seem very happy grazing of late and will often sit with the sheep, just chewing on grass.  Oh, and I caught that ear-petting thing with Peanut again. One of the black-and-white girls had started past him, then caught sight of his ear–not hard to do now that she’s taller than he is.  She stopped and put her mouth on it, then let him drag his ear out of her mouth.  Since he didn’t make any noise or yank on his ear, I’m assuming he still enjoys this pig-petting-trick.

Back in May with favas and lettuce

So my first garden of this winter season is that the small bed at house-level that I planted for my birthday a couple of years ago.  It was a rough summer for that garden, what with me trapped inside writing, not really watching what was happening. That said, it still produced onions, lettuce, fava beans and arugula.  Then the bermuda crept in and the bind weed joined it.  The roses did okay, but the grapevine did not.  I might have to see about building an arbor for it.

It took me all morning to remove the grass and weeds, but with every punch of my hoe I had to smile. What started as hay, straw, cardboard and iffy dirt is now a gorgeous dark brown soil  Once the soil was as clean as I cared to get it–yes, I know the bermuda will be back, but it served its purpose and kept the dirt protected from a scorching sun–I raked it flat, then went for the seeds.  Turnips, kale, tat soi, radishes, and carrots. I have no hope for the carrots, but I found a package, so I used it.

The garden after I cleaned and planted

Everything’s a month late going in and, judging from my cottonwood trees, I’m thinking we’ll have an early frost.  Still, once the willow drops her leaves, this garden gets sun all day long for the whole winter.  I’m hoping that will do the trick and I’ll once more have plenty of cold season greens.

So on that happy note, it’s back to the drudgery.  I have to fix my lawn mower.  I sort of overfilled the oil and I’m sort of certain I broke it. Breaking the mower is a whole lot better than breaking anything in that pump house and a whole lot cheaper to fix.  That is, if I really did buy that warranty.

Awaken the Sleeping Heart

Available now on Amazon for $3.99

AN ANCIENT PROMISE OF MARRIAGE, A WEALTHY WIDOW STOLEN BY A POOR KNIGHT, AND THE KING DETERMINED TO KEEP THEM APART

Stephen de Brazdifer sails from Ireland for England, seeking the bride promised to him by an ancient royal writ. But he’s too late. King John has already claimed the rich widow as his royal ward, wanting to cheat a man he dislikes, and keep her wealth for himself. If Stephen is to have his promised wife, he’ll have to steal her from his monarch.

For all her life Cecilia de Gradinton has cursed her wealth and beauty for the freedom they cost her. Now, newly widowed, with all hope of home and happiness gone, she rides toward her new prison under royal escort. But more than one deadly danger stalks her on the road to King John’s court.

Head Spinning

Dang it, I just finished editing the print version of the book and opened this page to start this post, only to remember that I have water running on my trees.  That is how the whole day has gone from 4 AM onward.  For some ridiculous reason, I had it in my head that actually writing the last words of my book meant I was finished. HA! But I couldn’t let another Monday come and go without a post. Last Monday I was turning six pages into twenty-five and breaking my concentration just wasn’t an option. So here I am at sunset, squeezing in this note.

It’s now been more than three weeks since Cinco last head-butted me.  Whoot!  Oh, wait!  That’s because I didn’t dare let him.

Right at the end of a book I begin to worry about silly things, like, maybe the house will burn down and I’ll lose my computer. Or the ram will headbutt me and break my arm.  A couple of years ago I had to refuse to help milk a cow with mastitis because she was kicking and I was terrified I’d end up in a cast.  Also,  the end of the book cuts into my walks down to the pastures. These last weeks all I’ve managed to do was morning and evening chores.  Tom has missed me.  He now refuses to enter the coop unless I carry him. Such a baby!

Helper Pigs

The piggy girls have also suffered from farmer-deprivation. This has caused some misbehavior around my refilling of the waterers I use for the turkey coop. The minute the piggies see me at the hose, and they come loaded for human.  One of them steals the base of the waterer, another drinks the water out of the reservoir right after I finish filling it and before I can get the base back on, while a third one runs off with the hose. But in the two weeks that I’ve had my attention elsewhere, I swear they’ve doubled in size! They’ve also almost finished turning my winter garden for me.

Over the summer, I’ve been dumping the straw from the chicken coop in that area. They thought this was great and turned it into bedding, which seemed to go a long way toward breaking it down. Then, when it was no longer fun to lay in, they’d start working it into the soil. In the process, they removed the quack grass that showed up again, noshed on the bermuda roots and eliminated most of the other annoying weeds, except the silver nightshade and the volunteer pumpkins. Oddly enough, the sheep have become fond of both. They’ve eaten all the pumpkins and nibble the leaves off the silver nightshade, even if there’s something more palatable right next to it.

Speaking of the sheep, Peanut brought his flock into the house a few days ago. The morning was beautiful and cool, so I had opened the doors that face the road. Apparently, I forgot to put the barrier in place that keeps them in the middle pasture and they came up the stairs. I kept hearing this tap-tap-tap, tap-taptapapapta-tap around the corner from my desk. I thought one of the cats had a toy, so I ignored it for a few minutes until it got so loud that I finally went to look. There was Peanut, right around the corner from my desk, on his way to say “hi”. Cinco was hanging back, having never seen a house before. Mari and her mother Tiny were in the doorway to the commercial kitchen, both of them with their heads cocked as if to say “What the heck is this place?” All it took to send them on their way was a clap of my hands. Well, except Peanut, who wanted some head scratches before he agreed to leave. (And I forgot to take a picture, double dang it!)

Two days later, they found their way around that barrier again. Peanut! I watch him studying that bit of fencing, gauging just how contorted he has to be to work his way around it. The others aren’t as smart, but if he figures it out, they follow. This time, I’d left the small barn door open. Half a bale of alfalfa later, there were sheep turds everywhere. They’d tried every open bag of feed I had, but couldn’t get to the good stuff–the chicken food and the pig food–thank heavens.  Smart sheep, stupid shepherd.

First thing on the list of “must get done before I start another book” is figuring out a sheep-proof barrier. No sweat.  I’ve got two weeks.

 

Awaken the Sleeping Heart

As you may have known, I’ve been working on my first Medieval romance in …well, a few years.  With fourteen pages left to write, I’m almost done. You can get a head start on reading it.  I’ve uploaded the first four chapters to Bookfunnel, where you can download it in whatever format you need.

Here’s the link: https://dl.bookfunnel.com/udfvx3iu1j

Many thanks to Karrie Ross for her great cover!

A Quick Note

Only one chapter left! Well, one chapter–the hardest one, of course–and an epilogue.  But I don’t count epilogues because they’re more postscript than chapter.  I just read through the book again to check for any loose ends that I haven’t pulled through.  As I did I thought of all my knitter friends. Miss a stitch and the whole thing is off. So, because my mind is still stuck in 1211 AD, this is going to be a quick post.

Cinco and I have reached detente. I achieved this with a long, thin, sharp stick. He already respects sticks and this one gives me about two feet of clearance. That keeps him far enough from me that he never quite gets that urge. If you remember, I’ve been putting my little flock on the wild hillside with Bear as their guardian (because Moosie knows how to get out of the fence).  I finally decided I needed a three day rotation, three days on the hillside, then three days down in the pasture. Tiny complains so much about being up there that I worry.  Yes, I was one of those mothers that equated food with love.

They’re down in the pastures today. Not only was there was no complaining but they pretty much stayed in one location and just grazed. That is until I opened the orchard door for the pigs. Then it was a wild scramble to get the pigs on the inside of the orchard gate while keeping out four determined sheep. Speaking as that food-driven mother, I’d let them eat more pig food but it really does make them sick. Just goes to show that humans aren’t the only ones that will follow their taste buds to the determent of their stomachs and general health.

I think the piggy girls miss the sheep when they’re out of reach. A little while ago I found one of my girls snuggled up to Cinco, gently running his ear through her mouth.  The pigs are fascinated with sheep ears. I’ve seen the girls do this with Peanut, who loves it, but never before with Cinco. He didn’t seem too surprised by what she was doing, so I’m guessing that the pigs have been spreading the love throughout the flock for a while.

As for the piggy girls, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks teaching them how to drink from the hose. Why? Because it makes me laugh. Each girl has her own way of doing it. My blue-eyed Yorkshire lookalike extends her bottom lip in a “V”. As the water fills her mouth and spills over, she sips delicately.  One of the black and white Hampshire-looking girls clamps her teeth around hose end. Then, as water gushes out of the back of her jaw as she gulps noisily. And of course there’s always a joker who has to grab the hose and dance around, squirting everyone else.

I’ve gotten pretty fond of my new flock of Brahma chickens. They’re surprisingly friendly and good layers. Maybe it’s me, but they seem kinder than any other breed of chicken I’ve had.  I ended up with one disabled girl.  I don’t know how or when it happened, but she dislocated her hip.  Usually, this would result in the other hens picking on her until they pecked her to death. Instead, she buddied up with a motherly sister-hen, who interacted with her as if they were mother and chick. That resulted in the whole flock accepting her as if she were just like them. And she manages to get around pretty well, considering. She eats well, too. The last time I picked her up she felt just as hefty as the rest of them.

I’ll sum up with one strange twist.  A few weeks back I got a pair of fake ceramic eggs. The idea is to place one of these eggs where you want your hens to lay. Give a dozen hens a dozen nesting boxes and you’ll find all twelve eggs in one box. Hens love to lay where other hens have put their eggs. I suspect the motivation behind this is to get another broody hen to hatch your eggs for you while you live the high life, chasing grasshoppers and green fruit beetles.  I’ve seen three hens stacked one on top of the other, all of them busily depositing eggs.

Anyway, the fake eggs were working great until one day when I went out with my bucket and found one of the ceramic eggs missing. I panicked. Had I picked up that egg and accidentally sold it to someone? I waited but no one contacted me about only getting eleven real eggs in their dozen. But where had that egg gone?

Scratching my head, I went on as usual.  A few days ago, my second fake egg disappeared overnight. Huh. Guess there’s a skunk or raccoon out there somewhere scratching its head over what the heck that thing that looks like an egg really is.

And that’s the news from Farm Woebegone.