Legamin
Loving the herd life
When we first bought our farm we had just passed through our home being burned to the ground, our business collapsing in the chaos after the fire and unexpected forced retirement. We bought the farm to restore the 105 year old farm house and set up an antique furniture restoration shop that had always been a hobby/dream and my wife hoped to just have a quiet place to live out the rest of our lives…seemed like a plan. I had a career in medicine and physics and my wife in bookkeeping so we were ready to be our ’authentic farm selfs’!
My suspicion was that after sitting on the front porch rocker and whiling away the morning in a good book and watching the neighbor’s farming activities I could ‘putter’ in the flower beds and walk the perimeter of the property admiring the nice things that nature offered us…that was my thought.
But on my walks I began to notice that all four of the barns needed some carpentry…no just paint and a bit of patch…but real carpentry! One of them had no sides…just great poles lifting a roof into thee air at odd angles covering a concrete pad. I saw in this silage barn the potential for a new lambing barn!….so we ordered siding….
On our quest to be more independent, ‘self-sustaining‘, ‘organic’, hippy yippie and generally just ‘healthy’ we planted a garden (which failed) and bought some goats and sheep (that became beloved pets) and …well….pretty much everything went counterclockwise down the porcelain trail…..
But it was FARMING! And ’Farmers’ reinvent themselves like a well loathed politician! So we researched for a couple of years, watched infinite U-toob videos, read a RAFT of books and eased the goats and sheep into the freezer (heaven?), replanted the garden and focused.
We bought Leicester Longwool Sheep…a critically endangered breed with about 1000 breeding quality sheep left…and joined in the mission to bring them back from the brink. They are large, lovely, funny, loving and gentle…but they are still sheep. Last year we added chickens to the menagerie…someone told us that by turning them loose with the sheep that they would help aerate the barn straw and keep fly larvae down…I should never have listened! Chickens LOVE sheep’s grain! At night, instead of the perches and nests that I put up they opted for sitting around the lip of thee sheep’s water all night adding their particular brand of filth to the liquid refreshment. I tried to relocate the chickens when it all became a bit much to clean up daily (they Ignored the nests and laid eggs in the once neatly stacked hay that is used for sheep feed…then hid them by covering them) but they insisted on returning to the foul the barn and water at night like newborn ducks stupidly imprinted on the sheep! Well my sheep had ENOUGH! So I build a chicken coup and yard…where they happily used the nests, turned right around and ate the eggs….(did I buy stupid chickens or wretched cannibals?). So this last week I breathed deeply before buying a 3 nest box from which the eggs neatly roll out from under the hen into a secure covered drawer and our 9 hens FINALLY are giving us 6 eggs per day….I swear if I knew who wasn’t producing there would be chicken dinner for three straight days!
But the sheep are happy, the chickens are happy…and I AM HAPPY to be doing 3 hours less work per day cleaning up after CHICKENS!
I’m facing our first major lambing in a few weeks (Days?) and we are setting up an Apiary…because we weren’t busy enough….but I’ll write about that later.
My suspicion was that after sitting on the front porch rocker and whiling away the morning in a good book and watching the neighbor’s farming activities I could ‘putter’ in the flower beds and walk the perimeter of the property admiring the nice things that nature offered us…that was my thought.
But on my walks I began to notice that all four of the barns needed some carpentry…no just paint and a bit of patch…but real carpentry! One of them had no sides…just great poles lifting a roof into thee air at odd angles covering a concrete pad. I saw in this silage barn the potential for a new lambing barn!….so we ordered siding….
On our quest to be more independent, ‘self-sustaining‘, ‘organic’, hippy yippie and generally just ‘healthy’ we planted a garden (which failed) and bought some goats and sheep (that became beloved pets) and …well….pretty much everything went counterclockwise down the porcelain trail…..
But it was FARMING! And ’Farmers’ reinvent themselves like a well loathed politician! So we researched for a couple of years, watched infinite U-toob videos, read a RAFT of books and eased the goats and sheep into the freezer (heaven?), replanted the garden and focused.
We bought Leicester Longwool Sheep…a critically endangered breed with about 1000 breeding quality sheep left…and joined in the mission to bring them back from the brink. They are large, lovely, funny, loving and gentle…but they are still sheep. Last year we added chickens to the menagerie…someone told us that by turning them loose with the sheep that they would help aerate the barn straw and keep fly larvae down…I should never have listened! Chickens LOVE sheep’s grain! At night, instead of the perches and nests that I put up they opted for sitting around the lip of thee sheep’s water all night adding their particular brand of filth to the liquid refreshment. I tried to relocate the chickens when it all became a bit much to clean up daily (they Ignored the nests and laid eggs in the once neatly stacked hay that is used for sheep feed…then hid them by covering them) but they insisted on returning to the foul the barn and water at night like newborn ducks stupidly imprinted on the sheep! Well my sheep had ENOUGH! So I build a chicken coup and yard…where they happily used the nests, turned right around and ate the eggs….(did I buy stupid chickens or wretched cannibals?). So this last week I breathed deeply before buying a 3 nest box from which the eggs neatly roll out from under the hen into a secure covered drawer and our 9 hens FINALLY are giving us 6 eggs per day….I swear if I knew who wasn’t producing there would be chicken dinner for three straight days!
But the sheep are happy, the chickens are happy…and I AM HAPPY to be doing 3 hours less work per day cleaning up after CHICKENS!
I’m facing our first major lambing in a few weeks (Days?) and we are setting up an Apiary…because we weren’t busy enough….but I’ll write about that later.