Jason

Jason is our moorit merino ram lamb. He has a nice set of horns and a pretty even temperament. His mother is Cory and sire was Kahn.

Born this winter, he had a pretty benign start. Cory was really huge and it seemed that the lamb would never come. When he was born, it was a question as to the gender for a while. He was an ugly lamb.

He has tons of wrinkles and has beautiful fleece.

He was a real mama’s boy.

His mother left about a month ago for a new farm.  He was weened, but seemed lost for a couple of days.   Now he has transitioned into an independent little fellow.

Sheep as brush hogs

Brush hogging is a term used to describe clearing brush from the land. There are really fancy machines that will chop up brush, but the brush comes back and then there are are the suckers that grow back. This is where sheep come in handy. They love to munch the random twig. Here is the warning and the disclaimer:

Be very careful about wilted Cherry. Toxic to sheep. I don’t know how much is toxic, but take care. Here is a link: http://www.sheepandgoat.com/poison.html

But don’t get too caught up in toxic plants, sheep have an amazing way of keeping out of trouble. They have generally left the clover and milk week in my pasture alone. However if the sheep are starving, because of not enough feed, then they might get into more trouble.

I think is it good to get a couple of “how to” books when you first start out, but the books can really freak you out with all of the things that can go wrong. If you are a worrier by nature, then sheep are not for you.

Also, lambs learn about which plants to eat from others in the flock, so a batch of bottle babies don’t know squat.

Sheep will gird small trees and love eating the leaves off the shrubs and bushes. We are converting the woods back to pasture. The wood that has been cut will be used for fire wood and in some cases wood for home projects like flooring and trim. The clearing is a bear of a job, which is were the sheep come in.

We opened up the pasture to the woods and the sheep go after the small trees. Sometimes during the evening pasture walk, I will bend a young tree down and the sheep will go after the leaves. I call the flock down to the saplings we don’t want. Maple is their favorite. But almost any good hardwood will do.

So far the work the sheep have done have saved us a ton of work. They like the diversity of the plants and I like the woods slowly turning to pasture. The evening walks around the woods are my favorite and I think the sheep like it as well.

writer’s block

Having trouble getting stuff out today. I am sensitive now that I might piss off someone with what I write because of the reaction I got with Shoot, Shovel and Shut-up. So now I feel somewhat tethered. Unable to freely write and too conscious of the topics.

I have said before that there are topics that I would like to write about, but that I have to wait. Writing that you know will upset folks needs to be really carefully considered before publishing. In any form.

I was thinking of starting another blog with a fake name so that I could write about more stuff. Keep the farming stuff on this site and other topics off. But there is something about needing to hide what I feel and think that really irritates me.

I came from a family where talking about emotions and how one felt was taboo, especially if what you felt was not consistent from the expectations or regular rules of behavior. Being the odd one out was often difficult. I have always been the black sheep, hence part of the reason why I raise the odd merino. Black. There are merino breeders who do not accept colored merinos as pure merino. Even a better reason to raise them.

I am contrary by nature. I stir the pot and call out stuff as I see it. I challenge the status quo. I am trying to learn to do this in a more gentle way and not with confrontation. Confrontation turns folks off and the result is that the message is lost.

So I guess as I write I need to learn how to write openly, more gently. But Gary Larson isn’t subtle, nor was George Carlin. Neither would be funny without the dark stuff, but the message is delivered with humor, which disarms folks and allows room for gentle confrontation.

My tethering is the pain point of the beginning of growth. I welcome it and will take the challenge of writing in discomfort.

Wood for the winter

Bub got a wood splitter for Father’s day. For the past two wood seasons, he split all our firewood by ax. Well, not all. I can split wood and I am good at it, so I will pick up the ax once a year and prove I have good aim. But I hate splitting wood by ax, so I don’t. I have left it to him, just like he leaves holiday preparation to me.

We figure that the savings on oil this year will pay off the splitter pretty quickly. We put oil in the tank about 2 weeks ago and the cost was 4.67 per gallon. That is $ 1167.50 for a full tank. The wood splitter cost $1126.30 plus the gas in the truck to pick it up and bring it home. We think the cost is equal to tank of fuel oil.

Three years ago (two heating seasons) we took our tax return and a bit of our savings and put in a wood stove. About $4000.00 for the stove and building materials. Bub did it all himself. We ended up heating the house on one 250 gallon tank of oil. We heat our water with oil as well as have hot water baseboard heating throughout the house. The savings we had with the oil paid off the stove investment in two years.

We would fill the tank about once a month in the months of December through April. Then figure two more times in the off months for a total of about 6 tanks or 1500 gallons. Teens in the house with hot showers and tons of laundry adds up.

We burn about 5 cord each year. All of the wood comes off our land and we harvest it ourselves. It is a huge job and most of our “spare time” is alloted to the cutting, splitting, hauling and stacking of wood.

We live on a 20 acre lot that is mostly wooded. There is a beaver pond at the bottom of the land which is about 4 acres and our house and drive take up another .5 of land. We are slowly converting forest back to pasture. The land was pasture 70 years ago and has grown back. There is a deer yard on our property, which will not be harvested. If you cut correctly, one acre can produce one cord of wood per year, every year.

That translates to having a good bit of our heat being sustainable. It would be terrific to save enough to go “off the grid” but that will take a few more heating seasons to save up for solar panels and a windmill.

One small step at a time.

The Graduate Farmer

Emilie got the Principal’s Award for academic achievement. We went down to that dinner a couple of weeks ago. Two weeks later there was another awards evening for Seniors and she was given the “most improved writer of the Senior class”. Last night was Scholarship night for the Seniors and she was awarded a Memorial gift from the local Harley Davidson group. ( For a moment I was dreaming that she got her own hog)

She is dyslexic and did not find academics the easiest thing to navigate. She is also very tall. 6′1″ and has pretty big feet, men’s 12.

In spite of her challenges, she managed to pushed through and win the Governor’s Award for Academic Achievement and Citizenship in the 8th grade. Only one kid at each middle school in Vt. is given that award.

She spent a good deal of her Sophmore year on crutches having both knee caps cleaned out from arthritis.

She managed to shear just a couple of weeks post-op. You an see the bandages on her left knee taken right after surgery.

At the end of her freshman year she was accepted at the Governor’s Institute of Asian Studies and she traveled to China for a month when she was 16.

Just a week before she was to take off, she and her sister T-boned a Subaru going 30mph. The girls were in a golf cart. Lucky to survive. In the ambulance, both girls strapped to backboards, Em says ” hey Liz, do you think I can get extra money from Dad for China because of this?’ I was thrilled to hear the scheming. Higher executive function meant that the girls were going to be fine.

She mustered, got her brace and headed off to Mongolia and Beijing

There are about 250 kids graduating tomorrow morning from Kennett High School in North Conway New Hampshire. At the first awards dinner there were about 12 kids in the Senior class that got the award for all A’s and only 1 B for the school year. 3 kids that got the “Grades almost good enough, but your effort at work is worth recognizing” award, and one kid got the most improved award. Em got the middle award. Mostly A’s and  one to many B’s to get the top award. But still worth recognition.

For the dyslexic kid, this is one hell of an achievement.

What a wind-up to the big day tomorrow. At 10:00 am Miss Emilie Anne will have a cap and gown, most likely flip flops and shades. She will march with her mates. Take a seat and try to soak it all in. I remember that a classmate’s father spoke at my graduation 25 years ago, but I couldn’t tell you what he said. I was looking forward to the party that going to follow.

Emilie has decided not to go to project graduation. She has mentioned that she is going “camping” with buddies. HA.

She went to project prom and hated it, so there is no chance that she will give the organizers another shot. She has a good head on her shoulders, so I am not too worried.

When we went down to the awards thing last night I brought her English teacher, Ms. Kittle a book with a picture of Emilie that was taken the first day of Kindergarten. On the inside of the book I thanked her for helping my daughter to find her voice in the written word.

I got all choked up. I even choked up reading the card I got her for graduation. I didn’t think I was going to make it through the evening without blubbering. Before we went down, I blubbered off and on all day. I am sure that at the graduation, I will blubber. I cry pretty easily at emotional things. This is going to tip me right over. Emilie is expecting it and will laugh.

That is a good thing. What a relief that she got through High school in one piece and that she is planning to go to college in the fall.

She wants to be a farmer, dairy, I won’t hold that against her. She came in top 6th in Vermont Dairy Quiz bowl and this winter took first in New Hampshire at the FFA (Future Farmers of America) in the Diary Quiz Bowl and in Dairy showing.

She has a good head on her shoulders.  Much much better then I at her age.  I am so excited for tomorrow and the ceremony that transitions all of us onto the next phase of her life as she goes off to college to become a farmer. (Shhhh don’t tell, she already is)