Manny, oh manny

Well, after the all Star Break, most Red Sox fans can anticipate the beginning of the end.  Time to put the lawn chairs back in the garage.

Let me clarify.  Red Sox fans are those who were fans before the Sox won a world series this century.  Not the come this side of the fence because the Sox actually won the big one.  What was the big one?  The series where the Sox came from behind to beat the Yankess for the for the league championship.  The World Series was icing on the cake.  I cried and like most real Sox fans, walked around in a daze for a couple of days.

Manny annoyed me then, especially his droopy pants.  But I forgave his insolence because he was a stranger in a strange land. Now it seems as if his arrogance has caught up with him.   $$Too Manny Problems $$$ said a sign at Fenway.

I agree.  Manny you can just be Manny somewhere else.  You have worn out your welcome.  I would like to see a trade to someone who has good sportsmanship, not an over inflated ego.

make hay while the sun shines

Summer is a busy time around the farm.

I had been gone from Davis Hill for a while and my return has been met with a mountain of paperwork, filing and weeding of the garden. Jo and I planted early and the peas and beans are ready for harvest. The plan was to pick after getting some billing out. The boys had a different plan.

Good weather means making hay. Cut, bale, haul and stack. The farm uses round bales that are stacked up like giant marshmellows by the main barn and then coded by field location. The hay is not dried out like the square bales I use, these are baled soon after the hay is cut and raked into rows. These bales are 1000 pounds and stand several feet high and several feet deep. Machines are needed to move, wrap and stack them.

Charlie likes to use his John Deere for cutting and baling. Tom uses the International Harvester 4245 with the clam shell arms for picking up the bales and putting them onto the hay wagon. There are two different types of wagons, the traditional wooden wagon is a bit scary to haul. It May-Maws behind the truck, that is how Tom and Joe say bob and weave. I like the new red metal wagon made exactly for the round bales and I like towing it behind Charlie’s Ford F250 vs. Tom;s Dodge 1500. ( I have a dodge 1500 truck too, but towing a hay wagon with 5-6 tons is a real load )

The boys call on the cell phone back to the farm to ask for the wagons. They drive the tractors over to the fields across town, stranding themselves there. We have lunch and drink ready for them so they don’t have to shop work. Yesterday it was mid afternoon when it was time to fetch the bales and bring them to the farm. Once the bales are retrieved, they then need to be wrapped in plastic and stacked.

The machine for wrapping does one bale at a time and it spins the bale while it turns it around to be wrapped. The end result is a bale that will cure over a couple of weeks. The bales are stacked outside the barn and as long as the plastic covering isn’t torn, the hay will keep through the winter. Air it the main factor in rotting hay.

After all the bales are brought back to the farm the wrapping takes a good while. There were 4 wagon loads harvested from the field yesterday, I think the count is somewhere in the low 50’s. I worked the wrapper, while Tom moved the bales to the machine, then once wrapped and kicked off, he stacked them up.

The cows have a diet of hay mixed with grain and corn silage. My sheep have a diet of hay, grain, barely and sweet oats. It takes 15 adult sheep one week to eat a round bale. The farm grinds up one bale a day at each feeding and adds the other feed. So two bales a day for 100 head of milking cows. Plus you gotta have the machinery to move the feed.

I didn’t pick any peas or beans yesterday. Today it is raining, so I will do chores, then head to the farm and get some billing out. No making hay today. I will pick peas and beans instead.

Transition:

Pronunciation:

\tran(t)-ˈsi-shən, tran-ˈzi-, chiefly British tran(t)-ˈsi-zhən\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Latin transition-, transitio, from transire

Date:

1551

1 a: passage from one state, stage, subject, or place to another : change b: a movement, development, or evolution from one form, stage, or style to another

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transition

Returning from Field Days was easy for the sheep. By the time Sunday came they had grown tired of being in a pen with people poking at them. Their neighbors to the left were a pair of llamas who were characteristically aloof. Molly May and Jason tried to make friends, but were rebuffed. The neighbors to the right were mare and her foal, huge black draft horses that were able to reach right over and make contact. The sheep were unimpressed.

Joseph was taken out on lead a couple of times a day and did very well. He will be fine going to a show. Molly May was alarmed at leaving her little flock and cried so pathetically. Folks stopped to see if I was hurting her in some way. No soothing her at all. She is too young and needs more practice on lead.

Annie was given grace off lead, she is pregnant and I think due in September.

Jason was simply his usual devil dog self and would not behave on lead at all. Twisting and turning like he was Ferdinand stung by the bee. Tried on lead only once, but he was the darling of the display. A true ham, sticking his little nose out and allowing kids to pet him. A group of children gravitated to him and I allowed them, one at a time to go into the pen and sit with the sheep. Jason would just go to them so that he could be loved. Some of the children came back several times and just sat in the pen for over an hour. At one point I had quite forgotten that Eliza had been in with Jason so long.

Loading up was pretty easy. Everybody was on lead, the children had all come back to help load up, we walked to the truck and picked the lambs up, one by one. Closed up the back and drove off. Much easier unloading at home. They all knew to get out of the truck and walk back to the pasture and the rest of the flock. No need for quarantine, they were the only sheep at the fairgrounds and had no contact with other ruminants.

Watching the lambs return to the fold was interesting. They all cried out to each other. Then went off to graze. The pasture by the house is pretty spent. They have been down here for the last two weeks. The flock came back to me shortly, crying out for better feed.

I had some fence to repair in the upper pasture, it seems the bear had gone though and several fence poles were down. The solar battery is dead again. Grass needs to be trimmed around the perimeter. Grabbing poles and replacement fence wire I made the repairs then back to the flock. They followed me eagerly up to the pasture and settled in. No need for electric last night. Enough food and the comfort of the flock being together will keep everybody in.

This morning all is quite. The transition from field to fair was a bit bumpy for the lambs as it was for me too. Faced with scary surroundings and living with the upheaval for a few days is exhausting. We return to our familiar settings a little changed from the journey.

Field Days

The state of Vermont is made up of regional counties of which I live in Lamoille County.  Morrisville is the center of the county, our county court is in Hyde Park and our county fair grounds are in Johnson.   Lamoille County Field Days are held up at the fair grounds and I am heading up there this morning to hang out with 4 of my sheep for the day and to answer a ton of questions about spinning and wool.

There is no money to be made there for me in the short term.  This is a service I do for the farming community and to the sheep community. I have listed sheep for sale, but my buyers are most likely not to be found at this fair.   Larger sheep events, like Fryeburg Fair, Rhinebeck and the Big E are were serious buyers will be.  But one never knows, so I brought up the for sale ones anyhow.

It has been raining a ton lately. Really raining, soaking rain, flood type rain.  The sheep are a mess.   I brought them up on Thursday and they were drenched from the rain the day and night before.  Impossible to block out while wet and a white sheep looks gray. It will take a couple of days for the sheep to dry out.  They are soggy wet wool beasts.

Blocking out is trimming the wool of the sheep to make the sheep look more manicured and uniform.  Blocking is done for showing sheep and it takes a bit of practice for the sheep to get used to it as well as for getting good at it as an art.   Field days is a good event to practice, no pressure for showing and it is a part of raising breeding stock that folks are interested in.

Brining lambs to events like this is always popular.  Folks like lambs.  Lambs do not always like to be at a fair or show.  Generally the first time they are away from their mothers and it is loud and scary.   This is also good practice.  Putting sheep on leads and walking them about is good practice.  A sheep that is new to lead is generally one that will not win in a show ring.   Folks are more likely to purchase a sheep that is calm on lead.

The down side to taking sheep off the farm is the exposure to animal disease.  My sheep are the only sheep at Field days this year.  There are a couple of goats, two llamas, two alpacas, horses, ox, and cows.  There are also a couple of chickens, ducks and rabbits.   But generally field days has more tractors then animals.  More rides then farm displays.  There is the arm wrestling competition, the ox and horse pulls, the pan toss and the maple creamy barn.   4-H has a huge dairy cow show, but no sheep shows.  Very little risk of exposure to other sheep diseases like pink eye, foot rot or OPP.

This is an opportunity for folks to see a Merino sheep and to see the yarn and products that can be made from the wool.   I sit with my spinning wheel and English combs and work the fiber next to the sheep.  I amazes me that folks often ask what I am spinning,  they simply do not connect the sheep to the wool.  I am often asked ” what are you weaving”.    Some folks are will stay and chat for hours and are like little sponges asking all sorts of questions, but the majority of folks see the activity as some quaint old fashioned craft and dismiss it.

I enjoy doing this because it is like sowing seeds of wildflowers in a field.  You never know who will come and see you spin or see your sheep and have a piece of their life changed a bit.  I have been demonstrating for nearly 20 years and have had folks come up to me with a story of how they saw me demonstrate, or saw my sheep and they then began their own journey with sheep or fiber.   I love it when an older person comes and watches me and then tells me of a memory they have of their grandmother spinning, or carding or of raising sheep.  Then they often tell me of how they had forgotten that until what I was doing brought the memory back, like a flower blossoming in a field.

Yesterday there were a ton of kids at Field Days.  Today being Saturday, I am expecting much the same, but more folks.  Sunday, the last day, will be less of crowd.   Three days, then we all settle back to our routines.

Molly May

Poor little Molly May. Her best buddy left the farm a few days ago and her mother Polly is a court’n with stud man Moses. Mother has weaned her and she cried all night. I mean all night. At 3:20 I went out just to see her standing by her mother and bawling. Mother was not too concerned. Plus it has been really pouring and the sheep are drenched. Worse then mud season.

Poor lambie. I am hoping that she will get over it in a few days. I can’t sleep through sheep blatting. Even with the fan on and the windows shut. Nope. She is quiet now after chores.  I think that the weaning was a bit sudden for her and that she has been a bit hungry.  Who knows.

Moses and Polly are standing with each other. She has stood for him several times this morning and he is pretty attentive. Average gestation is 145 days, give or take. That puts Polly due at December 13th. Black ram and black ewe should make a black lamb. you never know though. Sometimes with color you can get a few surprises.  I think there are a couple of other pregnant ewes, Annie and Tiny Tot.   Ohio Dawn is being chased around as well.

I like fall lambs much better then mid winter or spring.  Just do.