I had just completed a trip to the dump in the truck. Seventeen pounds of cardboard, four heavy stinking bags of old, old garbage, waterlogged and ripe. I was finally accosted by one of the expressionless heavyweights who work there and asked for my punch card. I said I didn’t have it, because I never bought one, and I kind of didn’t know I needed one. But I have been dumping my trash there for two years and no one ever asked me for one. Truth be told I had noticed people putting cards in for a punch, and I guess I had simply avoided the obvious conclusion that there was a system for paying for this service.  At the time I didn’t have any money on me so I told the sweaty town employee that I’d pay next time, and he seemed ok with that.

When I got home I parked the truck on the verge and staggered towards the house reeking of refuse, intending to avail myself of some cold fruit tea  and a few peanuts. But as I stepped onto the porch I heard an unsubtle rustling in the woods behind me. Too big for an animal, but no engine so it could not be a machine. I turned to see my truck careening through the undergrowth, heading for the gorge which lies behind our house. There was something horse-like about the truck, graceful, perhaps, as she galloped towards the abyss. But becuase of the lack of engine it seemed as if she was almost being surreptitious. As if she was in fact committing suicide, while my back was turned.

It was hopeless, I was too far away to leap in and pull the parking brake. I stood with the word NOOOOO running through my head. I imagined her bouncing over tree stumps and rocks and flattening saplings in her path until she was brought up sharp by the large boulders that form the brook in the gorge. There she would rest, perhaps for years, possibly for ever, a home for racoons and fisher cats for millenia, or until humanity blows itself up.

As luck would have it, there was a large Ash tree in front of the truck. She was not, in fact, going very fast, and before the tree her front wheels hit a large-diameter root which slowed her down just before her bumper made contact with the tree. There she stopped and all was silent.

No problem, I thought, I’ll just throw her into 4wd and back her out.

She started right up but when I popped the clutch the wheels spun. I threw the wheel left, then right, I moved her forward, right up til her bumper was cutting into the lithic face of the ash tree, then bounced her back. Nothing. The root under the front wheels was massive and there was no getting back over it without a considerable run up.

Tractor, I thought to myself, and, always delighted for an excuse to operate another piece of my mechanical portfolio, I ran for the barn where I found my 1987 Kubota. I had to take the forks off the bucket, and leave the weight box behind so I could use the tow hitch. Eventually I backed the tractor up to the truck’s rear bumper and wrapped a chain around the tow hitch. As I moved the tractor forward the wheels started digging into the soil. Soon They were two feet down, and getting deeper.

Shit.

I lengthend the chain and moved the tractor until its heavy agri tires were on the more solid ground of the gravel driveway. Same thing. Now I had holes in the lawn and the driveway. And still a truck in the bushes.

People were coming to pick up their kids any minute. People that I didn’t want seeing me struggling to get my truck out of the bushes.  I walked up the track and little and looked at the truck. No, there was no way I could claim I had just parked it there to put it out of the way. It was in a bush. Teetering on the edge of a gorge. Surrounded by holes made by tractor tires. 

As I searched my brain for the solution of a cleverer man, a red car came down the driveway.  I looked nonchalant, as if whatever I was doing was cool, was not a desparate struggle to cover up a stupid blunder–that of failing to apply the parking brake. Digging holes in the driveway with my tractor tires while my truck sat in a bush was par for the course.

Scott got out of his car. I had to spill the beans. His eyes lit up, clearly desparate to play with machinery after having been watchin his small children all day.

“I was thinking I would cut the root with a chain saw, then it’ll come out easily.” I said.

Scott looked dubious. “Naw. That’s not going to work. Getting under there with a chain saw, cutting from that angle, not that’s all wrong. What you want to do is jack her up at the front and drive her out.”

“But once its jacked up, how will i drive it out? Won’t the wheels be off the ground? It’ll fall off the jack…”

“Nah, just shove some boards or blocks underneath.” We discussed it for a while longer until his kids showed up and he had to get going.

I liked my chainsaw idea, but Scott probably kne what he was talking about, even if i didn’t quite get the picture. I went and got my heavy duty jack. I crawled under the front end, narrowly avoiding having my eyes poked out by sticks and saplings. Once there I found that the axle was too far under the truck to allow me to operate the lever on the jack. And because the front of the truck was obscured by the large ash tree I couldn’t put the jack in from there. To spare you complicated and technical details, suffice it to say Scott’s idea was a non-starter. Which delighted me for numerous reasons, not the least that I could go and fire up my chainsaw.

As those of you who read some earlier posts will know, I have a ridiculously long bar on this saw: 36 inches.  All salacious quips apart, this made it very easy to crouch next to the wheel and cut the offending root. Actually it took several attempts because the root had other roots growing off it and they were deep underground. Ten minutes later I pulled out a two foot piece of root easily one foot thick. Now there was nothing blocking the front wheels. I jumped in and reversed her out.

That, in short, is the end of the story. I did update Scott on the outcome of this event, and he raised an eyebrow as if to say, “well, i wasn’t wedded to the jack idea anyhow. As for the other characters; well the truck is fine, although I did open the glove box the other day to find a mother mouse sucking five babies in amongs all my old reciepts. She crawled through the fire-wall to esape me, dragging her babies, still attached. And for expressionless town employees, you might ask? Well, even if their’s was a bit part, I am still intending to do my civic duty and pay for that punch card.

 I still need to finish the floor with cedar and put in benches , but it all seems to be in working order.  

Also to do: add a water barrel to complete the steam part of the sauna. The idea is that you effectively sweat out all of your toxins.

Today I was up in the orchard with the kids. They were following chickens around and I was getting a jump on my wood splitting. The UPS driver showed up and we spoke briefly about this and that, and I mentioned something about “in a perfect world…” to which he responded, “well cutting wood at home with your kids, it doesn’t get much better than that.”

 It was one of those moments when someone else shares a vision of your life, giving you access to an outsider’s perspective. Whereas before I had been focussing on the task, sweating and unable to contemplate the big picture, his words struck a chord, and I had to stand back for a moment and appreciate his insight.

Cutting firewood is a spring through fall activity. I should just do it all in the fall, as the weather’s best for it then. This spring I went down into the lower woods and started picking off the 10-15 year old poplars that cover the hill. These are good logs and make easy cutting without the need to split them.  But it was early March and the snow was too deep still to make much headway. I dragged what I could out and left the rest for summer collection.

When it comes to cutting firewood, bigger is usually better, in terms of saws. My debate was not over the capacity of the engine, although I went with the Stihl MS 460, a big professional grade saw, but the size of the bar. I ended up with a 30″ bar which is mammoth.

I had five cords of tree length wood delivered, and stacked it in a large pile in the orchard. Cutting a big pile poses several logistical questions. Should you just dive in and cut it all as it sits? The problem with this is that your saw tip will be hitting the log behind the one being cut, and saftey rules argue against that (kickback, etc.)

But then you are left with manoevering individual logs into position from which you can cut them cleanly without hitting anything else.

I tried this approach first, and found that I spent way too much time with a crow bar prying logs free from the pile and laying them out separately for cutting. Not only that but there was the distinct danger of being trapped or crushed under a log that slips and rolls onto of your leg.

Driving around town I noticed other log piles. I would take note of these piles, and watch to see how long it took people to cut them up. Most remained intact for months. But occassionally I would notice a pile that had been ripped through, seemingly in one go, and I marvelled at the speed of this. I noticed that in these cases the pile seemed to have been attacked in situ–meaning that the owner had just gone at the logs where they lay piled up.

This is where my 30″ bar comes in. I figured I would just go for it and cut two logs in one swoop. When I got cutting, however, I found that the length of the bar was a problem, because you want your logs to be the same length, otherwise they don’t stack neatly or efficiently. And log piles are never very symmetrical, so when cutting one log, the others are positioned differently, making it unusual to cut two logs to the same length.

I got myself a new bar (16″) and this made life much easier. I was more or less able to leave the pile in place and with the much smaller bar, pick away at logs where they lay, until I had the pile reduced to a winter or two’s worth of firewood.

As for the monster bar, I still use that, when I come across a really big log, and then, theres nothing sweeter.

As for the UPS driver and his Zen words, well, I’m just glad I’m not doing what he’s doing. And I hope he has a pile of logs and some kids to go home to.

So from my particular vantage point the choice is to sail or to garden. One can do a little of both, perhaps, but inevitably something suffers from innattention.

In a perfect world one would have a boat with decks wide enough to support a vegetable garden. You could string hanging tomato plants from the cross trees, grow lettuce on the transom. Or even tow a floating raft behind the boat with a raised bed on it. Obviously root vegetables could be problematic.

One of my ideas for a book is to persuade my family to sail south in the winter and rent a patch of land from a Rastafarian. There we can spend a couple of weeks cultivating vegetables, then sail around for a few more weeks, every so often coming back to weed and tend. When the season is done, head north in the summer, and do the same thing in Maine. This would be the story of the sailing farmer, or the farming sailor.

But in reality these activities are not natural allies. Sailing is too purely pleasure-oriented (I’ve yet to find a homesteaderish function for it, failing to find any relationship between it and self-sufficiency). That is why sailing belongs in the “Half-hearted” column of this blog as it relates to homesteading, it is the natural ally of the weed, and the antagonist of the cultivated plant.

Having said that, it allows me to appreciate the garden in a whole new way. Sailing, or any other activity on the water, gives you a new perspective on land, and therefore on our land-based existence, so that invariably when  I return from a sail to be confronted with the late summer garden (at this point fairly sorry) I marvel at the wonderful contrast between sea and land-scape.

All this to say, yes, I haven’t done much here in the last month or two.

Anyway, all my tomatoes were lost to blight. Rest of the summer veg score card? Potatoes good; Onions good; carrots  excellent; garlic excellent; cucs excellent; basil, what can I say?  As for Corn, cabbage, broccoli, they all sucked.

This link shows what I’ve really been doing most of the summer:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwmyKFBbErc

Looking at my own feeble plants I figured I should get some pruning done. Apart from Coleman’s description in Four Season Harvest, my other books didn’t offer much instruction in exactly how to do it. Then I went online and found a youtube video from Johnny’s selected Seeds in Albion, ME.

Vid is posted below. Key points: only need to prune indeterminate varieties (check on seed pack).

Prune thoughout growing season.

take off “suckers” in the “axles” between leaders.

Do it by hand.

Do it every week or so.

Why? Puts more enegry in central leaders and allows more oomph for the fruit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eak7yj0tEvM

This morning on NPR there was a story about Saudi Dairy farms.  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105381728 These  make the American CAFO seem like a quaint family farm. Prince Abdullah Bin Feisal (son of King Feisal) went to California in the 70s, and saw some of their biggest dairy operations and came back to establish two of them. In the desert. Stocking it with Holsteins from America, they now have buildings that house 1700 cows each, with up to 70,000 dairy cows in one operation.

Now we are talking Saudi Arabia, where there is not a blade of grass–that green stuff that most ruminants evolved to eat. But hey, thats no problem, because no one feeds them grass anymore anyway. We grow soybeans in Brazil (on jungle cleared with indentured workers) and ship it thousands of miles where it is fed to animals mixed with hormones so that they can digest it properly and not get sick from eating it.

grazing...the way life should be

But the much bigger problem is, um, heat. Its gets easily up to 120 degrees Farenheit in the Kingdom.

OK, you say. They must have drunk milk “traditionally” right? So it can’t be fucking crazy to have a dairy operation there.

Sure, but “traditionally” the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsular were tribal, nomadic herdsmen. With the exception of course of  a couple of cities like Medina and Mecca.  Their herds were mostly sheep and goats, bred over millenia to handle sparse grazing and intense heat, the herdsmen and their associates using the animals to generate nutrition from the desert for them, and they, in the great circle of life, ate them. This all made perfect sense, on a sustainable, small scale, with creatures evolved to their habitat.

Yeah. This beats an air-conditioned factory.

Apart from importing cows from the US, they get them these days from Australia, and they are shipped, thousands at a time, on giant freighters equipped with massive vents, de-salination plants, and an army of handlers. These poor cows, admittedly who were not brought up in a green field, but probably within sight of grass, have to endure 2 weeks at sea, then are consigned to an air conditioned building in the desert for the rest of their (thankfully) brief life.

These buildings manufacture rain. That’s right, to cool the cows it has to rain a fine mist pretty much all day long. Then the cows must drink. Then they must be kept scrupulously clean to avoid contaminiation and disease. This means 30 gallons of water a day per cow. For 38000 cows. You do the math. Actually I’ll do it for you: its one million, one hundred and forty thousand gallons. Every day. 

The water comes from an acquifer. One has already run dry since the plant’s inception. They have drilled another, one mile deep.

Clearly the einvironmental impact of this sort of thing is staggering. In fact it is insane on so many levels it is difficult to know where to start. Does the phrase “unsustainable” come to mind? Not only are the cows kept in a factory, but the scale of this thing is the most enormous drain of resources imaginable. 

these swiss cows don't know how good they've got it

What’s the alternative, you might ask? They have to feed their people.

Well, this gets into Michael Pollan’s crusade, the re-imagining of agriculture. Clearly the whole system we have built is…what’s the word? unsustainable? Yes, that’s it. We need to work our way back –or forward, really–to a new paradigm, one in which the mega facilities are dismantled, in favor of many smaller operations which service local (sometimes very local) areas.  Gene Lodgson has a vision in the Contrary Farmer, of the Eastern US being re-shaped into a patchwork of small farms, each producing food for a small number of families. This would take us back in many ways to pre-industrial times, but would only be feasable financially and socially with modern technology and financing and marketing, to enable farmers to escape the dirt-farm experience of pre-modern times, and pay them a living wage for their labor. It would also necessitate a new way of perceiveing “farming,” and an evolution of the farmer into something valuable and even attractive.

They would be environmentally friendly, like the old farms used to be before hedges were ripped out, livestock killed and mono-crops planted with government subsidies (Nixon’s solution to the threat of rising food prices, as described in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)  Animals would maintain their own pasture by grazing and fertilizing. And the GRASS would underpin the whole edifice: animals eat grass, we eat animals (see Lodgson’s All Flesh is Grass for more). No more need to have Brazil de-forested to be worked in soy beans by slaves. No need to use all those fossil fuels to transport it to other places.

Yes, this is a big deal, and one that probably will never come to pass, even though the urgency for world-wide reform seems to be growing under twin pressures of population growth and environmental collapse. China is instituting a centralized poultry processing facilities, because the risk of having fowl in densely populated areas is just too high. Argentina, apparently, once the shining light of sustainable beef, is looking to Iowa and beginning to copy our (CAFO)practices out of bottom line considerations. Didn’t they get the memo? Meanwhile, Middle Eastern states like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as the US, are buying vast tracts of land in places like Ethiopia, Sudan and China, to grow food,  all places where, as the NPR reporter noted this morning, many of their own people can’t find enough to eat.

Here’s a YouTube piece of Almarai in Saudi Arabia.Its a company promo. Their tone is quite proud.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JAy-fmBqhQ

And this one is about cow transport to the Middle East from Australia

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-epz3DTAG3Q

With certain notable exceptions such as Burning Man, and I guess Mardi Gras, these modern-day festivals are almost always civic activities driven by chambers of commerce more than by the profound sense of restlessness created by the change of seasons, or the maddening sense of dread engendered by the onset of fall. In otherwords they don’t come from an almost primordial urge, but from a very contemporary and mundane place–entertainment capitalism.  Here the real prime movers, the juice in the veins, are the tourist boards and local merchant associations.

No, Thank You!

 But often the Nearing way, the hard-core back-to-the-lander attitude seems too hard-core, in fact it often seems downright pathological in its austerity.

We, on the other hand, quite often venture into the city, to entertain ourselves,  but it has to be said, we sometimes come back smarting from a sense of agrophobia, nursing a sense of disappointment, nay, distaste for contemporary mainstream society, and wishing we hadn’t bothered. Last weekend was a case in point.

The “Old Port Festival” in Portland is a pretty typical modern American festival. Unlike ancient festivals–the bacchanalia of Ancient Greece, or the Mexican Day of the Dead, or the Easter Parades of Sicily– these modern American “celebrations” tend to celebrate nothing more than consumerism. Whereas old world festivals still have a sense of participation, and are focussed on transforming consciousness to some extent (usually in some pre-Christian sense, involving a certain licentiousness, a purging of  every day restraints and conventions) the modern American festival is a venue for one thing: Fried Dough.

pump those sales up

Perhaps that’s an exaggeration, but they tend to cater to a very low denominator, and when its not fried goods that are being sold, it is something else, the focus here being on sales.  Sure, there was a nice parade, for what it was worth, but even that, unlike old-world parades, was not exactly audience participation, it was something you watched, sipping your Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks, before you went to have a fried lunch and take in the vendors who were….selling stuff.

Granted, there were a few attempts at reasonably creative floats, some vaguely political statements about how we should eat local, or somesuch, but thats not really the spirit of a festival–the pushing of a political message, even if it is quite on target and necessary to save the planet. But the entire festival was a planet-destoying activity anyway, so that’s a bit of a paradox right there.

who the hell am i?

nice match

Hmm

want some?

Whoops, that must be Rio!

cheer the f&*k up will you?

Anyway, we sat though this, and it was fine, the crowds didn’t really bother us, as we half expected them to (dragging small children through crowds, while they are whining to have all the garbage they see around them is never fun). Then when the parade was over it was time for lunch.

American street food

The weather’s turning warm, finally. I thought I would have to do this earlier but it has been so cool in the last few weeks that Lucy the ewe has been fine with her heavy fleece. Except, perhaps, that she takes frequent shade breaks from grazing in her shelter on sunny days. But the nights have been cool. So much so that I’ve lost a bunch of tomato plants to the cold, I think. Either that or the hoop house is too hot. Probably both.

But now that the weather is taking a turn, that fleece had to come off. This week was looking very busy, what with getting ready for the mulling spice season and (finally) launching our sail boat Bon Vivant, that I came home from work, and Katy went out, so I fed the kids and took my new Sheffield Steel shears out the the paddock, along with a copy of Storey’s Guide To Sheep which has a promising twenty-step description of how to shear a sheep, and I went at it.

Before I started I gave Conrad the camera with instructions to take a few shots of me and Lucy. Below is the results. He got bored after a few shots and went off to climb a tree. Gemma, who can’t get out of the paddock without help, took over the job of photographing. 

Upshot:  half an hour later, one short-haired sheep with no blood. Amazing.

  

This is the point at which Conrad got bored. Notice his penchant for close up, all action shots. Preferably with my head missing. Gemma has a slightly different, but no less individual style. See below:

This one’s rather beautiful, almost lyrical wispiness.

Out of focus ass-shot

This one really conveys some of what I was experiencing

  Prancer looking sheepishly for a suck

are we done?

I took the last couple of shots. Gemma got bored too and I was left to document my own handiwork. A bit messy, perhaps, and not as short as it could be, but I was afraid of cutting her, which apparently is very easy, and they bleed alot. Also, I have to say, I wasn’t very impressed with the Sheffield Steel Shears. They had a tough time with some of Lucy’s wool, which was, admittedly, matted with all sorts of stuff. On reflection its not as smooth a cut as it could have been, but it will be effective. She’ll be cooler, and less likelihood of maggots.

Here’s where we’re at as of May 31:

These radishes are superb. Multi colored, some spicy some mild, and big .

radishes

butterhead

These lettuces will be ready in a week or so. Then they’ll bolt. We’ve had others from the cold frames for 2 weeks. Nearly done with them.

mustard

Mustard was the first thing in the hoop house in April. It was milder when it was small. Now its killer and Katy won’t eat it. I think it has hallucinogenic powers.

broccoli

Bigger than when transplanted. This was started from seed in cold frames in Apil. Its been cold and windy all month so hopefully it’ll catch up in June.

peas

Peas in the hoop house are three times the size of ones planted outside. Even though they are the hardy early heroes, they like it a bit warm. We’ll see how they fan out on the ceiling.

pole beans

These are planted in compost dug from behind the barn, where horse and cow shit was shovelled for some years. We’ve added a couple of winters’ worth of goat crap and its looking pretty good.

fall garlic

This garlic was planted in fall and in spring it was the first thing out of the ground. Bedded in aged horse manure, our own compost, and covered in seaweed all winter, it looks good.

lettuce

Maybe next week. These were admittedly grown from plugs.

Rockett

Otherwise known as Arugula, but I’m trying to avoid political statements here. Maybe another week or two to go here, then it’ll quickly shoot its load and get bitter.This is grown where the tatsoi was a couple of weeks ago. Ate that. Very good.

squash seedlings

I Need to transplant these as soon as possible. I am running out of room. I thought the 50×50 bed i had plowed would be more than enough, but i’ve nearly filled it with corn and potatoes and onions and cukes.

watercress

I Love watercress. Slightly to quite spicy. It came up in mid may and seems to be fine just growing slowly as we nibble at it.

vetch

Vetch is a legume, weed, which grows like crazy in the pasture. The goats and sheep like it. Look closely at this pic, you can see how one plant grew until it found another, tied itself to the other so that they look like one plant that has grown out the ground, formed an arch and grown back into the earth.

escapee

A lone lamb grazes across the hillside, separated from the flock by several hundred feet and an electric fence.  The “flock” in question here is a motley collection of animals; there are our two goats, Robin Hood and Little Black (like everything else named by the children), then there is the ewe that we bought as a feeder last year. Feeder, for the uninitiated, is a lamb to be fattened for the table. In fact the word gives the wrong message, since it seems to conjure images of the animal being stuffed, or fattened in some ungainly, foie gras kind of a way. The fact is we turn them loose on reasonably good pasture and let them at it. I only occassionally give them pellets, usually to get them to come to me if I need them to.

Feeders

Anyway, this lamb turned out to be the biggest of the four we bought. So we kept her (she was a ewe) and decided to have a go at breeding. She is a Dorset Freisan mix, the Dorset being heavier set, with more hair around the face, and the Freisan being finer-boned and more of a dairy breed. We took her to Luke’s place, where he had a virile Navajo Churro Ram by the name of Panda (‘cos of his coloring). We turned her in with the Ram, and left her there for a couple of weeks, then brought her home. Several months later we booked tickets to England to visit our peeps. Then, when we consulted the calendar and did a little math, we realized she would probably lamb while we were away. Shit.

Back on the phone to Luke. “Can you watch our sheep for a couple of weeks? She’ll probably lamb while we’re away, and that’s good for us, because we don’t know what we’re doing, and you do.”

Luke was unphazed and graciously took her in, saying that usually the lambs plop right out.

 Strangely enough we did have sheep for several years while I was growing up in Devon. In fact we had about 400 at any time. Why did I not know more about the process? Well, I was away at boarding school, and my dad was a gentleman farmer who employed a farm manager. Truth is out. That said, we did often get up in the middle of a January night and do lamb patrol, and we often bottle fed lambs, but I never put my hand up a sheep’s ‘tube. Therefore my technical knowledge of this kind of animal husbandry was limited. We were used as sheep dogs quite often. Sometimes we ran after them, sometimes we rode our dirt bikes to round them up. We were also pretty good (my brother and I) and manhandling them into the sheep dip–a kind of concrete bunker with water and disinfectant in it.

lucy

So while Luke watched the ewe, we jetted off to the old country and drank dark ale and danced around the may pole.  Actually it was March. The daffodils were out, and the weather was fine. Two weeks later we came back, and to my amazement she had not lambed yet. This meant that we would be on watch. So we took her back home, looking extremely preggers (she, not us–that came a little while later). But it was a full two weeks more until she popped. It happened one night, and Conrad, always the first one up, came running into the house to tell us the news. We came to the barn and found her licking the afterbirth off the lamb, who looked great (a ewe). We took a quick glance at Sheparding for Dummies, and snipped off her umbilical, swabbed the stub with iodine,  checked the ewe’s teats for squirtage, and that was about it. Done deal.

Snowflake

So that gets me back to the motley flock. Apart from the Ewe and her lamb (named Prancer, then changed to Snowflake–because of her coloring) there are two other lambs. These are the feeders I bought from Perry Ells up in Union Maine.  She runs a 60 acre sheep farm in some hard scrabble country which she and her husband cleared themselves, reclaiming land from the forest. The area has a certain Scottish beauty to it, hilly and wooded, with plenty of ferns, swamps, and outcroppings of granite. There are remnants of old homesteads in the woods, every so often you come across a stone wall where a livestock corral had been, or the foundation of a house. The Finns settled the area so there would have been plenty of hardscrabble sheep too.

This year I only bought two feeders. We had Prancer and her mother already, but  it was clear that we would not be able to slaughter Prancer, so we had to look elsewhere for food. This kind of carnivorous thinking begins to sound very grim sometimes, and it makes Perry Ell’s all-natural farm look like a death camp. The two lambs we bought from her were like adolescent orphans in comparison to Prancer. They were twice her size (because six weeks older) and tried to suckle from her mother (which they did not succeed in doing). They will be the unlucky ones. the problem is, however, if we are to continue eating our own lamb, then at some point we’re going to have to…eat our own lambs, that is, ones we have “birthed” on the farm. If we can’t imagine eating Prancer, how will it be different with Fluffy, or Snowdrop, or Kebab? 

Here is the rub (and I’m not referring to the spice rub): One hears that if one is to eat meat one should be ok with the killing process. But we’ve done that, and are not particularly OK with it. But is it evil to prefer to pick up one’s meat at the deli counter? This way you don’t have to face your lamb as you load it into the truck and take it to slaughter. For people of weak moral character this is probably the way out. Don’t think about it.

Eat Me

We still have lots of meat from the three we butchered last November.  The two feeders I bought this year were another Freisan dorset mix (ram), and a suffolk Freisan mix. The Suffolks are good meat sheep because they have long backs, yielding lots of loin, which is the good stuff.

But it was the Dorset who was grazing off by himself, outside the electric fence. He has been getting out for a week or two now, nosing his way under the lowest string of the fence. The fence is very imperfect. Being cheap, I have not invested in a pricey electro-plastic netting system,  instead I opted for a system of electric wire which is attached to plastic poles with insulators.  The whole setup is powered by a small solar charger. Because I’ve fenced in a good-sized area of at least half an acre, I’ve had to splice the wire in several places. This creates potential for the charge to get lost, in addition to the vagaries of the sun. You might think, reading this, that I do this to give myself a headache, and perhaps you are right.  Add to this the fact that sheep’s wool is thick, and that’s why the lamb doesn’t feel a thing when he goes under the wire. Its his unwavering herd instinct which keeps him from wandering off, so he grazes on excellent, untouched grass which is being saved for their next rotation, all by himself, like a solitary diner at a fancy restaurant. The only question is, why don’t the others do it?

greener grass

Rotation is the word when it comes to grazing,  as practiced by all good grass farmers–smaller the paddocks the better. Since my fencing setup is a pain to move I don’t do it as often as I would like. In general sheep don’t like to graze too close to their feces. This is good becuase if they did they’d get parasites (which they do often anyway), and there being many different types, it can be difficult to get rid of them by dosing. The trick with rotational grazing is to get them to eat the pasture uniformly, not leaving out the stuff they are perfectly capable of eating, but would prefer not to, like a kid eating the meat and leaving the broccoli. If they over-eat some plants they risk killing them, while others are under-grazed and gain supremacy in the pasture. That is why small paddocks encourage ruminants to eat all the plants, and when they are done, you move the fence. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

truly free range