tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63311070660829351562024-03-07T02:14:14.318-05:00Reports from the FarmPinwheel Farm, where I'm "going around in circles," is a constant source of amusement, amazement, learning, inspiration, and WORK. This blog is to share all that with my family and friends, since I can't possibly find the time to correspond with each of you personally.Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.comBlogger367125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-75719939876425372072021-01-17T05:42:00.000-05:002021-01-17T05:42:22.578-05:002021 Winter Prices: Hatching Eggs, Chicks, Chickens<p><b>See bottom of post for payment, pickup and delivery information<br /></b></p><p><b>HATCHING EGGS<br /></b></p><p>Generally available, for pick up or local delivery. Eggs are gathered several times a day, held in moderate temperatures to prevent freezing in cold weather, and candled (within the limits of colored eggs) before sale to be sure of no cracks, etc. Marked with collection date and hen if known. Accumulated for a week or less in cartons that are turned twice a day. I have had hatch rates around 70% with indifferently calibrated incubators and poor humidity control. No guarantees.<br /><br />Free hatching eggs (up to 1 dozen) for classroom (or homeschool) hatching. Hatch-and-return is an option if we plan ahead.<br /></p><p>ChocoMint $15/dozen (limited availability, will include a mix of hens unless otherwise agreed)<br /></p><p>ChocoLink $10/dozen<br /><b> </b></p><p><b>CHICKS AND CHICKENS </b></p><p>Baby chicks are usually hatched weekly in small batches. They are color sexed at hatch, to the extent possible, and marked with sex and breed color codes. I hope to begin wing tagging soon to keep better track of individuals both on the farm and in case of customer questions after sale.</p><p>All birds are fed non-GMO or organic feed, usually from local growers/millers, plus fresh greens when available. Heavy predator pressure prevents free ranging, but we use portable enclosed pens when weather allows.<br /></p><p><b>ChocoMint</b></p><p>I'll be keeping some for the breeding program, but will be hatching as many as possible from my best birds, so some will be available. If you hatch your own eggs, breeding your non-chocolate hens with a ChocoMint rooster will give you sex-link chicks (males are black or have black markings; females are chocolate or have chocolate markings...some breeds are easier to tell than others).<br /></p><p>Hatch to 7 days: $7 each, straight run only, no sex guarantee.<br />8 days to 16 weeks: $7 + $1.00 per week of age, up to $25 <br /></p><p>Pullets laying brown, or untested: $25 <br />Pullets laying green: $30<br />Hens retired from breeding program $25 - $30<br /></p>Young cockerels (as soon as can be determined): $20<br />Proven sires of hens laying green eggs: $35<p><b>ChocoLink WTG</b></p><p>The variable coloring of the Whitings True Green hens results in a wide range of chick colors in the ChocoLink WTGs, making some of them harder to sex than hybrids with more standardized breeds. Both sexed and unsexed chicks will be available. Over time, my ability to interpret chick color will improve. Meanwhile, chicks sold as pullets only are guaranteed...if they crow, I will buy them back for your original purchase price.<br /><br />I will be changing roosters from time to time. Some hatches may include chicks from two different roosters.<br /><br />ChocoLinks will not breed true in all traits, but the chocolate gene will be expressed when a ChocoLink hen is bred to a rooster that carries the chocolate gene.<br /><br />While the hens for the ChocoLink hybrids are lighter-weight laying breeds, the ChocoMints are a heavy breed with English Orpington and Barred Rock ancestry. <br /><br /><b> </b><u>Straight run:</u></p><p>Hatch to 7 days: $4 each<br />8 days to 16 weeks: $4 + $1.00 per week of age, up to $20 </p><u>Pullets only (sex guaranteed; egg color not guaranteed):</u><p>Hatch to 7 days: $7 each, <br />8 days to 16 weeks: $7 + $1.00 per week of age, up to $25 </p><p><u>Cockerels only (will consider quantity discount):</u></p><p>Hatch to 7 days: $ each, <br />8 days to 16 weeks: $2 + $1.00 per week of age, up to $15 <br /><br /><b>ChocoLink PWL</b></p><p>These should be available in February or March, when the Pearl White Leghorns start laying. No idea what they will look like or what egg colors.<b> <br /><br />PAYMENT OPTIONS</b></p><p>I accept cash, credit cards, PayPal. and Venmo. Checks if I know you.<br /><b><br />PICKUP OR DELIVERY</b><br /><b></b></p><p>Pickup at the farm in North Lawrence, by appointment only. Contact me via Messenger (Natalya Pinwheel Lowther), phone (785-979-6786...when I find it, and mailbox never works), or email (natalyalowther@hotmail.com). Please wear clean clothes and shoes. Supervised children are welcome; dogs will need to stay in vehicle except brief on-leash potty breaks.<br /><br />Delivery can sometimes be arranged locally or along the I70 or Highway 24 corridors between Lawrence and Manhattan. <br /></p>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-68550498499561705122021-01-17T04:10:00.002-05:002021-01-17T04:10:29.122-05:00Chocolate Chicken History<p>Once upon a time there was a farmer (or two, or three...) who loved chocolate....<br /><br />Some years back, a friend rented space at Pinwheel to carry out her longtime chicken breeding projects. As things got busier for her, I got more involved in the day-to-day work of R.'s Chicken World. But I never got the marketing end figured out, and she was too busy to market, and we had some predator problems, and so eventually she sold the flock.<br /><br />Her projects included breeding chocolate-colored chickens...English Orpingtons and Barred Rocks. We joked about how cool it would be to have chocolate chickens that laid green eggs.<br /><br />At some point, we sold a chocolate-colored rooster to J.</p><p>By the time J. came to Pinwheel, she had been breeding from that rooster for several years, and she wanted to expand her program with her birds at Pinwheel. This included hatching some eggs to sell chicks. She was out of town the weekend they hatch, so I ended up in charge. We had agreed to sell them straight run, but with a promise to buy back any roosters since we were selling to city people.<br /><br />That turned out to be a true God-send. J. chose to abruptly leave the farm, cutting off all ties. Her chickens went, too. But meanwhile, I had placed a couple of orders for hatchery chicks that we wanted to raise, some broilers to butcher and some Whitings True Greens (WTG) to which we would breed her chocolate rooster. Suddenly I was raising 50 chicks by myself, in addition to everything else! A bit overwhelming, but the broilers would finish in 8 weeks and be gone, and I could always sell some of the WTGs.<br /><br />Then customers called me to return roosters. J. wanted nothing to do with making good on our guarantee, so I took the money out of pocket to make good on the guarantee. Then I realized...R's breeding program had come full circle, and returned to the farm...and I had the chocolate roosters and green-egg-laying hens to carry on the plan that R and I had imagined long ago. Additionally, J. had sold some hatching eggs to my Mom some years back, and she had a rooster and two lovely hens out of that hatch.</p><p>So, I started hatching chicks, buying feed, and building chicken facilities, and here is where I am:<br /><br />I have a breeding flock of what I am calling ChocoMint chickens descended from R's, J's, and Mom's flocks. Some are solid chocolate (light or dark); some are barred (light or dark), some are solid dark chocolate, some are white with chocolate filigree or Columbian markings. Some lay brown, some lay green...I'll be selecting for the green ones.<br /></p><p>The ChocoMint flock will produce terminal sires for creating ChocoLinks...sex link hybrids with laying breeds to create chocolate hens that (hopefully) will lay green eggs. The chocolate color gene is passed on by the rooster, but his male chicks from non-chocolate hens will not be chocolate. Daughter chicks from non-chocolate hens will be chocolate...or at least have traces of chocolate. This allows the chicks' sex to be determined at hatching, non-invasively.<br /></p><p>For the ChocoLink hybrids, I have a laying flock of 15 WTG hens that lay green eggs, and 6 Pearl White Leghorns that will lay white eggs. My first cohort of ChocoLink WTG hybrids should be laying sometime in May...I can barely wait! <br /></p><p><br /></p>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-27285108385676789682021-01-17T03:39:00.001-05:002021-01-17T03:39:27.713-05:002020 Hindsight<p><i>Just over a year ago, I started the new year by renewing my determination to keep a blog again. I wrote:</i> <br /></p><p>Facebook took a toll on my writing...along with a variety of distractions and general busy-ness in daily life. Now, in 2020, I hope to get back to less Facebook, more blogging.<br />
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Since my last posts, here are some of the significant changes, as well as continuities, at Pinwheel Farm.<br />
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Border Collie transition: Sookie left a couple years ago, and I adopted Daisy in spring of 2019. Daisy is a bundle of anxieties, erratic in her ability to pay attention and learn. On the other hand, she is sweet, gentle, and friendly with everyone, and she is VERY interested in sheep. Unfortunately, I can't do much herding training until she decides it's in her best interest to listen and learn. She's about 4 years old.<br />
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Livestock Guardian: Many years ago, I tried out a semi-retired Great Pyrenees, who turned out to not be a good fit for the farm. Then we had a llama, Freckleface, who was amazing. After his demise, I tried another llama who was aggressive with the sheep. Generally, we've done alright without a livestock guardian, but this spring I had the chance to see some great Great Pyrenees at work with a friend's flock that was scattered by the tornado, and then had a chance to purchase an LGD puppy from working parents on a friend's farm. Thus Luna became part of the farm...a small white bundle of fuzz at 8 weeks old, now a rangy 8 month old weighing over 70 lbs., with her back nearly at table top height when in the house. Daisy's most important contribution to the farm so far has been exercising and socializing this energetic puppy...a task that would have overwhelmed me if I had to do it myself.<br />
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Elder care: I have been traveling more and more to Manhattan, KS, to aid my parents as they "age in place." They are in good health and energetic for their advanced years, so a lot of what I do is groundskeeping and facilities maintenance on their 20 acres in the Flint Hills....</p><p><i>And then...I got distracted and never finished the post. I would have been busy preparing for my annual trip to Phillipsburg, KS, to the Shepherd's Mill to teach natural dye workshops at their annual fiber festival in early February, and to deliver fleeces. And J. moved to Lawrence to apprentice at the farm. And suddenly there was a pandemic, and everything changed.<br /></i></p><p><i>So, it's January, and I'm going to try again.</i></p><p><i>J. is gone. Luna is gone. Daisy the Border Collie is gone, and Briar the Border Collie is on duty. I did not do Farmer's Market. Chickens happened, and continue. A year of solitude on the farm interspersed with trips to Manhattan has, in retrospect, been good for me, personally, and for the farm in practical ways, if not financially.<br /></i><br /></p><p> </p><p> </p>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-69008789634570748692016-04-28T14:00:00.000-04:002016-04-28T14:00:05.774-04:00Welcome, City Shepherds! P.S.Last but not least, before getting an animal that needs shearing to be healthy and comfortable (angora goat or wool sheep), be sure you have a plan for having it sheared. You COULD do it yourself, but it is truly a challenge with a squirming animal (and the smaller they are the wigglier they are, it seems). It is horrible to nick your own animal by accident, and all too easy.<br />
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I will be making plans for City Shepherds to bring their sheep to the farm on our regularly scheduled Sheep Shearing Day Open House. They will be kept separate from my flock, and biosecurity measures will apply, but it will make life soooooo much easier for new shepherds. Our shearer can also give lessons at shearing day.Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-68233969179019240952016-04-27T21:14:00.000-04:002016-04-27T21:14:14.173-04:00Welcome, City Shepherds!<div data-contents="true">
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<span data-offset-key="c87bv-0-0"><span data-text="true">The City of Lawrence just passed regulations allowing small ruminants (pygmy goats and sheep) to be kept within city limits! This is exciting news for livestock lovers with large lots! </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="c87bv-0-0"><span data-text="true">But there's a down side. Goats and sheep are cute, but they ARE livestock, not pets. They aren't just dogs that eat hay. </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="c87bv-0-0"><span data-text="true">Here are some words of wisdom from a livestock pro: First things first! Before you decide to get any kind of livestock, esp. sheep and goats, you need to have the following things really nailed down, not just "we'll figure it out when we get there".</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="bn9ae-0-0"><span data-text="true">1. Carcass disposal. Even if it's years in the future, you need to plan this BEFORE it happens, because you won't be in any shape to make decisions or track down options when it does. A rabbit or chicken isn't a big deal (chicken bones go in the trash all the time), but a goat or sheep in the garbage can in the middle of the summer is probably a bad, bad idea. Alternatives that work in the country probably won't work on a city lot.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="ulog-0-0"><span data-text="true">2. Manure management. Everything poops (yes, dogs do, too). With livestock, this is a good thing IF you have a system set up before the manure starts rolling in.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="adk6b-0-0"><span data-text="true">3. Transportation. Don't just have the seller deliver your new livestock. If you don't have access to safe, humane transportation for it, don't bring it home. You may need to transport it to the vet in an emergency. Veterinary "farm calls" are an extra $100 or more on top of the cost of exam or treatment.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="88r2j-0-0"><span data-text="true">4. Veterinarian. Most Lawrence vets want nothing to do with small ruminants. Hopefully this will soon change, but unless it does, plan on taking your livestock to Eudora Animal Hospital, Pleasant Valley in Tonganoxie, or Baldwin. Many medications, esp. for sheep, legally require a vet's oversight, even if you administer the medication to the animal yourself. That means establishing a relationship with an appropriate vet BEFORE there is a crisis.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="dpfeh-0-0"><span data-text="true">5. First aid kit. Treatment tools, thermometer, basic treatments, bandages, wound treatments, etc. Figure this out with your vet. When crisis hits, you can handle it much better if you have the items you need at hand. Your vet, or an experienced livestock handler, can talk you through a lot on the phone.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="10dg5-0-0"><span data-text="true">6. Willingness to administer injections. Those vets are a long way away if your animal needs daily or twice-daily injections to treat an illness or injury. Also see #3.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="9j1b1-0-0"><span data-text="true">7. Good fences, gates with good latches, animal shelters, AND animal-proof storage for hay, grain, etc. BEFORE the animal arrives. These need to be stronger than you can even imagine, because these animals like to rub (sheep) and climb (goats). Facilities must also include a small gated pen that can be used to catch and restrain the animal. They can run faster than you...even when they are almost dead.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="6qcf9-0-0"><span data-text="true">8. Proper, humane restraints designed for sheep and goats. A collar and lead rope, at least. Also preferably a gambrel restrainer or cuff, for emergency restraint. </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="ff242-0-0"><span data-text="true">9. Feed suppliers. More than one source for the kind of feed you need, in case your usual supplier is out. Sometimes "out" means "until the next hay crop". There will inevitably be times when you can't just feed grass.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="1d0ja-0-0"><span data-text="true">10. Back-up chore people. You generally can't take livestock for boarding, so you'll have to have someone come to your house while you are on vacation. Or out of town for work or funeral. Or when your entire family has the flu and can't crawl out to the sheep shed through a blizzard.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="5prg7-0-0"><span data-text="true">11. A lawn mower. Because there are kinds of grass your goat or sheep won't touch with a 10 foot pole.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="3f47k-0-0"><span data-text="true">12. Insemination. If you want to breed your sheep or goat so you can have babies and milk, be sure you have a deal with a stud owner in the country where you can take your gal for a honeymoon, or learn about AI for goats. Sheep pretty much have to be naturally bred. Bear in mind that many of us keep closed flocks, do not want other people's animals on our farm, and do not "loan out" our rams. Promiscuity can spread disease, right? </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="vb1e-0-0"><span data-text="true">13. Backup source of colostrum and milk if you are breeding sheep or goats. Again, you won't have time or mental capacity to figure this out from scratch if your mom-critter doesn't have milk for her newborn. Colostrum must be given within 8 hours of birth. </span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="7uve1-0-0"><span data-text="true">14. A plan for male offspring. Please, please, please be real about this. If you want milk, you have to keep breeding goats or sheep every year, and you can't keep all the babies with limited space. </span></span><span data-offset-key="7uve1-0-0"><span data-text="true"><span data-offset-key="7uve1-0-0"><span data-text="true">Someone else will probably want your female animals, but m</span></span>ost of your friends do not want non-productive animals unless they can take them for slaughter. Inevitably most male animals will be slaughtered. Don't breed if you don't want this to happen.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="7uve1-0-0"><span data-text="true">15. Learn about prey animal psychology. Sheep and goats are very, very different than dogs...they are more like horses. Studying up on low-stress livestock handling, Monty Roberts-style horse training, etc. will help you learn to interact calmly with your sheep and goats. Most people only know how to interact with dogs, using predator body language. If you interact with sheep and goats that way, they'll panic, and you'll be frustrated.</span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="br732-0-0">NOW you're ready for the fun part--deciding which species, which breed, which farm, which animal, and what to name it!</span></div>
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Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-9284776431782883812015-10-06T16:00:00.000-04:002015-10-06T16:00:30.376-04:00Still HereYes, Pinwheel Farm, the sheep, Sookie, the chickens, and the whole rest of the Community of Life are still here. Facebook has been a powerful distraction, as has simply survival. Send a friend request to "Natalya Pinwheel Lowther" and like "Pinwheel Farm" if you want to keep up to date with farm events and products available.<br />
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It was also actually still here at the farm this morning...and quiet...unusual these past few years. Not just a stillness of wind and an absence of people coming and going at the farm, but also a blessed absence of the "new normal" background noise of diesel engines idling, large trucks sounding their horns, and earth-moving equipment alarms constantly chiming as they roar around pulverizing soil and trees at the neighbor's place.<br />
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The past several years have been a frustrating ongoing effort to get the county to enforce applicable codes...doubly frustrating, because of my own long history of being subjected to non-existant codes and falsified complaints. The recently intensified flurry of earthmoving and construction next door seems to be, finally, some progress towards compliance with codes and away from the junkyard it had become. (Quadruply frustrating, because I'm poised to begin working with the FOURTH Zoning and Codes administrator since the situation next door began to escalate, and since this is an interim Administrator, there is a fifth in my not-so-distant future.)<br />
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Anyhow.<br />
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I took advantage of the perfect day--peaceful, still, quiet, overcast, pleasant fall temperature--to sort out sheep for breeding groups. This will give us lambs just before and during sheep shearing* in the spring...a bit earlier than usual, hoping to clear the calendar later in March and April for more timely intensive spring planting. (*Third Saturday in March every year...Open Farm Day...Like Pinwheel Farm on FB for information as the date nears.)<br />
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It was great having a constant stream of WWOOFers here from June until a couple weeks ago. We were able to "work sheep" (run them through the handling system** and record weights) every week or two, something that hasn't happened in a couple years due to lack of volunteers. One of the lasting benefits now that everyone is gone is that the sheep are well trained to the chute, so I can easily work them solo. Which I did this morning...more than once. (**You can click over to <a href="https://www.blogger.com/You%20can%20click%20over%20to%20https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.678728275534604.1073741833.435652223175545&type=3">Pinwheel Farm's album on Facebook</a> to see photos and notes on the handling system.)<br />
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Just so all you non-livestock-farmers can appreciate what goes into your lamb chops and mittens, and so you wanna-be-livestock-farmers can have a glimpse of what you're getting yourselves into, here's the morning's drill:<br />
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1. Realize that the older ram, Wesley, has jumped the electric fence out on pasture to get closer to the ewes.<br />
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2. Ewes loafing in the barnyard decide to explore the loading ramp, and push open the gate at the top (gate at the bottom was left unlatched and open, and top gate left closed but unlatched, when I loaded market lambs last Wed. Note to self...don't do that!) while I'm doing chicken chores. Suddenly they are all in the garden. (Must have been a lovely waterfall of fat wooly sheep cascading off the upper end of the ramp...I'll have to stage that sometime and take a video.)<br />
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3. Round up ewes with novice working dog (sometimes helpful, sometimes unhelpful, always eager) and get them into an unused paddock near the garden.<br />
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4. Let them graze there long enough that their tummies are full and they are willing to leave.<br />
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5. Run them up to the barn and into the crowding pen for the chute.<br />
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6. Start weighing sheep in the chute.<br />
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7. Realize that the list of which ewe goes with which ram is still in the house. Hope sheep stay in chute while running to house for list. (They do.)<br />
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8. Mentally run through the whole Rubick's Cube puzzle of how to organize the sorting and moving so that the groups can be joined as needed and moved to the right places on the farm without mixing. (Another sort pen would be really handy, sometimes.)<br />
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9. Sort out Wesley's ewes into the side holding pen while weighing all ewes and trying to evaluate which white ewe lamb to keep (the black one's a no-brainer--she's close to my end breeding goal for perfect fleece). Oops, two of Wesley's ewes end up with Quincy's ewes and the market lambs because I'm distracted by doing too many things at once.<br />
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10. Run Quincy's ewes and the market lambs back into the crowding pen and through the chute again to sort out the other two Wesley ewes.<br />
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11. Run Quincy's ewes and the market lambs back into the crowding pen. Open gate between main holding pen and "buffer zone" between the holding pen and the crowding pen. (Don't usually use this buffer zone for holding animals, but without another sort pen it's the only solution for this puzzle.)<br />
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12. Run Quincy and the ram lambs over from the other side of the farm and shut them in the buffer zone. (Handy that Wesley has trapped himself in the pasture and can't join them...saves a couple steps in the whole process.)<br />
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13. Run Wesley's ewes to the other side of the farm where Quincy and the ram lambs were. (The grass is greener over there, so no problem.)<br />
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14. Walk out to the pasture and take down the fence that Wesley jumped. Follow Wesley as he walks up to join the ewes, and observe who's going to lamb in exactly 5 months (April will lamb in March).<br />
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15. Back to the barn. Manually separate Quincy from the market lambs and put him in the main holding pen.<br />
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16. Run the ewes through the chute to join Quincy, sorting the white ewe lambs out into the sort pen for a final evaluation. (One of them will be kept as a replacement ewe.)<br />
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17. Realize that I've been miscounting ewe lambs, and actually have one more than I thought. Which means one more than I have scheduled for processing. Which means either keeping an extra one for breeding, or selling one on the hoof. (Don't need to decide that now.)<br />
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18. Watch ewe lambs for awhile: compare weights; look at hoof color; ear/skin/face/leg color; tail mobility, wooliness, and length; wool density, length, texture, and character; wool cover pattern (clean face, legs, belly), overall conformation and behavior. (Sometimes I consider who the dam is, but in this case I'm just looking at the lambs. Whoever the dam is, she will get extra "points" for having her lamb selected, rather than the lambs getting extra points for having a particular dam.)<br />
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19. Choose two, actually the smaller ones. Judging by ear tag numbers, they are some of the youngest, they were sired by Wesley, and they have the silkiest and densest fleeces plus some dark skin on their faces which indicates some colored genetics lurking in there under Wesley's whiteness. Put them in with Quincy and his ewes.<br />
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20. Run Quincy and his ewes out to their side of the pasture and close the gate. Hope that Quincy and Wesley will both be content with their own ewes and not figure out how to jump into the main lane that serves as a buffer between the groups, which would probably lead to fighting through the fence and maybe jumping the other fence and getting into the same pasture which would lead to a lot of fighting and general mayhem. (Wesley--older, bolder, wiser, and larger--is on the side with the strongest, highest fence.)<br />
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21. Since I'm out there, take a side trip to evaluate the pasture they've been grazing down in the far west, along the drainage ditch. They've done a great job on poison ivy and other weeds. (Need to rearrange fences so Quincy's group can clear out some other areas before frost. That will also give more separation from Wesley.)<br />
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22. Spend awhile watching a mixed flock of small birds catching bugs in the big elm trees. Junco, tufted titmouse, and apparently several species of warblers in fall plumage--hard to identify, esp. as they move quickly and appear mostly silhouettes against the gray sky. (Good reminder that what I've done with this land DOES make a big difference for wildlife...esp. now that the neighbors are bulldozing most of the thickets and trees on their property, destroying a lot of wildlife habitat.)<br />
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23. Notice that the neighbors who are doing the earth moving have set up a situation where if we get a heavy rain, a lot of silt will flood over my pasture. (Mental note to follow up on this with appropriate agencies to ensure that adequate sediment control is in place to prevent erosion/siltation).<br />
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24. Notice that the other neighbors have set up their horse fences so that the horses are walking up and down a fence line at the top of the bank of the drainage ditch, which could lead to severe erosion and sedimentation of the publicly managed ditch that drains most of the county north of here. (Mental note to do some education with neighbors and follow up with Drainage District. I'm not a busy-body; this ditch is vital to the whole area, and my pasture is one of the places the water first backs up into if the ditch doesn't function as designed.)<br />
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25. Check fences. (This area has been subject to several incidents of people vandalizing perimeter fences over the past few years, rendering parts of my pasture unusable at times.)<br />
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26. Head back towards the barn to put the market lambs in their new pasture. Oops, here they are! How did they get out of the barn? (Turns out the heavy gate to the sort pen was unlatched, and they eventually pushed it open.)<br />
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27. Round up the market lambs and put them in their pasture.<br />
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28. Back to the barn to check that there's mineral in the mineral feeder, check all gates, etc.<br />
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29. Mental checklist to be sure that all groups have access to water and are well separated by "hard" (not electric) fences.<br />
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30. Gather up weigh sheet and breeding group notes and head to the house. (I'll compare weights to last week's and calculate gains/losses later.)<br />
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31. BONUS! Discover that there has been an egg in my sweatshirt pocket ever since I chased the ewes out of the garden, AND IT HASN'T BROKEN! A testimony to good handling equipment, trained sheep, and a (somewhat) trained working dog...not to mention a lot of experience and understanding of sheep psychology and behavior. And patience. Especially notable since some days I can't even seem to walk from the coop to the house with a pocketed egg without an "eggsident".<br />
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If this all sounds like a fun, exciting morning, just give me a call. We can arrange a "play date" at the farm sometime soon...like when I need to weigh all three groups again in a week or two.<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-62450656912294592522013-09-28T17:22:00.000-04:002013-09-28T22:10:29.517-04:00Market ResearchAbout 8 years ago, I started an experiment at my Farmer's Market booth. When I settled on my current popular salad green/herb display--"mix 'n' match, $10/lb., as little or as much as you want, take what you like and leave the rest"--I soon realized that often folks just wanted a few herbs, which didn't even register on the scale. So I started the "$1.00 for a small bag, whatever herbs you want to put in it."<br />
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It's been very popular, and enlightening as well. People love not having to buy more than they will use, and being able to get just the fresh herbs they need for the recipe <i>du jour</i>. They love not being forced to waste food. Often they are happier with one fragrant sprig than they would be with a larger package, because they don't want to waste.<br />
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There are also always a few who make their pesto (because this usually happens during basil season) in the small bag, cramming in the tender herbs until the juices run. I don't weigh the bags, but I'm sure I've seen $3 worth (by weight) of herbs in a $1 bag.<br />
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And then there are the "regulars" who put twice their usual amount of herbs in the bag, and give me $2, even though they are still only getting a few snippets of this and that. Even though I still smile and say, "That'll be $1." They know what it's worth to them. It's twice their usual.<br />
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From time to time, someone new to my booth comments on my little experiment. "Don't people take advantage of that?" No, not really. For every pesto-maker, there are many sprig-takers. It all averages out...and overall, I make more money on the herbs this way that if I sold them by weight or by pre-measured bunches.<br />
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It's a good deal for everyone...people get what they want, they essentially choose their price, they take only what they can use, and I don't have to pre-weigh/pre-bag/label/etc.<br />
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***<br />
Green onions are another long-time experiment. It used to be, there just wasn't much demand for them. I bunched them in rubber bands like the store, and then took them home and took off the rubber bands to throw them in the compost (before <a href="http://justfoodks.org/">Just Food</a>). Eventually I got frustrated with the wasted effort and just laid them on the table in loose bunches. Figuring out how big to make bunches of anything can be a pain in the neck when the items vary in size both within the day's offering and from week to week. Every bunch required at least some small mental activity to decide what was in that particular bunch.<br />
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One day I didn't separate them into bunches. "You get to pick your own bunch," I told the customers. "How big is a bunch?"they asked. "You know how big a bunch of green onions is...like in the store," I replied. "No, I don't." "Yes, you do" I would laugh and smile. And timidly, they would start picking up onions, looking at me for cues after the first few. "How many is in a bunch?" they would ask, hoping I would relent and spare them the responsibility. "It depends on what size they are. You might want all big ones, all small ones or some of each." I would smile and repeat myself. "You know how big a bunch of green onions is." And by golly, they would almost always pick out exactly a bunch of green onions.<br />
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This was, in part, about getting customers involved in the <i>process</i> of vegetables, the post-harvest handling that for conventional grocery-store veggies is often done by migrant workers living and working in grueling conditions. It was also about building self-confidence, about showing people they know something that they didn't think they knew.<br />
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Sometimes people needed a little more guidance. "It's enough that you feel like you're getting a good deal, and not so much that you feel like you're cheating me," I would tell the still-skeptical.<br />
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There are, of course, outliers in the range of green-onion-purchasers. These fall into a couple categories. One is people who don't normally shop who have been sent to Farmer's Market with lists. It's pretty easy to tell from the deer-in-the-headlights look that they truly do not know how big a bunch of green onions is. They aren't even quite sure if they know what green onions <i>are</i>. I demonstrate, teaching them gently for next time. Another is people from other cultures where informal direct sales venues like our Farmer's Market are common, and haggling over prices is the norm. They are inclined to make somewhat larger bunches, and then keep adding to them. I don't argue. It's just a few onions.<br />
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As with the $1 herb bags, there are also those who won't use a whole bunch. So I sell half bunches for half price. But sometimes, people don't even want half a bunch. They hold up one or two onions. "Whatever it's worth to you," I say. Often they give me the half-bunch price. It's worth it to them to not have to waste the rest of the half-bunch. And it's worth it to have the one green onion.<br />
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***<br />
This year, for the first time, I planted a row of okra. For some yet-undiagnosed reason, the plants are suddenly dying, one by one. Harvest is slim, but more than I need for home use. So I take a small bag to market each week.<br />
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Today, a customer picked out the choicest small ones that she wanted. "How much?" "What's it worth to you?" I asked. "How about a dollar?" "That's fine." She paid and went away happy. Not long after, another customer looked at the remaining okra, about the same amount but coarser pods. "How much?" "What's it worth to you?" "How about a dollar?" "OK" The customer handed me a dollar...and then handed me another one. "No, two dollars!" And walked away happy.<br />
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A little later, a customer and I discussed a small purchase while I was packing up. "A dollar or whatever," I said. She handed me a $5 bill. I went to make change. "No, keep it," she said.<br />
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***<br />
A few weeks ago, a FaceBook (and long-time face-to-face) friend posted an angry comment about the high price of fresh food. She took stores to task for overcharging consumers...but also held Farmer's Market vendors accountable for charging high prices. When I responded with comments about small farmers' costs of production, and how artificially low our US food prices really are, she got angry with me. It was sad, because I'd long thought of this person as a friend and ally, and someone who (as a high-end food service professional) truly values food.<br />
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I challenged myself to reflect on whether there might be some truth to her accusation. I survey prices from other vendors, from the stores, and consider my production costs and quality differences when I price my produce. Are my prices were ridiculously high? Am I helping fuel inflation?<br />
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My market research says that for many people, my prices are just fine. And left to their own devices, my customers often would pay more than my set price.<br />
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In my friend's defense, we're both old enough to remember when gas was $.25/gallon and tomatoes were $.25/lb. (If you stop and think about it, the price of high-quality tomatoes in the store is often right about the same as a gallon of gas. Go figure. I'll take the tomato any day!) So yes, there has been a lot of inflation as the decades add up. But in the case of Farmer's Market prices, it seems to be a mutually agreeable situation.<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-48728349659110118032013-07-15T01:17:00.001-04:002013-07-15T01:17:57.342-04:00Herding ProgressHerding training has been on the back burner with my efforts to keep up with harvesting and planting. Lambing interfered, as well, because the ewes were fierce and I didn't want Sookie to be badly scared or, worse, injured by a protective mama. Also, I haven't had the sheep out on the pasture much this year, for various reasons.<br />
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But nevertheless, we've been in the pens and lanes with the sheep from time to time, and Sookie definitely wants to work them. But how? They have learned, over the past few years, to basically ignore dogs, or to stomp them. The bottom line has been, neither the sheep nor the dog knew what was expected of them, and I couldn't figure out how to get past that. It seemed like if one or the other would do their part of the dance that is working sheep with a dog, the other would follow the lead and I could coach.<br />
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But what we had going on was pretty much just pandemonium.<br />
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On the few occasions when we needed to get the sheep to do something, it basically amounted to me stomping and waving and yelling at sheep, while Sookie ran around, breaking through the middle of the flock, circling endlessly, ignoring my "lie down" commands, etc. I would try to direct her while also yelling at the sheep, and we would all end up frustrated and confused. Yet if I left her out of the pen and tried to move the sheep myself (which Toss taught me to do quite efficiently), she would run around like crazy and yelp and carry on, creating a distraction.<br />
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Eventually, I've figured out the following:<br />
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--Sookie is very "loose-eyed" for a Border Collie--whether by nature or by nurture (not seeing sheep until she was 3) I don't know. She works standing up, close in to the flock, and without a lot of direct eye contact. Although she is learning to keep her eyes on the sheep more, she still looks back at me a lot. I need to accept this as her natural working style, and stop expecting her to act like Toss.<br />
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--Sookie is incredibly gutsy, and will squeeze between the sheep and a fence or shed in very tight places without showing fear. She also doesn't take it personally when a ewe charges her...she'll get scared and run for a little way, but then she wants to go right back in as soon as she realizes the ewe has refocused.<br />
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--Sookie is a master of the "fake grip". She likes to get in close and pretend to bite the sheep in the face or rump. Over time, she is gaining more response from the flock because she is hounding them like a giant horsefly buzzing in their face. This seems to be a sense of annoyance on the part of the sheep, more than fear.<br />
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--I need to figure out ways to clearly distinguish between the commands I'm giving to the sheep (our familiar "Come, sheep" call that the sheep have learned to associate with fresh pasture) and the commands I'm giving the dog ("Sookie, Come").<br />
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The other day we easily sent most of the flock out to pasture, but a few remained in the green calf shed. This shed has 3 small stalls with narrow openings onto the lane. There was one yearling in each of the outer stalls, and a young ewe with lamb in the middle stall.<br />
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The single yearlings both fell for Sookie's "suction" method of getting sheep out of the stalls. She runs past the doors repeatedly, glancing in. After a few passes, the sheep inside get so nervous that they want to run out into the open. Eventually, she runs past and as soon as she passes, the sheep pops out of the shed right behind her and follows her for a few moments. Apparently for a sheep, it feels safer to have her moving away from them than towards them. She doesn't try to "get" them in any way once they are out, unless I direct her to.<br />
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The ewe and lamb were a different story. When mild "suction" across the front of the shed didn't work, Sookie intensified her effort by running in and out, back and forth between the now-empty stalls on each side of the central stall. Even that didn't work. So she went into their stall after them, running in circles between them and the walls in the tiny (6' x 4') stall. I think if she had stopped at the back of the shed, they would have moved away from her and out the door, but she kept orbiting. On the other hand, stopping might have allowed the ewe to target her. She forced her way around, moving so quickly the ewe couldn't really target her. Then she got right in and fake-gripped the ewe's nose repeatedly. The ewe was rattled but not budging out of that shed.<br />
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I finally went into the stall, being careful to avoid putting myself in danger if the ewe decided to bolt out. The ewe finally left with her lamb, but wanted back into the stall after I emerged so I had to guard it.<br />
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I encouraged Sookie to drive them down the lane to meet the other sheep. I kept stopping her to allow them to move at a leisurely pace during the heat of the day.<br />
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During the driving, the little ewe lamb stopped to pee. Sookie was right beside it, and they were about the same size. Sookie stood while it peed, with her open mouth very close to the lamb's face in a freeze-frame "fake grip". Both animals were relaxed with no sign of fear on the lamb's part. As soon as the lamb finished peeing, and moved on, Sookie completed her stop-action fake grip. The lamb merely tossed its head away from the dog, as if avoiding a fly, and ambled on.<br />
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I can see that we are making progress. It just doesn't look like what I expect a herding BC to look like.<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-80699601373198676702013-06-15T20:17:00.002-04:002013-06-15T20:17:33.000-04:00Sookie's Triumph: Staying HomeOne reason Sookie needed a new home (and thus came to live with me) was her wanderlust. She would get bored, escape from fenced yards, and roam the 'hood solo.<br />
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At first, she was always on a leash here, learning to stay near me. Gradually I got tired of being tethered to the dog, and she got more used to staying around me, and the leash fell into disuse. Once in awhile, she would force her way through a gate and wander off, or I would forget and leave a gate open, but not too often, and she would come when I gave her special call. Not sure how I figured it out; it's sort of like a very loud bird-call version of her name, something that a peacock might utter. I'm sure the neighbors dislike it, but it gets her attention from a long distance even when there are trains, cars, helicopters, wind, etc. making noise.<br />
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Then Matt--who was great buddies with her--left the farm in early May. Since then she has been very bad about slipping away from the farm. I think she is looking for him...or maybe even hearing/smelling him somewhere in the neighborhood, since he has friends who live nearby.<br />
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If I notice she is missing from the farm (and I try to call her to me every little bit, to keep her on her toes and focused on me), I start calling and walking towards the driveway. Sometimes Maggie, the dog across the street, alerts me with her "tattle-tale" bark.<br />
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It can take a few minutes to get there from the farm. Sometimes she is already there by the time I get there, panting hard from her romp. More often, she comes bolting down 5th Street towards me, or is in a neighbor's yard. I worry about her getting hit by a car, so as soon as she is within earshot of regular commands and in a safe place, I order "lie down", and she does. She'll stay until I get there, though she knows what's coming: The Transport of Shame. I pick her up and carry her home.<br />
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No "bad dog", no scolding, just a stern silence and I pick her up and carry her. No evening stroll with Mom as a reward for bad behavior! She doesn't struggle, but neither one of us enjoys it very much. (I'm glad she does not weigh more than 35 lbs.).<br />
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Yesterday, she slipped away, and as I walked through the woodlot to the house, I heard her barking (unusual--she is a very quiet dog) up along the street. When I got to the driveway, she came right to me, and I saw a woman with a big dog on a leash walking down 5th Street away from the house. I realized that Sookie must have interrupted their walk by going up to them and barking at the dog.<br />
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I decided to chase them down and apologize for my dog being at large, and her bad behavior. So I told her to "lie down" and "stay there" in the driveway, and jogged about half a block to overtake the woman and her dog.<br />
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The woman was very nice about it. She said that Sookie had met them near the farm driveway, and run along our side of the street while the woman and dog were on the other side. As soon as Sookie got to our house, THEN she started barking--she knew exactly which space was hers to "defend"! We stood and talked for awhile. I kept glancing back at Sookie. She stayed right where I'd left her for quite awhile. When she stood up, I "downed" her again, and she stayed right there. The woman was amazed at her obedience.<br />
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I feel like it was a real triumph for Sookie's training in several ways. First, that she clearly demonstrated that she knew her proper space, and didn't try to claim the neighborhood as hers! Second, that she hadn't actually gone up to the dog on the leash, but had stayed on her side of the street. She can be a real b---- with strange dogs at first, and it would be bad if she did that without me around, with a dog on a leash. Third, that she stayed put for so long in her own yard while I talked to and petted a strange dog a half block away!<br />
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Now if we can transfer that "down-stay" to when we are working sheep!Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-30830129102743804142013-03-01T01:50:00.002-05:002013-03-01T01:50:45.537-05:00Paperwork SeasonWinter is supposed to be a season of rest for the farmer, right? Just sitting by the fire spinning, or reading, or what-not?<br />
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Actually, this winter has really brought home to me the real winter occupation of this farmer, at least: Paperwork.<br />
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A farmer wears many hats: amateur veterinarian, geneticist, entomologist, marketing specialist, carpenter, electrician, plumber, mechanic, etc. And also: bookkeeper, lawyer, regulatory policy analyst, real estate developer, community planner, etc.<br />
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An awful lot of these involve paperwork. A lot of this paperwork happens in the winter, for three reasons: first, that's when we need to do crop-related planning for the coming vegetable production season; second, it's the only time I'm likely to have time to fill out paperwork; and third, everyone in farm-related businesses realizes this is the best time to get farmers to actually fill out paperwork.<br />
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And attend meetings. Trainings. Workshops. Seminars. Conferences. Etc. Each of which supplies the farmer with yet more paper, more paperwork, and copious notes.<br />
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This winter's calendar included: Great Plains Vegetable Growers Conference (in St. Joseph, MO; we went 2 of 3 days); Wholesale Marketing Workshop (KCKS); Kaw Drainage District meetings; Grow Lawrence Annual Meeting; Food Policy Council meetings; Kaw Valley Seed Fair; Downtown Lawrence Farmers Market Annual Meeting; WIC Vendor Program Meeting. And more to come. This is only the ones we actually attended; there have been all kinds of farm shows, seminars, webinars, and workshops that we were just too busy to attend.<br />
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A few events still loom ahead--including one of the funnest, the annual scale certification party at Pendleton's Country Market where the farmers get to stand around and visit and eat donuts while waiting for our scales to be inspected and--glory hallelujah!--someone ELSE fills out the paperwork, in return for us writing checks!<br />
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Forms to fill out, fees to send in (farmers markets, WIC, etc.). Renewals (meat wholesaler, live plant dealer). Memberships (Grow Lawrence). Checking to be sure we aren't planning anything new for the year that will require yet another registration/certification/training/fee. Checking to be sure no regulations have changed that will require yet another registration/certification/training/fee.<br />
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Then there's the paperwork we make up for others to fill out, like surveys and sign-up forms for our CSAs. We'll be doing two CSAs at day care centers this year, as well as one that will bring people to the farm to pick up their weekly bags of produce.<br />
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Garden planning. Seed orders. Bed maps. Rotations. Succession plantings.<br />
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That's the routine stuff, some of it stuff we've been doing every year for more than 15 years.<br />
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Then there's the big stuff. This year the big stuff has been mostly related to the new Douglas County Agritourism regulations, approved at last (after 3 years' work) on January 2, 2013. Many of our dreams for the farm have been hogtied for years--more than a decade in some cases--because County regulations just didn't accommodate the notion that people could, would, and should want to do things on farms like hike, picnic, buy farm-related products, etc. Picture those dreams as a string of racehorses fidgeting in the starting gate for 10 years, and now the gates have finally opened. They're off and running....<br />
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But wait! No! First there must be paperwork! And everyone has been so busy trying to get the regulation passed that no one has had time to design the forms to implement the regulation! County staff bent over backwards to get the forms done so we could submit our application in time for them to have a meeting to review our application and then another meeting with me to give us their approval...leaving maybe like 4 waking hours to prepare all of our promotional materials to hand out at the Seed Fair the next day. I was literally proofreading the County's draft forms a page at a time as the administrative assistant was printing them out!<br />
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Thus we became the first Agritourism site registered with the County--a status which allows you, whoever you are reading this, to walk on our farm without intent to do agriculture, and allows us to sell you items that we've made that aren't agricultural products (for example, drop spindles that we might make if we weren't so busy with paperwork), and allows us to invite other farmers to come sell things at our farm. We can offer workshops that aren't specifically about agricultural skills (for example, how to fill out agricultural paperwork).<br />
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But only if there are 100 of you or less at a time. Under the new regulations, if 101 people might show up for our Sheep Shearing Open Farm Day (March 16, 10 a.m.), we need to go through another layer of County registration which includes filling out another, more specific, application form; gaining the approval of the Board of County Commissioners; etc. Counting backwards from the scheduled sheep shearing day to the day the County would need to have our application left the County with about 3 days to create the form and get the form approved, giving us to put together a lengthy packet (including site plans) overnight.<br />
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If anyone wonders why I am not a university professor of something, it's because I hate working on deadline projects with acres of typewritten narratives, like grant applications...or Agritourism registrations. But, we got through it. Co-Farmer Matt saved the day with stellar mapping skills gained from his former Cubicleville engineering job. I, of course, gained a lot of application narrative writing experience at the environmental consulting firm where I worked for 7 years. Odd backgrounds for farming, but surprisingly handy.<br />
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We're making progress. The County Commission will decide on our ">100" application on March 13, 3 days before the event. With those applications behind us, we've moved on to getting the CSAs properly paperworked. Today was our second "info booth" event for that...one more to go.<br />
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Somewhere in there, we knocked out the application for the permit (and $250 fee) for our new well, and met with the Health Dept. to get approval for the well site. That will be a phased project, but at some point we'll need to fill out forms for the "Ag Use Exemption from Building Permit" for the well house to keep the pump from freezing. Last time we went through this exemption process, it took a lot longer to get the exemption from the permit than it would have taken to get a permit. Things have changed for the better at the County, and so I trust this process has been improved as well.<br />
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So, it's time to pull out the next big project...a new washhouse. In addition to actually deciding where to put it and how to build it, we have to get an Ag Use Exemption for it, too. Yay, more paperwork!<br />
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The new on-farm farmers' market doesn't need much paperwork other than the Agritourism Registration, but has been the subject of many long conversations with the County to work out details of parking, paving, sanitation, etc.<br />
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Weaving through all of these projects and plans is a constant thread of sanitation. People poop, and we need to plan for that and make sure they wash their hands. Animals poop, and we need to plan to keep it off our veggies and stuff. Pretty much sums it up. The Federal Food Safety Modernization Act dictates how these things need to be done--and, of course, documented. In between the doing and the documenting lie signage and standard operating procedures--written, of course. The self-assessment survey form that will guide us in knowing what paperwork we need to write and what we need to write it about is more than 30--THIRTY!--pages long.<br />
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I'm looking forward to spring, when we can rest from the hard work of winter paperwork by working in the garden!Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-67074844782376757512012-12-26T22:02:00.001-05:002012-12-26T22:02:46.409-05:00First Try at Herding!Coby went home last night, and things are a bit quiet around here. Sookie initially reverted to some old behaviors, like constantly pawing me while I'm working at the computer. So, I reverted to the old response: stand up and walk away. It didn't take very many times for her to get the message.<br />
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She unwittingly gave herself a good lesson on manners with guests this morning. A friend with a darling, sweet old chihuahua, Chalupa, visited us this morning. Sookie decided the visiting dog could not come in the living room, and Chalupa decided to play her "age card"..."I'm an old lady and I can go in the living room if I want to". Sookie flew into a tizzy at Chalupa, using some pretty nasty dog language...but in doing so, she accidentally knocked into a big empty popcorn tin that was sitting nearby with the lid partly on. The lid flew off with a clatter, the can made a huge crash, the sky fell, Sookie decided that her crate was plenty 'nuff territory to defend, and beat a hasty retreat before the rest of Armageddon happened. We humans just sat back and watched karma step in and handle the situation better than we could ever have done. Natural consequences are the best training device! After that, she was polite to the little dog.<br />
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This afternoon, Sookie had her first actual off-leash try at the sheep! We'd ventured into the sheep pen earlier, on-leash, but Sookie's whole attention was on sheep poop. So I decided that a better environment would be to let the sheep out on pasture where the sheep poop would be further apart and the sheep would be moving a lot. Instead of going in through the pen, we walked from the pasture to the pen, then let the sheep out. The sheep were overjoyed!<br />
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I mostly just watched, assessing her behavior with the sheep while being ready to intervene if a sheep decided to stand her down. At this stage, an attack by a big sheep could sour her to herding for a long time.<br />
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One of the runts was lagging behind, and I was pleased to see that Sookie was reluctant to pass it in order to keep up with the rest of the flock as they joyfully ran out to the pasture. Some dogs aren't careful to stay out of the middle of a group, and then things go really wonky as sheep move away from the dog in all directions. Sookie's reluctance to pass by the laggard kept the whole flock moving as a unit.<br />
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Once we were all out in the wide open space of the pasture, I waved at Sookie to go out around the flock, and she did...a very nice outrun at an adequate distance away from the greedily grazing sheep to keep the sheep calm, but still keeping a light contact with them, watching them all the time. She wasn't sure what to do when she got out there, though, and since the sheep aren't dog broke (trained to come to the handler when they see a dog), they didn't help us out. So at that point she shifted her attention back to me: "Mom......????? Now what?????"<br />
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I went to her and encouraged the sheep to move away from her, but by then she'd glued her attention back to me. So we went back around the sheep a bit to my starting point, and I waved her off around them in the other direction. Out she went again on a nice outrun, good as gold...just still not sure what to do when she got out there.<br />
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I don't want to call her to walk up on them until I know they won't stomp at her when I can't protect her. I don't want them to bully her and make her afraid to work. I'll be trying to find someone nearby with a good herding dog to come "dog break" the sheep, before we can make too much progress. But it was a good start.<br />
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She did sort of accidentally get the sheep moving again, by her presence; they decided to all run back to the sheep pen. Again, she was reluctant to pass the slow lamb, and looked like a pro "wearing" back and forth behind it, trying to get it to go faster. It didn't (spoiled bottle baby). So the flock got to the pen and "bounced" at the gate (even though it was open) and came back at us while we were approaching a wide intermediary gate. It was pretty comical because they all stopped right along the line of the open gate, as if there was an invisible wall, when they saw me and Sookie coming at them!<br />
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Then they headed for the pen again, and this time Sookie and I made them all go in. Sookie's "wearing" was actually very helpful in effecting this, and she got lots of praise!<br />
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She is pretty much a dream dog...at least if I can gradually wean her away from looking at me and get her to keep her attention on the sheep. She works on her feet, and doesn't "stick" in one spot, laying down eyeing the sheep. She is a natural at "wearing"--small dodging moves to the left and right that keep her on the sheep's radar and "steer" the sheep. She doesn't bark at them and go nuts, she doesn't run in too close and scatter them, she doesn't attack them, they seem calm around her. I'm very optimistic about training her to be a great working dog!<br />
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Afterwards, we went to the Romping Grounds for a reward. We're playing with three balls now, and she'll get them one at a time and put them in the bucket, sometimes even on the first try!<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-40777631261272045732012-12-25T00:31:00.002-05:002012-12-25T00:31:50.559-05:00More Balls, More FunIt has been good having Coby, the big Golden Retriever/Poodle mix, staying with us for a couple weeks. After the initial fuss over social status and territory in the house, he and Sookie have become good companions. They get along well at home, and have a great time romping together on the farm.<br />
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It's especially valuable to Sookie's training. Nothing like a big lumbering random distraction to hone her attention to me... and he keeps me from accidentally falling into routines I'm not aware of.<br />
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Sookie is very sensitive to routines. At first, we always went straight out to the "romping grounds" when we went to the farm morning and evening. Recently, we've had a few issues with her trying to INSIST that we go there first, before doing chores...and refusing to walk out to the pasture until after the romping grounds. Well, I need to be the one who gives orders, and sometimes we have to put work before play on the farm!<br />
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I'm letting both dogs off the leash as soon as the farm gate is closed behind us now. Then I stop Sookie with a "Lie Down" or a "Wait" at each gate or intersection. Trying to keep her guessing...where will I go next? Sometimes I try to fake her out, or start one way then change my mind. She is learning to pay attention to me, learning that I'm unpredictable but something fun usually happens if she sticks with me.<br />
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At the romping grounds, we have two tennis balls now. And Coby. It's getting really exciting!<br />
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We've been working a lot on finding lost balls. When I can see them, and she's searching, I use the sheep-finding commands: "Look Back" (if it's behind her) and "Here Here" (if it's between me and her). Slowly she is learning to turn and search farther away on command. This is a challenge for her, because she wants to work close to me, watching me. Turning away from me is hard for her, but very necessary when working sheep. When in doubt, she starts going into orbit around me, looking at my feet. Not productive!<br />
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Continual random drilling on "Lie Down" has had good results, and she'll drop just about anywhere most of the time, regardless of what Coby is doing. Sometimes he is tripping over her, but she ignores him if I'm giving a command. This is vital before we start sheep work...as long as she doesn't ignore the sheep in the same manner!<br />
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As a variation from our usual throw/fetch with the tennis ball, I've been working with two balls at once. This is extra challenging because once in awhile Coby will leave his stick and come grab a ball. We let him, and instantly re-direct to the other ball.<br />
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I'm especially impressed with the impulse control we've gotten on "Lie Down" "Stay" with a new game. I put her down near me, then throw one ball one direction, the other ball the other direction. She will actually stay in place when two balls are being thrown AND Coby is leaping after them right next to her! This is a pretty incredible feat of self-restraint and obedience!<br />
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Then what joy the command of "That one!" brings as I direct her which one to go get first! Off she tears, grabs it, brings it back, drops it in my hand, waits to see whether I will throw it again or tell her to go find the other one. Sometimes that depends on whether Coby is going after the other one.<br />
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Today, I introduced a new concept: "Drop it in the bucket", instead of "Drop it in my hands". She is trying so hard to understand! She is very intent, but puzzled. I hold the bucket in front of me, cup a hand inside it for her to drop the ball into. It just about blows her mind! Now and then she gives a sharp little bark of frustration at not understanding, and we switch to some other game for a little while to let her unwind. But even when she is frustrated, I can tell she loves the challenge of learning new things. She WANTS to understand and do what I ask of her.<br />
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By the end of this evening's romp, she was beginning to actually get the ball into the bucket now and then, without me having to dodge the bucket around to try to catch the ball.<br />
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Next we'll take out a couple more balls, and have her gather more balls at each throw...more balls to put in the bucket before I start throwing again. The bucket is important because I won't always be wearing a coat with large enough pockets for multiple balls. And the bigger task of fetching more balls, one by one, gives me more time to think: "NOW what can I teach the Border Collie?"<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-86406578254471967982012-12-15T01:42:00.001-05:002012-12-15T01:42:45.985-05:00Double Trouble--But Worth ItNot one but TWO escapes from the farm today by the quicksilver canine.<br />
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First, she slipped through a sheep pen gate as I struggled to maneuver a load of logs through it, and found a hole in the "fence" between the woodlot and the neighbor's in the blink of an eye. We were right on her tail and retrieved her from the mobile home park down the block within minutes. She had been confined to the vacant sheep pen where we were working, so we had taken her leash off so she wouldn't tangle on the brush we were moving.<br />
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Renewing our caution, I kept her on the leash when we were working in the garden, but didn't tie her. She obeys much better when she's dragging the leash, and I can step on it to get her attention if she's ignoring me. She's been respecting the electronet fence across the back yard, even without it being energized, stopping until I lift it and say "come under". But apparently she slipped under it, and we had left both the woodlot and driveway gates unlatched. Before we realized she was gone, a stranger rounded the corner of the barn, calling out to us, "Hey, is this your dog? She was at __ & ___ [5 blocks away]." She seemed totally unabashed...she had made a new friend. "Nice dog," he says.<br />
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Rolling my eyes. Restraining my temper. Recalling the most memorable lesson from the AKC Puppy Kindergarten class: If you leave the puppy in the living room, and it chews up the couch, roll up a news paper and hit your self over the head with it, saying sternly, "Don't leave the puppy with the couch! Don't leave the puppy with the couch!" Right. And don't take your eye off the Border Collie for an instant. Ever.<br />
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But there were many high points, too. This morning, we reviewed yesterday's progress and added one more command: "Leave it." With her in a "Down" "Stay", I would place the tennis ball a couple feet away from her and say "Leave it." She was pretty good at waiting until I said "Pick it up" and "Drop it in my hand." Later in the wood lot, when I was moving chunks of firewood, I asked her to pick up the small ones and put them on the woodpile. She actually seemed to understand...and even left them on the woodpile.<br />
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***<br />
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Later, we decided to merge the two groups of sheep and see what would happen. It's that time at the end of breeding when we try to reintegrate all the little breeding groups into one or two larger groups, to minimize chores. With 3 official breeding rams this season, as well as a couple intact male market lambs, it can be tricky. Rams will often try to kill each other.<br />
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Tuesday, we put the two younger breeding rams (White Crow, 9 months, and Patchface, a year and 9 months) together with the market lambs (i.e., two smaller ram lambs plus some ewe lambs). There was some pushing and ramming between Crow and Patchface, but they seemed to settle down pretty quickly. We ran all the mature ewes into the pen with Braithe, our senior ram.<br />
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My goal is to start Sookie working with the market lambs, since they're smaller and much less assertive than the big ewes and rams. I thought maybe we could work them with Patchface and Crow in the group, but Patchface seemed pretty assertive towards the dog. So...could we actually get Braithe, Patchface, and Crow--500+ lbs. of testosterone-infused muscle--to peacefully coexist in the same pen?<br />
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I took Sookie into the Green Barn Pen on the long leash, and drove the young rams and market lambs into the barn with her in tow. She seemed confused, and distracted by all that tempting manure, but she showed some interest in the sheep as well. At one point, one of the rams broke away from the flock and ted back behind me. I called out "Look!" and she actually did! We went after him (and the other one that followed him) and got them back without the rest of the group turning back, too. Then, to the cry of "Put 'em in the barn!" Sookie and I were able to walk the group into the barn. A good beginning.<br />
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Then we went to drive Braithe and the ewes over from the pen on the other side of the back yard. First we rounded up a few ewes that hadn't come to meet us at the gate. Sookie paid attention well, and seemed to be more interested than with the lambs. When we got them gathered at the gate, M. opened the gate and they poured out into the broad grassy lane. Of course they were more interested in eating grass than in going to the barn...but as Sookie and I moved behind them, they quickly changed their minds. Except for a couple older ones, who looped back behind us. I said "Look back!" and turned after them, and--Sookie looked and went the right direction to run them back to the rest of the flock! Then everyone ran to the barn pen.<br />
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The barn pen has a particularly nice bale of hay in it at the moment, and Braithe didn't even blink an eye at all the rams in the barn. So, I let the young rams and market lambs out with the rest of the group. There was some sniffing and chasing, but no significant ramming. Braithe spent most of his first couple for penned with other rams, and he and Patchface were penned together ever since his return to the farm last spring; I hoped he would have fond memories of this. We were working nearby, so we kept an eye on them in case violence erupted, but eating seemed to be everyone's top priority. In a few days we'll sort out the lambs, and have a breeding group and a working group.<br />
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***<br />
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The end of the working day should have been another session with the tennis ball, but alas, we could not find it. The second one had disappeared a few days earlier. Are the coyotes playing with them and carrying them off? It's a mystery. Sookie looked and looked, and so did I. Disappointing. We went home to dinner and a quiet evening.<br />
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As I knitted with Sookie curled in my lap, I pondered the dilemma of the missing ball. We'll have a friend's dog as a house guest starting tomorrow morning, so getting in a good romp before meeting the very bouncy Coby seemed important, not to mention continuing to build on our recent training work. But every time I thought about going to a store 10 days before Christmas, I winced. Eventually, I thought of Luna (Toss's daughter) and her person B. Maybe they had spares?<br />
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A phone call and a few minutes later, we were on Luna's doorstep. Luna was her grumpy self about there being another dog, but Sookie displayed excellent manners and turned away with quiet dignity whenever Luna showed her teeth. Sookie entirely ignored the cats, but managed to slip through the cat door to the cat food not once but twice! I didn't want to get her too wound up chasing balls to show off her moves, so I took the risk of testing her on her newest sequence of commands in "public". Like clockwork, on command, she laid down, I placed the ball on the floor nearby, she "leaved it", and on command she picked it up and dropped it in my cupped hands!<br />
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Now I'm wondering, can I teach her to fetch tools for me when I'm working? Will she be able to tell the difference between phillips and flathead screwdrivers?<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-16285060062163872622012-12-13T21:42:00.000-05:002012-12-13T21:42:14.606-05:00Triple TriumphThis training of Sookie is a slow unfolding--significant progress each day, but it's only visible if I look really closely. The reminders applies to all of my life, especially to all my relationship: be in the moment, pay attention, expect perfection, look for the successes and not the failures.<br />
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She still runs away and doesn't seem to hear me, if she has slipped out of the house yard fence without the leash, or if she is intent on tracking some enticing smell on the way to the romping ground. I need to bite my tongue rather than fruitlessly call again and again. If she doesn't want to give me her attention, when she is off-leash, there is no way I can get it. I can only trust that in time, she will be so completely interested in what I will ask of her next that she will always have a bit of her attention on me, ready for the next adventure. That, and eventually the smells of the farm may seem less compellingly exotic to her city-raised nose.<br />
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I was distracted and aloof at the romping ground this morning. We actually didn't get there until this afternoon, because of a thought-provoking meeting this morning followed by various follow-up calls and emails. I had taken my pruning shears, and let her play on her own while I cut out wild grape vines that are a potential tripping hazard. We tossed the ball a little bit, with her dancing and throwing her head around and rapidly mouthing the ball every time she brought it. She was coming right to me and letting me take it from her mouth, but it was a lot of dodging and grabbing to get it, and my leather gloves saved my hands from a lot of little bruises from accidentally colliding with her teeth and jaws.<br />
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***<br />
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This evening we went out again at dusk. When I let her off the leash, she went out looking for the ball, round and round the Hugelkulture piles, but couldn't find it. It's hard to see in the clumpy grass in the twilight. I wandered around looking, too. When I found it, I called her to me, and she eventually came. I pointed at the ball with my outstretched arm and pointing finger, saying "Look!" She would look deep into my eyes, tongue hanging out, trying to discern what I wanted. "Look!" I would point again. Her gaze on my face was unwavering, 100% Border Collie intensity.<br />
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We've done this before, many times, when I'm trying to show her a lost ball that I found. I usually start 5 or 6 feet from the ball, then gradually get closer until my finger is nearly touching the ball, repeating the command while looking at the ball myself. I lock eyes with her and then deliberately shift my line of sight to the ball, hoping she'll follow. I have never gotten her to pay attention to my hand, unless to paw at it and examine it.<br />
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But this evening, when I got within a couple feet of the ball, she shifted her gaze to my hand, and instantly pounced on the ball. Success! We did it a couple more times through the evening, and I could tell she had finally begun to grasp the concept of looking where I was pointed/looking, instead of at my face.<br />
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This seems trivial, but in working sheep it's critical. If she's sent out to gather the flock, and can't find them, I might need to direct her towards them by pointing them out and saying "look!", if verbal left/right commands aren't working to direct her towards them. And if she leaves one behind when gathering the flock, I'll need to tell her to "Look back" so she can return for the straggler.<br />
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That seems like a small difference in commands--"Look" and "Look back". Someone who has struggled to convey the simple concept of "sit" to a mere ordinary dog might wonder whether a dog could tell the difference between the two. Well, my old Toss not only knew these very similar-sounding commands, she understood "here" (i.e., come here) and "here here!" (pay attention to something else over this way) as totally different commands.<br />
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These similar commands underscore the vital importance of the trainer being consistent, especially in the beginning as the dog and handler get to know and understand one another, or when introducing new commands and concepts. In many ways, training Sookie is all about training myself. I must be very consistent in my use of words and gestures if I'm to succeed in communicating with her.<br />
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Another crucial aspect of the "look!" command is that it is a step in breaking her preoccupation with looking directly at me for commands. This is often an artifact of conventional obedience training, where the emphasis is on having the dog's visual attention on you at all times, as it awaits commands...unlike in a herding situation where the dog must keep its eyes on the sheep to control them, and only listen to the handler.<br />
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***<br />
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Once we found the ball, I just sat in one place and let her bring it to me. No gloves this evening (it was a very nice afternoon, still pleasant at dusk without being totally bundled up), so it wasn't long before my fingers were cringing from crashing into her teeth as she mouthed the ball and tossed her head each time she brought it back. OK, time for the next level. Now she needs to PLACE the ball in my cupped hands, instead of flirting with me and making me take it from her. "Drop it in my hands" I tell her, over and over, as she dances around me. Later we'll work on the all-important non-specific "drop it"--usually meaning "put down that disgusting dead thing you found before you get one step close to me!"<br />
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Total attention now, and total patience. I need to respond lightning quick when she releases the ball, to close my hands on it just when it is loose in her mouth. And I need to NOT take the ball unless she releases it. I begin by using a lighter and lighter touch to take the ball from her, until I'm not grabbing it enough to get it away from her. She WANTS me to throw the ball, so she is invested in this. How can she get me to throw the ball? I have to make this segue gradually enough that she doesn't lose interest, I have to throw the ball now and then, we have to succeed. And I have to make a big deal out of each success, however small.<br />
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As my touch lightens, as we succeed a few times, as the edge wears off her energy at bit from chasing and bringing back the ball, suddenly I can see that she GETS it--she understands. She's still dancing and tossing and chomping and generally being a moving target--but if my hands are cupped in the right place at the right time, the ball is somehow released into them, falling just fraction of an inch. YAY! YOU DID IT! GOOD DOG! and she is petted lavishly before the ball is thrown again. Suddenly she's releasing the ball into my hand with less and less dancing, and dropping it from higher (measured in fractions of an inch, still). What a great feeling!<br />
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***<br />
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Of course, throughout this process, there are many times when the ball is dutifully dropped, but it lands on the ground instead of in my hands. I could have used this to work on "drop it", but thought that would confuse the issue. Instead, we took advantage of the situation to also work on "pick it up", which she also had figured out by the end of the session. Not that she's graceful, reliable, prompt, or accurate, but she knows what I mean. We have communicated: we have "created a shared meaning", in the words of my college communication class many years ago. The rest will come with practice (another word for "play").<br />
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So, this evening, we "got" three new important concepts/commands in one session. Considering that a week ago, she wouldn't even bring the ball back to me, I'm pretty amazed at the rate of progress we've made.<br />
<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-80357355339823643492012-12-11T21:29:00.000-05:002012-12-11T21:29:01.969-05:00Dog TiredEvery day is full and busy, more than ever, with Sookie in the picture.<br />
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We go to the "romping pen" every morning and evening for a 15-30 minute session that is play/exercise mixed with training. Additional training happens on the way there and back, and really whenever she's with me and whatever we do. It is mentally exhausting for me, after awhile, even though it's very rewarding for both of us.<br />
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She is an amazingly intelligent dog and a quick learner. I joked to Dad last night that after all these years, I would have to learn calculus. "Whatever for?" he asked. "Because I'm going to run out of things to teach this dog in a few years, and I may have to teach her calculus."<br />
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When I met Sookie, she and her owner and his other BC, Lucy, were playing with a tennis ball. The rules were: A. throws the ball. If Lucy catches it, it's Lucy's ball to dance around with and dare everyone else to try to get. If Sookie catches it, it's Lucy's ball to...and Sookie would tag after, run circles around Lucy, etc. A common dynamic between an older dog and a younger dog.<br />
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In solo play, this amounted to Sookie playing keep-away with me. Eventually she would bring the ball somewhere near me, and I would manage to snag it out from under her nose at some point to throw it again...or pick it up while she was distracted with the Hugelkulture pile.<br />
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When she had the ball, she would lie down "on command" at a distance IF she were already stopped and just standing there, and was ready to lie down. But when she was running, there was no stopping her. Ever. She would eventually honor a "come here" command, and then lie down (on command) at my feet with much ado.<br />
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This was fun for both of us, to a point, but it all added up to a lot of exercise for me, trying to get the ball back to throw it to exercise her. And it wasn't a very good foundation for her eventual work with sheep. Before she can go in with the sheep, she needs to lie down instantly on command, no matter where she is. And she needs to "come" when called. Without these two basics, I would have no control at all with her off-leash in with the sheep.<br />
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So. This is how smart this dog is: Sunday morning I got tired of the "keep-away" game. I had figured out that she would "come"and "bring the ball" much better if I were squatting down, so I did that. I wouldn't throw the ball unless she would let me get it without me moving from my squatting position. I did a lot of reaching! By the end of the session, she had figured out to bring me the ball and leave it on the ground near me. If it was too far, I would fruitlessly reach, and she would eventually pick it up and put it closer to me.<br />
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Sunday afternoon, she clearly remembered this new rule: if she wants the ball thrown, she has to bring the ball to me. After squatting a few times, I stood up, and she had to bring the ball where I could reach it from standing up. Again, lots of reaching! But she figured that out, and was "coming" pretty reliably even when I was standing.<br />
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Monday morning, I made her "hand" me the ball without me reaching down to the ground. She was doing great by the end of the session...though an on-looker would see something like the blur of a hummingbird at a feeder, as she dances back and forth around my legs darting her muzzle with the ball between my hands, mostly too fast for me to grab the ball. When I do manage to get my hands on the ball, she releases it to me instantly...much better than Toss ever did. I would have to activate pressure points on Toss's jaws to get her to release a ball, until she learned that the hand coming under her chin meant "drop". She never honored the word.<br />
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This evening, we started working on getting her to drop the ball into my hands. Didn't quite get there, but we were both tired from working sheep and having a lot of visitors today.<br />
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Sookie's "come" has vastly improved during these past couple days, too. She hurls herself at me like a freight train, often running a tight loop or two around me in her enthusiasm before stopping at my feet. I am trying to introduce the concept of "easy" (a slow, controlled walking pace), but it is going to take some practice! Something we work on at the end of a lesson, when that raw energy has worn down a little.<br />
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Meanwhile, during these same sessions we worked on "down" wherever she was, especially trying to get her to drop instantly in the middle of a "come". She's made rapid progress, and as of today will do an instant drop mid-run off-leash while we are walking out to the "romping ground". Very impressive!<br />
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Now that she is better at "come", as well as being familiar with staying on the garden lanes, she can drag her lead or be entirely off-lead a lot more once we are behind the protective gates of the farm. I still don't trust her not to go explore the neighborhood, after she led me on a 20 minute romp through the neighborhood in my sock feet with no cell phone on her third day here. But little by little, she is learning that her life is fun, safe, and interesting if she hangs out with me and does what I ask.<br />
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Tonight, there is no trouble with paws interrupting me while I write. We went to the "romping ground" 3 times today, plus she watched as we moved and worked sheep for several hours. By the end of the day, when I went back out to do one more sheep chore, she opted to stay in her kennel in the house instead of going out with me. I was surprised, but honored her choice. As I write this, she is sound asleep flopped on her side on a folded blanket under the desk. Pooped pup!<br />
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I'm pooped, too. Not just physically, but also mentally. This level of training takes a lot of concentration and self-discipline.<br />
<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-19231833448479208522012-12-07T12:14:00.001-05:002012-12-07T12:14:23.348-05:00Drink Your Dried FruitLife is not all about dogs, although sometimes the dog seems to think so. Sometimes it is about warming up and refueling after a long romp/training session on a cool winter morning. And that, of course, means a hot cup of tea...and a little something.<br />
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I love dried fruit, but it's so easy to eat a lot. And with the amazing home-dried locally grown fruit that Mom makes for the whole extended family, there is a limited supply. And dried fruit stuck to your teeth is not a whole lot healthier than candy stuck to them.<br />
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On my Canadian adventure, I was given a gift of uniquely Canadian tea. It was composed of dried Saskatoon berries, dried blueberries, etc.: all real chunks of fruit. You put a couple teaspoons in a pot, poured on boiling water, stuck it under a cozy for awhile, and presto! Canada summer in a cup! Add a little cream, and it was like ice cream only warm!<br />
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Lately I realized I could do the same thing with Mom's dried fruit. I still use a tea bag, but then select a few pieces of complementary flavored dried fruit, and put the big chunks in before pouring the water. When I get to the bottom of the cup of fruity tea, the fruit chunks are delightfully soft and warm to scoop up with the spoon. I get the most enjoyment possible out of a few pieces, and nothing stuck to my teeth.<br />
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My winter tea corner now occupies the whole end of the kitchen table, double decker: electric tea kettle, mugs, boxes and bags of tea, tea strainers, homegrown honey (not needed with bit of homegrown stevia or a slice of dried pear) and jars of Mom's dried fruit. Also a jar of candied ginger, because one of Mom's favorite "teas" is just a slice of candied ginger in a cup of hot water. Refreshing and warming.<br />
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In the refrigerator, there are more tea fixin's: jars of jam...many flavors, but especially strawberry. Somewhere when I was a child we read about "Russian tea"--plain black tea with a spoonful of strawberry jam mixed in. Also cream or half-and-half.<br />
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My current favorite combo is dried home-grown figs in a cup of peach-flavored herbal tea, with a little half-and-half. Hopefully next year we will get a supply of frozen sheep milk/sheep cream laid by, for even more luxurious homegrown winter tea.Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-68535877922348422462012-12-03T01:45:00.000-05:002012-12-03T02:10:59.838-05:00Basic Training<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_OQd34PfXgucEjvTPcJsgQBncZ1e2kXKgIPmn2rEEBBqGWW3_i3FHkogJvulA4soMg_crlGt_wqkpu9NF6ma_cY-6OwpZH-X84mJC-6RuCn1KQYtCAqZPA5pWmdwj-7bI2TM1VzJusU/s1600/IMG_3404.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjV_OQd34PfXgucEjvTPcJsgQBncZ1e2kXKgIPmn2rEEBBqGWW3_i3FHkogJvulA4soMg_crlGt_wqkpu9NF6ma_cY-6OwpZH-X84mJC-6RuCn1KQYtCAqZPA5pWmdwj-7bI2TM1VzJusU/s320/IMG_3404.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Meeting Patchface, Penny and Jenny.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Totally airborne! This great shot was just random chance...there are more photos of just the grass, because she was out of the frame before the camera and I could respond!</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sookie's toybox...the Hugelkulture pile and waste wool composting area.<br />
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I remembered the camera this morning when we went out for our morning romp/field training session in the East Margin Pen. She is a much easier dog to photograph than any of my other Border Collies, who were/are all camera shy. She's a bit of a ham, but mostly she's like this whether the camera is on her or not.<br />
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She continues to amaze me with her ability to learn. The gate/door thing (wait/come through) is coming along nicely, and we're already doing some off-leash work with it at the front door. I try hard to be totally random about it--sometimes I step through and close the door in her face, sometimes I send her through before I go through, all different variations so she learns to listen for the command and not for a particular gesture, time, or routine.<br />
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She is a very "footy" dog, with several related habits that I'm trying to change. One is that she is constantly trying to check out the dishes in the kitchen sink, the crumbs on the dining table, etc.--putting her feet up and of course the head follows, with that slim nose reaching out as far as possible. Another is that when I am working at the computer, she frequently paws at me, puts her feet on the chair next to me, etc. She also puts her feet up on the door sometimes when we're approaching it, and sometimes puts her feet up or paws at me when she comes to me.<br />
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Most of these behaviors are relatively inconsequential now. But any day--I hope!--we will have wet weather again, and then those sweet spotted paws will be muddy/manurey. It won't be so cute then!<br />
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I don't like animals around my food, so cats AND dogs are not allowed on my tables or counters. Discouraging the habit of cleaning up the dishes after me is a challenge, because she usually does it when I'm not in the room. Sometimes I hear tell-tale sounds, and can rush in and reproach her. She clearly knows she isn't supposed to do this! But mostly, I need make sure there isn't a food reward for her searching. The butter dish and crackers that I like to keep on the table during chili season are now in a heavy covered casserole dish, I clear the dishes and food off the table as soon as I get up, and brush off the crumbs. So it looks like once again a dog will teach me to become a better housekeeper! Toss taught me to make my bed...because when the Border Collie comes in from the sheep pens on a muddy day, the bed best be all made up if you want to sleep in clean sheets. A huge part of training a Border Collie is training oneself. That is one reason I've waited so long after Toss's death...wanting to be sure I was ready to retrain myself.<br />
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The relentless pawing at me while I'm at the computer has really bugged me, so much that last night I finally put her in her crate so that I could get anything done. It's important that I do this BEFORE I'm irritated with her, so she doesn't associate the crate with punishment. But I really don't want to have to lock her up to work; I like petting her head (at my initiative, not at her demand) while I'm waiting for the stupid little spinning beach ball on my Mac. What to do?<br />
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I had an insight today: I'm rewarding her with attention (what she wants, because the computer is getting it) by brushing away her paws each time she puts them up. It becomes a game, like the "Slap Hands" game Dad used to play with us when we were kids. So today, I've disciplined myself to instantly get up and go do something else--even just walk in a circle around the room--while studiously ignoring her, the moment that paw comes up. Also, I try to remember what she wants--attention and praise--and give it to her when she is respecting my desire to focus on the computer.<br />
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The first few computer sessions throughout the day, I didn't get much done on the computer, but I did get a lot of exercise. This evening has been a major improvement. For awhile, she went and lay in the crate on her own accord. Now she is laying quietly at my feet. She's also motivated me to get up and finish reupholstering the dining chairs, improve the barricade protecting the cat box, put some linens away, etc. Fortunately I'm a bit ADD, and I frequently switch tasks anyhow.</div>
Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-31845091825175748802012-12-02T01:20:00.000-05:002012-12-02T01:22:40.451-05:00A Good First Day<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Today I took Sookie around the main parts of the farm, just getting familiar with her, and letting her learn her way around the farm a bit. I kept her on a long lead, so that she couldn't get into (too much) trouble. That way I wouldn't have to correct her very much, we could put off some unhappy lessons like the electric fences, and we could just focus on bonding and trust building, along with me assessing her current level of training, inclinations, style, etc., and introducing a few basic commands.<br />
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Sookie is very much a "nose dog". Toss was not...she could be 3 inches from a hidden ball and not find it, and she rarely tracked things with her nose. If she couldn't see it, it didn't exist. I noticed Sookie's nosiness as soon as we headed towards my car, after her previous owner had driven away leaving the two of us in the fenced dog park. As soon as I let her out the gate (on leash, of course!), she made a bee-line to my car. Sort of. Her nose was to the pavement the whole time--she was barely looking at the car. I realized instantly that she was following the scent of her blanket that A.M. had carried over and placed in my back seat, with one corner dragging the ground. I opened the door as she approached it, and she literally followed her nose up and into the back seat without a pause!<br />
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This morning we spent some time out in the East Margin Pen, where there is plenty of room to run, and dog-proof fences that aren't electric. I took the tennis ball with us, but even when I unclipped her lead, she wasn't very interested. Too much to smell!<br />
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Our farm waste disposal area is in that pen, and she took special delight in a composting pile of old wool. Why didn't I think to take my camera? The look on her face was priceless when she came up for air after burrowing in the loose pile, festooned with dreadlocks of various natural colors.<br />
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Penny, Jenny and Patchface came up to stand at the fence and meet her, curious. The ewes stomped a bit, and Sookie barked at them and ran back and forth, but those new smells in the grass were far more enticing. Still, she came back to watch and bark at the sheep several times.<br />
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This off-leash time, in addition to all the on-leash time we spent before and after, gave me a chance to evaluate some of her previous training, and get some ideas for her training program for the next little while. She'll lie down instantly on command at a distance if she's stopped already, and she'll instantly come on command (at a dead run!), but she won't stop running and lie down if I call her and then tell her to lie down. Turning her "lie down" into a full "stop" is an essential foundation for her future herding training.<br />
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A big challenge has been going through doors and gates. In a normal home, it's not a big deal if the dog bolts out as soon as the door is opened, like a racehorse out of a starting gate. But on the farm, I need her to let me make the decision about whether, and when, she is coming through a gate. For safety reasons, this is something I try to teach all "my" dogs, even those that are just guests for a few days: "wait" until I say "come through". This is a very valuable habit because it means the handler's voice, not the physical gate, is the barrier. I can open a gate and get something through it (a sheep, a bucket, a garden cart, etc.), without having the dog in the way, and end up with the dog on whichever side I want. It's also important for the safety of the dog, because some of our gates are springy and can startle a dog by suddenly "biting" them. This can lead to even worse bolting, as the dog becomes afraid of being attacked by the gate, and therefore bolts through as quickly as possible to try to reduce the risk. Of course, this just increases everyone's risk.<br />
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She is such a quick learner! The habit of bolting can be really hard to break, especially with an excited, energetic dog like Sookie. But by the end of the day, with many gate and door experiences as we puttered around at various small tasks on the farm and at home, she had clearly gotten an idea of what I want. In several situations (that I noticed), she actually stopped as we approached an already-open gate, BEFORE I gave the command to "wait". Coming and going out the front door of the house is getting calmer, too.<br />
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How do I teach this? First, I have the dog on the lead close to me as we approach the door. I arrange for the dog to be on the door post side of my body, so that the dog will try to pass between me and the door post instead of between me and the door. I ask the dog to "sit" and "wait", and praise both commands (this builds on commands the dog already knows): "GOOD sit! GOOD wait". I wait for the dog to relax a bit, for the attention to be at least a little diverted from the door. Then I slowly begin to operate the door, reinforcing both commands. If the dog stands up, I cease the "sit" command, and continue repeating and praising the "wait" command. If the dog tries to press towards the door as I open it, I interfere with my outstretched foot blocking her path. If I have to, I close the door again and walk the dog off a couple steps, starting over with the "sit" and "wait". Eventually, I manage to get the situation set up to where the door is open, and the dog is standing or sitting near it, without struggling to get out...hopefully paying attention to me, and not the door or whatever is beyond. My foot may or may not still be between the dog and the opening, depending on the level of success we're having. From this position, when things are calm, I give the "come through!" command at the same time I remove my foot and step away from the opening so that the dog has the freedom to step through. Then I myself through after the dog, and praise the dog profusely. I try to keep the leash fairly short but slack) throughout, so that if the dog does rocket through at the last moment, she'll hit the end of the lead and stop, and will be close enough to enjoy her reward of praise and ear scritches.<br />
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This sort of training is, obviously, very time consuming and requires a great deal of patience and attention. But the payoff, long term, is significant. Eventually, like Toss, there will be little need for leash, doors or gates--at least when she is with me. Our mutual bond will control her movements, as she remembers to ask me for instructions at each threshold. As with Toss, over time, our communication with one another will become so refined that the question and answer--"may I go through now?" "yes, please!" will transacted effortlessly, even wordlessly, through the briefest of tones and gestures. It will become part of a grand dance that we do, that incredibly complicated dance I call "farming".<br />
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She is pretty much a poster child for the importance of crate training. She is happy being in the crate, and instantly relaxes once she's there, although she will sometimes make a feeble attempt to avoid my request that she go in it. When she just won't stop pestering me, and I need both hands to type, I'll give her some lovin' and then put her in the crate for awhile so we can both chill a bit. Also, when I've had to be off-farm today, I know that she's been safe and not getting into any trouble, because she's in the crate.<br />
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As you might imagine, she is in the crate now. Otherwise, I would not have gotten this written!<br />
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<br />Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-66613529461955213382012-11-30T23:44:00.000-05:002012-11-30T23:44:07.769-05:00A New Beginning with A New PartnerFor many years, I've shunned any type of match-making service, even the few well-intentioned friends who've offered solutions to my choice to "travel solo" for the past few years. Pre-internet, no matter how lonely I was, I never even looked at the "Personal" ads, let alone wrote one. Especially not across state lines. If I was going to find a perfect partner, destiny/God/random chance was going to have to dump them in my lap; I wasn't going to go looking very hard. Too busy.<br />
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The internet and cell phones vastly increased the ease of long-distance communication, opening up myriad new possibilities for meeting people close and far. But I watched so many friends struggle with the also vastly increased possibilities for disaster, and quickly decided that's not for me.<br />
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It's not that I'm not willing to take risks and try new things; I just look to farming, not relationships, for my gambling fun. Some rewards are worth taking risks for. Some risks are just too horrible to think about. Some odds are just not that good. Farming, yes; blind dates, no way.<br />
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If there's anything life has taught me, it's that every year brings big changes that affect me and others, often in very different ways. Friendships, even partnerships, can melt away like winter snow yielding to a warm March wind. The person I meet one day is not the same person I know a year later. Impermanence has characterized my relationships, whether cohabiting or long distance. Year after year of losses to death, career changes, relationship changes. Year after year of people coming and going at the farm (let alone in my personal life) left me deeply weary, tired of beginning each farming season with a whole new cast of characters.<br />
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Measuring myself now against the yardstick of my past, I've become fairly cynical about relationships in general. I have become more social, yet more solo, as the years go by. I often forget to long for the enduring symbiotic relationship with someone else that I used to think mandatory for my happiness.<br />
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So it was quite improbable that one day in early October I would be sitting at my computer and have the name of a rather obscure match-making service come to mind. Even more improbable that I would look it up and go to the web site. But I did. God only knew why.<br />
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A profile immediately caught my eye. The next step, of course, was to write my own profile and send it in for consideration as a possible match. At least a sort of a change of pace from filling out job applications. Into the wee hours of the morning, I typed away, answering the questionnaire, providing references, so many details to think about, so much soul searching.<br />
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I sat back in mild shock when I realized that I had pressed "send". Commitment...if not to a particular relationship, at least to the idea that I could consider another relationship. Ack! What was I thinking? God only knew!<br />
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The same night, others far away were busy at their screens. Within a few days, I received word that the face that had caught my eye initially had caught someone else's first. I was surprised to feel a little pang of disappointment. I hadn't been hoping for anything, remember?<br />
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But the day I sent in my profile for approval, someone else far away sent one in, also. The person processing the profiles decided to skip the formalities, and put us in touch with one another directly. There ensued a flurry of emails: questions, answers, stories, photos. Fear and hope, doubt and elation swirled inside me. Whatever had I been thinking to start down this road? It was definitely a slippery slope...and a long one: from Lawrence, KS to Springfield, MO.<br />
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Photos. Not for decades have I envisioned myself teaming up with a redhead with flashy sunglitzing. Yes, there was one major crush decades ago...SO not my type now! But by the time I saw the photo, I'd already been captivated by the text, and I mentally steeled my will to ignore the trendy look of this total stranger. Other things were much more important than that intriguing face--grinning from ear to ear, laughing eyes brimming over with golden glints.<br />
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Our work and travel schedules made it difficult to find a time to meet in person. Also I was adamant that I needed to finish the major interior renovations on my little home before gallivanting off to the next state to turn my entire life on its ear.<br />
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Then for a long time, the internet was silent, and I thought perhaps the opportunity to partner with this intriguing stranger had slipped away from me after all. I was busy in the ways October is always busy at the farm, riding the emotional and physical roller coaster of early freezing weather interspersed with beautiful weather, taking sheep to slaughter, picking green tomatoes the night of the first freeze, farm help bailing out at the most inopportune time, a million things to do to make the most of autumn and prepare for winter.<br />
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The matchmaker emailed to ask if I'd heard anything for awhile; she hadn't, either. We presumed that someone else more local had appeared on the scene, and jogged off into the sunset with that amazing athletic redhead. I promised myself a good little self-indulgent wallow in loneliness, self-pity and cynicism as soon as I had gotten the upper hand on the major rebuilding of the kitchen floor. There is nothing like washing dishes in the bathroom sink to remind oneself that sometimes "traveling solo" is actually a very good thing.<br />
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But finally the floor was done, and out of the blue, an email came once again, as if weeks of silence had not passed. We decided to meet in a park halfway between Lawrence and Springfield: a public place, no one's home turf. Safe. But scary. After all, this stranger would probably be coming home with me, hopefully forever.<br />
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As I drove through the sun-drenched November hills on a impossibly warm, glorious afternoon, I thought about the millions of arranged marriages of the past millenia, and today in other corners of the globe. I thought about mail-order brides who left everything they knew to start a new life in a strange place, with strangers in unfamiliar lands. What would it be like for this stranger I was about to meet? Basic compatibility had been ascertained, a mutuality of goals--but there was no way to gage whether we would actually like each other. Can I learn to love a stranger, when my heart's been broken so many times? Can they love me? Can we live and work together if we end up not loving each other as much as in the fairy tales? What HAD I been thinking to Google that match-making service?<br />
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Pulling the car into the parking lot, seeing the truck parked off to the side, goodness, it's really happening! Fumbling with the seat belt, watching at a distance, being watched. I want to move faster, I want to move slower, now hands are reaching out to clasp across a diminishing distance in a vacant field, smiling eyes laughing in the sunlight.... I had meant to bring the camera to capture this moment forever, but perhaps it is too personal for that.<br />
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Clearly, a Power Greater than Myself has once again worked in mysterious ways, bringing us together. How else could we each have decided on the same night to contact the same match-maker? And how else could it ever have worked?<br />
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Home now, together, elated and exhausted. This will be fine, for all of us. We stand at the beginning of a long adventure, Sookie and me.<br />
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Thank you, Mo-Kan Border Collie Rescue, for playing matchmaker. Thank you, A.M., for loving this beautiful dog enough to realize she needs a demanding job on a sheep farm instead of endless days off in a back yard. Thank you, God, for guiding us all.Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-32028282049973884522012-07-22T01:09:00.001-04:002012-07-22T01:09:08.831-04:00Why Not Sell and Go?<i>I'm going through and finishing off some half-finished blog entries from the past couple years. This was written in 2010.</i><br />
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This essay belongs to both blogs, <i>The Rainbow Covering</i> and <i>Reports from the Farm. </i>My life belongs to both worlds, the natural world of the farm, and the spiritual world of my Christian journey. But wait--the farm is God's creation; that's spiritual...and my Christian journey is so deeply fed and supported by the practical day-in, day-out work of the farm. The "two" worlds are inseparable.<br />
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Today, for the umpteenth time, someone suggested "the solution" to "my problem". </div>
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"The problem", as usual, being that I am a) very land-poor at the moment and b) even more time-poor...a) in spite of and b) because of the fact that I am farming as well as working a full-time job off-farm, which is obviously too much for one person.</div>
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"The solution" usually begins with the person asking, "Look, I know it's none of my business, but how much equity do you have in this place? You're never going to win this [insert current regulatory/local politics struggle]; why don't you just sell the whole thing and buy a place in [insert name of more rural county that doesn't have such restrictive zoning regulations], and then you can live a nice, sane, peaceful life for a change?"</div>
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I really do try to keep an open mind. When folks make this suggestion, I don't necessarily try to rationalize my decision to stay and keep struggling to them (after all, it's my decision and my life; if they don't "get it" now they probably never will). But I do try to honestly, once again, put all the issues, assets, and liabilities on the table and give them a good looking-over.</div>
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Today it was one of my Old German Baptist acquaintances that suggested this, and for some reason that gave me some new insights.</div>
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He had offered to drop by and share his construction wisdom on the proposed remodeling project at 501 North St., the farm's "little brown house". We spent the better part of an hour going over the plans and fleshing out some of the details, but I could tell he was thinking grave thoughts about the whole thing.</div>
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"Why not just keep the big house, and sell this? Or better yet, sell the whole thing and move to Franklin County." My first response was to tell him what really special soil we have here...I often quip "I'd move to ____, but I just can't figure out how to take my soil and groundwater with me." Then I told him about my rock-solid understanding that God put me here to serve him in a way like Noah--building the farm as an ark for a multitude of species, safe from the pesticide-poisoned world out there.</div>
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The mention of Franklin county brought an odd sense of dissonance as I pondered his words. Mostly folks recommend I sell out and move to Leavenworth County, just north of the farm. Then I realized: he was suggesting his community, not mine. Many of the Old German Baptists live in Franklin County, south of Douglas county.</div>
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And that lead me to reflect on an increasingly real consideration for sticking it out and staying here: Here is where my people are.</div>
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Here is where my people are. And that is my greatest treasure.</div>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-46121526098483208052012-07-22T01:04:00.000-04:002012-07-22T01:13:27.440-04:00Sustainable Farming in a Warm Winter<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Tahoma; font-size: 13px;"></span><br />
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<i>This post was written in early winter, 2012, and only now finished.</i><br />
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Good article on an important topic: http://grist.org/sustainable-farming/why-farms-want-cold-winters/</div>
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Long, sustained cold weather helps kill grasshopper eggs in the soil, as well as other types of insect eggs. But there are many countervailing forces at work; humidity encourages a killing fungus among grasshoppers, so a bumper crop of nymphs in the spring may fizzle in a hot, humid June before doing much damage. Likewise, we could constantly till the soil during a mild winter like this, to expose as many grasshopper eggs as possible to the killing cold of a sharp winter night, even if the days are mild. But that would dry out the soil, and expose it to erosion by the wind, and disturb the beneficial creatures sleeping beneath the surface, like the salamander we found a couple years ago and didn't kill because we weren't using a power tiller.<div style="text-indent: 0px !important;">
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My choice to avoid even "certified organic" tampering with "God and Mother Nature" is based on the premise that if we grow a wide variety of stuff, some things will do well in any given year, even if some fail. I believe that true "sustainability" is found not in heroic measures to save a particular planting of a particular crop, but rather to use the least possible effort/inputs to raise the most we can of something, anything, everything. With the diversity of livestock and veggies, sheep eat weeds (if that's all we grow) and chickens eat grasshoppers (more profit there), so even total crop failure produces something. <br />
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"Least effort" means avoiding many conventional and organic practices: irrigation (unless we need wet soil to harvest carrots, for example), raised beds, double digging, biodynamic compost, pest control, fancy packaging, etc.--basically, anything that takes extra human or industrial energy. It means putting seeds or plants in the ground so that they grow naturally, and harvesting and marketing with a minimum of cosmetic "fuss" (trimming, bunching, and pre-packaging). We do rinse the dirt off our veggies, because we want to keep our dirt on the farm, and not transmit weed seeds off-farm. We also rinse veggies to remove "field heat" and slow the metabolism so that things store better. </div>
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We also tend to be sparing about "forcing the season" for most crops, despite our selective use of row covers and the high tunnel. Forced plants are not healthy, happy plants. Tomatoes planted outside from seed bear nearly as early as those started early in a greenhouse, grown too long in the pot, and set out in soil colder than they like. There is usually little return for extraordinary effort to keep tomato plants from freezing in the fall...the quality of fruit is declining rapidly as the day length shortens, and it's better to just pick all the green fruit and ripen indoors or make green tomato pickles. The plants we cover are ones that like the cold, and the covers keep the tips from frost-biting so that quality is better. We also cover crops for practical handling reasons, like keeping the silver maple and elm seeds and autumn leaves from ending up in your salad without tedious hand-sorting as we harvest.</div>
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Doing less work for each crop means we can do more work on other things...and a mild winter also gives us time to catch up on things we usually struggle to squeeze in during the growing season. We are glad for a mild winter this year, for having time to lay down wood chips on muddy paths, to begin clearing and mulching long-fallowed garden beds that will be put back in cultivation this year, to sort and repair tools and generally get ready for the coming season. </div>
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There is an emotional level to sustainability, as well as practical--our inner energy, as well as physical energy, should be conserved and used wisely. A great deal of that has to do with reducing occasions for resentment, frustration, disappointment, and anger that we often feel when things don't go well. A key to this is remembering that "expectations are pre-meditated resentments". If we farm with hopes instead of expectations, leaving room for different outcomes than we are hoping for, then it can be easier to accept gracefully that things have not worked out as we foresaw. </div>
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Farming IS "a slot machine, not a Coke machine". If we expect that we will get X volume of crop from planting Y volume of seed, we are sure to be stressed. Instead, we plant seeds (mainly for things that have grown well in the past under these circumstances) and offer basic amenities (superior soil, natural rain water, attempts at weed control, a blanketing mulch to moderate extremes), and have faith that something will come of those modest efforts. It usually does. With wonder, we watch new sprouts emerge from the ground. With anticipation, we watch luscious leaves unfurl into succulent salad greens. With gratitude, we reap a harvest that has grown mainly without any effort on our part. The wonder is that it happens season after season, year after year, way more reliable than a slot machine...except for those few rare years that just go wrong. Even then, likely something went right or got done...and next year will be different.</div>
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One of the hardest things for beginning farmers is to have faith in this process of trusting that on the whole, things will go right and a crop will result. And to let go of the mostly erroneous notion that if we intervene with every little thing that seems to be going wrong, we will turn the course of things in a significant way. It's easy to overlook the energy--physical and emotional--that can be invested in watering to "save a crop" during a drought season when no water can be enough, compared to the small investment in simply making a second planting, mulched well, so that hopefully one or the other will be at the right stage to produce despite the drought, and perhaps both will bear full fruit after all, doubling the crop.</div>
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</span>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-47148074573629622492012-07-22T01:01:00.001-04:002012-07-22T01:01:35.039-04:00Mabel and the Hog--a Slaughterhouse ExperienceTime is flying so quickly! There have been so many wonderful things going on, so many huge things going on, so many intense and uncertain things going on, that it is hard to stop long enough to write them down.<br />
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What happened today was so amazing that it demands my full attention, documented by recording the experience in this post.<br />
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It was a pretty routine take-cull-ewes-to-the-processing-plant day. We got everything ready last night, loaded them at Oh-Dark-Thirty (a.k.a. 5 a.m.), remembered to check the gas gage and take appropriate action, and chugged down the road to Bowsers Meat Processing.<br />
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There was a short wait while they did the two hogs in line before us, starting the morning off at a leisurely pace. As we whiled away the time on the back loading dock, another batch of hogs came in. The folks wandered over to talk to us after they unloaded--unexpected until we realized they are fellow Farmer's Market vendors. We rarely see one another except across the lot or on the way to the port-a-potty on Saturday mornings, so it was nice to exchange a few words.<br />
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When we went back inside, they were skinning our first ewe. That left Mabel alone in the kill pen, but the market vendor's hogs were in the pen right beside her. She was a little anxious about being the only sheep (just as she is at home if she is separated from the flock for some reason), and "bahhed" a couple half-hearted protests. We spoke soothingly to her from across the room, while focusing mostly on the skinning operation with the other ewe. Seeing the carcasses is important to us, because only without the skin can we really fully understand the body condition of our animals...wool hides a lot of fat and/or bones.<br />
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I glanced over at Mabel, and saw that she had turned to face the hogs. In fact, she had stuck her head through the bars of the kill pen, into the hog pen. Then I saw the hog! He moved over and touched noses with her. I expected her to pull away, because hogs can be pretty predatory with non-hog animals that they perceive as "food", and sheep are pretty wary about ANY new animal, even if it's just a sheep they don't know yet (or a friend that's just been sheared).<br />
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But she didn't pull away. Not even when the hog began exploring her face. She held perfectly still, not panicked or afraid, while the hog's wiggly snout moved over her cheek from nose to ear. I was poised to shout an alarm if the hog bit her. I've skinned out hog heads, years ago when I worked for Bowser. They have very sharp omnivores' teeth. In my imagination, the hog suddenly turned into a bloodthirsty monster and ripped poor Mabel's face off. Not so far-fetched when you consider that by this time I'd seen most of Mabel's right ear disappear temporarily into the hog's mouth, only to be released when the hog suddenly became interested in her eye. It worked its mouth around her eye, then moved back to the ear. The only thing that kept me from screaming was the fact that Mabel had not tried to back off or stop the hog's overtures in any way.<br />
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By this time, my co-farmer, BH, had moved to my side. "He's calming her down," he observed. He has an almost uncanny understanding of herd animals sometimes, a real gift. I realized how quiet she had become, after her initial complaints about being flock-less. I watched the hog with a more open mind. Maybe he wasn't sizing up a meal, after all.<br />
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I realized that Mabel was relaxed. She was perfectly free to withdraw her head from between the bars and move a long way from the hogs. But she didn't. She stood perfectly still, eyes soft and not scared, and let the hog's face move alongside hers.<br />
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I realized the hog wasn't smacking his lips and salivating like some fiendish monster. He was gently lipping at Mabel's ear and face, caressing even. He withdrew slightly for a moment, and she stayed in place, apparently waiting for more of his exploration. He resumed after a pause, beginning with sniffing her nose, then lipping at her eye and putting her ear in his mouth. He toyed with the plastic tag in her ear, and I held my breath, worried, that he might grab the tag and pull it out of her ear. But no, he gently released her ear again.<br />
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After several minutes of this, she slowly withdrew her head from between the rails, and calmly waited for the rest of her time.<br />
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Usually, my sheep are afraid of the hogs--in fact, Mabel had NOT wanted to enter the building with the first few hogs in it, even though she had willingly stepped off the truck into the loading pen. It was very strange to see a sheep interact with a hog like this.<br />
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When I shared this novel experience with a friend later, they wondered whether it had changed my attitude about slaughtering my livestock. Now that I had witnessed this "act of compassion", would I have doubts about the ethics and morality of sending my sheep to be slaughtered.<br />
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Well, no. My thoughts on this haven't changed. Because my thoughts on this are very, very secure.<br />
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Mabel did not get to choose the time of her death. Well, I won't either. That means someone else (most likely God or a virus) will be choosing my death, just as I chose hers. Her death could also have been chosen by God or a virus, or a stomach worm, or a coyote. In most of those cases, it would have been much more drawn out and stressful for Mabel.<br />
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The death I chose for Mabel was mercifully quick, as always. A little stress from unfamiliar surroundings...probably akin to my experience of flying to Winnipeg about 7 years ago. A stranger stepping in to offer some unknowable sort of comfort or distraction. And then, in less than the blink of an eye, gone. I am not alone in thinking that I would wish this same death for myself were I suffering from a terminal ailment. Callous? Not the least. Pragmatic: "Natural causes" tend to be slow and full of pain and suffering. As I've said before, the slaughterhouse is the most humane end possible for a sheep life.Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-25556404072024564422012-04-01T09:42:00.002-04:002012-04-01T10:02:10.829-04:00Signs of Summer[ I have not written here for over a year. Farming solo AND renovating AND working full-time off the farm has taken their toll on a lot of things. I think I'm back now.]<div><br /></div><div>Back in late February or early March, I stepped outside one day, and Nature shrieked at me: IT's THE MIDDLE OF APRIL!!!!" Something in the robins' song; some smell in the air; the first mosquito seeking my arm; a hundred little clues added up to only one possible conclusion: Spring was in full tilt, at least a month early.</div><div><br /></div><div>Before that moment, we had been chugging along at the farm feeling very content with the work we were doing, cleaning up several year's worth of neglect. This year, finally, I have enough help and good help at that (another post). In fact, it seemed like we were ahead of the calendar with both training and action. But in that moment, I realized that we were suddenly a month behind.</div><div><br /></div><div>In the past few days, I've seen dragonflies flying, fireflies hatching from their nymphs to light up the night, hot weather plants breaking dormancy. All the spring perennials have bloomed, and we're starting to see irises and soon peonies around town. All the fruit frees bloomed during March, when usually the trees are still bare and some late pruning can be done. The garter snakes have been active for weeks; scarcely a day goes by without seeing one in the garden or pasture. The praying mantis egg cases I'd intended to sell at Farmer's Market (still 2 weeks away) are hatching...next time I'll store them in the fridge. Some growers are harvesting asparagus already, weeks early. Morels, that May delight, are thronging in the woods.</div><div><br /></div><div>Off the farm, I've seen pond turtles sunning, bullfrogs in the slough, herons fishing along the banks. One diligent farmer has his soybeans in, standing several inches tall now.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's wrong. It's scary. What will summer be, if March is in the high 80s? Alternatively, if we get the least frost now, the magnitude of devastation will be unimaginable and will last for years.</div><div><br /></div><div>The losses caused by this unseasonable weather are already mounting. Spring greens are our mainstay at Farmer's Market from April to early June. It's too hot to plant them, plus we're busy putting in hot weather crops now in case summer brings even hotter temperatures and drought. So we're missing an entire growing season this spring. The greens we have are growing too fast for us to harvest, even if we could market them. </div><div><br /></div><div>Traditions are at risk. If peonies normally are the "Memorial Day flower", how barren the graves will be two months from now! My usual birthday treats, roses and asparagus, will have come and gone. Etc.</div><div><br /></div><div>Keeping a record of this unusual season is a good reason for me to start blogging here again.</div>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-38371037533997183242011-03-11T23:47:00.003-05:002011-03-12T00:37:00.790-05:00One Small Step for Pinwheel, and Mankind, and the PlanetAbout 11 years ago, we enrolled 2.3 acres of our approximately 12-acre farm in the USDA's Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) as a Riparian Buffer Strip. Setting aside some adjacent odd corners that weren't eligible for the program gave us a total of about 2.5 A (20% of the farm!) that is "set aside". We receive a modest annual lease payment for maintaining this land by keeping it free of noxious weeds and cedar trees, and by mostly just leaving it alone. We are not even supposed to walk in the same place all the time, but the deer don't know that, and we tend to follow their trails on the rare occasions we traipse around out there. We do sometimes mow a path along the slope that isn't in the CRP proper.<div><br /></div><div>In aerial views (try Google Earth for 1480 N. 1700 Rd., Lawrence, KS 66044), you see a shaggy-looking diagonal band on the west of the pasture, and along the north. It is 150 feet wide: 50 feet we planted to trees that would look beautiful, while providing food for wildlife, and eventually for us, and 100 feet we planted to native Kansas tallgrass prairie grasses and forbs (wildflowers) that would provide excellent habitat for wild creatures of all kinds, while slowing any run-off (and erosion) from our farm into the Maple Grove Tributary to the west, and the unnamed drainage channel to the north. </div><div><br /></div><div>This land was eligible for the CRP program because it had been in row crops--corn and soybeans--when we bought it. On a certain sloping area, in a 100' diameter circle, not even weeds would grow, and the corn would get maybe a foot or two tall, producing nothing. The ruts between rows of corn were as deep as the plants were tall. Old-timers tell us that the 1951 flood left a "sand boil" there--like a sinkhole, but filled with pure sand. Indeed, the soil there is nearly pure sand. No wonder nothing grows.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not even the trees we planted took hold there, but a few species of the tallgrass mix we planted made themselves right at home. Amidst the little prairie of 10' tall Big Bluestem and Indian Grass, there is a circular amphitheatre of Little Bluestem and Sideoats Grama, spanning both the 50' "tree" band and the 100' "grass" band. </div><div><br /></div><div>In another part of the area seeded to grasses--near the south end, the highest ground--the taller grasses have done well, but thousands of elm trees have sprouted into an impenetrable woods.</div><div><br /></div><div>On the low north end, many different tree species that we didn't plant have found their way to the farm by wind and birds: ash, sycamore, ornamental pear, mulberry and cottonwood. The pears are lovely in the spring, provide flowers for bees, and produce lots of tiny, inedible fruit that the birds love in late winter.</div><div><br /></div><div>Our planted trees and shrubs include wild plum, redbud, buffalo currant, burr oak, walnut, and pecan. </div><div><br /></div><div>Periodically, the Farm Service Agency or Conservation Service folks have come out for an inspection. We always have a nice hike, and they have approved what they saw. Our "management plan", as far as I knew, was "natural succession", which means that instead of trying to keep it the same for ever and ever, we would let nature take its course and "evolve" into whatever the land wanted its ecosystem to be (minus noxious weeds).</div><div><br /></div><div>This year heralded a change: satellite imaging good enough that they could sit in the office and "walk around" the farm. I received a satellite photo in the mail with angry red circles: trees in the area that was supposed to be grass. </div><div><br /></div><div>But I thought we were doing "natural succession"????</div><div><br /></div><div>"No, you are not, not in the grassland, only in the tree band," I was told. After all these years, cutting down about an acre of trees would take longer than the April 15 deadline "or we will demand a refund of all payments plus penalties and interest"...even if I didn't have sheep shearing, lambing, spring planting, plumbing, policy work, and a full-time off-farm job.</div><div><br /></div><div>They grudgingly offered that maybe they could change the management plan, if the board approved the change. </div><div><br /></div><div>After a week on pins and needles, I found out today that they approved the change! The trees can live!</div><div><br /></div><div>This is great news for me, just in terms of not having to do the work of cutting them down to avoid a payback I couldn't afford. But it's really much bigger than that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Compared with the original corn/soybeans, or even with the tallgrass, those trees have sequestered a LOT of carbon...meaning that they have taken it out of the atmosphere and stored it in their trunks and roots. CO2 (carbon dioxide) is the "greenhouse gas" that is causing global climate change. Our atmosphere currently has about 388 parts per million (ppm) CO2. Scientists have said for decades, and continue to affirm, that this is TOO MUCH CO2 for life as we know it to continue. We need to get the CO2 level down...down to 350 ppm or below. We need to do this as soon as possible. (for more information see www.350.org.)</div><div><br /></div><div>But how? Well, all the yucky stuff about using less energy in our daily lives, of course. And switching to renewable energy...but not just any renewable. Burning anything releases CO2 into the atmosphere, so though it conserves fossil fuels, burning firewood to heat our homes and ethanol or bio-diesel to run our cars isn't going to solve the problem. Solar and wind--and ironically, nuclear--are good energy alternatives, as well as hydroelectric and geothermal where they can be effectively used.</div><div><br /></div><div>There's a happier, really green side of getting the CO2 levels down, too: trees. We all need to plant lots and lots of trees, and preserve the older trees we have! Trees to reforest lands slashed and burned to produce lumber and increase conventional cropland. Trees to fill vacant lots and odd corners of land, like the slope along the west edge of my land. Trees around our houses and along our streets. </div><div><br /></div><div>Trees do so much more than just capture CO2! The CRP trees have nearly obscured most of the lights and much of the noise from commercial and industrial areas nearby, as well as the highways. Lumber is one way of sequestering carbon...using trees without burning them to release their carbon back to the atmosphere. Trees can also reduce energy needs by cooling our houses and slowing wild winter winds. And they can provide food for us and the rest of creation.</div><div><br /></div><div>I don't know whether the FSA board took all this into account when they decided to let my CRP keep its trees. But these are many of the happy outcomes of their decision. Long live the trees! So that if we're lucky, long live us!</div>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6331107066082935156.post-76635623369183852692011-03-06T03:37:00.003-05:002011-03-06T04:03:15.962-05:00Drowsy Winter, Beginning SpringWinter turns me more nocturnal than usual, and this winter especially since I've put so many late nights in working on the house project. Nary an end in sight there, though much progress has been made...I've resigned to not being "done" before the farming season starts, and continuing to plug along at it while doing all the usual farm stuff as well.<div><br /></div><div>No idea how that will "work". It's not like I have enough time as it is, without lambs and planting and harvesting and Farmer's Market...but I trust that I will figure it out as I go along.</div><div><br /></div><div>Today, though, I've realized that I'm beginning to feel "spring", and that means more energy, more interest in poking around in the dirt, more enthusiasm for getting out there and doing stuff. A dim remembrance grows in the back of my brain...oh, that's why I've been so ineffective and slow at getting stuff done this winter. I've been in the cold-induced stupor of the goldfish at the bottom of the stock tanks: alive, and essentially thriving, but in suspended animation.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, in a few minutes this morning before work, I pulled enough weeds in the high tunnel to direct seed some broccoli and cauliflower transplants, and weeded out a few of the many volunteer Upland Cress and arugula plants. Pesto, anyone? The garlic and regular chives are sprouting, ditto the chard. Lots of Ruby Streaks mustard greens, too.</div><div><br /></div><div>Chard is amazing! The plants in the high tunnel are now 1 1/2 years old...we harvested for 2 seasons last year, and looks like at least one more season this year. Who knows how long they'll keep going? And all this with no irrigation, inside the high tunnel! There are some new plants, too, germinated by the 1/2 inch of rain last fall when we took the high tunnel cover off for a week. </div><div><br /></div><div>Outside, there is kale and mustard and other greens under row covers. The sorrel is sprouting up, and there are fresh green leaves hugging the ground under the dead branches of lemon balm. </div><div><br /></div><div>As I wander, investigating, taking a census of the survivors, I nibble little bits of this and that. The leaves are thick and dense and bursting with flavor, nothing at all like the vegetables in their usual main-season form. I suspect the tiny handful I browsed today had more nutrients than a couple bags of grocery store salad put together. I want to do some research on that, to document that really, even small bits of really intensely healthy plants can make a significant contribution to a balanced diet. </div><div><br /></div><div>So much to study, experiment, learn and do! Full of ideas this year, as always. Track soil temperatures and learn what the parameters are for various weeds, so I can better use them as indicators. Effects of rain and high tunnel on soil temperatures. How to make the high tunnel cover easier to take off and put on (alone). How to capture and re-direct and store the rainwater that runs off the barn and high tunnel so I can grow more in the high tunnel without</div><div>irrigating. How to replicate and manage the micro-climate effect of the barrels of water at the back of the high tunnel.</div><div><br /></div><div>I visited Mom and Dad in Manhattan, KS, recently: like looking in a mirror! They are dreaming and plotting and planning as well, along the lines of integrated tilapia/vegetable production in their high tunnel. So many possibilities!</div>Natalyahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14679714656258328028noreply@blogger.com1