...and a mint for your pillow madam.

It's December 21 and the Barnyard Organics sheep are in their new palace. And what a palace it is!!!
Here's what it looked like, first thing this morning;

Then, with a layer of sawdust from Mark's friend, Jason Gaudet, who runs a business, cutting firewood just down the road.

Finally, the layer of (mint scented*) straw.

And TA DA! Tonite, as the sheep ate their supper!

I wish I could say that moving them from one barn to the next was as easy as posting these pictures, but, not surprisingly, that is not the case. They just didn't like the door we wanted them to use, but after much chasing, tussling, fighting, coaxing and cursing, we managed to drag them all where they needed to go.

Check out my proud carpenters/farmers. Even Wilson, who normally hates the sheep, sheep barn and all things sheep related, didn't scream his face off while we fed them tonight. That has got to be a sign!

*My favorite part of the day (and 'real farmers' will roll their eyes at me here) was when we were bedding out the straw. We had a bad infestation of field mint in our oat crop last year and thus, the straw made from the oats was FULL of mint. As we were fluffing it around, the barn filled up with the scent of mint and I felt for a minute like I worked on housekeeping for the Waldorf, or the Royal York or somewhere that actually still leaves fancy mints on fancy pillows. Only organic sheep get THAT kind of treatment!

Anyway, so that is the big excitement around here lately. The barn is pretty much complete. Just a few little extras to tidy up sometime in the future, but for now, it is so much more than I expected and exactly what I wanted! I can house like 80 ewes in there if I want!!! Time to get on the lamb marketing train! Wooot woot!
I took this last shot as I was leaving the barn tonight and I'm pretty sure that ewe is smiling at me. Like a little, subtle sheep thanks. hahaha!
On a side note, we finally cut our Christmas tree today (the top 8 feet of a 50 foot wonder, and it's PERFECT!), which would have been fine had Mark not decided that the best method to get it home was to tow it behind the four wheeler. If it was 50lbs when we cut it, then it was 300 by the time we got it home. It was completely coated in slush and wet when we landed back in the yard. So it spent most of the day outside, standing up against the house, dripping off, but I'd like to get it up before New Years, so it's laying out in the basement by the cast iron rad doing it's best impression of a tree that might possibly dry off within the next 48 hours. I've got a spot cleared in the living room and a little girl who has been promised a "Chreesmeees tree", so even if I have to use towels as a tree skirt, it's going up!!! (I should mention here, that no matter how wet this tree is, it is a step up from the one last year that we had to pressure wash after it got wrapped up in the tire of the four wheeler when we got stuck in the mud...)

If I don't write again before Christmas, have a good one, enjoy the spirit of the season and take some time to relax and take it all in.
Hope things in your corner of the world are merry and bright!

-Sally

CBC News Story

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/prince-edward-island/story/2009/12/17/pei-loblaw-farmers-appalled-584.html#socialcomments

I'm posting the website of a news story which has grown in the past couple days regarding a donation made to a local food bank by the Weston's of Loblaws (Superstore here in the Maritimes) fame. The story itself is interesting, but it's the pages of comments which really shook me. I am astounded at how many are anti-farmers. I could only read a few pages worth before I had to shut it down in disgust. Galen Weston Sr. finally articulated exactly the attitude that farmers have been dealing with when it comes to large corporations for generations, which is basically, "Too bad, so sad."
Agh, oh I have so much to say about this. I wish I could be as articulate as one of the local farmers here, Ranald MacFarlane, well known for his outspoken opinions. He's also a representative of our region for the Nation Farmers Union, and I think is one of the best educated on the realities of the farming crisis in the area (and doesn't mind sharing it). I would love to know his first reaction upon reading this article. I know that he already refers to The Superstore as "The Satanstore". Since I don't deal with big stores with my products, and don't ever intend to I am a bit disconnected from how it exactly works, but I DO have friends whose farms have shut down in the past couple years, after generations of working as hard as the rest of them. Agriculture is a dismal place sometimes, and the attitude expressed by Weston, and most of the commenters of the article doesn't show a bright light at the end of the tunnel. Does the food crisis concern no one? I guess it's probably like the Copenhagen mentality right now. Let's worry about our current problems and hope that the future figures itself out.

Sorry for the downer dump in my usually light hearted blog. I just cannot believe that there are that many naive people who sincerely believe that a farmer who goes out of business is getting what he deserves for not being able to compete. While Loblaws made $186 million in profits this last quarter.
Hmm..sounds about fair to me!

Ok, ok, soapbox is tired out for the night.

I hope this finds you in better spirits than me!

-Sally

Christmas Came Early in Freetown This Year!

I must have been a very good shepherd this year because Santa has come early and built me a beautiful feed alley for my new sheep barn. I've started with a shot of the old sheep barn and the evidence that I need a bigger barn. All my feed slots are filled and the lambs are eating off the floor. Not a tragedy, but since I'm not quite done building my flock yet, it's only going to get worse, so I put on my best cute face and TA-DA! a new barn for me and my ladies!

Here's my little glow worm showing off the alley mid-build.
The diva never misses an opportunity to pose.



So here is the nearly complete alley. It's high enough off the ground that the sheep don't have to bend down to eat, I'm above them to feed them, but just low enough that Mark doesn't hit his head on the low ceiling. It's going to take some skilled tractor driving to be able to clean out, but according to calculations, is doable. So we'll see! I'm ecstatic! Especially since the estimate was given that the sheep may be in the new barn as early as this week!! Whoohoo!!
We are hoping to be able to finish up this year's tattooing (a job I infamously put off EVERY year until the last possible minute) and do one last garlic juice deworming before moving them. Most of the ewes look really good, but the lambs are not doing as well as they should. The last two that were born were..er...svelte when they were born and never really caught up, so they will be getting a good dose to help them out. I don't remember telling you about the garlic juice when we did it the first time, but I can honestly tell you that it is one of the smelliest jobs I have ever endeavored. We drench (which just means to force feed) a good shot of pure garlic juice and grapeseed oil for each animal and while they get most of it, it is inevitable that some is going to end up on hands, clothes, faces, boots, etc. And we all know how garlic likes to stick around. Ugh. So gotta suck up that job sometime this week!
I shipped my last three ram lambs last week and we decided, for the first time, to keep one for ourselves. I don't tell my customers this as a rule, but I'm not much of a lamb fan really. So we just kept the legs, the loin chops and then got the rest made into sausage. It should be arriving any day now and we will have sausage for sale! I'm hesitant to call it organic however, since I suspect the spices are probably not organic and our last inspector indicated some questions over meat grinders and how they can be thoroughly cleaned between conventional and organic meat and whether they actually are, in a busy butcher shop. So, we have sausage made with certified organic lamb for sale! (It's all about the spin! Good thing I have a degree in Spin Doctoring, care of Mount Allison University!)
For Mark's side of things, he has the tractor and blower in prime condition for the year and had no major incidents on his first snowfall this year. Let's hope that holds out all season. He also just turned 30 on the 11th and we had a little get together to celebrate with some of this friends. It was a great time and I think we relived enough of our youthful past to keep the big round number from getting to him. Carol, Wendell and Martha were nice enough to keep the kids for us that night too, so we had the luxury of sleeping in (although a 7 am wake up probably doesn't count as a sleep in for most people it was like gold for us!)

Christmas preparations continue and now that the bitter cold winds have left us for at least a couple days, the kids can get back outside and help with chores again and the such. It's pretty pathetic when we drive over to the farm to do chores because it's too cold for the kids. The next project is heading to the woods to find a tree. We found a little grove of firs last year, so we'll be going back to that, but it's kind of slim pickin's, so we can't be too picky. I think every tree is the best one every year, so it won't matter. I just like the hunt!
I reminded Mark that we should go when it's mild and he in turn reminded me of last year when we went when it was 'mild' and got bogged down in the mud with the four wheeler and our tree got wrapped up in the tire and we had to pressure wash it when we got back to the barn. I've never washed a tree before and to be honest would like to avoid it again if possible. Although, evidently it made for a good story! And the tree was fine in the end! That's why you put trees in corners of houses, to hide the muddy side, right?

Whew, lots of bad grammar and poor punctuation in this entry. My spin doctor profs would be upset with me. That's what happens when you've got one kid crawling up your back and the other waking in thier crib as you type in a flurry!

Hope this finds you well!

-Sally

Winter Prep...

Since this is technically a 'farm blog', I'll start by posting a picture of some chickens, but for the most part, the first half of this entry is once again mostly for the benefit of my family in WB, NB, who are keeping up with our water trials in the basement each spring and our ensuing attempts to fix the problem. This week we tackled it once and for all and dug a few holes.
This is the first one, about 15-20 ft deep. It started out as a trial hole to find the old dry well, and Mark and the backhoe driver thought they were lucky enough to have hit it first try. We sent the backhoe guy away while we had the plan to simply re-fill the hole with new rock and be done with it. After chatting with Wendell that day, he told us that actually what we had found was the pipe that used to be his old septic tile field, from way back when he and Carol had their trailer down on this lot.
Hmph.
So, back comes the backhoe.
This time, we started at the corner the house and traced the pipe out to the actual dry well. It was about the same distance as the original guess, just a slightly different angle (towards my garden..which was once again decimated in the process). The picture above shows Mark tracking the pipe as the backhoe did the heavy digging. Once we finally reached the end, there was much more evidence of what we expected an old dry well to look like. The pipe job was pretty shabby and for a while I was sure that I was on an unsexy episode of Holmes on Homes. Mark sounded just like him, ripping apart the previous job, proving all the ways he was going to do a much better job, etc. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute.
Anyway, the final decision was to fill that trench back in and dig a new one, out to the first hole we had dug. So that's what we did.
When we had first dug at the corner of the house we also found an extra pipe. A narrower, simple, black pipe that had been connected to the weeping tile at the corner. While the general consensus from the peanut gallery was just to reconnect it and not worry about where it was coming from, Mark wasn't going to let it go. So he dug it up and traced it back to our washing machine. Apparently, it was common to pipe the water from the washing machine to somewhere other than the septic because it was believed that the soap from the machine could kill the bacteria in the septic that is needed to break down...things. SO, this time, there are two pipes running to the dry well. One for the weeping tile and one for the washer.


Thankfully we live on a farm and tend to have lots of...excess...stuff/garbage around that urban dwellers don't have the luxury of keeping around, so we were able to fill that first giant hole with old cinder blocks. (If you are from the Dept. of Environment, and this in some way violates some kind of PEI law, disregard that photo and commentary please. Thank you.) We also put that big green pipe down into the well too, so that if need be, we can at least look in and see how much water is in there, or pump it out...or something. It might prove to be completely useless, but it feels better to be able to access the dry well, for some reason. So here's the final product before it was filled in. Take that snow and rain! Not only do I have a big muddy ditch that runs around half the house, and a big muddy lawn, I now have a big green pipe sticking three feet above the ground in the front yard which Lucy keeps affectionately insisting is a "gaubige can!!!" Don't misunderstand however, I am in no way complaining! If I have dry feet come April, I don't care if I never have grass again. So here's hoping!

In other news, and believe it or not, there is other news, the sheep barn is coming along! As you can see, the woman door got put in this week and as you may also be able to see, has a very complicated security system in place. Baler twine! (I am slowly bringing my Wilson/West Branch/Hillbilly ways into the Bernard mentality!!!!!)
As Mark was cutting out the door (with a chainsaw..haha) he found a board that had been signed by Doug Profitt, Wendell's business partner quite a few years ago. The date is July 12, 1987, which would have been when they remodeled this barn the first time, to switch it from dairy to potatoes.
The next two shots show the progress from the outside, and Mark's meticulous insistence that it look good, not just do the job. I think he succeeded.

The hay in the back sheep barn is starting to get low, so hopefully we'll be able to move soon! (I'll let you know what kind of comment that generates once Mark reads this.)

Hope this finds you well!

Sally