Most of you might be too young to remember an old song entitled, "Stuck in the Middle With You". I did and it seemed amusing to me when I saw the silly sheep exactly in that situation. Silly ewes.
It is rather amazing the trouble sheep can get themselves in. Little Zoey, a Babydoll/Jacob cross who looks like a purebred Babydoll Southdown, can stick her head through the fence to get what is dropped from the bigger ewes at the feeder. So, along came one of the other little sheep who stuck her head through the fence too, then proceeded to stretch the wire just enough so that neither she, nor Zoey could get out. The Icelandic cross has no name as she is not going to be a permanent resident on the farm. She is part Barbadoes and part Icelandic, but looks neither except for her lovely wool coat. The Barbadoes ewe was not friendly, very skittish and very wild. She could jump over my head if I tried to corner her in the barn and she was no more than 30 inches tall at the withers. Amazing. But her babies are wild just as she was. She would scoot them to the far reaches of the pen as soon as she spied me, keeping them well away from any contact. So, when this little lady got herself stuck, she was in full panic mode. I attempted first to put her in kneeling position and promptily got kicked with those hind legs for all she was worth. She is pretty strong for a little thing. That was also the closest I have been to her and I thought I should trim her hooves while she was captive, but didnt want to stress her even more and decided against it. Zoe was bound by the tension on the fence wire caused by the bigger ewe. The only option I could see was to clip the wire around the bigger ewe, which of course would then release Zoey once the other was free. So, I did and yes, Zoe backed out and shook her darling little head wondering what on Earth that was all about. She is such a sweet little girl.
Most of you might be too young to remember an old song entitled, "Stuck in the Middle With You". I did and it seemed amusing to me when I saw the silly sheep exactly in that situation. Silly ewes.
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With the oil crash, the landslide effect has taken a toll on the non essential services in the area. We are hit very hard due to the extreme layoffs in the oil industry. The towns are mere shadows of themselves, with thousands laid off and gone or in the process of moving. Houses are listed for sale, left empy or offered for rent. I suspect as this trend continues, some will be in foreclosure and the former inhabitants will not be able to redeem the mortgage costs and suffer the loss. This whole downturn in the economy has affected the number of people coming to the area. Much of the business at the bed and breakfast was support staff for the oil industry. The hotels and motels are also empty and are offering reduced rates to entice anyone coming to the area to stay with them.
So, after much deliberation, the Moose Hills Inn will be closing its doors. I will be moving into that house and renting my farmhouse in the fall. It will be repainted and readied so the new tenants will have a lovely little house on the farm without the work of taking care of the animals. I envision an elderly couple as the preferred tenants, some one who misses the farm life, but is grateful not to have to do the chores anymore. I would be pleased to help them out, too, buy some groceries or run some errands for them, should they require. Wouldn't it be ideal if they also could help me out on occasion, possibly do the chores for a bit so I could get away? Well, that remains in the future. The option of opening a bed and breakfast for the future also remains, only I most likely would rent the little house as the bed and breakfast, rather than move again. It may be a few years before the economy turns around and the area prospers once more. The timing will actually be quite suitable for me, as my plan was to be here ten years of which four have already passed. In six years, then, I will subdivide the land into four parcels, two with houses and two without, sell everything left and retire. We cannot determine what happens. We can only adapt, change and function within the changes to make them work for us. If I had a million dollars, I would buy a SunFrost refrigerator and a solar array and live off grid entirely. For now, I am grateful to have a roof over my head, a steady pension and the beautiful farm I have the privilege of being the custodian of. Without the bed and breakfast work, I will have more time to stop and smell the roses, to hunt down and gather wild herbs and flowers, to spend time in the garden and in the winter, to work with the wool and fibres, and so on. I am content and although this was not planned, it is going to happen. As of the first of May, 2015, Moose Hills Inn will be closing its doors. Thank you to all who made the last three years a great pleasure. Meeting many of you, serving you and listening and sharing stories, has made the bed and breakfast experience a wonderful experience. Blessings to all of you. Namaste. Have you ever said that you would never do such and such that some one has done, and yet, maybe years later, you find yourself in a similar circumstance and guess what? Yes, you are doing what you said you would never do. I once learned a valuable life lesson criticizing my sister in law for doing something with her children. Years later when I had children, I found myself doing exactly the same thing I was harshly critical of. Until you walk in the shoes of another, which of course, you can never really do, can you possibly judge. You cannot judge, but all of us do. Maybe Amma does not. She loves all the same, full of the love of the Creator.
But should people who smoke be availed of health care for smoking related illnesses? Maybe yes the first time, but hopefully they learn their lesson and quit. If they become ill a second time because they continued to smoke, should society pay their debts? How about the drug addict who goes to rehabilitation time and time again, only to come out and head straight back into the drug addiction cycle they know all too well. What about obese people who do not exercise, eat gross amounts and then blame their genes on their conditions? Like a drug addict, should society continually help them recover. What if they go back to the same pattern that landed them to be morbidly obese? I watched a documentary on a morbidly obese person. He was the size of a grand piano and was nearly a thousand pounds. He had long not been able to walk or get out of bed at all. Some one was feeding his addiction. That some one in his case, turned out to be his wife. Slowly she was killing her husband through stupidy believing, or so she said, that giving him what he wanted made him happy. She had to clean his bowel movements which just sort of happened and dedicated her life to him, or making him a living amoeba. When the government stepped in to rescue him, the wall of the house where the bedroom was had to be crashed down and he had to be moved in a tow truck for large vehicles. I am sure he felt shame. While he was gross at home, no one knew, but when he was exposed, he was vulnerable to comments and judgement. He gained his health back, lost more than half his body weight and then became morbidly obese a second, then a third time again after recovery. How can we not judge? I am thinking of the oil crash, which has severely affected everything in this area. The workers were let go, and most of them were not from here, so they sold their belongings and moved home or elsewhere. That left a skeleton population so then non essential services crashed after that. Hair dressers, nail salons, pet groomers and such began to struggle and doors are closing. There are people who cannot pay their mortgages so the housing market has gone crazy, but no one is coming to buy. Some are walking away. Those who stay cannot afford to eat. They smoke and drink, but cannot afford a decent meal. Should the soup kitchens deny them sustenance when the time comes because they could better budget their money and afford food if they did not drink or smoke? That is being judgmental. Everyone who is hungry should eat, with the thought that they will be humbled and quit their nasty habits and go straight. What if it became more like the hungry thirties where street labour gangs worked to eat just to stay alive? Perhaps people would not have such a sense of entitlement then? But drug abuse grows, as does alcoholism when there is despair and hopelessness. It is hard not to judge. It is hard to love despite the sabotage one sees when money comes in, kids go hungry and the parents are drunk. It is harder yet to pick up a drunk and attempt to give them hope, or a drug addict or any person who has given up on him/herself. Some are so filled with love they can forgive the people and work with them in earnest on recovery. I am not there yet. That man eventually ate himself to death, but his wife is the one who bought the food and gave it to him. We all make choices. I am not better because I am not an addict. I am stronger. Some how they did not acquire the tools necessary to say no and to value themselves enough to stay healthy. And still, thou shalt not judge lest ye be judged. I have never been interested in keeping good records. When I owned businesses, I realized the importance of that task though, and always surrounded myself with those who enjoyed bookeeping and record keeping and managing. I wish I had a manager for the farm. I don't keep records. I should, I know, but I don't. Somewhere in a notebook, I do write down when a sheep has lambs, what they are and what sex and who the sire was, but it is in one of six notebooks I have that I also write everything else in. So, when I need to know such information, I hunt and search for it. Usually I find it within a short time. It would make so much more sense to keep one book for sheep, one for goats and organize it by the calendar, but I don't.
The farm is an expensive hobby. The costs are quite overwhelming and the income generated from it is not sufficient to cove those costs. Without the extra income from the bed and breakfast, I would not be able to continue to supplement my pensions and carry on. Well, with the oil crash, the ripple effect has also hit the bed and breakfast and I am now tossing around the idea of closing it for a few years, moving into the bed and breakfast house and renting my beloved farmhouse. With this change, I will have to continue my downsizing efforts. I was reviewing the goat situation earlier this afternoon. I would like to keep the two Nubian milk goats, one Nigerian doe, one Cashmere doe, one Pygora doe, one Angora doe and one buck. The new babies and some of the mothers will have to be sold. Last year's sheep cut was difficult, but the fewer numbers made winter feeding easier. Still, I do not need 4 Cotswold ewes. One is sufficient, or possibly two, one coloured and one white. I have only one Jacob and one Icelandic now. And so I will need to decide who gets to stay once again and who goes. Only this time, the sheep, who are not cull sheep, but unusual or rare breeds or crosses of rare breeds, will go to the Odd and Unusual sale in Westlock or Lloydminster, not the auction, where they do not know anything about rare sheep. I have had better luck selling individual lambs as pets too, so will continue to do that this year. Small starter flocks are also good sellers. The cows will pay for themselves as the price of beef rises. I have a few large lambs and sheep to sell as meat lambs because no one here wants the smaller breeds, such as Icelandic. The key is the fleece, not the meat though, so perhaps those sheep would be best rehomed too. I cannot afford the thousands of dollars to buy feed in the fall for the animals. The chickens will have to be limited to twenty hens and two roosters, the ducks to four of a breed, no more than six geese, six guineas and six rabbits. And so it goes. Once again, the paring down of the animals to make survival possible, is necessary. The very hardest part will be to do something with the dogs. I just cannot seem to even think about parting with one of them. Their feed is currently the most expensive on the farm. I will have to find a different way to feed them. The Mongolians feed their dogs gruel from boiled barley and meaty bones. I can get meaty bones and barley, so maybe I can give that a try. It does mean cooking a large pot of the food every day the day before. Some vegetables can be added on occasion. I can add eggs to the gruel during the spring, summer and early fall, when there are plenty. It is time to rethink the farm once again, and reorganize to make it possible on a very limited budget. It can be done. It will. Today is Good Friday and it was too. I drove a total of nine hours to pick up and bring home a mostly Gotland ewe lamb. She hails from the Cranbrook BC area. There are no purebred Gotlands in North America, only those that approach pure. She is mixed with Blue Faced Leicester, but she still shows the amazing, soft and crimped fleece of the Gotland sheep. Gotlands are grey, so she has the colouring of her sire and not the true Gotland colour. She is sweet natured and very easy going, plus people friendly. She is not halter trained, but has been haltered wthout much trouble.
I had to drive through a blizzard, sleet, snow, rain and the sunshine in order to bring her home. It was one of the Alberta spring days when Mother Nature was unsure what she wanted, so offered a little of everything. The temperature dropped 10 degrees in a few hours then when the sun came out it rose again, though it is cold after that snow and freezing rain. The Gotland is in the canopy of the truck overnight. Tomorrow I will decide exactly what to do with her. She may go in the barn for a few days or to live with the Highland heifer, though cows are cows and the sheep's wool is too pretty to sleep with a cow. You know what I mean. In the fall, the Gotland ewe lamb will be bred to the Blue Faced Leicester ram and the baby will be 75% BFL. Blue Faced Leicester wool is also very crimpy, but not nearly as soft and log as this sheep with the Gotland genes. I am pleased to have her on the farm. Welcome to the Fat Ewe Farm, She has had a name change from Dolly to Rika, meaning noble one. May she be such on the farm. No! That is not a funny joke for April Fool's Day, not in the least. Why do we have a blizzard out there today? The wind is howling fiercely and snow is blowing and staying on the ground. The ground was nearly void of snow, too, because we had such lovely temperatures in March. Granted, we could have used a little more precipitation and last night, we did have over an inch of rain, but gee whiz! Snow! Today! Not funny. I have been cleaning the goat barn. It has almost two feet of manure packed bedding and the ammonia smell from the heap was horrendous once disturbed. While it was cold outside, I suppose the bottom was frozen. Now that it had thawed, it was unbearable to clean the barn, which is really an old round granary. I did some the day before and finished the main bedding yesterday, but I had company for supper, so quit and showered and finished making dinner, a delicious roast goat in orange Thai curry with aspargus and Daikon radish, and borscht soup. My mother loved borscht. I do not. Today it is still not a favourite, but my guest was Ukrainian, so I thought it fitting. And today, I thought it would be quite easy to quickly do the chores since I had been able to use the hose and did not have to haul water in buckets on the wagon. Due to the blizzard, the chores took much longer than anticipated, but then I did get the coarse broom and swept the last of the mess in the goat barn. Then I sprinkled Dolomite lime on the floor to absorb the ammonia. It would have been best to allow the barn to dry out completely, but the does are pregnant and due anytime and with this blizzard, they need a warm shelter, clean and out of the wind. Sometimes things just have to happen, so the barn is back in use tonight. The goats do have another three sided outdoor shelter which they use much of the time. Fortunately the wind side is full plywood on the outdoor shelter, so they huddled in there together and were comfortable. It was just the sense of urgency because of the pregnant girls. Babies must be warm and dry when they are born to ensure survival. A blizzard is no place to enter this world. Anyhow, the chores did get done and the barn did get finished, thank goodness. It was almost 8:30 when I put the birds in their coops for the night and bid them sweet dreams. I will sleep well tonight and hope you do too. ZZZzzzzzz. Imagine that - snow on April Fool's Day. Harumph! The first layer is removed. During the winter, every so often a new layer of hay or straw was scattered over the existing bedding. It was frozen to the floor and impossible to get out of there. This method is known as deep pack bedding and is thought to keep toes warm as it generates some heat from decomposition in place. But, whew! The ammonia smell when it was disturbed made my eyes water, so I had to take frequent breaks. |
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AuthorFluffy writes daily about the experiences on the farm and with the bed and breakfast patrons. Archives
October 2020
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