White Sheep Can't Jump

9:14 PM, 12 February 2010
Temperature: 45 F, raining sporadically

Today's chores began with a thump: one of the pregnant ewes decided to jump the fence, tired of the same old pasture and hungry for more hay than they'd been given. This turned the usual chores into something more prolonged, as she could not be enticed back into her pasture or into the other pasture with bread, poultry feed, or hay.

Fed all other animals accordingly and walked the length of the poultry pasture's fenceline as one spike was seen out of the earth. Fixed said spike; ewe continued to avoid entry, so it was decided to string a line of fencing shutting off anything in the direction of the house between the two pastures. The gate to the rest of the pregnant ewes and the three rams was left open and the poultry fenceline followed a second time (after feeding the birds and collecting a goose egg); sure enough, the ewe and a friend (the ewe we call 13) both scooted into their pasture, making it easy to close the gate behind them.

Total duration of chores which usually take at most 30 minutes: an hour and a half.

It proceeded to rain at times very hard indeed, with sporadic breaks in the rain when the sun would come out, resulting in sheep lying down all over the meadow sunning themselves. The afternoon feeding went pretty unremarkably; the ewes in the poultry pasture are truly fearless as long as they think there's food in the offing and will eat from the scoop directly even if it's not precisely offered. Unfortunately, the scoop contains poultry feed, not sheep feed, so this isn't entirely a desirable happenstance.

Minnow still has three live kits as near as we can ascertain. We now have an approximate idea of how many goose eggs we can expect to collect per week, about, from our current flock; the answer would appear to be two. We would like to see our flock increase, and of course to encourage our ducks to lay as well. To this end we've gotten a fair number of used tires for free from a local tire place (they otherwise need to pay to recycle them, so they are happy to allow us to have as many as we want).

We will be pressure-washing the tires and setting them down in the birds' pasture, ideally once we've gotten the ewes into their own pasture, but we'll see. The tires will then be filled with hay and some sort of shelter rigged over them to keep them relatively dry and comparatively safe from external predation.

More tires will be washed and possibly painted and stacked before being filled with earth for the garden; it's a useful way of separating out plants and having them at variable heights with minimal shading issues while not being true container gardening.