24 October 2010
Cool & moist

Working together, we've managed to divide the west paddock in two by fencing it off properly. The process made us further aware of what a poor job the workmen we'd hired had done; fenceposts 10 to 16 feet apart or more in places, a lack of plumbing on the wooden posts so that they are not approximately true, insufficient or lazy clipping of the fencing to the posts, insufficient or no tightening of the fence via comealong or other methods. However, it has held up to date, with only two regular escapees, so there is that.

The escapees are one ewe yearling lamb and one ram yearling lamb, the former escaping from the ewe pasture to wander around eating grass. She does not go very far from the fence as they don't like to be too far from the flock, and while she appears able to get back in on her own, usually when she's out we end up letting her back in by way of the gate at feeding times.

The yearling ram lamb had been escaping into the ewe pasture from the ram pasture by going under the fenceline where the workmen had been particularly and exceptionally loose with the fence and posts. He was the only ram to be doing this, but when we saw him giving the ewes the glad eye, we decided it was time to take some more serious action, especially as our attempts to tighten things up were not quite enough and he was still able to go back and forth.

Fortunately, some shepherd friends of ours cut us in on a deal they were making, trading some of their ewes to someone on craigslist in exchange for some fencing materials. They lacked a ram to trade to the fellow, and did we happen to have any going spare...? Why, yes, as a matter of fact...!

He proved a bit difficult to catch, being wary of netting and in the ewes' pasture, which is wide and open, shunning getting close to the fenceline, He did pop back under the fence to the ram side, being leery of all the harassment he was getting from us, and thereupon one of us stood by the gate with the shepherd's crook uplifting unmoving, alfalfa just inside the gate. After one false attempt, he was hooked, dragged up and over by the horns and popped into a cage and taken for a drive.

Thus Silver Cat Macfree is off running a new pasture with a handful of ewes all to himself. The USDA vet still needs to be notified (legally required) but we received in trade five rolls of six-foot deer fencing. This amounts to excellent value for the money, and we'll put that to very good use indeed; we could use forty rolls of the stuff and possibly not have enough.

There is still a great deal of canning to be done, as we have five pecks of apples to process. The current plan is apple butter and apple pie filling; the first attempt at apple butter provided us with quite a lot of apple sauce, but it wasn't quite buttery enough.