Today was warm and sunny again, so I decided unilaterally that the lambs should leave their lambing pen and go out into the sun. Given a vote (with their hooves), the lambs and mother Maggie concurred.This was also very exciting for Aunt Nellie, Maggie's sister, who is always very find of her nephews and nieces.
I tried to walk the dogs down to the beaver pond, but left it too late. Earlier, around the farm, the snow was set up and you could walk anywhere you wanted on hard "neve" snow. But by the time I went off into the woods, it was melting again. The worst feeling is the one you get when you can walk on top of the snow three steps out of four, or six out of seven, and then you fall in! Crusty snow makes for painful post-holing too, bruising your shins.
So instead we walked on the snowmobile trail. This is a cross-county trail that runs across our leased land in the back. Back when I was a more avid cross-country skier, I used to complain about snowmobilers. I hated the fumes, especially from the two-strokes, and could not for the life of me see why anyone would ever want to ride such a smelly beast when they could ski or hike.
Now my arthritis is much worse, and I don't ski much anymore, snowmobile trails are good for me because they allow me a place to hike in the woods in winter. Regular readers know I don't mind a post-holing hike, nor a snow-shoe hike, but the conditions aren't always good. If it were not for the snowmobile trails, I'd not find it so easy to stay in decent shape.
Still, you'll never get me on the machine itself, only the trail. I still can't understand why anyone would want to ride that fast through the woods. You'd never see a bird, or a track, or smell or hear a thing!
Anyway, as you can see, Mary and Haggis are good buddies on the trail.
After that, it was my job to dig out the back door to the barn, so the lambs would be safe from predators tonight. Digging out a foot of ice and snow and bedding and manure all around the door was a pretty good workout. That's two days of hard exercise in a row. Happy Mick.
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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.
The earliest posts, at the very end of the blog, tell the story of the Great Farm, our purchase of a fragment of that farm, the renovation of the homestead and its populating with people and animals. Go all the way to the last post in the archive and read backwards from there to get it in chronological order.
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