A Great Farm Diary: Womerlippi Homestead Annals

A day off -- finally

2012-01-29T02:34:00.000-08:00

I haven't been posting much lately for folks to read, and I haven't had time to take any pictures. Apologies for that, but I'm having a busy start to 2012 at work and at home -- that is, when I''m home.

We were all set for our regular trip down to see Aimee's folks in Harrisonburg, VA, before Christmas. That trip is normally plenty of travel for me, and once I get down with it, I'm usually happy enough to hunker down and not go anywhere except to work and back for the rest of the winter.

But this year I'd signed up to take students to a conference in DC. This is a great conference for students, the National Council for Science and Environment annual meeting, and for one reason or another no-one had wanted to do it this year, so muggins of course said he would, and I did and even enjoyed it.

But while we were still down in Harrisonburg I received the news from my sister that my mum's condition was worsening, and on the drive back home Carol called to say that she'd passed away. So then there was the flurry of activity, more or less routine at this point since we've done it so many times, that accompanies these emergency visits back to the UK, and then the visit itself and the funeral, all described in earlier posts, and then the trip home, which was pretty bad since I was delayed for twenty four hours in Dublin and then landed at Boston in an ice storm, and the worst one of the season so far to boot. The bus ride from Boston to Portland was delayed, and the two-hour drive from Portland to Jackson took four.

Five days later there was the conference.

So, having arrived back at work essentially a week late for the start of the semester, this last week has been one big catch-up, and about seventy hours work total. Luckily I get up early, and so there are usually an extra three or four hours available. Following a few of these early morning sessions, I'm now more or less back on track in all my classes.

This process of catching up is complicated by the fact that I've signed up to teach an extra class in renewable energy over the next three weekends, at our local community college, Kennebec Valley, or KVCC.

This class is part of a multi-class program that is itself part of the current federal government effort to provide "retooling" for mid-career professionals in the energy business, to enable them to make the transition from conventional energy management to renewable energy and energy efficiency, and I'm quite tickled to be invited to give what is essentially the overview class.

Yesterday, after a slight delay because of another ice storm, I taught the first eight-hour class, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. My students are all established professionals, including two engineers, a manager for a large local HVAC contractor, and two more with experience in support tasks for the energy business, back-office and sales and so on. I also enjoy KVCC because of the tech school atmosphere. It reminds me of my first college, Number One School of Technical Training, RAF Halton.

It's a knowledgeable crowd, my favorite topic, and a great setting.

But I don't think I'll have much time for this blog these next few weeks!

Some walks in Britain

2012-01-15T13:58:00.000-08:00

Regular readers will know I've been away in Britain with my sister, burying my mother (see two posts back) and visiting with relatives.

(Click on any photo to enlarge.)

Even so, a man has to eat, sleep, and exercise, and the places where I was at were fine for country walks, so that's what I did when I wasn't with my sister or relatives.

Here are the pictures I took.

I stayed in the small market town of Cowbridge, in the Vale of Glamorgan, which is a service center close to my sister's house, with a good hotel, The Bear, a former coaching inn and recommended.

The first walk is an early morning wander around the town's trails and historic sites.

There's an eleventh century castle, much remodeled in Tudor times. What you see here is Tudor.

I really liked this small tarmac footpath crossing this small sheep field. It seemd eminently practical to have just a small ribbon of surfaced pathway so folk could use the shortcut without getting muddy feet or wearing out the field.

The town used to be walled, and there remains a remnant or two of the old fortifications.

Then there's the "Physic Garden," a medieval walled garden kept up by volunteers. These are trellised apple trees.

This late rose was still blooming in the courtyard at The Bear.

Then it was off to Sgeffield, where I visited Wire Mill Dam, Ivy Cottages where my family used to live, and hiked up Porter Clough to the edge of the moors.

My sister and I hope to get a memorial bench like the one shown for our parents and maternal grandparents.

Finally, there's the view from Symonds Yat, a beauty spot easily accessible from the M40 connector between South Wales and the Midlands.

I liked the tiny white dots of the sheep below.

The lumber being harvested is Eastern Hemlock and Western Red Cedar, which I thought was ironic. I went all the way to Britain to find a woodsman harvesting American trees at a British Forestry Commission reserve.

A good walk

2012-01-15T10:56:00.001-08:00

Ernie and I left Aimee to the football warm-up show, and took ourselves for a good walk.

We went down to the beaver ponds on Great Farm Brook, but the dams had been washed out and the ponds drained. Probably the beaver have been trapped out. I wouldn't know when, since we'd have seen the trapper's own tracks in the snow, unless they came from the east side, which is much longer to hike and without a proper trail of any kind.

But they'll come back. There are plenty of beaver still in Maine.

It was cold. Today's high has only been about 8 F. I had rime ice all over my beard again, but Ernie was perfectly comfortable.

Strange to see the water level so low. Without the dams, this area is just a slow section of creek, and indeed you can see the water running under the ice. If the beaver don't come back, the trees will fill in from the edges, which would be a pity, since the one of the attractions of this hike is the nice open feeling of the pond area. In Maine we get used to hiking under the forest canopy, which is pleasant enough, but it's nice to be able to see a little further now and then.

The sheep are nonplussed by hiking. This time of year they tend to confine themselves to the one area of their pen closest to the barn door. They don't even hike across their small paddock.

Bentley will cross his paddock, but then it is vary small, barely fifty feet across. Yesterday he was running around in circles for some strange reason.

Today, he just tried to ram Ernie, who for his part just instigated more ramming, by barking at him.

Eulogy for Jean

2012-01-13T13:02:00.000-08:00

Given by her son Michael at Coychurch Crematorium Chapel, January 10th, 2012

We are gathered here to bear Christian witness and to celebrate the memory of my mother, Mary Jean Womersley, born Mary Jean Watson.

Jean as most of us knew her, was only half Welsh, and the Welsh bit wasn’t even from this part of Wales, and she indeed grew up and lived the first sixty-odd years of her life in the Rivelin and Mayfield Vallies in Sheffield, a long way away, and so there aren’t very many of us here.

But as I said at Gordon’s funeral here just last year, I tend to think funerals are perhaps as much to cherish the living as the dead, and if this funeral is to celebrate Jean’s life, it is also for my sister Carol and Gordon’s brother Stan and Jean’s sister-in-law Rita, and Jean’s friends like Muriel, and for all of us who knew her and loved her and who have come here to see her off. My sister and I want to thank everyone deeply for coming, and especially David and Beverly for being our minister and funeral planner. It’s been a massive comfort to have someone who is family in charge.

A son must necessarily have some difficulty writing a eulogy for his own mother who gave birth to him and fed him and raised him from her own flesh, but it has to be done. And it’s not so hard to know what to do. David knows, through proper training and years of practice, and I know through instinct: We who are still living must try to make sense out of what has happened to the dead so that we can go on living, and living right, so that we do justice and honor to the dead.

So let us honour and celebrate Jean Womersley and all that she stood for, which was a lot.

Jean was a very kind, gentle and sweet woman, who loved her friends and especially her family and her home, and held onto them most fiercely, and most of us who knew her loved her for that. She was also a survivor, even a throwback, in some ways, to the practical English and Welsh farm-wives of old, who knew they had to keep family and home and hearth together, and that is what she did most of all and did best. It was in her blood and what she was raised to do and she did it well and did it right.

She was born to the Watsons of Whiteley Woods, an old Sheffield family, and her roots were in that small cottage that still stands today by Wire Mill Dam, where Thomas Boulsover worked on the first Sheffield Plate and where generations of Watsons lived out their lives, surviving the Industrial Revolution and two World Wars and the Great Depression and everything else fate could throw at them, which was a lot. They were a strong family physically, and all the men, bar none, served, and served well, in the British military, in both wars, some of them in two world wars, and in other places. They were the salt of the earth, but they were not fertile. While they lasted, Jean would visit them at the Woods and walk us kids down to the woods to visit them too. We were raised by this extended family, not just by our mother and father, but by Jean’s parents Lettie and Arthur, who watched over us while mother worked part-time as a young housewife.

There were times in her life when she was very adventurous for a young woman of her background and upbringing. I remember being inspired by the scrapbook of her teenage walking and youth hostelling holiday in the Lake District to try those same kinds of hiking and walking adventures myself. This was just after the war, and must have seemed a great event in her life after the bombs and rationing of wartime Sheffield.

It must have been that sense of outdoor adventure, and that vivacious smile, that attracted my father Gordon to her. Dad had two brothers and a sister, and came from a musical and political family, while Jean was an only child, from a family that mostly were good at growing gardens and being quiet together. It must have seemed noisy at times!

But most of all Jean wanted to settle down and raise a strong family. She would have been happiest if she could have done it in that same cottage.

My favorite picture of my mother is one of her working the obviously heavy clay soil of the bungalow close to Dronfield that was her first married home. She’s strong and young and wearing a headscarf to keep her hair tidy while she digs. She’s smiling but also obviously a little upset that she’s the one digging while someone else – guess who -- is idly snapping pictures.

She was tolerant of my father’s notions and ideas and enthusiasms such as photography and jazz, even to the point of tolerating and later valuing the idea to make their own chocolates and sell them. But in her quiet practical way, it was Jean that worked out much of the details of the most sustainable, final development of the chocolate business, after the most extensive of Dad’s ambitions had run their course. She, with Dad and Rita and Stan, put together a small but effective small business that supported two families.

How should I live the rest of my life the way my mother would want me to live it? That seems to be the important question that results from my mother’s death, and the answers I have are very clear to me, and very straightforward. From these answers, and from how practical and straightforward these answers are, we can then also see what kind of woman Jean Womersley was, and we can remember what she was like.

The first thing I must do, and the most important, to honour my mother is to look after my sister Carol. That is what mother would have wanted me to do. I’m the big brother. It’s up to me to watch out for Carol the way mother would have wanted me to. There aren’t many of us Womersley-Watsons left, a true rare breed like the Romney sheep I raise at home in the woods of Maine, and we have to stick together, even if we live far apart.

Because the most important thing to Jean was her family. Her husband Gordon, me and my sister, and her mother Lettie and father Arthur were the most important things in the world to her. After them came other family members like Stan and Rita and the old folk at the woods. It was important to work together, to visit together, to play cards together, to watch kids together, but most of all to stay together.

The other thing I must do, if I’m to be a good son to Jean Womersley is to look after my own wife Aimee, now at home in America looking after our farm animals. I need to love her and honor her and keep her, which is what I said I would do in my wedding vows. Because my mother’s marriage was very important to her. She was married for over fifty years. Grandma and Grandad Watson were married for almost as long.

Till death us do part. That’s what it says.

But I also need to pay the bills and keep a roof over Aimee’s head, which is what mother would have thought of, in her practical way, as the most important thing.

Few of us that knew Jean, know the whole story of everything she went through to keep a roof over our heads as kids, and later to keep a roof over her own and her husband Gordon’s heads, through the ups and downs of Dad’s employment and later the chocolate business. I think the person that probably had the most of the picture in the early years was Grandma Lettie, but after Gran died then it was probably Rita that Jean talked to the most about this problem.

And she succeeded, against all the odds, didn’t she? To the extent that she bequeathed to my sister and I a fully-paid off home here in South Wales.

And I know right away that what she would have wanted me to do with that resource is what I will do, to use my half share to pay off my own home, to keep a safe secure roof over Aimee’s head.

We shouldn’t underestimate just how much satisfaction it would give my mother if she could know that I would do just that with the resources she put away with her own hard work and practical love. She was, simply, a very loving, practical woman to whom family and home were the most important things in the world. And because of her, I am able to live in a cottage in the woods and dig in the dirt and raise a family, albeit in a different, wilder set of woods.

Those are the kinds of simple straightforward answers I get, then, when I ask myself what it is that I must do to honour my mother’s memory. That’s the kind of woman she was, a loving practical person who succeeded in raising a family and keeping a husband and keeping a roof over everyone’s heads, despite everything the world could throw at her. Just like the generations of Watson women of Whitley Woods, who survived two world wars and the Great Depression in much the same way, while their menfolk were away in the military.

And so the circle of life goes on.

Jean will be cremated here today. Eventually, in a few days or months but probably not years, my sister will scatter her and father’s ashes in Whitely Woods, Sheffield, close to the cottage the Watson family occupied from the mid 1800s until the late 1990s. Mum and Dad will be part of that landscape, part of the bluebells in spring and the holly in winter. We can go see them there. As a farmer and a forester I appreciate that deeply.

I was there just the other day to see mother’s cousin Barrie, who is too frail to be here but sends his love, and there’s a beautiful hundred and fifty year old English beech tree that came down in the recent gale, just up from the cottages, a strong, still young, large tree, four feet diameter at breast height. Beech is one of the strongest woods, and it has the most energy for heating homes. If I were back in Maine I would be cutting it up for firewood, although it would also make good furniture lumber. But there’s another young slender beech coming up in its place. I have no fear for the beech trees of Whiteley Woods. They are survivors.

In the case of death from Alzheimers Disease, the mourning begins early, as you begin to lose the person you love long before they are dead. My sister and I are now survivors of two parents’ deaths from Alzheimers Disease. We have had many years of grief, far more of it than we ever would have thought possible when we were younger. But we remain strong. Our parents and grandparents survived two world wars and the Great Depression. Our battles have been with Alzheimers Disease. But we will go on. We are, after all, part if not mostly Watson, from Whiteley Woods. To know this, just look at what my sister has done to look after her two sick parents all these years. I am very proud of my sister.

So have no fear for us. The circle of life will go on, because of Jean Watson, which is what she would have wanted. It’s what she would have wanted most of all.

So that’s all I have to say here, and I think it’s enough, except to say thank you all for coming to help us bear witness to the life of Jean Womersley, my mother.

Cold

2012-01-04T03:47:00.001-08:00

The weather earlier this holiday week may have been warm enough that I could strip down our small tractor and weld part of the sub-frame on Sunday and get it all back together on Monday, but that situation changed with a vengeance yesterday, as an arctic front swept in.

This year's winter weather in Maine is controlled by a substantial La Nina episode in the Pacific, and it's interesting to follow the jet stream pattern that results. After several weeks of being on the safe, warm side of this atmospheric phenomenon, we've slipped to the other side, and the wicked witch of the north now has us firmly in her grasp. I tried to finish up a few small tasks on the tractor yesterday, but was quickly rewarded with frozen fingers, and had to abandon the last fiddliest job of fitting a split pin (AKA cotter pin in American) to the kingpin.

Instead I came indoors for a very welcome cup of hot coffee.

This morning it's zero degrees F out there, which is minus eighteen degrees C. That isn't too cold for Maine, but it is unpleasant to be outside, and has me worried about frozen pipes.

All proper Maine husbands need to worry about pipes.

In our case, the cellar and crawl spaces where all our pipes are located are heated by the exhaust vent from our propane hot water tank, and by the wood stove which radiates directly to the floor on the underside of which the pipes are attached. I used to heat both cellar and crawl space directly with a special vent tapped from the forced air oil furnace, but I disconnected this vent this fall when I sealed the furnace system and insulated all the ducts. The furnace went unused 95 percent of the time, and the leaky ducts, and especially that cellar vent, ensured that this system became the greatest source of cold air infiltration to the house. The wood stove would suck essentially suck cold combustion air up from the basement through the duct work, making the house feel drafty and uncomfortable. By discontinuing the cellar heating, and sealing and insulating the duct work, most of the remaining cold air infiltration was cut off, but I was worried that the pipes might not get enough heat.

It seems I shouldn't have worried.

The prime result is, we were able to quit using the large outside wood furnace. All we have heating this home right now, even while it's zero degrees F outside, is about 40,000 BTUs/hour of wood heat from an 80,000 BTU/hour Norwegian wood stove running at about half capacity, and a 1.5 KW oil-filled electric heater running at two thirds capacity. I doubt we'll use even three cords of wood this year, when we have about five on hand, and usually use about four.

That's only 43,000 BTUs/hour total, when the degree days needed are something like 100, and a massive victory for energy efficiency. In earlier posts, I was worried about the outside wood furnace, and how we would be able to afford to replace a faulty chimney, but it seems like I don't need to worry. We could even sell that furnace off.

Or, more likely, save it to use for heating the new workshop building we have planned.

Broken sub-frame

2012-01-01T12:39:00.001-08:00

Here's the front sub frame for our nearly 40-year old Kubota tractor.

Hint: It's not supposed to be in two pieces!

Just how long this important structural component has been broken is a mystery. This tractor has always had more up and down movement in the front end than it needed, contributing to a couple of nasty tips. I discovered the crack when the front right tire developed a slow leak and so I was spending more time than usual down around that part of the machine, putting air in the tire.

The weather here in Maine is unseasonably warm, and forecast to remain so through tomorrow, so it was feasible to tear the tractor down, remove the sub-frame, weld it, and perhaps have enough time tomorrow to put it all back together before it again gets too cold for such things. If I'm really lucky with weather, there'll be time to put a new tube in the right front tire too.

Here's the repaired unit. It was an easy weld, a classic butt-weld. It should hold, since there's more metal in that spot now than there was before.

Here's how much the tractor had to be stripped down to get at the part.

This, I suppose, is my idea of fun. I guess I probably need to get a life, but I was happy enough working out there in the sun.

The sheep don't care for the sun much. They hung out all day in the shade, the younger ones playing king of the hill on this frozen compost heap.

What was Mrs Womerlippi doing while I was working so had (and admittedly amusing myself)?

Playing with the new dog.

Ernie

2011-12-23T09:31:00.000-08:00

Here's the first applicant for the job vacancy recently announced. And it looks like he's got the job.

His name is Ernie and he's a rescue dog. He came to us from National English Shepherd Rescue, or NESR. He was a troubled puppy, apparently, but is now much improved in temperament, thanks to the efforts of NESR, particularly NESR foster carer Heather Houlahan, who has her own blog here.

Ernie's history is somewhat mixed. He was a pedigree English Shepherd puppy sold to a couple in Cambridge, MA. We have the papers. They apparently couldn't manage him, which is unsurprising. These proper shepherd dog types that actually still have the herding instinct -- Border Collies, Australian and English Shepherds -- generally make very poor candidates for an urban existence.

They need a proper job to do, and they need more or less constant companionship, either from their people, or from another dog.

When young, they are best apprenticed to an older farm dog who knows the ropes. In their proper farm environment, when they're not herding sheep, they're on guard, and so although they like to play, they're never really off the clock. Having known Ernie for a day or so now, I can easily imagine that if some ill-advised attempt was made to keep him in an apartment 22 hours a day, with his only exercise in streets and parks full of humans and other dogs that he couldn't get all properly herded up and in the right pen, then, well, he would likely have gone stir crazy.

(So would have I, by the way. That kind of existence is not for me. I like my sheep barn, my woodpile, my apple trees and my gardens.)

These hapless Cambridge urbanites gave Ernie up at 7 months to NESR, and to the expert care of Heather, who had him mess in with another half-dozen shepherd dogs on her farm, a lifestyle not unlike our own (only we have fewer dogs). Ernie was exposed to the proper kind of shepherd dog lifestyle, and got a little farm training, as well as a second chance at a more contented, playful kind of late puppyhood, without the stresses of an urban existence. He calmed down, learned some of the ropes, and figured out what his job in life was going to be.

We're very pleased with him so far. He's very well-behaved, he minds his manners, he already is house-trained and puppy trained, he can sit, lie down, walk to heel, and go in his crate. He gets a little stressed out by cats and small children, but we expect that our moggies will sort him soon enough.

He has all the proper shepherd dog instincts for protecting the farm, and getting all his people all herded up together, and so on. He's still plenty young enough to begin his sheepdog training. It shouldn't take us long to get him to move sheep on our farm where there are lots of fences and alleyways that make the job easy. But I'd like to have him try the more open-ground kinds of techniques, where the dog learns to go all the way around the herd and bring them back to the handler.

Something to look forward to for me and Mr. Ernie.

Help wanted -- General Farm Dog

2011-12-12T03:06:00.000-08:00

This may seem awfully callous, but we're going to replace our farm dog Haggis as soon as we can. There's a huge hole in my life where my dog used to be, and Aimee misses having a dog around the house too. I realized just yesterday that this is the first time I've been without a dog since 1988, which was the year the sainted shepherd dog of shepherd dogs, Liza Jane, appeared in my life (and promptly got herself pregnant by another dog I got that year, Thumper, a Blue Heeler cross, to begat, among others, Cocoa, who was definitely not a shepherd dog at all but who lived with me until we got Haggis in 2002). My college room-mates called Liza Jane "Mick's dog wife." She was a Montana dog born and bred, but lived in Maryland, Georgia, and Maine, and accompanied me on some huge adventures.

Before that, long before that, I had a different shepherd dog, a Border Collie-cross, called Paddy, which takes us back to about 1973 in the world of Mick's dogs. Paddy used to do my newspaper round with me when I was a teenager and accompanied the RAF Leeming Mountain rescue team on many an adventure. We often would follow the dog to find our way on the hill. This was more accurate than map and compass, although I'm not sure what this says for our map-and-compass skills. (Patrick Elvis McGinty Womersley was the full name my sister and I gave this great dog, who died of a very old age in the 1990s, 17 or 18 years old.)

Paddy, Liza Jane and Haggis were all what I've heard described as "velcro" dogs -- they stuck with me whatever I happened to be doing. They were equally as good at riding in the truck (or an RAF Land Rover) as going for a walk, flying a kite, or herding chickens. This is a characteristic of the various shepherd dog breeds, and probably why I miss them so much.

There's also an as-yet unfulfilled need around here for a shepherd dog that can actually successfully herd sheep. We move our sheep from pasture to pasture all summer, and although the sheep generally know where to go, it would be helpful to have a dog to help round up any strays.

The other more serious reason we need a shepherd is for the coyotes. These predators have already heard that Haggis is gone, and are moving in steadily. I've heard them within a few hundred yards each night since. I can keep them at bay for now by making sure to go outside early and late every night, and by leaving the scent of a man wherever I can. But this won't last forever. Lambs are due in April.

Help Wanted.

Vacancy at Womerlippi Farm
for
General Farm Dog

Qualifications:

Shepherd breed or shepherd cross, prefer Border Collie or Aussie
Male or female, must be neutered
Must like sheep, chickens, old people, small children, in that order
Must hate coyotes, bad stranger dogs, bobcats, and hunters who can't read maps
Loud bark, must be worse than bite. Prefer no bite at all, except when applied to the types on the previous list

Pay and benefits

Room and Board, own bed, kibble and canned food, allowed to clean out pots and pans, treats, grooming, regular walks, own seat in pick-em-up truck, full health care, personal herd of eleven fully-trained sheep

Applications received until position filled. Reference, background and health check required

Haggis gone

2011-12-10T01:59:00.000-08:00

Photo: Haggis and me in happier days:

Aimee and I are completely gutted after having to put Haggis down last night.

He'd been doing well on the prednisone. It didn't solve the laryngeal paralysis, but it kept his throat from getting sore, and so he could eat, and of course he was happy enough to be able to eat and sleep and be with us.

That's really all he ever asked of us, even when healthy. Such unconditional love.

But we couldn't find the smallest dosage that would do the job without side effects. Last week we dropped the dosage on the vet's instructions. The choking and inability to eat got immediately worse, so we called the vet and upped the dose again. The side effects began to kick in. By Tuesday he'd developed nausea, one of the side effects, and by Friday he was again starving to death, only this time from the nausea instead of being unable to eat because of a sore throat.

He worsened a good deal during Friday while we were at work. I came home to find him in terrible shape.

He wouldn't touch his food, couldn't keep anything down at all, and wouldn't even come in the house for weakness and pain. I had to pick him up to bring him in. As I picked him up, I discovered there was this additional symptom of abdominal pain, which could also have been caused by the prednisone -- stomach bleeding is one side-effect. He and I both rested for a few moments, he on his bed, me on the couch close by, while we both waited for Aimee, and he seemed like he might begin to feel better, but then he vomited about a half a gallon of almost pure water, and so I realized he'd been drinking away because of some internal pain, most likely bleeding in his stomach.

Aimee came home later, and although we prevaricated for a minute, we quickly made the decision to put him down there and then. Even if we could find a way to fix the side effects of prednisone, his inability to pant easily would make it impossible to stay cool once the warm weather returned, and would even be difficult during the very coldest weather, when the house is often cosy because of the wood stove, and even healthy dogs tend to pant.

We were prepared for this after these last two months of Haggis's illness, but not totally. Haggis has been such a good dog and such a great friend to have, and so loving. I was going to have to do it myself with the rifle -- our own vet closes at five on Friday and taking him to the emergency vet in Brewer, Maine, forty miles in his condition, with that much pain, just to be put down, wasn't a sensible option or in his best interests.

Aimee stayed inside while I put him down. He was trusting and safe in my hands until the very end, and even wagged his tail for me when I held him after the shot as he took his last breath.

I honestly can't tell you right now whether knowing he trusted me so and was happy to be with me even while dying makes it worse or better.

But I am glad he is no longer in pain and misery.

We'll bury him quietly today on our own land.

Lonely boy Bentley

2011-12-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

Here's our new ram Bentley, now on his own for the winter, until the lambs are born and the ewes are safely past the period when they might come into heat.

He wasn't at all happy about this.

I took away his ewes yesterday afternoon, distracting him with some food, while I slipped the ewes out of the gate. Once he realized they were gone he began ramming the gate and baaa-ing in frustration, except that in a full grown ram, what passes for a baa is actually more of a grrrrr!

Tough. He'll have to stick it out. Most rams are such knuckleheads that there is no choice but to keep them separate from the rest of the herd much of the time, in well-fortified pens. Rams must lead solitary lives much of the year.

You can put rams of the same age class together out-of-breeding season. They can't do too much damage to each other when they're well-matched, and they're not that inclined to spar when there are no ewes to compete over.

But in season, and when one ram is clearly more dominant, they must be kept separate, or they'll destroy each other. This happened to us a couple of years ago, when a visiting ram, Snorri, beat the living daylights out of our old ram, Abraram. I had to put old Abe down with the rifle and make mincemeat out of him. I decided then and there never to have two grown rams on the farm at the same time ever again.

The other thing I did yesterday is cut away Regina's forelocks where she had become wool-blind. Wool-blindness is when a sheep can't see for fleece over her eyes. Corriedales can be prone to it, especially when crossed, as ours are, with Romney blood. Regina is the yearling in the background. You can see her eyes. That's how you know that this is a new photo of her.

Here's a chicken that looks like it wants to come in the house. For a warm-up, maybe? Or to eat Haggis's food?

Haggis update

2011-12-02T01:38:00.000-08:00

Our red shepherd dog Haggis has been a very sad puppy lately, and we've been sad too, as we wrestle with his health problems.

It's a major change in the happy equilibrium of the farmstead, although we're coping, as folk generally do when such things occur.

He recently developed laryngeal paralysis, a condition in which the larynx becomes unable to open and close with each breath as it normally does. The effect is that he wheezes and sucks wind for all but the slightest exertion. He can no longer take a walk unless it's just a mild toddle of a hundred yards or less, nor can he do very many of his other important jobs, such as herding chickens, woofing at the mail lady, or following us around the farmyard.

Obviously we've been trying to decide what to do, and have considered having him put down, or doing so ourselves. There's an operation, but it's uncertain in outcome, as well as thousands of dollars in cost, and we're practical people. We love our dog, but we're not paying thousands of dollars to keep him alive when he might not do so well afterwards. He'll take his chances, as we all must eventually, despite the best of modern medicine. We know we'll have to put him down eventually.

He's been so good-natured and uncomplaining about the whole thing, and has worked so well on finding his own new equilibrium, that for now we've put such thoughts out of our minds. One thing that helps is that he now gets a pill twice daily which works to reduce the bruising and inflammation that comes with this condition. He is now eating heartily, although he no longer can swallow the couple pounds of kibble he used to put away each day. He gets canned food instead, and has let us know through doggy sign language which of the various brands he prefers.

For a while there, before the pills, we wasn't eating at all and indeed lost a lot of weight, from 88 down to 76 pounds. This was weight he could afford to lose. Haggis, like all Womerlippi critters including human ones, was previously quite well-built, if not a little fat.

He can't afford to put that weight back on, because a fat dog pants much more, and Haggis can't easily pant without sucking air, and so the new diet will have to be monitored.

He spends his days much as he did, except that in the past he would get up and do things, and now he doesn't much. He still likes to follow me out to feed the sheep, but he's no longer right at my side. He instead picks a central vantage point and monitors my work from there.

So far he seems satisfied.

A shepherd dog is often quite critical of human efforts in sheep care. Shepherd dogs are the experts. Humans are still learning. We need to be watched constantly. Even a sick shepherd dog has his duty to the sheep.

(Sometimes we call him Corporal Haggis since he's so very dutiful and diligent. Good NCO material. Always ready to serve.)

He can be coaxed into taking a very slow toddle off towards the wooded trail where, this time of year, we used to walk a full mile together and with Mary-dog, at least once and often twice a day. He generally stops at the point where the trail begins and looks at you as if to say, OK, that's enough for me, and then we go back.

At night-time, he no longer climbs the stairs to sleep in our room. He tried that just once a couple nights ago, but the room was too warm for him, and so we took him back down. If the house gets warm, he asks to stay on the porch or be allowed outside.

His greatest pleasure, apart from just being around us, is to roll on the lawn.

I think that as long as I see him roll on the lawn with such pleasure, and as long as he's still so pleased to see us each day, we can work this out.

I am pretty bummed to lose my walking buddy, though.

It's hard to take yourself for a walk when you've always had a dog to take.

We did consider getting another dog sooner rather than later, but are cognizant that it would be very upsetting to Haggis to see me take another dog on a walk. We can't do that to him.

New pac boots on new snow

2011-11-24T02:50:00.001-08:00

It's Thanksgiving Day in America. I'm thankful for warm feet.

My old pac boots blew out. They developed a crack in the rubber, and so whenever the snow was slushy, the felt liners would get wet, and my feet would get cold.

This was no fun for me. Since I have to go out every day to tend the sheep, I prefer to have dry feet.

The old boots came from LL Bean and so we took them back to the store and received partial credit of $51. But I didn't like the looks, nor the price, of the replacement LL Bean snow boots. At $210, they were expensive, and they weren't even what I think of as proper snow-pacs. All futuristic-looking black plastic, they might not have looked out-of-place under a Darth Vader costume.

So we went online and discovered that although the LaCrosse company has also switched to fancy new boot types that look like they come out of the "Transformers" movie, they still sell their old-style classic Snow-Pac.

At $110, these were good value. I've had a previous pair of LaCrosse snow pacs, and they work great.

With the serious winters we get up here, you have to take boots pretty seriously if you want to be safe and comfortable.

Warm feet are happy feet.

I gave my $51 LL Bean store credit card to Aimee. She'll spend it.

The snow arrived early Wednesday morning, and it blew pretty well until afternoon. As soon as it stopped I went out with my new boots to start up the tractor and plow.

Then I took some pictures with my forty-dollar camera. I had to switch to the "macro" setting to snap the new boots, and I left it there for a shot of a layer that was happily laying until I disturbed her with the camera, and this ewe-nose.

Tillie, our number one sheep, wanted to get in on the camera action.

Laundry machine mangled

2011-11-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

Here's the filter of our laundry machine, a GE front loader only five years' old. Those stringy shreds are plastic swarf from the guts of the machine. The inner basket became out-of-round somehow, and tore these shreds off the tub.

To the point where not only did it make a horrible noise and have to be shut down, but the tub became perforated by the wear in several places.

I off course stripped it down completely to inspect the damage, and then priced the parts online. The half-tub section we needed was $160, the stainless steel basket $545.

We went to Home Depot and bought a new model, slightly larger and stronger, on sale for $499.

But we went for the extended warranty this time.

Now I have our garden cart loaded with laundry machine parts. I have to waste them. They look brand new. I may try to sell them online.

Low dollar, though.

Hopefully someone can afford to fix their machine, that way.

Apples for sheep and Haggis's cough

2011-11-12T13:03:00.000-08:00

We had Open House at school today -- a hundred and thirty students, as well as parents and even some grandparents, came to visit. As a result, Aimee and I were both tired when we got home and both took a nap. Aimee's still asleep.

I woke up feeling better after an hour or so, and went out with Haggis, AKA coughalopagus these days, to see about some sheep treats.

Our neighbors apple tree has shed all these golden delicious type apples, which are very sweet and tasty for sheep after so many frosts. Their sugar content must be sky high. The sheep crave them, and so do the whitetail deer, who come out of the woods at night to eat them, and then melt away in the early morning before deer hunters see them

The sheep saw me filling the buckets under the tree and started bleating for apples before I was anywhere near done.

In other news, Haggis has been back to the vets and has his diagnosis: He has laryngeal paralysis, not lymphoma.

This is a good thing, as such things go, because laryngeal paralysis is a good deal less terminal than lymphoma. He's going to die of old age in a few years' time, not cancer in a few short months.

This is a satisfying diagnosis too, in that it explains all his symptoms, the coughing, the inability to cool down in summer, even the response to his exposure to the cellulose insulation.

It doesn't make him feel any better to know any of this, but we're glad he's getting better. He has to take cortisone tablets twice a day, and we upped his rations because he lost so much weight. He fell to seventy-four pounds from eighty-eight. He's especially spoiled because it's hard for him to eat dry kibble because of his sore throat.

Now he gets a whole can of dog food, not once, but twice a day. With a cortisone tablet stuck in it.

What a spoiled puppy. He spends much of his day sleeping off all this overeating, lying still and trying not to cough.

Bentleyville

2011-11-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

Bentley, our new ram, arrived Friday causing quite a stir among the ewe-thful inhabitants of Womerlippi Farm.

But he was unable to get directly down to the job for want of some work on a secure pen for him. Rams are inherently large and rambunctious critters and need to be pretty well caged in 24/7. The population of the Great Farm may be low these days but it includes one pensioner and one toddler, either one of which could easily be hurt or even killed by a charging 250 pound ram, and so we needed to be sure that our animal was secure.

I started Saturday by making an eight-by-five foot shed-roofed ram shelter. This didn't take long. I used the nail gun and the miter saw, among other labor-savers.

Then came the problem of moving it to the right spot. Made using two-by-four hemlock with plywood sheathing, the new building was heavy. This had to wait for a couple of hours on Sunday, after we discovered Bentley pushing his way through the woven wire field fence to get to the ewes. He was easily disentangled, by the simple expedient of pulling on his back leg, but it was clear that he could pop the welds on the fence anytime he felt like it, unzipping a large ram-sized hole for him to toddle through on some lustful adventure.

Seeing the writing on the wall, I was off to the Farmer's Union like a shot, to get some sturdy welded cattle panels which seem like they will hold him.

One half of his pen was already fenced with pig panels, made of the same quarter-inch steel rod as the cattle panels, plus two strands of barbed wire. This arrangement may eventually need to be replaced with the taller cattle panels.

Bentley secured, I did the usual Sunday chores, and then jacked the new shelter up a couple feet off the ground with the vehicle jacks and jack-stands. While it was so conveniently situated to save my back, I gave it two quick coats of white waterproof and rot-proof paint.

The next job was to take the sides off the utility trailer so the ram shed would fit underneath the jacked-up shed. This also went fairly easy.

Letting the four target ewes and Bentley out into the Back Forty to get them out of the way, and thus at the same time beginning the official Womerlippi Farm mating season, I used the Bolens tractor to maneuver the ram shed into the proper position. Then came the metal roof, which I'd left off to save some weight and to give me less width to get past that coppiced ash tree in the ram pen.

By late afternoon Bentley and his harem were suitably imprisoned.

All in all, I'm content enough with the fruits of my labors.

I think he can still get out if he wants, by going right over the pig panels and their barbed wire, but the five foot cattle panels stand between him and the baby and granny ewes, and as long as that remains the case, I don't think he'll escape. But as soon as I have an extra hundred dollars, we'll switch out those pig panels for cattle panels.

I don't mind the expense. We'll need them for the pigs anyway.

Here's a shot of Bentley in action. I have to say, he is an energetic fellow. Molly here got the proper treatment several times during the afternoon. But his doohickey doesn't seem to extend the way it should. It seems to remain quite firmly sheathed.

I do hope this isn't a problem. This ram has been an expensive project.

We can probably afford more cattle panels, but I don't think we can stretch to Viagra.

Bentley

2011-11-04T12:29:00.000-07:00

Here's "Bentley", AKA "Birch Branch 30," our new ram.

Bentley motored over from Pittston today, albeit in the back of an ordinary American farm pick-em-up truck, not a swanky British motorcar.

He had scratched his nose somewhere along the way, and so had to be sprayed with Blue-Cote, but other than that he seems fine and certainly has a suitable set of equipment dangling behind.

I say suitable, because Mr. Bentley is what you might call a journeyman, and he has a journeyman's job of work to do, which is to impregnate the four ewes that we have ready to breed this season.

(There are two "granny" ewes, Tillie and Jewel, and four baby ewes, but they all have to be kept away from Mr. Bentley, lest he molest the yearlings before their time, and so he doesn't trouble the grannies.)

Of course, the arrival of a new ram was cause for some stir among the ewes.

"Hello sailor!" "Why don't you come up and look at my hay sometime?"

Unfortunately, the grannies led the pack.

Dirty old ladies. At their age, too.

Around the farmyard in the storm

2011-10-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

I went out with the forty dollar camera to see what I could snap, so you can see what it looks like up here today.

Here's the view up the driveway to the barn. Notice the heavy snow on the power line. We'll be lucky if we don't lose power today.

The house itself is cosy and warm inside the blanket of thick insulation there now is under those excellently-dipped shingles.

I can't imagine how the old couple that once lived here managed to get by without any insulation! I've been sealing and insulating this place for five years now, and it's still not quite done. But it is very cosy.

Ten inches of snow on a sheep fence. I'm glad I bought in the rugs that were hanging here until a few days ago.

Here's faithful Nellie, one of our more affectionate sheep, coming up to be petted in the snow.

Nellie, Molly, and a white fluff ball of a ewe lamb, whose name according to the wife is either Roxy or Rhea.

(I can never keep these names straight in my head.)

Haggis in the deep snow, and a nice natural curl of snow on the side of the greenhouse.

October snow and a sad, sorry dog

2011-10-30T04:20:00.000-07:00

A big nor'easter came early, barreling up the coast and smothering pretty much everything from New Jersey north to Nova Scotia in the white fluffy stuff.

We had fair warning, and although I'd been plugging away for weeks at the pre-winter farmyard and dooryard chores, I took fair note of the forecast and put a good day's work in Saturday, cleaning up the rest of the equipment and other items lying around the place, fixing the fences and gates that needed to be fixed before the snow, and otherwise taking care of business.

I took special care to check the generator and tractor fuel supplies and put the starter battery for the generator on a trickle charge for the day. With such wet sloppy snow, and the leaves still on the trees, power outages are forecast, and indeed we've had three or four short ones already.

I then retired for a nap on the couch smug and secure in the husbandly knowledge that it could blow as much as it bl*@dy well liked and all would still be well in the world of the Womerlippis.

Since then we've had a good ten inches and it's still whiter than any English Christmas out there.

It's interesting to me that we live more or less constantly, November to March, within a thermometer's hair of the climate regime at the top of Britain's Cairngorm mountain. I well remember how daunting it used to be, on the RAF Mountain Rescue winter climbing course, to drive our Land Rovers from the warm cosiness of the village of Braemar to the top of the road at the Cainrgorm ski area car park, and then continue up to Coire an t-Sneachda for the climbing.

How many times have I made that particular trip?

But here all I have to do right now to get the same experience, as long as there's a "R" in the month, is to stick my head outside my own front door.

Today's plans include a sensible big and greasy breakfast, followed by a good wait for the blizzard to stop, followed by a couple-three hours work with the tractor and snow shovel, to make sure that when this mess melts, as it surely will someday between Monday and Friday, we're ready for it and the meltwater can all drain in a useful direction.

In other Womerlippi news, we had a bit of a blow of a different kind Friday to hear from our vet that Mister Haggis, our recalcitrant shepherd dog, may have canine lymphoma.

We had thought it was just asthma brought on by contamination from the chemicals used in cellulose blown-in insulation.

A few weeks ago, with Aimee gone for a day or two to some wifely conference or some such thing, I'd taken the opportunity to blow a foot of insulation into the tiny crawl space above our front porch, something I'd been meaning to do for a few years now.

But the crawl space was not yet well-sealed, and every time the wind blew thereafter, cellulose dust would settle to the porch floor below, where Haggis spends his days patiently waiting for us the get back from work.

When the poor pup first contracted a good case of pink eye, then developed a nasty cough, it was a fair guess that the cellulose dust was to blame. Occam's razor ain't no facial hair removal device.

Accordingly, I sealed the crawl space up properly with mastic and trim boards, then decontaminated the area below with a good old-fashioned besoming, making good use of the Swiffer mop and it's alcohol-laden cleaner to be sure we'd gotten most of the light grey dust.

Yet the cough persisted, and so Haggis had to go to the vet's Friday. He was very happy to ride in Aimee's Camry car, and indeed sat without moving a muscle at the tire place, while I bought a nice aggressive pair of all-weather radials to see us safe through the snow and down to Virgina for Christmas. On to the vet's, and he was still happy until he made it inside the front door, when the smell of the place suddenly hit him and he made an abrupt u-turn, heading, or attempting to head, right back to the parking lot!

He loves to go for a ride, but he doesn't like to go to the vet.

On the vet's table he was given a very thorough examination, with all kinds of strange palpitations -- the spleen, the lymph node, the tendons on the back of the rear ankle joint, as well as a good old-fashioned stethoscoping, and so on. I appreciate the work of any craftsman, and this particular vet is clearly a master of the medical massage.

Haggis, for his part, was most upset to be felt up so thoroughly, without any choice in the matter.

The upshot was, we must now do a couple weeks of patient dog-watching to rule out kennel cough, and then our sorry mutt must return to the vet's to have some blood work and a biopsy of the lymph nodes. More than likely, he has the carcinoma, in which case he has less than a year to live.

His coughing proceeds apace, and is most unpleasant to hear. We feel quite sorry for him. It's clearly very uncomfortable. Often, he coughs up some interesting clear frothy spittle. We're in the habit of pausing whatever TV show we're watching using the DVR to let him get it over with. Yet another advantage of modern entertainment technology.

Mostly, he just lies quietly, as in this photo, trying not to get worked up about anything. Sensible dog.

The good part is, he now gets three cheeseballs a day, the cheesy mutt, with his several pills wrapped inside.

And, loyal and true friend that he is, all red hair and soppy puppy love for us both, we know that as long as we're both close by, he's happy enough and content with his lot in life.

If he really must die soon, all he will ask of us, to die a happy dog, is a little more of our time and companionship.

Camry starter solenoid repair for $15

2011-10-15T08:16:00.000-07:00

Aimee is off to a biology conference in New Hampshire. While the wifey's away, you'd think the husband would play, but there's a persistent "fails-to-start: starter just clicks and doesn't turn engine over" problem on her precious Camry to fix first.

Otherwise not only will she be upset when she gets back, but she'll also be driving the 215,000 mile Nissan farm truck back and forth to school, and Aimee's not really up for that. The truck is pretty old and has lots of foibles that only mechanically-inclined folks would have tolerance for.

Like the tailgate that falls down of its own accord every 50-60 miles unless you check the catches every ten or fifteen miles. Or the smell of oil-burning-on-muffler that occurs every time the truck is asked to drive more than five miles. Or the gas tank that has to be filled only 2/3 of the way because the filler neck had to be lowered to accommodate the new wooden truck bed when the old one rusted out.

The Camry starter job was going to be easy enough, and indeed if it hadn't been for the SAR call-out last night I would have had it done by 9am or earlier.

What happens, apparently, with these Camry starter motors is that the solenoid (the big electromagnetic relay that carries the power from the battery to the starter whenever the key is turned) had worn out its own contacts. These little l-shaped copper contacts do all the work of passing all those starting amps to the starter motor itself every time you start the engine.

They were easily sourced online, just by googling "Camry starter solenoid repair." They came first class mail, less than a week, cost less than $15 counting shipping, while the replacement motor from our local discount starter firm cost nearly $130.

$15 bucks and an hour's work saved me $115. That's $115/hour.

Almost lawyer's rates, that.

Ravioli! (Eventually)

2011-10-11T03:31:00.001-07:00

Aimee bought me the ravioli-maker attachment to my pasta machine for my birthday.

(My fiftieth -- a half-century on planet Earth!)

It took me a few days to have the time and mental capacity to risk wifely ridicule, and try to make some ravioli.

Unfortunately, ridicule was forthcoming anyway. And, I suppose, not without warrant, since this mess was the result of my first try. Not proper ravioli by any stretch of the imagination. Aimee laughed and laughed. I like to hear her laugh, so I didn't mind so much, but I wanted some proper raviolis!

However, a little tweaking and reconfiguring and learning of technique, and we had it down. The key seems to be to make sure you have slightly stickier pasta sheets than are normal for regular noodles (fettuccine noodles are what I usually make), and that your filling is very regular and smooth in composition. My first attempts used filling that had big chunks of grated zucchini, which got in the way of the roller edges and so prevented the sealing of the ravioli pockets. I blended the same filling down a little, used slightly stickier dough, and it worked fine.

The second-last photo, a little blurred, shows last night's dinner of home-made ravioli with home-canned tomatoes, homemade pesto and a thick slice of home-made wholewheat bread. Very tasty, filling, and nutritious.

The final photo shows the frozen noodles the next day. This was a great success, and bodes well for future mass-production. If you dry them a little on pastry sheets, flipping them once to dry out each side, they seem to freeze well in Ziploc bags. (This would be a good place to use those Ziploc bags with the vacuum pump, so you might squeeze out all the air and prevent freezer burn.)

I think I like my ravioli maker. It's also a great way to use up surplus eggs, of which we usually have plenty. Eggs go into both the noodle dough and the filling. If I used rolled wax paper or parchment to catch the finished pockets, I could make sheets of finished noodles several feet at a time, let them dry, and freeze them. Currently Aimee buys me bulk frozen ravioli and tortellini. It's an easy dinner when you come home late from work, and goes well with our homegrown tomatoes and pesto. But now I can make our own ravioli instead, enough for three or four dinners at a time.

I expect this to become another winter pastime, like knitting with our knitting machine. And the noodles will dry quickly whenever the woodstove is going.

The next question is, "what to put in the filling?" I need some good recipes for filling that use other local or home-grown ingredients we have on hand and in good quantities. Ground lamb and tomatoes with rosemary would be one good possibility. Bacon and mashed potato? Pesto and cheese? The possibilities seem extensive.

What did I do with the mushed-up monstrosities that were my earlier attempts? I popped the worst messes in the blender with some mashed potato and ground it all down, then called it gnocchi dough, and froze it for later. The second tier messes, the ones that actually had some shape to them, I cooked up and kept for snacking on later.

A walk with Haggis

2011-10-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

It's the long weekend for the Columbus Day holiday here in Maine. I pulled our spuds yesterday, not a great harvest, but adequate and better than might have been expected considering how much potato blight we had.

That left me stiff and sore this morning. The weather was due to be warm, so I wasn't much up for any more garden chores. Aimee was off to some biologists' fungus meeting in Waterville.

Haggis and I decided on a good long walk.

We drove up to the Dixmont Hills, just across the county line to the north. A good three miles or so and maybe 800 feet of ascent, just enough for a couple hours exercise in the golden-dappled woods of autumn in Maine.

Haggis is funny when hiking. He's an old dog now, and likes to spare himself if he can, and the Dixmont Hills are steep in places.

Probably he's thinking to himself, "if that mean old master would just take me on a good walk like this every day, I wouldn't be so old and fat and slow."

I know the general feeling. I get much the same inclination during the deep snow of early winter, when walking in Maine is damn near impossible. Any moderate walking fitness I may build up the rest of the years seems to bleed away during those two months.

Not that Haggis won't run along most of the day. he just takes a lot fewer side trips than he used to. If Haggis can see a trail and thinks he knows where to go, he'll run still ahead. Not too far -- just enough to let you and he both know that he's not quite past it yet, but not enough to give him more work to do.

If you're bushwhacking, he sets right in behind you and dogs you until he can see the trail again.

He gets hot, too, so any crick or wallow is a good excuse for a nice cooling dip.

I took pictures, but my cheap old camera was set to the close-up setting, so they all came out blurred. Here's one from way back, but the same season of the year.

2011-10-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

It's a wet weekend in Maine after a nice week of Indian summer. We're in domesticated mode.

Nothing like a cat in the lap for that.

Charlie-cat likes to cat around in the bushes on his forays and so he picks up stickers and burrs.

Then he decides he needs a little hair-do, so he jumps up on the couch and settles in my lap until I comb out all his burrs. Even when I'm done, he stays until get a dead-leg from cat-constricted circulation.

Shenzhi-cat brought in a dead vole, the killer.

Haggis, for his part, has a sore eye, and many have pannus or CSK. He went to the vet Friday. He's on cortisone drops.

The sheep are wet and soggy, but don't seem to mind.

Aimee and I have the weekend off completely for once, which is nice. I've been doing door-sealing, weatherstripping, and ductwork-insulating jobs, ready for a hard winter.

Aimee wants me to make her leek-and-barley soup later, another sign of dropping temperatures.

Hoofs and dags and Captives

2011-09-25T02:01:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the first of two field trips each academic year in which Aimee and I host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education program at our farm.

This program, called "Captive" for short among students, trains applied biologists for careers in zoo=keeping and other animal care work at a professional or managerial level. Students may also go into veterinary careers.

It's a very popular program with young women, but there are a handful of young men too. The students are characterized by a particular fondness for animals.

Aimee and I enjoy having the students to the farm because a) it takes away some of the very back-breaking work of sheep care, and b) it's fun to watch the students literally come to grips with the sheep. The professors who run the program, Sarah Cunningham and Cheryl Frederick, are routinely delighted with the arrangement too, because of the great experience for their students at a crucial time in their education.

It's a good trade for all concerned, but especially the students, who like all students need to learn some important lessons.

Sheep are cute and fuzzy, especially our little lambs, but they're also wild and woolly, and will struggle mightily to get out of the shepherds hands.

They also smell.

A lot.

They smell a lot. And it's not a good smell.

I'm not sure how many "Captive" students question their career choices when, often for the first time in their lives, they are told to grab on to their damp, stinky, heavy, powerful, struggling animal and make her assume the proper control position for hoof care or medicine, or whatever peculiar and seemingly perverted task is called for, but if they do, well, that's a good lesson, isn't it?

One that had better be learned sooner rather than later in the college career. If you don't like handling sheep at this point in your career, you aren't going to like giraffe or hippopotami or grizzlum bear very much later, either, and so it may be time to go off and get yourself a communications degree, or join some other less contact-oriented line of work.

Today's task was FAMACHA® care, as well as the ubiquitous dung tags or "dags" for short, and a little hoof trimming. Nothing too difficult, but, as always, animals need to be immobilized and properly handled to manage all this, and it's probably the handling part that is the main lesson.

It's certainly the main emotional lesson. As we routinely tell the students, sheep care is a bit like rugby, and indeed it's no surprise that the regions of the world that produce the most domestic sheep, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, Wales and of course my own homeland of northern England, also produce the best rugby players.

There are no half-way measures in rugby and sheep handling.

You just have to get "stuck in" and grab your sheep. This kind of gumption is not that easy to learn quickly, especially if you're a fashionable young lady from suburban America who has just left her teenage years.

There are other good lessons. FAMACHA care provides one. The main point of this routine is the control of the barber-pole worm, Haemonchus contortous. Infestation by this parasite is exhibited by the symptom of anemia, which itself is exhibited by lack of red blood cells in the blood vessels of the eyelid.

If the eyelid is white or creamy colored and almost devoid of red blood cells, then you treat for worms using a broad spectrum anti-helmintic such as Ivormec.

Notice the scientific language. The lesson is less about FAMACHA or worms, and more about science and its practical uses. First year students fresh out of high school in the first four weeks of their college career are apt to cherry-pick the lessons they like and the lessons they don't like. Routinely, the lessons they like are the ones with warm fuzzy animals, and the lessons they don't like have long words, math, and lots of complicated science reasoning.

This is understandable. One necessary character trait for a good college teacher is empathy for the student. It's a long time ago now, but I still remember well enough being an seventeen-year old RAF aeronautical engineering trainee, and being fascinated by fast fighter jets and less interested in the math, science, and engineering of flight.

But an empathetic student, faced with a sad wormy sheep, being taught by an empathetic professor, can begin to grasp that the proper care of this animal depends on her properly learning the science of worm management, and thus the science of biology, particularly cell biology and evolutionary ecology, is required.

And thus, dear readers, another applied biological scientist is born, and the world, or worm, turns once more.

Two sheep needed to be wormed, which was occasion for another big word : "intubate." Lacking a proper drenching tool, the Womerlippi Farmers get Ivormec into a sheep's stomach and importantly, not into a sheep's lungs, with an intubation kit that was originally designed for hypothermic new-born lambs. It's a little awkward but works.

The sheep had been out on good pasture all summer, so their hooves were nice and didn't need much trimming.

They didn't even have too many dags, which was in some ways a pity because dagging is a disgusting job and at this point in a college career a Captive students badly needs to have to do some truly disgusting animal care job or another.

They did fight a bit, but the proper holds and positions take care of that. A sheep can't move at all if held properly in any one of half a dozen holds. The students learn quickly to get the animal into the proper position and keep him there. Only one lamb escaped treatment, by scrambling rather athletically over a gate we thought was too tall to scramble over.

You never learn not to be surprised at what animals may do.

Three groups of students were handled in this way, nearly fifty students in all, but only ten sheep, counting the one that escaped. Three or four sheep per group.

Still, everyone got to get their hands on a sheep. And a good day was had by all, except possibly the sheep.

There was also a bit of talking involved, as we explained scientific care routines and bits and pieces of sheep medicine, and a little farming, all by reference to science. It's relatively easy to actually get lessons into the student's brain, once you've got his or her attention using the hands-on or haptic teaching method, wet wooly animals optional.

We call this approach praxis at Unity College. It's a relatively unique feature of our pedagogy. And it works.

Which saves an awful lot of effort and money. You'd be surprised how much expensive education is out there that doesn't work nearly as well.

You'd think folks would catch on, but they don't.

Aimee has pictures here. Enjoy.

Getting in the harvest and putting up food

2011-09-17T10:12:00.001-07:00

I didn't feel like writing much for the farm blog last weekend after Mary passed away. But it was a busy time, as we were getting ready for a class visit while also deep in fall harvesting and putting up of food.

The class, Agroecology, came by on Monday and spent a good couple hours on an in-depth farm tour. I has set up a tomato canning demonstration for them, but we ran out of time.

The tomatoes canned up just fine, all the same. I took some into college on Thursday, along with other products such as yarn and pesto and pork chops, to show the students and give out in class.

Next on the harvest list would be more apples, but that had to wait for this morning.

It's been an exceptionally good year for apples, and we have departed from our usual practice of making just a few packages of apple sauce/pie filling because of the failure of the blueberry crop at our friend's farm. Lacking our usual twenty or thirty pounds of blueberries, we needed more of some other kind of pie stock to see us through the winter and so the apples have come in handy.

It's always been my intention to get our apple trees all pruned and in shape for the long haul -- they're terribly overgrown, having seen no pruning in thirty or more years -- but that's a slow business. I was pleased that with no help from us this year they produced some very nice apples.

I had already picked a pretty good cart-load of Golden Delicious type apples and made those into apple sauce. Today's cart load were mostly of a different variety -- another of the many unknown kinds we have, something like a Cortland. They proved a superior pie apple, not turning brown and cooking down nicely.

I then took a tour of our apple trees, tasting and bringing in a few samples here and there. Deep in the woods I found a very pale yellow apple that was super-sweet, my favorite so far, but by the time I found it, all the best ones had fallen in the wind.

The next job was to bring in a few spuds, enough for a nice Sunday dinner of ham and mashed potato -- our pig came back from the butchers last Tuesday. Potatoes, like apples, have done well this year, despite the blight. Some of the spuds in our patch were blighted, but most were fine. I'll wait for a hard frost to do the main harvest, and sort them very carefully and we should still get our target two hundred or so pounds.

Aimee came home with the shopping just as I was finishing this very pleasant activity, and so there was a small bustle of work as we brought in the food and some animal feed, then Aimee turned her attention to the basil crop. She'd been shopping for bulk olive oil, parmesan cheese, and nuts, all for pesto. The next thing was to pick the necessary basil. This had needed to be covered last night for fear of a frost, while a more certain frost is forecast for tonight, so today was the very last day to do this job without the fuss of keeping plucked basil plants in water.

For a while now she's been sitting on the porch, listening to "Science Friday" on the Internet, plucking basil.

All very domestic here at the farm this weekend.

Mary gone to the great papa san in the sky

2011-09-10T13:52:00.000-07:00

Our dog Mary died yesterday, of an overdose of sedatives on the vet's table.

She had been losing weight all summer. By the fall she was vomiting and piddling on the floor much more than usual. We took her to the vets, only to find she was riddled with cancer, so we had her put down.

We brought her home and buried her under the trees in the backyard next to Daisy, another dog, and Maggie, a ewe who escaped the butcher, thanks to tetanus. Quite the cemetery. But there are far worse places to end up than under a few feet of soil and a cairn of mossy rocks in a wooded yard in Maine.

We're not too sad about Mary, since the five or so years she had with us were kind of a second chance for this dog we found wandering and emaciated in the woods in Virginia. By rights she should have died back then, but we bought her up to Maine. She didn't like the snow much, but she did like Aimee's "papa san" bamboo couch. She spent most of her second-chance five years in that couch, which she claimed for her own.

No human has sat there for years.

A big clean-up and shingles nearly done

2011-09-05T04:10:00.000-07:00

It's a holiday weekend -- "Labor Day" is the holiday, for those British readers unschooled in American holidays -- and accordingly we've been laboring, but not too hard. Aimee has a couple short rows of shingles left to nail, and she'll have finished one whole wall of the house. This is a truly laborious project -- every shingle is hand-dipped then carefully air-dried on a rack before being put in it's proper place. And yes, my tiny little wifie gets up that very long ladder and onto that scaffolding to personally nail every shingle in place.

As a result, this house which was falling into its cellar hole when we bought it all those years ago, looks like a million dollars. Below is a picture of what it used to look like, complete with part of the mountain of trash we removed from the site.

I don't imagine we'll ever have to do this job again in our lifetimes. Unprotected cedar shingles last for twenty or more years. I have no idea how long they last with such a thick coat of preservative, but I don't imagine I'll live to find out.

My contribution, such as it is, is to set the scaffolding in place and move it when needed.

I'm not allowed to so much as nail a single shingle. Aimee is a serious perfectionist when it comes to cedar shingles.

In other Labor-day weekend labor, Haggis was in need of a good grooming, and we had lost the sharp-toothed comb that is used for grooming a Haggis. He has a very thick coat of under-fur, and this must be de-thatched every few weeks or he gets a bit pongy. This is another Aimee-job.

What was the husband doing while all this labor was happening?

I was cleaning the house. We had some friends over for dinner, which meant the house needed a good besoming. Having guests is just the excuse to clean in all the corners and sweep out the cobwebs.

I'm a handy old besom, for a fella. Even if I'm not allowed to touch the shingles.

Old school

2011-09-01T13:39:00.001-07:00

My old buddy Gary sent me these. He's the tall dark fellow.

Guess which one is me? Click on the image to enlarge.

Just to remind myself that I was once as young as our first years.

Or almost.

Please note, the litter handling technique circa 1983. Hasn't changed much.

Canning some sunshine

2011-08-28T11:50:00.000-07:00

Our tomato crop looks history, but I wasn't going to go without my winter tomato stews and such, so I went to my Amish friends and bought twenty pounds of good canning tomatoes.

I was also able to get thirty pounds of prime Maine peaches for rather much more money per pound, from an "English" farmer though, not an Amishman.

Yes, that's right. I said "prime Maine peaches." Haven't you heard of climate change?

All this summer goodness got canned up today. Eight quarts peach halves, three peach pie filling, nine quarts tomatoes.

We'll put up some more tomatoes later in the week. I want at least twenty and preferably thirty quarts on hand.

Tropical storm Irene is very nearly upon us, and it's poured with rain all day so far, so this was a good use of my day, the last free one before term starts.

Other updates

2011-08-27T02:20:00.000-07:00

Other than the excellent news that the pigs went quietly, lots more has happened, good and bad, around the farm.

Under "good", our lamb and sheep management has paid off in spades for pasture quality for the first time ever.

In the past, we've always found ourselves with too much head of stock by the time the grass starts to slow down in the fall, and as a result we get overgrazing, and need to supplement grass with hay and grain earlier than is cost-effective.

You have to give a little grain. This time of year the less hardy breeds of sheep need a little supplemental grain if you're to get good lamb numbers.

Hardy types, Herdwicks and Swaledales and Welsh Mountains can pretty much fend for themselves year-round if there's winter grass, and indeed that's the proper management for those breeds in Britain.

Here in Maine, we'd ordinarily give the hardy breeds a winter shelter and just hay.

But slightly less hardy types like our Corriedales need a little grain before breeding, if you want to have high lamb productivity, lots of twin lambs. This is called "flushing." I began graining our ewes and lambs lightly a few weeks ago, for flushing, and to keep the shearlings and yearlings in good condition for sale.

The sale animals went for a decent price, which, with the weaner lambs sales in spring and the one fat lamb sale, also a few weeks ago, and last but not least my project of culling the large number of superannuated ewes we used to keep; all this reduced the flock count to ten, down from sixteen.

The pastures were looking tired so the remaining sheep went into the North Paddock and onto hay for a short while to give them a rest. A bit of rain and some sunshine later and we have grass in abundance, and fewer sheep to eat it. Our ewe-lambs are fat and fluffy and happy as a result. In a few weeks time we'll catch them for dagging and hoof-trimming, and check their eyelids, and I don't expect to see any anemia, except perhaps for Nellie who seems unable to fatten this year for some reason. I've already drenched her once, and am not sure what else to do except perhaps to give her a rest year. Her twin lambs are still nursing, the greedy buggers, and once they stop, or she gets wise and makes them stop, she may have a little more to spare for herself.

In other "good" news, Aimee had a birthday, although I'm not sure how good she feels about getting older. She liked her presents for once, especially that cute little lime-green li-on screwgun I bought her.

Aimee loves her tools. Must have gotten that from her dad.

In bad news, with that recent rain that helped the pastures, the late blight has struck again and we'll lose ninety percent of our tomato crop. I walk around the tomato patch looking for odd berries that have escaped the fungus, and it's just a miserable feeling. I love my tomatoes so much. I get that from my Dad, I know, and my grandfather, both of whom raised tomatoes every year.

The potatoes, otherwise susceptible (Phythoptera infestans is the "potato" blight after all), will be fine as long as I leave the harvest until after the first killing frost. The fungal spores don't penetrate the ground unless you disturb it, or unless the blight hits while the tubers are first forming.

And the potato productivity is well up. One plant alone that I pulled for eating now produced a five-gallon bucket full. We also have plenty of other vegetables.

And we have lots of apples, mostly because of a piece of bad news. A storm Monday took out our best eating apple tree, a big, tippy, split-trunk disaster of a tree that just happens to produce nice big Golden Delicious-type apples. This tree, overgrown like all the many apples we have, was on my list to be deadheaded -- pruned back to a pollard. They all are eventually. This was just higher on the list. But I postponed the job until I could see what the results of this very harsh treatment would be on the Granny Smith-type in the front yard. I cut that tree back to a near-pollard several years ago, and thus far there had been no apples to speak of. A few appeared this year. Until I know how long it takes to get a tree back into production, I can't put them on a rotation for deadheading.

The problem is, we really don't know, and probably can't ever know, what varieties we have here, or whether or not they were grafted, and so it's very hard to know if or how to prune them.

When I say they produce "Granny-Smith" style apples, that just means the apples look and taste like modern Granny Smiths. In reality, the tree is probably some much older, forgotten variety.

The orchard plantings probably took place between 1806, when the farm was begun, and 1880, when the original Great Farm mansion burned. What we have are likely the daughters and grand-daughters of the original and later plantings. Some of the trees we have would have been deliberately cultivated, others would be volunteers. At least a couple are obvious grafts, such as the two-trunker in the Back Forty, where one trunk produces some kind of Russet, while the other has pale yellow, sweet eating apples of some other kind, possibly the same kind as the tree that just fell. We can guess that any grafted tree was deliberately planted, and so dates back the last time this place had a serious and knowledgeable farmer or farm manager. The Granny Smith, fifteen inches or more at the base is also probably 150 or 200 years old. Others are likely fresh "sprouts" of 50 or 75 years only.

Anyway, long story short, my favorite apple tree came down in a storm, weighed down by lots of fruit. Neighbor Hamilton was the one to find out when his morning run was blocked by the tree fallen across the fence, and the sheep were out as a result.

He was good enough to clear the tree for me and even managed to round up most of the sheep. I came home to find him trying to get the rest put away. I relieved him of that duty, and then we finished clearing his driveway together. After that I stripped all the good apples off the down branches and pruned what was left of the tree back to a kind of triangular pollard, where the main trunk leaves the ground at 45 degrees, and the one remaining branch turns back at a steep angle to balance the trunk. The sheep were then set to clean up the hundreds of smaller wormy apples, which job they have not been able to complete.

Other bad news, I think I have a CV joint going out on the Ford Escort wagon, and so am considering doing that job and some other body and brake work to get the car in good nick for the winter. I went through our superannuated Nissan farm truck pretty thoroughly this summer, so that vehicle is now my daily driver while I decide what to do with the Ford.

And last but not least, we will get a hurricane or a tropical storm sometime Sunday or Monday. Monday is also the first day of class, so we may finish up with a search and rescue call-out on the first day of class.

The three not-so-little pigs

2011-08-27T01:58:00.000-07:00

So much has happened since I last posted here, it will take me a couple of posts to get updated.

The first big thing that happened was that the pigs went to the butchers. And they went quietly for the first time ever. Previous posts have told of my routine difficulties due to the need for a proper livestock trailer.

I still don't have a proper trailer, but I have a home-built lash-up that is much better than any I've used before.

I realized in July or earlier that the money -- $2,000 or so -- for even a used traditional metal livestock trailer wouldn't be there, so I started to plan. I bought a used utility trailer and added a wooden box sturdy enough for pigs and sheep.

I put a sliding door on the back with a pin-on-a-string thingy that works as a drop catch, as well as a cunning trapdoor in the roof at the front that allows you to drop in special treats.

On the appointed day, which was last Sunday, I placed the trailer in position at the front of the pigs' pen, and dropped in some corn cobs and watermelon rinds. Sure enough, two out of three pigs climbed on board, so I pulled the string, and just like that they were trapped.

Off to the butchers they went.

Then I came home and repeated the process without incident for the last pig.

Let me just say that again so I can enjoy the words: The pigs went without incident this year. It was totally routine. And my blood pressure was only slightly elevated.

In the past, the butchering days have left me just shattered. It was always bad enough to have to take the poor buggers to their deaths, but then add bad equipment on top of that, and you're talking a seriously unreasonable kind of stress for me and the pigs.

The only problem with this trailer is that it's a bit too cramped for three pigs, so the third pig doesn't want to come in, however nice the treats might seem.

Once the pigs were gone, I cleaned out the barn. I did a better job of that than usual -- the cobwebs in the ceiling/hay floor joists were just a little too numerous for my tastes, and Hallow'een isn't for a couple months yet.

Apple harvest

2011-08-15T02:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure when harvest season began. A few days ago. We just kind of blended into it without fanfare.

First I pulled the onions. Didn't do very well there, I'm afraid -- the sheep had gotten about a third of them by sticking their heads through the fence, and what was left was small, or had split into several bulbs like shallots and kept hard stalks. I hung them on the wire platform in the garage to cure.

Then I harvested a bucket of potatoes to see if they were ready, more or less, and they were. The haulms haven't all died yet, but there's a couple of friends from work we always invite to dig a few spuds for themselves, and I wanted to do that before the fall term began.

Next I noticed a lot of smaller but bug-free apples on the Golden Delicious tree in the North Paddock. This is our best tree for eating apples. It always has larger, less buggy fruit.

So I made apple pie filling with some of these, just because I could.

This is our peeler-corer-slicer thingy. It works well. You can peel, core, and slice a whole pot of apples in minutes. I put them on a slow heat with cinnamon and sugar for several hours, and they cooked down nicely. I set the mix to cool and today I'll bag it and freeze it.

I'll need to make a lot of apple pie filling this year because we heard from our blueberry farmer that their blueberry crop has failed.

Bummer.

Shingles

2011-08-13T12:52:00.001-07:00

Here's Aimee, perhaps two days' work shy of completing the cedar shingles on the front wall of the house.

She's been beavering away quite eagerly at this job since we re-organized the ladders and scaffolding. It's now much safer up there, which I think is why. The weather is also much nicer, not nearly as hot and humid.

She stopped work again a short while after I took this picture. She was tired, but she also ran into a wasps' nest, which the husband must now sort out. Unfortunately the two numpties that have completely ruined our village hardware store, running down all the stock so that there's hardly anything you need, haven't any wasp killer either.

I guess I'll have to run to town.

Thirty miles is a long way for a can of wasp killer.

Here are the sheep lazing in the shade of the barn this morning. They're looking pretty sleek except for Nellie, who may need to be wormed again soon.

Mary piddle problem

2011-08-12T01:48:00.000-07:00

Our redbone coonhound, Mary, is a very lazy dog.

(You must say "redbone coonhound" with a southern accent, adding extra vowels throughout, to get it right.)

This is no great surprise, indeed only natural, given her sad life story.

She's a former hunting dog that we rescued one winter's day from St Mary's Wilderness in VA. She had either become lost on a hunt or her former owner had had abandoned her. She was starving, skeletal, and had well-healed bite marks that could only have been made by a bear. She was hanging around the trail head, and when we climbed out of our rental car to go for a hike, she followed us up the trail, refusing to leave us be, and so we took her.

She probably knew we were her last chance.

A trip to the vets and a plate or two of dog food saw her quickly on the road to recovery. We were surprised to see what happened next. We gave her a temporary bed in my in-laws house. She took to it like a fish to water, and has seldom gotten out of bed since.

Mary sleeps almost all day, every day.

Almost immediately after arriving at our home in Maine, she took to Aimee's "papa san" bamboo couch, and now spends at least 12-16 hours of every day there. Her day bed is on the porch, where this time of year, she spends all but thirty minutes of her remaining 23 1/2 hours.

Occasionally, she will sleep on the lawn.

In bug season or when the snow cover is deep, when dog walks are unpleasant or impossible, a maximum of about thirty minutes of her day is spent not sleeping. The rest of the year she gets a forty-minute walk once or twice a day. It takes her about five minutes to eat, and she occasionally will have a roll on the lawn or a stretch.

That's it, all she wrote -- her entire life.

The rest of that half-hour, especially in bug season is spent with me, trying to get her to piddle outside. There's a routine, of course, as there always must be with dogs, especially rescue dogs, to keep them content.

The routine goes like this:

Between 2 and 4pm: Mick comes home from work or from working in the yard, and feeds Mary and Haggis. In season the dogs may get a one-mile walk.

After eating, Mary goes back to bed on the porch.

About 6.30pm, after Mick eats his own supper and lets both dogs in the house.

Mary goes straight to bed on the "papa san."

About 9pm or 9.30, Mary is made to go out and piddle.

Mary goes straight back to bed on the papa san.

About 6.30 or 7am, Mick takes Mary and Haggis out to piddle before going to work. In season, the dogs get a one-mile walk.

Mary goes straight back to bed on the porch, where she remains all day until dinnertime.

And that's it. No more, no less, the entire life of a Mary-dog.

She seems content with it: enough food and clean water, her own private bed, and no bears, that's all she asks for. A simple life.

But lately I've been waking up and coming downstairs each morning to find a massive great pool of Mary-piddle on the kitchen floor.

She's not incontinent. She just doesn't want to piddle outside. She may not be piddling before she goes to bed. Some of the time she may get kicked out at 9 or 9.30 and forget to do so.

I routinely go out with her and Haggis at bed-time to make sure they do have time to piddle, but now it seems I have to start checking up one her with the flashlight. That's a little annoying.

The second remedy is to drag her out of bed at 4 am each morning and take her out to piddle then. You have to physically remove her from the papa san. She will not get up of her own accord, not that early. Understandably, I've been reluctant to do this, but I'm getting tired of piddle on the floor.

Poor Mary.

But poor Mick, having to clean up piddle before I've even had a cup of coffee.

Dragging her out of bed is quickly beginning to seem the lesser of two evils.

Simpson Dura-Vent Failure: Dura-Vent or Dura-crap?

2011-08-08T13:22:00.001-07:00

Keywords; Simpson Duravent, Dura-vent, DuraVent, Duratech, failure, melting, breakdown, rip-off, scam, chimney failure, lawsuit, consumer report

Herewith a tale of modern woe and Kafkaesque bureaucracy with which to scare your children:

Two summers ago we were told by our insurance company that they needed a chimney inspection on record, if we were to be heating with wood fuel.

"OK" we said, good doobies that we are.

Only problem was, no-one really works as a qualified chimney inspector in the great State o' Maine. The state doesn't issue qualifications. Neither do municipalities. Local fire chiefs will occasionally take a look at your chimney, but they're not really qualified.

We got a little frustrated trying to find someone to do it. One guy and his shifty-looking buddy came out and looked at it and cleaned it and charged us $150, and left us with a receipt that might have been printed up by a child with a potato stamp, and a feeling that our "joint" had just been "cased."

So we called in a "proper" chimney contractor, Mr. Mike Peete, of Peete's Clean Sweep of Newport Maine.

Mr. Peete recommended a complete demolition of all our existing flues and rebuilding from the ground up.

I was sort of expecting he would put a liner in our kitchen chimney, which although cracked here and there, was otherwise sound. But no.

What followed reminded me of "Right Said Fred," by Bernard Cribbens.

"That there chimney's going to have to go."

There was a huge mess and a lot of dust and a massive pile of masonry demo in the back lot, which remains for me to deal with one fine day, but the chimneys were duly replaced with "proper" contractor-installed chimneys. Our insurance company was happy.

We weren't. The two new chimneys cost $3,500 we probably didn't need to spend. As soon as we could we switched insurers. Given what happened later, we were right to do so.

Because less than a year later, I happened into the attic one day, to find the kitchen chimney rusting out aready. The outside chimney followed suit shortly thereafter.

Mike Peete returned my first call but never made it out to the house to look at the problem. After that he stopped returning my calls.

The makers of the chimney, Simpson Dura-Vent, returned my first email and a very legal eagle called me at home, to bring my attention to the warranty where it says that the manufacturers instructions have to be followed completely or the warranty doesn't stand.

I got the manual and of course found a couple of areas where Mr. Peete's installation didn't match the original.

Artistic license, I guess. I wish he'd stuck to the script.

But it's pretty clear to me having inspected the faulty pipe on the bench (and given my engineering background I feel qualified to say), that the product itself is at fault here. It was made in such a way that hot gases from the inside can clearly reach the insulation, through an area just above the join between pipe sections, eventually melting said insulation, and then burning the galvanized coating off the outer layer of metal, eventually causing the rust, as well as extreme structural weakness.

The pipe that looks toppled over in the picture? It is toppled over. It fell over as soon as I disconnected the supports.

I can't imagine that a product as badly made as this hasn't been a problem for the company, but I can't find any record of other failures on the Internet.

A clue lies in the fact that we have two unharmed sections of pipe. It must have been a bad batch of product.

Yet even if my particular batch of chimney sections had some unique fault, there would likely have been others. Why aren't there any? Did the company settle with them and not with me?

I don't have much recourse. If Mr. Peete had followed the manual, I could sue Simpson Dura-Vent. I could sue Mr. Peete for not following the manual, but I'm not inclined to do that -- except for the bad product, his installation was workmanlike and proper. I could make a claim against my own homeowner insurance, let them sue Simpson Dura-Vent, and risk a higher premium, or I could just replace the sections with new ones.

Aimee and I talked it over and decided the best thing to do would be to replace the kitchen chimney with a different company's product, one that looks sturdier, and recycle the good sections of Dura-Vent into the garage for now.

But it's still going to cost me $500. Which is enough to make me want to write it all up on my blog.

If Simpson Dura-Vent doesn't like it, they can pay for my new chimney, then I might take this post down.

It's not like I don't have proof. The pictures speak for themselves.

And that ridiculous insurance company diktat to get an inspection in a state that doesn't have inspectors?

How much more dangerous is the new chimney than the old?

Last lamb gone and what good did it do us? A cost-benefit analysis

2011-08-08T01:51:00.000-07:00

I took the last male lamb to the butchers yesterday, the poor wee mite. His ultimate destination is our friend Lois's freezer. This final sale made this a bumper year for sheep sales. We've sold a total of six animals, one two-year old, two shearlings, one fat lamb, and two weaners.

How much did we get from this activity? About $430. Gross.

How much did we net? I don't want to think about it. Really. But I will.

This many sheep sales represents at least part of the cumulative production of the last three years. If I were to add the gross receipts from last year and the year before, and then subtract the costs and divide by three, making some allowance for the extra shearlings kept on this year (current "inventory") minus those we had at the beginning of the three years (inventory at the beginning of the time period), I might get close to a number that represents our losses or profits.

I keep a spreadsheet of costs versus revenue from which I compute our income taxes each year. If I count only those expenses that go towards sheep feed of one kind or another, and exclude the cost of fencing and barn, pick-up, tractor and trailer maintenance, I get about $3,000 of expenses for this three-year period.

Against which I get about $750 of sheep and yarn sales.

Meaning we lost about $750 per year on sheep.

To be honest, I thought it was going to be worse.

As the owner of these few acres, and caretaker of a few more, I tend to think I'm going to have to spend some money on grass and brush management, which right now is done primarily by our sheep.

How much would it cost me in lawn-mower and brush-hog maintenance and depreciation and gas to do this work myself? I have no clue, to tell you the truth. I hate mowing lawns.

But to begin with, I'd need a riding mower and a brush hog attachment for the tractor, and I'd need to calculate depreciation and expenses for both. A mid-range riding mower starts at about $1,500, the brush hog would be about $900, and our small Kubota tractor, which is second hand, cost $6,000. That's $8,400 of capital expense, which would probably average about a ten-year lifetime, or less given our land is so rough.

Call it $800 a year, plus another $50 in gas and oil.

And I don't account for our own meat consumption anywhere in this estimate. I'm not sure I eat $750 worth of lamb and mutton.

But how much do I eat? I would guess I eat lamb or mutton products perhaps once a week.

If I were to estimate that consumption as a third of a pound per week for 52 weeks, then that's about 17.5 pounds per year, which at $3/pound is less than $60 dollars.

So my $750 of excess sheep-care expenses is offset by $850 in avoided lawn and brush-management expenses, as well as $60 of meat.

There's also the sheeps' contribution to the gardening effort. We make between two and four tons of compost per year, but I think the majority of the nutrients in that material come from the pigs. Still, we do grow an awful lot of tomatoes and potatoes and onions and other crops in that garden.

But this is getting too complicated. I was breaking even at the previous stage, sheep vs. lawn-mowing and meat expenses.

I think I should quit this calculation while I'm ahead, don't you? All this calculating helps me justify my existence as a sheep farmer, but it doesn't help poor Molly out there, still bleating for her lost lambie. I'd better go feed her, to distract her from her loss.

She'll feel better -- they always do.

Sheep have short memories. As a result, they don't do cost analysis.

And that's probably a very good thing.

Countdown

2011-08-06T02:12:00.001-07:00

My last week of summer field research is coming up. Following that, a couple of easy weeks. And then the fall term will start and we'll be back in the grind. I'm getting that anticipatory feeling that I always get at the end of summer.

It's always interesting at this very pleasant time of year how little we remember our feelings at the end of spring term, how tired and frustrated and upset we were with one another, and with the educational process in general, students and faculty alike.

Education is a process fraught with inherent conflict, internally and externally, or it isn't education.

It should come with a government health warning.

Warning: Participating in education can change your mind.

Changing your mind can be painful. Symptoms include but are not limited to headache, blurred vision, backache, perspiration, shivering, pallor, migraine headache, and feelings of inadequacy.

I'm always amused by the politically correct among us, even at Unity College, who seem to think that all life's activities should be pleasurable, especially academics.

But, student or teacher, if you don't occasionally have some of these symptoms, you're probably not doing it right.

Newsflash! Serious college is hard. Hard things take effort. Effort hurts your mind. They also require feedback and criticism, particularly self-criticism.

But then that's how your mind gets better.

Enjoy.

MOP gear

2011-08-04T01:54:00.000-07:00

Aimee got a good chuckle out of my antics last night.

Sigh...

My job in life definitely seems to be to entertain my lovely wife.

But no, I'm not out to rob a bank or hold someone up.

(Although the girls at our actual local bank were just robbed by some low-life tea-leaf.)

My aim with this particular fashion statement is to defend hearth and home against a sea of outrageous and very aggressive paper wasps that have set up home in the barn attic. Every time I go to feed or check on the animals, these buggers sting me when I leave. The door sticks and needs to be slammed a little bit, which rocks the building and makes a loud noise, which rocks their nest and out they sally, stingers primed.

There's only one thing that really works with this problem, and that's good old fashioned, tasty organo-chloride pesticides. Never mind your organic farming BS -- that stuff is anti-intellectual mind-pap anyway. Nature is full of nasty chemicals created by perfectly organic, perfectly natural living beings.

We had a can of something in the shed somewhere, but I wasn't sure how much. Not wanting to start the job and not be able to finish, I went to the hardware store to get a fresh can.

I don't care to be stung either, so I took further precautions, suiting up in some ad-hoc NBC-protective gear -- yet another use for military training! When will the usefulness end, I ask myself?

I waited until dark. I even tried to use a red flashlight on the questionable semi-scientific grounds that I thought I remembered insects couldn't see colors, but my flashlight batteries were out, so that part of the plan was a bust.

In the event, all I needed to do was wait until dark. The wasps were sound asleep.

This morning's first job will be to remove the contaminated debris and any dead bugs. I don't want our chickens eating them. I eat eggs. I may not agree with some of the pseudo-scientific nonsense spouted by organic and anti-GM food advocates, but I don't care to deliberately become the last stop on the bio-accumulation chain.

In other news, every summer there's a day each year when the harvest provides the first completely home-grown meal of the year. This year that day was Sunday. Blackened, crisp-grilled pork chop, shell peas and new potatoes.

Yum.

How the other half lives

2011-07-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

Regular readers will remember multiple years of whinging from me about our lack of a suitable livestock trailer and descriptions of various flimsy lash-ups, as well as outbreaks of outright bodgery to make up for lack of the same. To say this problem has driven me to distraction in previous years would be an understatement.

(Here's a selection of totally classic posts in this vein:
1, 2, & 3)

There's even a very fine wood craving made by father-in-law Dick Phillippi of one such incident.

Memorialized in artwork, no less.

But obviously, this annual tradition had to end somehow.
Something Needed to be Done this year, if the pigs were to be safely transported to the slaughterhouse, and if I were to keep my sanity.

After weeks of perusing Uncle Henry's and Maine Craigslist for a suitable trailer, I finally realized I wasn't going to have the money to get one that was ready made and perfect.

Therefore I would have to make one.

I've made a small livestock trailer before using plastic sheeting and two-by-fours, and it worked alright until I backed the flimsy trailer frame into the barn's concrete slab with the four-wheel-drive pick-em-up truck, in four wheel, low range, and, unhappily, made the previously rectangular frame more of a rhomboid.

After that, my fine trailer wore out a new set of eight-inch tires every twenty miles. Obviously the trailer couldn't be used on the road anymore, although I still use it regularly for hauling firewood out of our woods.

I removed the plastic cap and made that into a stand-alone livestock crate, which we still have and which works fine for sheep, but is too flimsy for big pigs.

I finally set aside $300 after paying bills one Friday and set out to shop for a trailer. I found one in Carmel, just up the road on the way to Bangor, advertised for just that price.

I was a bit suspicious of it at first, because the axle had clearly been struck and was bowed about an inch, but the tires weren't worn and the owner swore he has been using it on the road. The rest of the trailer was fine, and I figured I could get a replacement axle for it, if need be.

But I haggled harder than I normally would have, because of the bent axle. He and I settled on $230, but he threw in a new trailer hitch, and a secondhand 1 and 7/8 inch ball.

The seller had tarted it up a bit, probably with some black Rustoleum in a spray can. He hadn't bothered to remove the decking to get at the rust on the frame underneath, which I resolved to do as soon as I could.

I let it sit outside in the yard until I got to a good point in some of my other projects, and so today after finishing the second full side of metal roofing on our barn, I wrecked out the floorboard decking and chopped them up for winter kindling, removed the remainder of the floor screws, ground off the rust with the wire brush attachment on the angle grinder, washed away the dust and dirt (which is right about the stage I took this picture), and then finally sprayed the whole chassis with half a quart of black Rustoleum in the pneumatic sprayer.

I have new decking sorted already, the same treated wood we've used on the truck bed.

The trailer came with decent, solid hardware for crate sides, supposed to fit into 2 by 4 sockets built into the frame, which will do just fine for most loads, and so I'll make new crate sides with the same hardware.

However, we'll need metal sides and a metal roof for pigs, so I can foresee a trip to the metal yard in Bangor in my future.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the pigs eat and sleep and drink like happy pigs. They're on their last half-ton of feed, though.

Do you think that if they knew that when this lot was finished, they'd be off to the butchers, they'd eat a little more slowly?

Tim'rous...

2011-07-31T11:17:00.000-07:00

To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough

Robert Burns

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

Old school

2011-07-24T12:19:00.000-07:00

I went over to our old house,, the "Bale House," to do a solar power system repair for the occupant.

While I was there I found my old box of photos and letters in the shed.

I needed to retrieve it, and conserve it from the mice and the damp.

There wasn't very much damage.

Here's one such old photo, of an RAF Mountain Rescue LWB Land Rover Ambulance parked outside one of my old billets in Skelton, Yorkshire.

The very skinny guy on the right is me, about 80 pounds lighter, nearly 30 years ago.

Unbelievable.

A bird in the hand

2011-07-24T02:51:00.000-07:00

Our very predatory cat, Shenzhi, is always bringing live and dead small animals into the house. We tolerate this because if we didn't allow her to hunt freely, we'd have rodents in the house and in the barn, spreading disease.

If we're going to have a cat, we need to get the use of a cat. Otherwise why have a cat?

But I was a little peeved yesterday to have to set this small bird free with an open wound Shenzhi had given it. She'd bought the bird into the house, but then lost hold of it. When I caught it, I saw the wound.

Poor wee bugger. And nasty, murderous bl**dy cat.

In other news, the truck is all back together with new leaf springs, brake drums, and muffler, and fresh anti-rust paint all over the rear end. It isn't finished yet, though. We're still waiting for a new flex hose, and there's a tiny bit of muffler pipe on the top of the join that I can't quite reach with the stick welder, so I need to make up or buy a new welding cable extension.

I need to get the truck out on the flatter hard standing where I can jack up all four wheels safely, then I should be able to reach it. That will take either another twenty feet of direct current welding cable, or twenty feet of 220-240 volt power extension cord.

I made myself moderately miserable trying to get at this small weld yesterday, on my back in my hot woolen welding jacket, in 90 degree heat, with the frame of the truck pressing down on my chest, the welding cable wrapped around my chest, and the welding helmet sitting skewed on my head because of the tiny amount of space between the truck and the ground.

Actually, what I really need is a lift. I need a lift in my nice clean, epoxy-floored, custom designed, three-bay, general-purpose mechanical workshop, but the lift alone (never mind the workshop!) would cost about $2,000 more than the extension cord.

Which might be more than the truck is worth right now.

The last bit of news is that he spell of hot humid weather finally broke yesterday afternoon and the nasty muggy mid-western air cleared right out, to be replaced with some nice cool Canadian air.

We could use some rain too, but for now we'll settle for finally being cool.

Haggis is happy about this. he's been in minor respiratory distress for days now, unable to stop panting even in his sleep.

We call this panting Haggis "huffing" and it can be pretty annoying, since it's louder than the radio, than TV, or than our own conversation, so Haggis generally gets banished to another room or the porch.

Being a sensitive kind of dog, actually a bit of a mummy's boy, he doesn't like being banished very much at all.

But he "huffs" at about 80 decibels.

Noisy dog! Go to the porch!

HOT!

2011-07-21T13:17:00.001-07:00

Here's our outdoor thermometer reading well over 90 F in the sun today. The humidity is also way up -- dew point of 72 F, which means this is a very uncomfortable kind of air that Maine doesn't often get.

Too hot to work outdoors, that's for sure.

I worked on the truck this morning, while it was a little cooler. I scraped and wire-brushed the rust with the air-hammer and angle grinder, and painted the underside with the pneumatic sprayer, and fitted the new drums.

I need a bit more paint to get a little better coverage.

And I need my new leaf springs to be delivered.

Come on, Fedex. I'm sure your vans are air-conditioned, right?

A very silly dog -- enlarged

2011-07-20T13:04:00.001-07:00

Pipes and drums

2011-07-20T11:41:00.001-07:00

Anyone who knows me at all, looking at the truck rear-end and muffler-pipe repair job I started a few days ago, would know that if Aimee and I had any extra money to pay for new parts, there would be a lot more to do.

And there was. I found out that both leaf springs were broken, and I also decided to put new brake drums on.

As usual around here in the summer, time is relatively abundant, but money for parts and materials less so.

All the same we were able to splurge a little on some additional repairs. Not that they didn't need doing. Just that we could have used the truck again this winter without doing them.

We could have squeaked by, in other words, on our old brake drums and springs.

(Ouch.)

The old springs had survived a good deal of abuse, including hauling much of the lumber to build the Bale House, as well as hauling very large amounts of hay for the farm. There was no surprise that they were broken.

The old drums were rusty, and I had known this since two winters ago, when I had repaired the emergency brake mechanism

Brake drums are always rusty. What required these to be replaced was the really bad rust that was eating away at the rim, making it harder and harder to pry the drums off using the normal kind of drum-prying technique.

The new drums have come in already, and Fedex says that the new springs will be here shortly, tomorrow or Friday.

Tomorrow's job, while we wait for the springs, will be to fit the new drums and do some rust removal and spraying of Rustoleum and undercoating.

This truck will be spanking when we get done, and good for another few winters, touch wood.

It's that old high-miler engine that will be the death of this beast.

Sold!

2011-07-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

Three sheep left the farm today to go on to another farm. Poppy, Penny, and Quira.

The farm is over in Skowhegan.

We were glad to see them go, because the grazing pressure needed to be reduced a little.

Symbiosis?

2011-07-16T12:36:00.001-07:00

Here's a fine pail of weeds, one of about twenty such bucket-loads I pulled today.

And the next photo shows the secret of raising tasty pork and effective weed-recycling.

Pigs!

Pigs love to eat weeds.

In our garden what we mostly get is quack grass, known as couch grass in Britain, as well as -- what else? -- pig weed!

Lots of pig weed. It grows well in the potato patch, where it is able to shoot up rapidly enough to clear the height of the potato plants.

I've learned that pulling weeds by hand and feeding them to the pigs is more successful and more rewarding than hoeing. I expect in times gone by, my various Celtic and Anglo-Norse ancestors people also fed weeds to their pigs, rather than hoeing them under. It just makes sense, and isn't so very difficult, or very much more work, really, once you get used to it.

As for the sheep, they make pretty good lawn mowers, as well as trimmers and edgers.

Definition of a "haggis"

2011-07-16T02:52:00.001-07:00

The American Heritage Dictionary (not quite):

haggis [ˈhægɪs]

1) (Cookery) a Scottish dish made from sheep's or calf's offal, oatmeal, suet, and seasonings boiled in a skin made from the animal's stomach

[perhaps from haggen to hack¹]

2) A type of dog, slightly mental, supposed to be a sheepdog, but would rather herd chickens. Needs a job, but doesn't really have one (because he won't herd sheep properly), follows master around slavishly, never takes his eyes off you, definitely a hack....

Haggis's particular claim to fame today: almost being trampled by his own herd of sheep.

He was wandering around in the driveway dozily around 5.15 am this morning (sheep feeding and sheep moving time), picking up those little black sheep kibbles he loves so much (don't think too hard about this or you may feel sick), when I turned the corner with all sixteen sheep at my heels.

Haggis was told to move out of the way because the sheep won't walk by a dog, but only moved maybe ten feet. The sheep began to balk and split up, so he was told again, only louder and meaner. He moved another ten feet, but at least finished up beyond the entrance to the pen I wanted to put them in. And went back to eating.

All the sheep but one went in. That one balked. Haggis was told to move again. He didn't.

This time he got the feed bucket thrown at him.

It didn't hit him, but at least he moved.

Too late though. Timing is everything in herding sheep, and they were quickly all out through the open gate and heading down the neighbors driveway on the way to the endless woods of Jackson, Maine.

Freedom!

Yes, but bobcats, coyotes and bears too.

Oh my.

Haggis at least came with me to get the sheep back, to undo the damage he'd caused. And the sheep, halfway down the track, decided they really didn't want to go hiking in the woods anyway, and turned around and came back and for one of those reasons known only to sheep, went right back into their proper pen.

Haggis is about eight or nine years old now. Mary perhaps a little bit older.

One of them will die soon.

And then I want a proper sheepdog, durn it!

One that herds sheep.

Just fixing

2011-07-10T02:48:00.001-07:00

I probably shouldn't be given pocket money and allowed to go to yard sales. I never saw a mechanical device at a yard sale that I didn't want to think about taking home. I am somewhat circumspect. I will avoid the worst, most of the time, the drippy oil pans, the seized blocks, the ancient rust.

But even then, if the price is right...

It's high summer in Maine, with rolling thunderstorms sweeping through from Manitoba on a regular basis, hot humid days before the storm, dry breezy ones after the storm. The wind research crew just got done with the second-last anemometer tower of the field season, and we have a three-day weekend before completing the last tower, which is in any case only a little one, a baby 30/40 footer for student edification and experimental purposes on campus.

The pressure is off.

Accordingly I'm feeling relaxed and expansive, and I just re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the fortieth or fiftieth time, which always adds greatly to my serenity.

High summer is, however, the worst of times or the best of times, for yard sales where mechanical equipment is being sold.

Don't stop me now...

In the last two weekends I have purchased the following broken or run-down motorized equipment:

1) A small Poulan weedwhacker, starts hard but runs, needs some carb TLC, five bucks

2) A small and very ancient post-hole digger, motor completely shot, but will take a new (secondhand) motor someday, fifteen bucks

3) A much larger Cub Cadet four-stroke weedwhacker, pictured, already repaired and running well, ten bucks

4) A Craftsman five-horse mower, pictured, fires but won't run, needs carb rebuild, ten bucks

5) A 2-inch pneumatic brad nailer, works well, ten bucks

In addition to these items requiring mechanical attention, I also stripped most of the bed off the farm truck, the better to get at a combined muffler and rear brake line replacement job.

You can see the new muffler kit behind the weedwhacker.

The short, very rusty pipe in the last picture (of the truck's rear area) is the one that needs to be replaced right now. But to be on the safe side, I'm replacing all the brake lines that are in the road salt zone.

Even after nearly 210,000 miles the engine bay of this truck is still rust-free, and the cab itself is nearly rust free, but the rear end is another matter. last year I chipped away at much of the rust with an air chisel, then cleaned up much of the rest with the wire brush on the angle grinder. Finally, I gave the whole rear end two coats of red oxide primer.

Even so, there's still rust, new rust and old rust, and I may do some more air-chisel/angle-grinder/undercoating work before I put this baby back on the road.

To say I enjoy mechanical work is an understatement. It really doesn't matter to me how beat up or run-down a piece of equipment is. I can always get some pleasure out of trying to fix it.

What I like best, I think, is the trial-and-error logic process. I also enjoy the unhurried feeling I have when confronting a mechanical issue, especially on the farm in summer. There's just me and the piece of equipment, and I can study the problem for as long as I want, stripping it down as I go until I get to the faulty parts, and then just go find or make whatever replacement parts I need. The Internet is a real boon to the farmyard or dooryard mechanic, if he or she is computer savvy. Most manuals and parts lists are now available online, and spare and replacement parts can be found speedily from online parts houses and even Google shopping.

But I also have welding gear and other fabrication tools and a huge pile of saved parts from all kinds of equipment, but of which I can use to make or adapt my own parts.

Mechanical repair work is a very meditative process. I've been properly taught to meditate, by both Buddhists and Quakers, and although these days I never attempt a proper sitting meditation, I certainly do lots of mechanical meditation.

Pirsig was right. There is definitely a kind of Zen to it all.

The important thing is not to fix the equipment, but yourself. What is most important is the control you achieve over your own mind during the process of fixing the equipment, and the balance and serenity that results.

Zen masters talk about "just sitting." I could talk about "just fixing." It's the same thing.

By just sitting or just fixing, you can begin to subtract your ego and the problems your ego causes in both your own self and in the machine.

Most mechanical problems are in fact personal problems. To paraphrase Pirsig, the real machine you're working on is a machine called yourself.

By working properly on both at once, you build balance and serenity in yourself, which then allows a more perfect use of reason.

You can also then take that balance and serenity, and more perfect use of reason, to other areas of life's endeavor. You can even put it to use for society.

Most societal problems are personal problems writ large and magnified by the unintended consequences of all our collective personality problems working together. If even one person can build balance and serenity and employ reason more perfectly, than that person can create an oasis within society where things work, for once, because personal problems are not allowed to ruin the machine.

You could become a wind researcher, for instance, learning where the wind power is and what problems there are that will be caused for people by using the wind power.

That's definitely a job that needs the use of a more perfect reason. There's an awful lot of unreason in the wind power business in Maine, from both activists and corporations, and in the energy business in general in the United States.

Or you could be a better teacher. That is definitely a job where a more perfect use of reason would come in handy.

For me, the phrase "day job" means teaching, which is much harder than fixing or even wind research. Teaching is a real challenge because it doesn't build serenity for me the way that mechanical work does.

There's not much Zen in teaching, it seems.

Actually, that's not quite true. If, and it's a big if, you have all the time in the world to work with the student and all his or her hang-ups, and your own hang-ups about the student, one step at a time, one student at a time, then teaching is all about Zen.

But this kind of concentration of time and effort and serenity rarely happens. Instead of working properly on every student, and every student's personality, and every instructor and every instructors personality, one step at a time, building balance and serenity as we go, and developing a more perfect use of reason in student and instructor, most teachers are in fact doubly employed.

We're hired as teachers for students who do want to learn, but society also wants us to be, at the same time, baby-sitters for students who don't want to learn. And this second role subtracts greatly from the first.

I'm not a baby-sitter. I'm a fixer, an applied scientist who, given time and funds and equipment, can figure out the answers to all kinds of difficult problems using reason.

Don't send me your kids who don't want to learn. Find them a baby sitter.

Send me the ones who do.

The world is full of problems for them to fix, if they can just learn the art of just fixing.

Rain!

2011-07-07T02:51:00.001-07:00

There hadn't been enough rain. The garden was dry and dusty. A storm over the weekend dropped enough moisture to create a temporary smear in the sheep's grain dishes, but not enough to wet the soil.

The same storm produced golf-ball sized hail a few miles to the north. But barely any moisture, frozen or otherwise, on this spot.

I almost broke out the sprinklers, which we rarely need here in Maine, but another storm was forecast for Wednesday night. I watched it come on the weather map, just to make sure the "widely scattered" storm cells weren't going to dodge around the farm, but it hit us pretty good, with three-quarters of an inch of rain.

The storm came out of the western mountains like most of our Maine thunderstorms do, and so once it passed, we had a very strange sunset, with interesting pink-orange light all around the farmyard.

This morning the rain was still heavy on the grass, and it looked as though weeds had sprung up overnight in the garden. A few potatoes and tomatoes had been struck down by the downpour. The potato plants will recover, but we'll have to tend to the tomatoes. I was fixing tomato cages over the weekend and ran out, needing about twenty more. Without cages some of our plants fell over. I'll have to see if I can't find some cages at the hardware store today so I can pick the plants back up.

Even so, we needed the rain and I was glad to see it.

At the parade

2011-07-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

Haggis and I went to watch the July 4th parade in the nearby town of Brooks, Maine.

I like to take Haggis with me when I go somewhere like this. He's so very well behaved around other people that he's a real pleasure to be with. He just hangs out and accepts everyone's admiration and petting like it's his natural due and nothing could be more routine.

A prince among dogs is Mr. Haggis.

Despite the fact that he's named after a generally suspicious Scottish sausage.

American parades are always fun for an ex-pat Brit. I've been in rather too many British military parades, but the American variety are way more fun. They are noisy with horn-honking, sirens and music, exuberant, and feature the internal combustion engine and all its derivative transportation forms in large measure.

Here's Paul, formerly the owner of the best hardware store in Maine (now sadly a shadow of its former self thanks to the numpties that took it over), on his retiree's muscle bike, in his American Legion uniform.

Paul is a US Navy vet.

The sign on the Brooks Fire Department engine says "Thank God for Volunteers."

Amen to that.

There were motorcycles, vintage cars, horses, and even quite a few goats.

Why goats? I have no idea. Maybe Aimee and I should enter with our sheep next year.

Aimee could go as Bo-Peep.

The best float I saw was the bluegrass band. They were playing as they went by.

Paraders threw candy, particularly Tootsie Rolls. I scooped up a few for Aimee because she likes Tootsie Rolls.

New camera for the 4th!

2011-07-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

Aimee and I took a rare together-shopping trip to Bangor today. This happens rarely because Aimee hates the way I shop -- I either dawdle too much or I make my mind up too fast. But we had to go to a funeral together first, and so we thus had to shop together.

Yes, that's right. Someone had to die before my wife would take me shopping.

Which meant I got a new camera. I'd been bidding on cameras like the one Aimee has on eBay, but had lost all my auctions. Then Aimee came up with a discount coupon for Best Buy, and so we decided to get me a new camera while we were in town.

After all these years of breaking second-hand digital cameras, I couldn't make myself get even a moderately-priced one. We got the cheapest regular-sized digital camera in the store, but it takes video and has a decent size memory.

Couldn't find any steel-toed work boots, though. My old ones have blown out, but there were none in my size that I liked.

Here are pictures of her Royal Aimee-ness with her subject chickens, ruling the roost, the herb and rose garden out front which is just lush and fragrant and colorful right now, and the sheep going gangbusters on their holiday gift -- a protein block with molasses, which will give them the selenium missing from Maine soil and plants.

Failed the test!

2011-07-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

I should know better than to invite wifely ridicule by posting this story, but I would hate to deprive a few readers I know of a smile or a laugh, so here goes.

I wanted to get my motorcycle license endorsement. This was very silly of me, according to Aimee, who has no place in her cosmos for the humble motorized bicycle, but nevertheless I wanted to get it, against all wifely wisdom and economic common sense.

I had previously owned a motorcycle license, and even a couple of different motorcycles, when I lived in Montana, but I was literally so broke when I came to Maine to work at the college all those years ago, still struggling to finish up that expensive education, that I couldn't afford the extra twenty bucks to transfer the license over.

At the time I told myself I was done with motorcycles anyway, that from here on out such frivolity would be disallowed, that instead I would work hard and marry and raise a farm and maybe a family, and so it wouldn't matter that I didn't have the twenty bucks for the permit transfer.

That was before the price of gas went up. And I had forgotten how pleasurable it could be to ride a motorcycle, especially one you've repaired yourself.

The fact of that matter is, I just like fixing things that go. I always have, since I got my first motorcycle at age 15. A very silly Italian 50 cc two-stroke trail bike, it had a major problem, a broken crankshaft, and so I only paid fifty pounds for it, but I replaced the crank and, miracle of miracles, made it go, and thus began a major career of repairing everything from excavators to fighter jets.

I'd actually rather repair airplanes than cycles, and there are even a couple of flying clubs around that I could join, but cycles are cheaper. I enjoy classic cars, but they take up a lot of room, and you pretty much need to keep them in a building here in Maine in the winter. I like old tractors, but only really need one tractor on this farm, and I have that already. I'm definitely going to get an old Land Rover to replace the Nissan farm truck when it dies, but that Nissan seems to want to live on forever, no surprise given the love and care it gets, and so the Land Rover will have to wait.

A man only ever needs to buy one Land Rover in his life, anyway.

A major Nissan brake overhaul is going to be required this fall, as soon as I have the money for parts, which job I'm already looking forward to, but we're not ready to do that job yet, because when we do the truck will be off the road for a few weeks, and we still have some summer farm chores to do and the brakes still work.

So, motorcycles are the best alternative, and getting my license just a step on the project road.

I suppose I could fix lawn mowers, but that seems a little low, don't you think. Another of these crusty old Maine guys that tinkers with lawn mowers and has a shed full of them, always for sale.

I'd have to smoke a pipe too, if I were to do that. Those fellas always smoke pipes. And Aimee wouldn't like that.

Anyway, a guy can dream, can't he? I'd really like to have some old British bikes. One of these days I'm going to build a really superb workshop here on this farm, a bright, clean, heated, fully electrifried, epoxy-floored palace, a veritable Taj Mahal of maintenance technology, and when I do, I'll have a BSA or even a Matchless to love and feed and water in that workshop.

Just because.

Aimee of course sees all such occupations as a total waste of money and a complete and utter diversion from what husbands should be doing, which is all the heavy work around the farm, and the endless honey-do list.

But a guy can dream, can't he?

Accordingly, a couple of years ago, and against wifely advice and instruction, I took the Motorcycle Safety Class and got a two-year learner's permit, which in Maine makes you legal to drive any motorcycle without a passenger within the hours of daylight. But at the end of two years, or before, you have to take the road test, or at least take another written test and get another two year permit

My two years were almost up, and so I scheduled a road test. It seemed best, a better investment than another two-year jobbie. I didn't have a bike, but thought to borrow or rent one. I found a buddy at work with a scooter, and was able to get the loan of it to take the test.

The great day arrived.

And rapidly went haywire.

The first blow to my plans was that the Internet (bloody FairPoint again!) was down at our place and so I couldn't look up directions to Belfast Methodist Church, which apparently doubles as a Maine DMV road test center during the week.

Still, I thought, I have time. Lots of time.

I didn't want to have to drive such a tiny scooter all the way from its home in Thorndike to Belfast, where the test was scheduled to be held, and so I went looking for the motorcycle ramp I had made a couple years ago, when I was tinkering with an old Yamaha Virago. Then I drove the farm truck over to my buddy's house and we loaded the scooter, a 125 cc Yamaha with Vespa-like styling. He showed me how to get into the storage compartment under the seat where the inspection sticker and registration were stowed. I drove away with plenty of time to get to the test site and unload and drive around a bit to get used to scooter. Organized, on time, thought-through. Going well.

So I thought.

It was as I was driving away that I realized I'd left both my Instruction Permit and my Motorcycle Safety Class certificate in my den at home. These silly slips of paper were on the list of official documents I needed to take the road test.

Looking back, forgetting these slips was the actual moment I failed the test. Everything else that went wrong was just a cascading chain of events from this moment. I just didn't know it yet.

I could have stopped right here and saved myself all kinds of trouble.

So, watching the time now, I drove back home first to get the stupid slips. This was about an extra fifteen miles of driving on a bad Maine road, and I began to feel the cortisol flooding my system as I bounced down the stupid rutted back road short cut, hoping I'd strapped the bike on well enough, watching it in my rear view mirror.

I hadn't, of course, and so another five minutes were wasted with ratchet straps. I don't know how you feel about ratchet straps, but I like them fine, until I start to get stressed, and then they don't work so well. I was all fingers and thumbs.

Things were not looking so good.

Then there were the durn roadworks.

Maine has two seasons, it is often said, winter and road-mending. Our harsh winters do for our roads and so they must be fixed every year, more or less. Added to this imperative, the famous or infamous stimulus package came with a lot of bridge money, and so pretty much the whole road system of the great State o' Maine is under bridge repair right about now.

Tourists be damned, The tourists come anyway. They must like sitting in two-mile long lines of traffic on Highway One. I suppose it's a much more scenic traffic jam than they can find in Jersey or inside Boston's I-495 or, increasing, from within the M-25 London beltway.

(What was it Bette Midler said in "Big Business"? Eurotrash!)

Two sets of bridge works on Route 7 ate up my last ten minutes. It was just 10 am when I pulled into Belfast, and I still didn't know where to go! More stress hormone. I knew that the best place to get directions to a road test would be the downtown parts store, and I was right, but it took ten minutes, and the silly church wasn't even really in Belfast, but across the bridge almost in Searsport, and so by the time I pulled into the church parking lot, my hands were shaking, and I hadn't even unloaded the cycle yet.

The official ladies behind the desk in the church's community room were polite but firm. I was late. I'd better go get my sticker and registration pronto or my test would be cancelled. I tried to explain that I needed a moment to clam down, but they didn't seem to get that at all.

Back out on the bed of the truck, straps all askew, I tried my hardest to get the durn luggage compartment open, hands shaking, mind a blur. There was a trick to this that my buddy had showed me. You had to turn the key back to a special position, push, click, and that was how it was supposed to happen. Pops right up. Right under the seat.

Neato. Or so it seemed in my buddy's driveway.

But it wasn't happening for me. I prayed. I twisted. I turned. I tried every combination. I finally realized if I just forced the seat up, I could slip my hand in and grab the plastic bag with the sticker. I ran into the building with my papers.

But the testing lady wasn't having any of this. Too late. Couldn't do it. Very sorry, but you were supposed to be here, ready to go, thirty-five minutes ago.

More to explain to myself what the heck it was that I was going to do now, I said despondently if that was the case, then I probably wasn't going to take the silly test, ever. It was just too much trouble I said, to take the stupid safety class, and find a borrowed bike, and get over here to this stupid out-of-the-way site, to take the silly test. And of course, in the back of my mind was what Aimee would think of all this. And I suppose I must have seemed pretty downhearted.

Miracle of miracles, the test ladies relented.

If I could get the bike off the truck in the next two minutes, I could take the test.

Now, if you can at all imagine, a 250 pound guy who spends his summers splitting wood and wrangling 80-pound anemometer tower parts can always find a way to get a little tiny bike like that off a truck in two minutes, but that probably isn't quite the way you want to watch him get a bike off a truck.

And it certainly didn't do anything for my nervousness. Neither did the two-way helmet radio they gave me, with the somewhat shrill test lady instructions ringing in my ears. Now I know what it's like to hear voices in your head telling you what to do!

Voices other than Aimee's, that is. I hear her voice in my head all the time.

Never mind the fact that I'd never ridden this bike before. My pulse rate must have been a hundred and five as I fired up the bike and ran through the light checks.

None of it mattered in the end. It wasn't my road handling of the unfamiliar bike that killed me. It was forgetting to look over my left shoulder when moving from a right hand to a left hand lane in a one-way system.

Do you know how many one-way systems there actually are in the great State o' Maine?

Not many, that's for sure. So, of course I forget to look over my shoulder. I checked both mirrors. I used my flasher. I kept the proper lane position in both lanes. I remembered to cancel the flasher when I got done with the lane change.

But I didn't look over my stupid shoulder.

Actually, I though I did pretty well myself, especially on the so called "hill start". This is where you need to be pointing diagonally uphill, with your back wheel against a curb as if parked, and then move out into the road. The test designers probably don't know about automatic clutch scooters that have to be turned off and rolled if you want to go downhill backwards, and neither did I as I tried to follow the instructions, but I figured it out totally on the fly.

I was strangely calm as I received my test results. The test lady was unfailingly polite. I was polite in return. Very British. Stiff upper wotsit. Manners are everything in moments of stress. The Queen would be proud. I told myself another two years of a learner's permit wouldn't kill my motorcycle fixer-upper plans, if ever I could find a few hundred extra wife-free dollars to buy some kind of fixer-upper project anyway.

I began the project of righting my keel, metaphorically speaking. I did it very deliberately, the stress hormone antidote. I loaded my scooter much more carefully than I unloaded it. I strapped it down extremely carefully, making sure to appreciate the ratchet straps fully. I very slowly did a couple of other Belfast chores. I even got myself a cup of coffee and a slice of pie at the food coop, ignoring the flipping tourists dawdling around in the aisles.

(Why do they have to stroll so slowly, and annoyingly, through our food store? One somnambulant tourist family in your supermarket would be enough, but we get ten or fifteen of them at once, and it's a very small store. One of these days I'm going to go to their store, wherever that is, and leave fifty untended shopping carts with broken wheels in their aisles, at 6.30 on a Friday evening, when they're desperate to get home with dinner. We'll see how they like it! Is this madness? Do I need to see a doctor?)

Then I drove to my buddy's house. Luckily he was out, so I didn't have to tell anyone how badly I'd done. I unloaded the scooter yet more slowly and carefully. I drove home very slowly indeed. I fed the dogs and tended to the sheep and pigs and chickens. I stashed my motorcycle test papers away nicely. I even read through the form to apply for another two year permit.

And I took a very long nap and slept it off.

And then, and only then, I told my wife.

A long trip and some clipped wings

2011-06-26T11:55:00.001-07:00

One of the good and bad things about being an academic is that you have to go to academic conferences. This can be fun, like a mini-vacation, and I always enjoy learning new things, but I do very like being home too.

There wouldn't be much point to keeping up an old Maine farmhouse and farm if I didn't like being here better than other places.

So I don't like to go to conferences that much. Enough to get me out of the door, but I tend to hurry back. Aimee likes it a good deal more than I do, and will often linger for a day or two.

Whatever happens, one of us has to be here to tend to the farm animals.

Accordingly, Aimee got back from her trip to the ABLE conference in New Mexico on Tuesday, as I was getting ready to leave for the AESS conference in Vermont on Thursday. Aimee came home two days late. I left a day late and come home a day early.

But even only three days instead of five was enough to make me feel like things were getting a little out-of-hand at home. I left with the barn literally groaning with hay, hurriedly pushed into the downstairs where the animals need to live, and my truck was full of wood off-cuts from the barn-building project at the college, just now getting done after nearly three years' on-and-off work.

The garden was OK when I left but pretty weedy when I got back. And the chickens were still getting out regularly, although they haven't threatened the neighbors' gardens.

So I sorted the hay and tidied up the wood. Aimee read up on how to clip chicken wings and we performed the operation yesterday afternoon, and now only one bird is regularly escaping instead of three. The top photo is of them free to wander a little in the North Paddock (west) now their wings are clipped. This paddock is fenced with chicken wire, and so they can have the run of it.

The pigs are no bother, as long as they're fed several times a day. They got the pizza I brought home from my trip, but forgot to unload from the car.

Finally, I went out to Reny's store in Belfast and got some new green wellies, my old black ones having developed leaks.

So, with all that and a little tidying around the house, it's feeling much more organized around here.

Here's one of our chickens brooding in the new hay.

Hay there

2011-06-23T02:51:00.000-07:00

We had about seven days of dry breezy weather, with a high pressure ridge lingering over the great State o' Maine, and so it seemed that the whole state set about making hay.

That much reliably dry weather after a spring in which we got both sun and rain in abundance, and not too much of either, will mean a bumper crop, too.

Accordingly, on Monday night my own phone rang and I heard the high reedy voice of a fifteen year-old Amish farmer with an offer of hay.

Timothy is following in his brother's footsteps and learning to make a living from the land. One of his other brothers is an extremely competent self-taught wind power engineer, but that's another story. Timothy and James, brothers two and three (out of thirteen siblings total), have opted for the farm rather than the workshop.

I was scheduled to be busy with my crew all day Tuesday, so I arranged to come get as many bales as I could on Wednesday.

This, of course, is not the way you do hay, being picky about schedules like this. You drop everything and make and put up the hay while you have the weather to do so. But I have a crew to run, and so can't drop everything.

But, when a little more weather-luck and a serious but fortuitous snag with Tuesday's wind power research job left me free Tuesday afternoon, I showed up a day early at the farm with my truck and a borrowed trailer, and Timothy and I labored together to load the first hundred bales while his father drove a two-horse team around the field dragging an older baler with a large single cylinder Wisconsin engine, making a fresh bale every twenty or thirty seconds.

Not too shabby a productivity rate for horse power! It took both of them to get that old motor running, though. There's just a flywheel to spin by hand, no starter motor or pull cord, and even working together they could only push the crank through one ignition stroke.

Think of it: Only one chance for the engine to catch on each try. When you start a car the starter motor can turn the engine through as many ignition strokes as are needed.

It was a bit like prop-starting one of the old Chipmunk trainers we still had in the RAF in the 1970s and 80s.

And any baler is so heavy you need the most massive horses to pull it, especially when you also tow a hay wagon and load at the same time.

It's quite the system. But it works. And picking the hay off the field saved me fifty cents a bale, even though I had Timothy's help to pick it.

Actually, towards the end of the first load a crew of Amish youths from a different family showed up to help, and one of them came with Tim and myself to put the bales up in my barn.

This was the first time any of our local Amish had traveled to our own farm, although I've visited most of them at their farms for one purchase or another.

Their verdict? "Cute." Our place is small and only lightly productive by their standards. But it's obviously well managed, or at least they thought so.

I only required a total of two hundred bales, and the day was wearing on with the driving back and forth very slowly, our old farm truck carrying and towing three tons of hay at a time. I had the two youths load me another hundred bales as I drove around the field, planning to off-load them by myself.

Just as we were finishing our second load, the shear pin connecting the Wisconsin engine to the baler severed with a loud bang, and I watched as their father threw the mechanical clutch, replaced the pin with the engine still running, and then started the baler again.

Most balers have a shear pin somewhere, in case a big rock or piece of iron is encountered in the windrow. It's easier to replace a small pin than it is to repair the damage to the baler mechanism.

That old Wisconsin must truly be hard to start, though, to require the pin be replaced with the engine running. I think I would have shut it down, even if only to have a minute's peace in the hayfield while I switched out the broken shear pin.

A starter motor would be nice.

Back home with the last of the bales at about five-thirty, I struggled to get them into the barn attic by myself. The hay door is eight feet off the ground, and having already loaded and unloaded a hundred bales, I was pretty tired. The bales were a good solid forty pounds each, and some were much more. I managed to get half the load in the attic. The rest was temporarily stashed on the ground floor.

But that was that: The hay was in, safe, out of the weather. The important part was done. This was a nice bit of good luck.

Of the several big farm jobs each year: shearing, firewood, hay, all but one are done now. I've made a start on firewood, but I still need three more cords.

Aimee will have to help me get the rest of the hay up to the attic this weekend sometime.

Despite the fact that we will have to move some of this hay later, this was still the most efficient hay-day we've had since we bought the farm.

Thanks to some good weather and a very young Amish farmer.

Wouldn't it be nice if all youngsters were as helpful and as productively engaged?

Rose by name

2011-06-19T12:01:00.000-07:00

This is a quiet weekend around the farm. Aimee is off to a conference in New Mexico, although not near the brush fires, but at the other end of the state. I have a long to-do list, but with a busy week ahead, I'm not working very far down it.

The sheep went onto the New Paddock this morning, while I cut some firewood out of their main enclosure, the Back Forty. That left a bunch of ash and birch branches with lots of delectable leaves on the ground, so I was sure to let them back in as soon as I was done with my trailer load of wood so they could chow down.

Then it was time for a hoe-down. With only one of us here since Tuesday, the garden had been neglected most of the week. It took a good couple hours with the scuffle hoe to get it back in shape.

The potatoes, onions, and Aimee's lettuce are all doing fine, but the tomatoes haven't really gotten going yet. The nights haven't been that warm. Tomatoes won't really get a move on until the nights exceed 60 F.

That should come soon, with the advent of July.

Here's one of my favorite garden plants, the Rosa rugosa outside our front door.

I think it's actually two different bushes because there are both white and pink flowers.

Either way, it's pretty. I love roses, and hope to have quite a few more one day.

Our peace and serenity was shattered when the phone rang this afternoon, and a lady with a pronounced southern accent was on the other end of the line.

She wanted to know if our surplus ewes were still for sale, and if so how much did they weigh and how much meat could she expect to get off one?

At least I thought that was what she said. Like I said, she had a thick accent. I don't always understand southerners that well, whether British or American ones.

We do have an ad on Craig's List and on the Maine Sheep Breeder's Association web page, for several of our two and one-year old ewes. We have too many sheep for overwintering, and would like to part out our flock.

I explained fairly gruffly (I'd been woken from a nap) that they were not for sale except for breeding purposes. She was disappointed and whiny. I hung up on her.

A few minutes later the phone rang again. The same voice on the other end wanted to know, right off the bat, if our ewes were "for sale for meat, since the last guy she spoke to wouldn't sell her any."

I explained as patiently as I could that I was the same guy.

"Well, what're you doing with two phones then?"

I was too dumbfounded to hang up again.

Finally, I told her to read the ad, where it says clearly, "Animals will be sold to well-managed farms only, for breeding purposes only, not for meat or lawn ornaments."

Then I hung up.

There are two reasonable explanations for this telephonic visitation:

1) This was a crank call, and someone is winding me up, or

2) This was a really stupid person.

Living the (not so) simple life

2011-06-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

It took me three days, working on and off, to get into proper shape to start the firewood chore for the year. I was able to replace the bottom of the wall easily enough, but I decided I needed to repaint the whole wall, and that was when I found that the soffit was rotting out quite badly behind the guttering.

I though I was being pretty smart when I put up that piece of guttering to keep the rain off the wood pile, but it looks like the rain managed to get behind the gutter and ran into the soffit, and so a whole length of soffit board and faceboard had to be wrecked out, replaced, primed, and painted.

Then the gutter was refitted, set up a good deal higher, right under the drip edge.

This time I used caulking to seal the gutter to the drip edge.

This wasn't such a lot of work in any given step, but it was a lot of steps.

What a complicated start to getting the firewood in! So much for the simple life.

So I was pretty glad to put the last touches to the whole repair and finally make it into the woods to cut firewood. I was very careful to keep the log cribs well away from the newly repaired wall.

I cut down ash, some cherry and one aspen that was in the way. Only a third of a cord, but a start.

The cherry had a big burl on it, which gave me a chance to use my new log splitter. Works pretty good.

I checked the blog. Last year I didn't start cutting firewood until later in June, mostly because I was in Britain with my sister Carol, burying my father.

It doesn't feel like a year since my dad died, but I guess it must be.

Sorry siding

2011-06-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

I needed to get our firewood cut, split and stacked for the winter, but the garage wall where we keep the wood was in sad shape.

Even though we place pallets between the wood and the wall, the extra moisture was causing the paint to peel and the siding to rot.

So I took my Skilsaw and somewhat unskillfully cut out the rotten sections of boarding and replaced it with some better lumber I had lying around.

The replacement material had been wrecked out of one of the two sheep shelters I had demolished earlier as part of the Great Chicken POW Camp Project. The sheep lumber was hemlock, as was the original garage wall. Eastern hemlock is a pretty stout and rot-proof, locally-grown building material, cheap and abundant around here, but these particular boards were also pretreated with lanolin from the sheeps' fleece.

I decided I couldn't possibly go wrong with lanolin-impregnated hemlock.

Maybe I should market it.

After fitting the new boards, I scrubbed off some of the remaining loose paint with the rotary wire brush head on the angle grinder, and gave it a thick coat of anti-mold primer, which left the building looking kind of piebald, but good to go structurally for a few more years.

Now I need to go to the hardware store tomorrow and match the finish paint color.

Ordinarily Aimee would not trust me to do the color-match thingy, and for good reason.

Aimee, and indeed most other females of the species, seem to be able to discern about a thousand more colors than I can. I can just about keep the primary colors sorted, and then things get kinda fuzzy.

But Aimee says (does anyone else miss the awesome British TV public service announcement cat "Charlie says"?) that Home Depot now have a machine to match colors for you, so errant husbands can now be sent to the paint department unaccompanied.

Now that's a very good thing, because if the machine matches the paint, and the paint is still the wrong color (as it surely will be), then the husband cannot be blamed!

Or can he?

To be continued.

Watch this space for another exiting episode of Mick Fixes the Garage next week.

Rough roof and ruff ruff

2011-06-04T13:17:00.000-07:00

A long time ago I told myself I would put a metal roof on our barn. The cheap and nasty composite roll roofing we have on there has tended to blow off in storms, and there is at least one bad leak and probably several others. I had stashed away some large pieces of gash roofing at college -- stuff that would have been thrown away otherwise -- and finally found the time to cut it to size and fit it.

("Gash," as in "gash roofing," is RAF engine fitter and general service slang for metal waste, or just about any kind of junk, or when used in the phrase "gash jobs," it means odd, usually unpleasant, jobs that you have to do.)

This roofing was dirty and already had screw holes in it, and not particularly evenly placed ones at that, but it was free, and will look fine after a few rainstorms and a little sun-bleaching. I just put new self-sealing screws in all of the old screw holes. There's plywood under the roll roofing so this was fine. If there had been purlins instead, this wouldn't have worked.

I need another 150 running feet of roofing, but only 27 of those need to match. You can't see the top of the gambrel roof from anywhere on the farm.

Except, well, from the top of the gambrel roof.

So pretty much any color and style of metal roof could go up there. I have calls into a couple of guys with classified ads for second hand, and offcuts of new, roofing. We'll see what we can do. I should be able to find something.

The recently-sheared sheep have grown out a quarter-inch of new fleece already, enough to keep the bugs off, and are much happier with life: lots of green grass, cool weather, and no hot heavy fleece to carry around!

The blackflies are all but gone anyway, and although we have had some no-see-ums, the mosquitoes don't bother us much here on the breezy, sunny knoll that is the Great Farm, so that's the worst of bug season over. In other parts of Maine, of course, the air is still thick with skeeters, but here it's nice out now here, and has been a very comfortable temperature the last couple of days.

Two chickens have been consistently getting out of the new chicken pen.

They must be the stars of that movie, Chicken Run.

Aimee took pictures while Haggis and I caught them this last time. They went to ground under the Christmas spruce in our front yard. Haggis likes to show his chicken herding skills off, so it's fine by him if there are chickens to catch.

Sheep are another matter. This morning, as I was moving them from one paddock to another, he just turned his head away in shame.

What a sorry sheepdog.

But what a fine chicken-dog. Just look at those moves!

Silly little clippies

2011-05-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Here's our 2011 wool clip, drying a little in black bin bags in the 85 degree F sunshine this Memorial Day afternoon.

Nine fat fleeces. There's another bunch like this upstairs in the barn. We'll go to the mill soon, to exchange this for spun yarn again. We're almost out.

Down to t'mill, lad, as they say in Yorkshire.

We were pretty lucky to get our shearer to come out this morning. He was expecting that the day's work had been called off due to a heavy thundershower last night. But I heard the rain start and so wrenched myself out of bed and put the sheep in the barn within a few minutes.

They were just damp, not wet, by the morning and the last of them to be sheared weren't even that.

When the shearer comes each sheep loses about ten to fifteen pounds of weight of fleece and dung tags each, in one swell foop, and I'm sure it's a lot easier to stay cool.

I can imagine some dieters just gaga at the idea of losing fifteen pounds in a day, but the sheep don't like it much. Our shearer is an old pro, though, and knows all the right moves: the right muscle to push to make a sheep stretch out a leg or the right way to hold the head to make a nice fold-free curve of shoulder for the shears. It must take lots of practice. He's a little older than me and has been shearing since the sixth grade. That's about age twelve, for you Brits.

Forty years a shearer.

I told him if he could just keep it up until I retire, then I'd learn myself. I'd have the time to do it, at least, if not the suppleness of joints.

In other news, poor Poppy lost her twin male lambs. They went off to our buddy John Mac's place, to graze his grass and save hm from mowing lawns, and eventually become his and Nancy's winter dinners.

Such is the way of all male lambs, since like many young males of the species, they aren't good for very much else, but Poppy isn't one for tradition.

She's most upset about it, and has been bleating for them all afternoon.

I was pretty tired, though, after being up at three in the morning, so I was able to take a nap anyway, despite the bereft sheep mother bleating outside the window.

What a miserable heartless lamb-stealing bar steward I am! Napping during a mother's moment of grief. Yet the more I do this stuff, the less I think about it.

We were actually a little surprised at all the fuss, because she didn't much care for them when they first showed up, and we had to bring one of them into the house to warm up because she wouldn't lick it like a proper sheep mother.

Last bit of news is that I managed to find us a new lawn mower for five bucks at a yard sale.

Here it is. Looks brand new.

The guy said it wouldn't run, and that was why it was for sale, but I guessed it just needed a carb cleaning and some fresh gas. It looked too new to be completely out of action already.

In the end, the carb was fine, no sediment or resin, although stripping it for cleaning probably ensured a good start because all the old gas would be drained out of the float bowl as a result, allowing the new gas to flow in. I also blew out the jet with compressed air for good measure.

All I had to do then was to weld some cracks on the pressed metal blade housing near the wheel mount holes. The previous owner had tried to shore up the wonky wheel mount with a bit of license plate, but welding did the job properly.

Then I cut the front lawn with our new five-dollar mower.

It cuts just like a brand new, hundred and ninety dollar mower.

Either this mower, or the larger one I found last fall, has to go over to the Bale House for the occupant to use over there. I've been looking out for one since the grass began to grow again.

I don't care which mower goes. I just care that the grass is cut in that clearing where Aimee and I had our first "dates" all those years ago, clearing land for a house.

If you take the trouble to cut down a lot of trees like that, the last thing you want is for them to grow back.

Evening in apple blossom time

2011-05-29T15:21:00.000-07:00

It's been nice-enough weather so far this long weekend in Maine. For the Brits reading this blog, we have a holiday Monday for Memorial Day, and so I have a nice break from summer fieldwork.

Aimee has been out in the field and in the lab, but that girl knows no rest. I may take a day off from work, including farm work every once in a while, but Aimee always seems to be doing something.

The vegetable garden is mostly planted, just the very tender-most plants to go, basil and pepper.

The onions shot up because we used mostly our own starts and they were several times larger than commercial onion starts. It's easy to see where we switched back to commercial starts, halfway through the second row.

It will also be a lot easier to weed the bigger onions than the littler ones.

The pigs are growing like weeds, already twice the size they were when they came. They've decided chasing chickens is good sport for pigs.

The southern face of the house is sadly peeling its layer of construction paper because we haven't been able to get all the shingles finished on the west side so we can move around to the south. Procrastination station. I plan to start dipping shingles tomorrow, if I can devise a sensible method that uses less of the sealant we've been using.

Notice Shenzhi-cat hovering next to the bird feeders in hopes of catching a bird, the bad cat.

The apple blossoms are quite lovely and I've just been delighted by them this year. Last year they didn't last so long and we didn't get as much benefit. Here's the Golden Delicious in the North Paddock (west). This tree hasn't been pruned yet, but it yields large, edible and worm-free apples most years. They don't keep well, but they eat well.

The stump is an elm that succumbed to the Dutch Elm infection and was made into firewood. Elm doesn't make good firewood, so I may not do that again. I'll cut them into chunks and compost them along with all my other large brush piles.

It was hard to split, too.

The lilac is almost in full bloom, and already attracting butterflies and humming birds. The baby chicks are out in their chicken tractor for the third day now. They seem to like it. They run around and jump about, getting strong and in shape.

The older hens are all cooped up now behind a new fence five feet tall. They just kept getting out, and so the fence systems needed to keep them in (and keep our neighbors happy) got more and more elaborate, as the chickens still kept getting out. One particularly scrawny Golden Comet is the ringleader. Today's evolution of the five-footer is only the most recent elaboration.

It's all been a royal pain.

Let's hope it works this time. I'm really getting tired of chasing these bloody chickens.

I suppose I could always make an example of the ringleader, the way the Gestapo handled the French Resistance.

Pour encourager les autres.

I don't think Aimee would let me do that.

We may need to have a little "accident" around here.

Aimee knows what a pain it is, though, because she managed to let three chickens out herself while she was in the barn greeting the pigs when she came home this afternoon.

They headed straight for my garage/workshop, so, thinking to trap them, she followed them in and closed the garage door behind her.

I then stood outside smiling to myself while hearing this squawking and fluttering and crashing and cursing and banging. Finally, it was just too much and I cracked up, laughing out loud enough to be heard inside the building.

At which point, poor wee Aimee lost her temper with me and the chickens, rolling up the door again to glare at me before stomping off, all the while telling me what I could do with myself, and letting me know that if I wanted the chickens in the barn, I could bloody well catch them myself.

So I did. With a lot less fuss and bother.

But I still think it was funny.

Zombie farmers and chary chicks

2011-05-26T01:36:00.000-07:00

So I got done with the rescue course, and then there was that day I played hookey to get our garden in, which turned out to be a very good thing to do since the rain came back the very next day, and then the wind research field season started and I'm already sleep-deprived.

I ordinarily wake up with the birds, which means, this time of year in Maine at 44 degrees of latitude, that I could expect to wake about 4.45 am or so. But, my head is full of specifications, parts list, schematics, and to-do lists, and so I've been waking at 2.30 or 3 am instead. I then almost automatically begin puzzling on some anemometry problem or equipment problem, and each time I've been unable to get back to sleep.

This is not that unusual for me. I tend to run a sleep deficit during any period of higher stress, and catch up later when the stress bleeds away. In a really stressful time I also get migraines, but I haven't had one of those since I gave up my two-year interim job as Provost of Unity College, a few years back.

Each night after work this week I've fallen asleep during the BBC six o'clock news. This too shall pass, I expect. I'll get used to the new routine.

But I'm looking forward to the upcoming three day weekend so I can take a few naps.

In other news, I came home from work yesterday to find Aimee sat on the lawn, watching the chicks, now almost pullets, being placed in the chicken tractor for the first time. This device has a tiny coop, just large enough for a few pullets, and then about 20 square feet of open bottom with access to the grass underneath. (I'll take some pictures this weekend.) There's a cunning little ramp from the coop to the grass which folds up and becomes a door.

Accordingly, there's a moment each spring that the first brave chick plucks up enough courage to go down the ramp for the first time, and this is what Aimee was watching for.

Apparently, according to the head chick wrangler, the first chick was just getting ready to go when the second chick in line pushed her out and she fell to the ground in a frightened flurry.

There's a lot of stress going around, I guess.

Getting the garden in

2011-05-23T03:11:00.000-07:00

It was a three day rescue course, but it's been raining for two weeks and my field research season starts today. We needed a dry day for tillage, to get the remainder of the cool weather garden crops in, so I played hookey.

The ancient Troy-Bilt rotor-tiller gave the normal amount of trouble starting, but after some coaxing roared into throbbing and very noisy life, and made short work of the thousands of tiny weed seeds that had sprouted.

It's gratifying that these are just the mild airborne weeds you'll always get, these days. The rank quack grass ("couch" grass in the UK) is more or less gone.

By weeding the soil, not the weeds, we managed to clear almost all the quack.

The onions and greens were already in and sprouting up. I put in cabbage, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, five varieties of potatoes, including some Blue Adirondack, a new variety (for us), leeks, and last but by no means least, carrots.

A big phew. That rain seemed incessant. But then it often does in Maine. Having the big Kubota and smaller Troy-Bilt tillers helps a good deal. This garden wouldn't be in at all if it had needed to be double-dug.

The chicks are getting big and Aimee has let them out on the lawn once already. Properly restrained, of course, not wandering free.

I didn't see this, but apparently they enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

The sheep are very loud these days. The lambs are big and still nursing, so the mothers are very hungry. They don 't have very good grass in their home paddock, the Back Forty, so they're always wanting to be moved around to the lusher pastures.

They get still grained twice a day and there remains untouched six-inch high grass in quite a few places in the home paddock, so this is just a preference they're expressing, not a necessity.

But the grass is always greener....

Please, please let us out! We're starving, honest we are.

But they've just scoffed down a big feed of sixteen-weight and oats, the bummers.

Rescue revival

2011-05-21T00:28:00.000-07:00

I'm on a mountain rescue course, a three-day high-angle top-up training, so I won't be posting much on the farm this weekend.

Aimee is looking after the home place.

And she's not at all happy about it.

The sheep are at that difficult point in the year, before they're shorn, but after the green grass is growing. This means they aren't afraid of the electrical fence, and they're very motivated not to stick to the limited rotational paddocks we confine them to to better manage the grass.

Which means they need to be shepherded a lot.

Apparently the sheep got out NINE times yesterday afternoon.

I'm using capitals because that's how Aimee said it: "They got out NINE times." And then she said it again: "NINE times." And again.

So I drove back from my rescue course way across the other side of the state late on the first day. I passed up the chance for free housing and a beer with "the guys" because, well, I like my sheep AND my wife and I don't want to lose either.

I noticed the symptoms immediately:

1) Sheep at the fence line of the Back Forty bellowing "We haven't had enough grass."

(Sheep protest movement: "What do we want?" "GRASS!" BAAAAA "When do we want it?" "NOW." BAAAAA)

2) Strange ad-hoc arrangement of benches on the lawn propping up the Premier electro-net fencing. That gets tangled very easily in use. That Aimee hates, because she has no patience for fence tangles. So rather than fix it, she'd rather prop it up.

3) Filthy white socks in the laundry basket, probably ruined, from likely very angry wifey running out to stop escaping sheep from eating tulips, or from taking off for points west.

Hmmmm

This doesn't look good.

So, after taking note of the fact that Aimee would almost certainly quite furious, and resolving therefore to tread very carefully, I put the sheep out on the Island Paddock, taking care to properly and fully electrify the fence.

That stopped the bellowing.

Then I toured the other animals, looking for additional difficulties. All seemed fine.

Small mercies.

Then I took my shower.

Then and only then did I tiptoe upstairs to the bedroom, where my emotionally exhausted wifey was napping away.

But my rummaging for clean socks woke her up:

"Those sheep got out NINE times!"

"NINE times!"

And so the sheep didn't get enough to eat because they kept getting out and had to be locked back up in the main paddock where the grass is thin.

The moral of this story is not that I am the very soul of husbandly patience with wife and sheep. I'm not. I've run out in my socks too, to save the tulips. And when I do, I turn the air blue with language I shouldn't use.

(I'm a former British serviceman, so therefore expert in bad language.)

The moral is, bad timing for rescue course. After the sheep are sheared, the electric fence will work just fine. But the shearing was postponed because of the terrible weather.

Can't shear wet sheep.

Actually, you can, but moldy fleece doesn't sell well.

So I arranged my approach to the rescue course so I could come home to the farm every night, because the sheep don't understand why they haven't had enough grass.

With only a mild sense that I was missing out on some fun.

I realized long ago that, although mountaineering was part of the pathway I took to farm life, it isn't "real" in the sense that farming is.

I think that's why I'm no longer much of a recreational mountaineer. Long ago, it stopped seeming as real as farming or building or even fixing a car. Or teaching, for that matter, which if done well is inherently real. So I spend my time teaching, farming, building or fixing cars. I still enjoy mountain scenery, and I still love to hike mountains, or even just to hike. Scrambling on rock is still fun for me. I truly enjoy my work teaching map reading to the new intake of future game wardens and park rangers we get every fall at Unity College. But I'm not in a big hurry to go to the alps or Norway or even Katahdin the way I used to be.

I'd rather stay home and look after the farm.

I think I still do search and rescue because that seems real to me.

I've been enough of a part of enough searches and rescues now to realize that when someone is lost or hurt in the woods or hills, it's very good that there are trained personnel to go find them and recover them and take them to hospital.

But I'm much more of a sheep farmer and husband than I am a mountaineer.

I'd rather hang out with the sheep and the wife than "the guys."

Although it would be nice if they would get along in my absence.

Piglets after all

2011-05-14T15:37:00.001-07:00

I spoke too soon. I was able to resurrect the camera. I decided to give the battery a charge just in case, and it now takes pictures, and may even have stopped the on-again, off-again business.

Maybe I should drop it more often.

(Or charge it more often.)

Here are the piglets.

I managed to finish their new outside pen before the rain came, so they could explore the Great Outdoors for the first time if they felt like it, but they didn't feel like going out.

I can't say I blame them. That's a whole piglets-length of drop down off the sheep's winter bedding to the dirt level in the pigpen.

Maybe tomorrow we'll move some of that hay to make a ramp.

Serial [camera] killer

2011-05-14T02:52:00.000-07:00

There won't be any pictures for a while. I broke another digital camera yesterday. Intending to take a picture of the new piglets, I dropped it onto the concrete floor of my workshop.

This is the third one I've owned since I started writing this blog in 2007, and I've managed to break each one of them. The latest one lasted only a few months, so I must be "escalating" like a troubled teenager, or one of the serial killers on "Criminal Minds." My next camera will no doubt last for only a few days at most.

If it wasn't for our policy that I'm only allowed to buy the cheapest second-hand digital cameras, I'd be upset about this. But I'm not. I have however, realized how easy it is to forget hard-earned lessons.

Before I dropped this camera, it had become balky, for some reason, only working properly after you turned it on and off multiple times.

As a result I had thought to myself , "wouldn't it be nice to have a new one?" and "Maybe I'll get a new one."

Now we see what a foolish idea that was.

I'll get another $25 second-hand one from eBay.

In the meantime, if I want to post you a picture of the new piglets, I'll either have to use my cellphone, or get Aimee to take them with her [nice, new, never-been dropped] digital camera.

I want you all to know, this does not mean that I am never allowed to have nice things and that Aimee looks after her stuff, while I don't.

If it wasn't for me, her car would never get an oil change, and it would still be covered with the winter's salt.

I take good care of big things that don't get hurt if you drop them. And my last serious car accident was nearly twenty years ago now.

I'm just really bad with digital cameras.

Really, really bad.

The Zen of Sheep

2011-05-08T02:31:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around with the camera yesterday evening at dusk, taking odd pictures for no good reason, except perhaps that wandering around your land with a camera taking pictures sometimes forces you to notice and appreciate things you might otherwise not.

Which if you think about it is a very good reason.

These two male goldfinches were attending Aimee's recently serviced feeder.

Our daffodils are in fine fettle, a slightly paler shade than the goldfinches.

The chickadee was a little blurry. He wouldn't sit still. And I have no idea why Aimee put the band of corn in the thistle feeder.

The sheep were playing sheep games. Cooped up all day while we were attending Unity College graduation, they were very happy to be allowed onto the Back Forty after dinner.

I wasn't going to let them out, since thunderstorms were forecast, but was forced to relent after I found silly Nellie with her head fully caught in the six-by-six inch mesh of a fourteen gauge sheep fence, obviously trying to reach the greener grass on the other side.

She was most upset to be caught, bleating very nervously. But this didn't stop her eating grass. Even though she was stuck fast and bleating, she was still tucking in pretty well.

I had to snip the fence twice to get the silly girl free. Her reaction was interesting. Once the wires were snipped, making a twelve inch hole that she might easily withdraw her head from, she just kind of stood there for a while, before finally pulling back and walking off shaking her silly wooly head.

Later, after I let them loose, she and Jewel had a big game with all the lamps, running up the hill then stopping, looking around at each other panting; then turning around and running down the hill, stopping and looking around again, panting; then running up the hill....

You get the idea.

Not exactly the most complicated game in the world, I know, but everyone was enjoying it, especially Jewel. I was watching from the back yard, while Aimee could see the lambs running, but not Jewel, from the window of her sewing room.

Sheep games don't have too many rules.

Very simple games do quite well for sheep.

I expect I could learn something from that if I thought about it.

These lambs are staring at me saying, well...

..."when are you going to learn?"

Peopling the peep pen

2011-05-06T04:01:00.001-07:00

Here we are at the real farm store, the one run by Mainers that sells Maine stuff.

We're picking up the peeps.

I like picking up the peeps because peeps make Aimee smile. As ever, we drove all the way back home with the box on her lap, her nose in the peepy peepbox and a happy smile on her face.

Aimee has been branching out in her capacity as head Womerlippi farm Peep Wrangler.

As well as the good old Buff Orpingtons (Borpingtons?) and Golden Comets we've had for years, she ordered Barred Rocks and Golden Laced Wyandottes.

(I had to look up the spelling of Wyandottes.)

Some of these are for other folks at the college. Apparently there's a discount for bulk.

"Three pounds of assorted peeps and a bag of peep feed, please."

But we're keeping some Barred Rocks and Wyandottes, I am reliably informed by the Head of Peep Wrangling.

I'm assigned to peep delivery later today. How these poor folks are going to manage a box of peeps under their work desk for the rest of the day is their problem.

In other news, Monday was my last 8am class.

Actually, it was a 7.30 am exam, but the net effect is the same: No more early morning departures from the farm for at least three months.

To be ready for an 8am class, I have to pretty much be at the college by 7am or 7.30 am at the latest. It takes twenty-five minutes to get there, so I leave at 6.30 am. But I have to feed sheep first, so I'm eating breakfast around 5.30 am.

Today, in celebration, I ate breakfast at 7am. And then sat down to post on this blog.

What a luxurious feeling!

I will be doing wind power field research over the summer, but those are actual 8am starts, not "be ready to teach a class at 8am starts," so I won 't leave until 7.30 am.

It's amazing what a difference an extra hour makes.

Haggis and I used it to take a nice walk in the woods yesterday. Haggis liked his walk.

He also likes the peeps.

Haggis, a certified Australian chick-herd, loves his peeps.

Tractorwerken

2011-05-01T14:09:00.001-07:00

In case you're wondering why these photos were posted with no commentary, it's because we've been having trouble with our FairPoint DSL, and were cut off again, for the fiftieth or sixtieth time, after the pictures were saved, but before the commentary was saved.

Consumer alert: If you live in Maine and have a choice of Internet service providers, don't get FairPoint. It's certifiably crap service. Worse even than British Telecom, and that's saying something.

We didn't have any choice. FairPoint is the only DSL provider in Jackson. We could try satellite, but it seems expensive and the reviews say you can't stream video. Our FairPoint disconnects us at least once every hour, but it does stream both NetFlix and the BBC.

(What would I do without all those BBC iPlayer documentaries?)

Aimee's on the verge of launching one of her righteous crusades. I've never known anyone like her for high dudgeon. It's almost as if she were British and someone jumped the queue. She will, if need be, write personal letters to very single officer of a company that's wronged her, for years and years if necessary, badgering them until she gets satisfaction. She never gives up. FairPoint doesn't know what it's in for.

You don't want to cross her.

But it is very annoying to pay $44 a month for what should be reliable service, only to have it break down so constantly.

Anyway, these were just some nice Sunday night pictures to show you what we'd been up to this weekend.

Saturday itself was a dead loss for me work-wise because of the Maine State Science Fair, but Sunday proved dry enough, after enough other dry days, to do a vital chore that badly needed doing, the cleaning-out of the pig sty, the building of next year's compost pile for the garden, and the tilling of the year before last's compost into the garden.

When we first got on this sheep-pig-compost rotation, we thought we could compost the material just for a few short weeks each spring, before tilling it into the veggie garden. But after a couple years of very heavy weeding, we realized it takes a whole summer of hot compost to kill all the weed seeds, especially the hayseeds.

It is mostly old hay after all, so I should have expected it to have a high load of weed seeds once composted.

So weed the soil, not the plants. These days I turn and pile the material up for a second time each spring, let it go for a whole extra year, and then till it in.

The '73 twelve horse Kubota tractor with its proprietary front-end loader and rear-tine tiller works pretty well for this chore. The loader only takes about six cubic feet of material at a time, but since that's easily two hundred pounds of manure, it's a lot easier than using hand tools. The tiller is superb, by far the best tiller I've ever used or seen used, and the tractor-tiller-loader combination together is well worth the six thousand dollars we paid for this rig.

That was nearly six years ago now in any case that we paid that, and I'd venture to say that there hasn't been any visible deterioration or wear to the equipment in all that time. It's all certainly built to last. The tractor itself will be 40 years old the year after next.

Then there's a couple additional shots, the chickens in their new prison-pen, and the daffodils finally getting ready to bloom, two weeks behind the daffodils down at sea level.

The chickens are not that happy to be cooped up in such a relatively small yard. Their grain consumption has only gone up a little, but now they fight over the nicest bugs they find, and one particular bird has taken to jumping up and down at the fence line anytime a human passes by.

I imagine she's asking to be let out, although that would be a pretty smart chicken-communication attempt, wouldn't it?

I expect that next year's birds will be less bothered by it, because they won't have know anything else.

On that note, wifey ordered me to sort out the chick brooder, which I dutifully did.

Chicks arrive Thursday.

The last picture is of lazy sunny dogz on the porch. Mary, the southerner, likes the sun; Haggis, from Aroostook County, Maine, likes the shade. That's a Shenzi-cat bum peeking out from behind the milk churn.

Building Jerusalem in my head

2011-05-01T03:52:00.001-07:00

It's been sunny off and on this week, but there's been a bit of rain too. There hasn't been any frost.

As a result, the grass is making up for lost time, and in our most fertile places has jumped up three inches in almost as few days.

I was able to put the sheep out to graze for the first time for a couple of hours on Sunday night after our chicken-fence marathon. They went to the New Paddock, where the grass was long-enough already, but less lush, mixed in with some brown thatch from the fall. This was good because they were able to adjust slowly to their new diet.

Sheep get a bit squiffy if they jump from hay to lush green grass too quickly. This is called "scours" and it isn't good for them.

Later, Friday evening after the BBC America news, we fenced the Island Paddock, and Saturday afternoon (after I got back from judging at the Maine State Science Fair) they went on to that very lush green material, with no ill effects.

Our flock of mothers and nursing lambs were grazed most evenings after work this last week, which reduced the hay consumption considerably.

For which my wallet is very grateful.

I had been trucking up to Newport every few days for a large round bale from Beem Farm, where they specialize in hay and straw. This was very nice timothy hay, which was good for our nursing mothers, but at $45 a bale, it was a bit steep for sheep.

Sheep are wasteful of hay. Our sheep, given a whole round bale to eat, will mine through rapidly (leaving a perfect nose-shaped hole in the bale), eating all the leaf and leaving the stem. The expensive buggers then bed down on the stems as if they were the softest straw, which they may as well be. After they've slept on the stems for a night, only the sharpest of hunger will cause them to go back over the now-tainted fodder.

The solution is to eke out the fodder using a hay feeder. We have one, in the barn, but it takes square bales not round, and I prefer our ewes out in the sunshine all day this time of year. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, good for drying moist dungy fleece, and a good deterrent for fly-strike. I'd rather waste hay than get infected sheep.

Actually, there is another solution, which is to chop the hay. Old timers used a device called a hay chopper to reduce the stems a little, after which cattle and sheep would eat more of the whole plant. If I could ever find or make something modern and efficient to do this job for us, I could get our hay consumption per year down about fifty percent.

So the green grass has helped a lot with costs. I also was able to convince Andrew Stoll the Unity Amishman to sell me the last of his 2010 hay, twenty square bales of green mixed pasture grasses which I picked up on Monday during my lunch hour. This fodder wasn't technically as nutritious as the Beem Farm timothy, but it could be fed a bale at a time, and it was the second cut of the season, so there was more leaf and less stem.

The combination of the switch to square bales and the addition of the evening grazing routine has cut the hay consumption down considerably. A round bale is often said to be worth ten to fifteen square bales, and indeed one Beem Farm round bale weighed more heavily on the truck springs than all twenty of the Stoll Farm square bales.

The Amish around here cut by horse power, but run their motorized balers in the barn, feeding the cut in by hand, and so you get a loose bale. But each Stoll Farm bale lasted almost a whole day, whereas the sheep ran through their last Beem Farm bale in only four days.

At $2 each for the Stoll Farm bales, and with each bale lasting longer, our hay bill has been more than cut in half.

Obviously we don't make money nor break even on the sheep business. Revenue from sales of whole live and whole butchered animals and yarn comes to less than $500/year, whereas we spend that much on hay alone, never mind the grain and shearing costs.

It probably costs us about $1,000 a year to stay in the sheep business. We can make a profit on eggs. We break even on pigs. But we lose on sheep.

But after several years of experience we've been able to work out what might work. If we had about a twenty-acre hay field, a bigger tractor, all our own haying equipment, a lambing shed, and four or five times as many animals of slightly better bloodlines, I reckon we might get good-enough prices for Corriedale ewe-lambs as breeding stock, and we could get a good carcass price for a Corriedale market lamb. We'd only get the very best prices for our meat if we put in our own mini USDA- and State-of-Maine certifiable slaughtering and packing facility, and sold our other farm products like Aimee's pesto and the yarn we get made up at the same time. We could then sell retail in small vacuum-packed packages, and get $5/pound or more at the local farmers market and in our own CSA scheme, the germ of which already exists in our pig club members.

Now we know how to keep sheep alive and thriving in this climate, we could make money out of them, I'm sure. But only if we were willing to risk something like $40,000 of capital.

Dream on, Mick! That's the path to impoverishment and bankruptcy. We're not giving up our day jobs anytime soon. I'm happy for now to write off that annual $1,000 loss against a couple tons of compost for the garden, against not having to mow lawns, which suburban chore I despise (and lawn mowers cost money and use gas which also costs money), and against the very great pleasure of seeing lambs snuggle up to their mothers on green pastures in the evening sun, as in the photo above.

For the foreseeable, if we're going to help take any particular sustainable business to the next level, it will be Unity College.

One of the hymns sung during the recent nuptial event in the UK was William Blake's Jerusalem, which particular favorite piece of music I was very sorry to miss, but then it did happen to come during my Friday morning commute.

We didn't get a day off in New England.

Bread of Heaven, however, another favorite (also known as Guide me, oh thy Great Redeemer), came during my morning cereal, much to my republican wife's* anguish since I turned up the volume.

But Jerusalem remains more germane to my mood this spring...

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon England's mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On England's pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England's green & pleasant Land

*In the British sense of the word, someone who prefers a republican form of government, most definitely not a monarchy.

The Great Escape

2011-04-25T02:00:00.000-07:00

Today's news of tunneling escapees from the prison in Kandahar came as no surprise.

After all, if our chickens can do it, why couldn't Afghanis?

Our birds got a life sentence recently when our neighbor lady Jean decided to put in flower beds to the rear of the house. Jean explained that she didn't want no stinking chickens digging up her new bulbs, and no, we couldn't fence the chickens out of the flower beds, because there were other plants here and there around the house she wanted to protect.

Actually, she wasn't quite that direct. Jean is very polite. But you get my drift here.

Our chickens would have to be fenced in, for the first time in their lives, instead of being fenced out of the two main Great Farm vegetable gardens: ours and the one belonging to our other neighbors, Jean's son Hamilton and his wife Andrea, and a few smaller ones around our house.

We maintain the fence around Ham and Andrea's garden because they're our birds. We also have a good fence around all our gardens. But, good fence or no, this scheme would no longer be good enough.

Jean's pronouncement came in the late fall, so I had some time.

So I dutifully stockpiled fence posts and concrete and wire, and, as soon as the ground began to thaw, dismantled quite a few other fences here and there, to recycle the components.

But progress wasn't fast enough. We had lingering snow. We had rain. We had no money for new fence, especially chicken wire. (We're spending it all on hay!) The birds were still free, spring was a-springing, and so Jean made a call.

The fence project would have to be accelerated.

So, Saturday morning, off to the farm store I went, list in hand. I chose to go to the Tractor Supply outlet in Bangor. I needed to get the snow tires changed over on the Ford wagon, and such things are generally easier done in Bangor, so I pulled the wheels and found the street tires and took those with me in the back of the pick-em up truck, dropping them off at the tire place along the way.

The choice of stores was my first mistake.

Tractor Supply is a national, for-profit hobby and horse farm chain, and they cater to the horse and pony, playing store-wide country-musak and displaying the check-shirt and blue jeans variant of American rural culture. Their clothing section is bigger than their hardware section.

This is not where we live. Waldo County is agriculturally diverse, home to the largest annual organic farm fair in New England and perhaps the largest in the entire USA. We also have a lot of 50 to 300-cow Maine dairy farms operating on the corn silage and hay rotation. There are vineyards, pasture poultry and pasture pork operations, llamas, dairy sheep, cheese-makers, a three-turbine farm wind farm, small scale ham smokers and even an organic compost operation that uses fish waste from the lobster fishery, but there aren't a lot of checked-shirted, barrel-racing, calf-roping country music fans.

So I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised when the teenage helper at Tractor Supply didn't know a t-post from a u-post; when there were no bundled u-posts for sale, only expensive singles; when the oats didn't come from Maine and cost 30 percent more than Maine-grown oats at our local feed store; when everything was 20 percent more; when there were only six rolls of chicken wire to choose from, and when there was only one-inch hole-wire and not two-inch.

It didn't improve my nagging feeling of being in some other state to discover the store manager had a marked southern accent. I may be biased and even perhaps prejudiced, but is it completely wrong of me to subconsciously prefer my Maine farm store staff to have native Maine accents? Especially when I'm being ripped off?

The final insult was paying $13.99 for a five-pound box of galvanized fence staples that cost $1.69/pound at our local hardware store or at the farmer's cooperative where we normally shop.

Although some feed prices were cheap, obviously that's the ploy: Bring them in with cheap 16-weight mixed feed and mark them up twenty percent on everything else.

So, if Tractor Supply market researchers are reading this webpage after routine googling, please note, not only do we not dress like that and listen to that stupid music here in mid-central Maine, we don't farm like that either.

After all this shopping and the afternoon rain, Saturday was wiped out. The fence job started on Sunday morning. I left the chickens in their coop while I put up the first sections, thinking I would need to watch carefully to see how they reacted.

Chickens, you see, are smart birds, particularly our chickens, and can often find their way out of a fenced area.

I started by reinforcing the sheep wire with chicken wire. I then strung a length of hot wire across the top of the sheep wire.

To round off the job, I added a length of sheep wire to essentially split the North Paddock in half.

(Making "West North Paddock" and "East North Paddock"? All paddocks need names.)

This sounds easy but was actually six hours of fairly painstaking work.

By the time I got all this done, and got started with what I was supposed to be doing, in the proper order of things absent the phone call from the neighbor, which would be to get ready for spring sheep grazing, I still wasn't feeling that confident.

Aimee and I had been catching and re-catching escapees all day long. This wasn't so bad by itself. It took me most of the day to get the chicken wire job done, so there were places to get out all along the line that hadn't been reinforced yet. But when the whole supposedly chicken-proof pen was complete, I admit, I was rather hoping to rest on my laurels.

But as I was loading the tools in the small trailer to start on the sheep job, I noticed out of the corner of my eye, one chicken, then a flurry of three chickens, somehow wiggling over the top of the gate.

Before I knew it, they were all out, and heading off for the far corners of the farm yard.

I gave up for now and instead did in two hours what I should have started with all along, and fenced the New Paddock and got the sheep on some grass. I raced through the job and will need to go back and upgrade some fence posts (as soon as I can get to a farm store that sell bundled u-posts!), but the sheep were so happy to eat green grass, even Jewel the ancient ewe-l was kicking up her hooves for joy like a spring lamb.

Despite having happy sheep, I was pretty grumpy, and the usual difficulty teaching the new lambs to move paddocks didn't help my mood much. The five o'clock and six o'clock hours both passed with me running around the North Paddock with the shepherd's crook, chasing errant lambs, while their trailer-trash mothers munched away oblivious in the New Paddock. I finally sank down to rest and eat dinner at 6.30 pm.

I was starving, having completely skipped lunch. I was also very sore and even a little sun-burned.

So much for my Easter holiday.

I can see we're going to have a long hot summer of trying to keep these damn chickens in. Obviously I'll need to start with a new type of gate.

If all else fails, we'll have to build a coop.

We'll call it Gitmo.

A cold spring, or is it?

2011-04-22T02:44:00.001-07:00

Photo: Last year's much earlier spring grass.

I have been bothered a little by the weather lately.

I have a number of projects to get done, but primarily I need to finish some fencing, to satisfy a neighbor who wants our admittedly marauding chickens off her land.

She gets free eggs and free slug control, but apparently is no longer willing to host the birds. We'll keep giving her eggs, of course. There's no reason to make a big deal about our birds. They shouldn't be over there in the first place.

But the weather hasn't cooperated with fencing, or at least it seems that way. The snow lingered late into April and the frozen ground prevented fencing. Now that the ground is thawed, massive rainstorms have moved in each weekend.

I have only two weekend days each week, and usually lose part of those to college work each time, grading or events, so a weekend rainstorm that is poorly timed can use up all my remaining time for farming.

And yes, as an official Yorkshireman I do work in the rain, but light mizzly (misty and drizzly) Yorkshire rain at 50 degrees F is a lot easier to work in than Maine's heavy spring downpours at 38 degrees F.

But at least it's not snowing. Although we did see a little snow in the air yesterday afternoon.

We're also out of hay, and so I'm buying in expensive stuff each week at $45 a round bale. It's beautiful hay, and good feed for the nursing mothers, but sheep waste a lot from any bale. I want to get them on grass as soon as possible, but the grass seems stalled.

So I wanted to know if my apprehension that the spring has been cold and the grass stalled out is actually true, and I also wanted to know if the La Nina conditions that came upon us late last fall were causing it.

I'm an experienced enough scientist by now to know that trying to decide for yourself if current weather is different than normal is fraught with difficulty, because our observational abilities are so poor, and our natural subjectivity intervenes very easily. Luckily, I keep a farm diary online, and so have dated pictures and narrative reports of weather in past years.

As for the ENSO, and in particularly the La Nina cycle, it's a very difficult phenomenon to sort out. Much complexity is involved, and there's no simple, direct connection. I do know for sure, because I've been monitoring, that the jet stream has been making the deep standing waves that are one sign of La Nina conditions. But I didn't know how strong the current La Nina index was.

So let's start with the local data. Here are the relevant farm blog posts from around this time in previous years:

Clearly, by April 25th, 2010, the grass was much further along than it is now.

In 2009, we had a dry spell at the beginning of April, and I distinctly remember this work day on the 12th April because it was so gross. The trees are bare. There was no grass until later in the month.

There isn't a clear photo of the paddocks in April 2008, but this post, on May 12th, 2008, about other signs of spring clearly shows Aimee's tomato plants, a little further along than they are now, a little later in the year. The trees in the background are just greening up, which they should be doing this year too, by May 12th.

So my own data is inconclusive, but if anything tends to make me begin to think that this weather is not particularly different than normal.

The semester is ending a week earlier, the end of the first week in May rather than the end of the second week in May, so that might be the main reason for my perception.

Most likely explanation, this is more like a normal year, while last year was warmer because of the El Nino conditions that prevailed.

As for La Nina, my favorite US science agency, NOAA, says La Nina has weakened, but effects will linger. They provide the following, recently updated discussion:

"La Niña will continue to have global impacts even as the episode weakens through the Northern Hemisphere spring. Expected La Niña impacts during April-June 2011 include suppressed convection over the west-central tropical Pacific Ocean, and enhanced convection over Indonesia. Potential impacts in the United States include an enhanced chance for below-average precipitation across much of the South, while above-average precipitation is favored for the northern Plains. An increased chance of below-average temperatures is predicted across the northern tier of the country (excluding New England). A higher possibility of above-average temperatures is favored for much of the southern half of the contiguous U.S. (see 3-month seasonal outlook released on March 17th, 2011)."

So New England shouldn't be feeling much if anything in the way of La Nina effects at this point, and summer should be about average. Of course, that meandering jet stream, until it calms down, will mean bigger then normal spring storms, and alternating cold and warm periods, but the net result shouldn't hold up spring very much more.

Good. Maybe the grass will start to grow now.

I'd like to see a nice green farm soon, like the one we had this time last year. I have some fence to build and I'm tired of shelling out extra dollars for hay.

And today's supposed to be a nice day, so that's a start.

Now I have to go eat breakfast and give the sheep another expensive bale of hay.

A big mess

2011-04-17T03:57:00.000-07:00

Today was the day when the last of the snow was finally gone and the road grit and firewood shrapnel needed to be cleaned up.

The Town of Jackson's plow truck, like most in Maine, has a large gritter on the back which spreads a mixture of sand, gravel and salt on the roads each winter. A major spring chore is cleaning up all thus material before the spring rains take it into the rivers, or before it gets picked up by the wind and blown in people's faces.

In our case, since the plow truck will frequently venture across our lawn, we have to rake it up and often reseed grass too. You can see the big piles to the left of our mailbox.

This nasty material had been frozen to the ground, but finally the ice was all gone. I hooked our York rake up to the Kubota and proceeded to rake it all up. There was much more than usual and so I needed a place to put it. At the back of the north paddock is a gate which has become overgrown with tall weeds and brambles, a gate we will need one day for access to a large area of potential new graze, and so I dumped it there on the theory that I could use it to make a roadway that wouldn't allow brambles to grow at all.

The firewood shrapnel was mixed in with the gravel, but I raked it out by hand and took it to one of our big brush piles.

Now the rain has started and the lawns are getting washed clean. By the end of next week they should begin to green up.

The lambs were not very happy to have to go out in the rain today. Can't say I blame them. It's blowing a houlie out there.

I have to go out later myself, for a search and rescue training. Oh well. Time to break out the old Goretex. I have some left over from my RAF Mountain Rescue days.

By the time this storm reaches Scotland it will be a real Force Ten Highland gale. I can remember some MRT training days like that.

Just a few.

Sheep school

2011-04-15T02:54:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was one of the twice-a-year days when we host first year students from Unity College's Captive Wildlife Care and Education degree program for training in animal handling using sheep.

The sheep need the handling, while the students need the experience, so this is a good trade for all of us. The sheep, for their part, get all their shots, their hoofs trimmed, their dung tags removed, and so on, the 3,000 mile service.

While the students get what we believe is exceptionally good experience, handling large, balky and even hostile animals.

Timing is everything, and in this case the timing was great for the students, but not so good for the sheep. We had hoped to get the students in before lambing, but as usual the stupidity of the college schedule defeated our plans.

If I ever happen to meet the absolute moron it was that decided one fine day that something useful to humanity could be learned in a fifty minute class, and then filled up students', and faculty members' days with these classes, carefully spaced apart so as to allow only a minimal amount of time for practicing difficult things or concentrating hard on tricky jobs, or, well, just plain thinking about things, well, I'll have something to say to that person.

My idea of a good class is at least a half a day, maybe more, of practical application solidly linked to theory.

We had two hours and ten minutes, and made the best of things. I had everything set up ahead of time, and we worked our way though the animals as methodically as we could in the time available.

We started with a good scrubbing of student's welly boots in disinfectant, to remove or kill any disease organisms from other farms, or the zoos and wildlife centers that these students regularly visit.

We then had a good briefing, in which their major professor, Cheryl Frederick and I emphasized that what we were about to do would be hard work, dirty, unpleasant, risky to the animals, and based on hard science. This is an important moment because the students in this particular program sometimes arrive with what I call the "Animal Planet" mentality, which is something along the lines that cute, fuzzy animals are entertaining, and that because I'm in this degree program and not, say, straight biology, I don't have to take the hard biology classes that are required, or at least, I don't have to take them seriously.

These students, along with the Marine Biology students, I'm sorry to say, routinely get the worst grades in genetics, cell biology, and similar "hard" courses, as well as in math. They often see these more abstract courses as unpleasant and unnecessary.

(This is particularly frustrating to Aimee, who often comes home quite angry about it.)

Whereas in reality, all serious modern animal care and medicine is applied biology, and if students don't pay attention in genetics or cell biology, they may not fully understand procedures, and, in their future careers, at best they'll have to resort to the use of rote systems and depend on others to actually work out systems of care, being handicapped in doing it themselves by their ignorance of the biological basis of care.

At worst, they'll kill animals.

Which we nearly did yesterday, more of which later.

So the students got a five minute briefing in which we connected the systems of care they would learn to the biology in classes, emphasized the hard work and need for grit and guts in handling the animals. Seeing a few glazed eyes and minds already wandering (which is normal for first years, but not good, a sign of poor high-schooling and short attention spans and the like), we made eye contact, and I made sure they were paying attention with a mild but gruff warning.

Once we had their full attention and minds on task, we got stuck in.

With only two hours to go, everything had to be set up ahead of time. Earlier I had penned the sheep into the back of the barn, where they spend the winter. This is a safe place for them and they were quiet and settled. I stepped in and started handing out lambs, one by one. Each lamb got a subcutaneous injection of tetanus vaccine. The students gave the shots. They had earlier been told how to do it, and then we showed them how, with the first lamb; after that each student got to inject a lamb, and later, the ewes.

The best place to inject a sheep with tetanus vaccine or any other subcutaneous medicine is in one of the four "armpits," the area of bald, loose skin on the inside where the limb meets the body. It's easy to pinch up a flap of this skin, insert the needle, and inject the medicine right under the skin layer, avoiding muscle tissue and blood vessels.

The students had been warned that as soon as the ewes were separated from the lambs all kinds of noise would break out, making it hard to concentrate, and this duly occurred as babies were separated from mothers.

Each lamb was then returned to the lambing pen, still isolated from the mothers.

The next job was to work on the mothers themselves, and just naturally the angriest mothers presented themselves first at the gate of their pen, very hostile, and bleating for their babies. It was a simple matter to let them out one at a time, catch them, and take them outside into the sun for their routine work.

A romantic notion of sheep handling might have left the lambs with the mothers, but this might have resulted in lambs getting crushed while mothers were caught.

Again, students need to learn to let go of soppy sentiments and plan out systems of handling and care that are best for the animals and realistic of the difficulties involved.

Taking the angriest mothers first this way was good, because that meant we got all the most difficult sheep done first. And of course, first of all was Nellie, then Tillie, then Molly, then Poppy.

Tillie is probably our Number One best mother, and most experienced. But Nellie is the most caring mother we have. Molly is an easy third, and Poppy is just learning, so the order in which the angry sheep appeared at the gate was just naturally the exact order of their ranking of motherly ethic.

Our Corriedale-Romney cross sheep are big, solid and very strong, no pushovers. A Corriedale ewe is just naturally one of the finest and feistiest mothers in the animal world. All the mothers wanted very badly to be back with their babies.

It was no mean feat to catch each one, give her a shot, trim hooves and dung tags.

Once fixed up, the mothers could then go back to the paddock,, and each set of lambs could then be brought out, given five cubic centimeters of vitamin paste (containing selenium for protection against white muscle disease), and then released to the mothers.

The noise level slowly dropped.

A moment of quiet drama ensued when a student accidentally nicked one of Tillie's arteries with the needle while giving the tetanus shot. Bright red blood leaked out of the wound under the skin, making a bulge.

This might easily have caused Tillie's death. What happens is that the slug of liquid medicine in the blood vessel becomes in effect an embolism, and if it enters the blood vessels of the heart, can stop that organ beating.

This is called thrombosis, and humans get it too, when we have a "stroke."

Luckily it was one of Tillie's arteries that was hit, not a vein, based on the bright red color of the blood that we saw.

Arterial bleeding from a puncture wound will usually stop, so I wasn't worried about Tillie bleeding to death. But I was worried about a thrombosis.

But again we were lucky in that it was an artery and not a vein, and so any medicine that made it into the vessel would have had to have been pushed through capillaries and the tissue they serve, and so necessarily dispersed before making it to a vein, then to the heart. In addition, the pressure in an artery is greater, so it's harder to push the medicine in to the blood vessel. More likely the arterial pressure pushed the medicine out, and we had instead a bulge of blood mixed with medicine under the skin, which would go away eventually, and the medicine would still be effective.

This accident was partly my fault for not mentioning as positively as I should have that it was important to get the medicine just under the skin, and not in a muscle or blood vessel.

I showed the students how to do it, but I didn't tell them this last part.

And not all students were perhaps paying full attention to the demonstration.

Again, if we could only have them for longer periods, so things weren't so rushed, this kind of mistake would be harder to make.

Once we realized what we had done, we just stopped work, let Tillie go, found her lambs and gave them back to her, and then just watched her for a few minutes to make sure she didn't keel over.

And she didn't.

Phew. Good lesson for students, better lesson for instructor.

One way to be sure that you haven't nicked a blood cell is to pull back on the syringe after the needle is inserted but before depressing the plunger, but this is usually not needed for a simple subcutaneous shot like this one.

Next time I'll be even more gruff about getting everyone's attention, and make sure each student sees the demonstration before doing the job themselves. Also, when I was training to be a military medic we practiced on skin/muscle analogs -- loose skinned oranges, actually, but I'm sure we can buy something bespoke from a hospital supply warehouse.

The student that gave the faulty shot was very surprised when we assigned her to give the very next shot. But you have to get right back on the horse that threw you while the adrenaline is still in your system. If you don't fear may take over, and you may never succeed at learning the job.

She did a much better job of the next injection. Well done.

After a while all the mothers were happily reunited with their lambs and the mayhem quieted. The remaining sheep got quite a bit of attention, except for Jewel, the second oldest ewe, who characteristically fought us all off, and went into the paddock without treatment.

This may not be such a bad thing, as it may soon be time to take her to the butchers.

I perhaps should have mentioned this too to the students, but an old retired ewe like Jewel will die eventually, either as her teeth wear out, or as she gets one or more of the hundreds of dread diseases of sheep. Jewel herself took ill last year, to Listeriosis or "circling diesease" and nearly died.

It's much better for them to die quickly in the slaughterhouse and for us to get the meat (which I usually have ground up for shepherds pie and sausage), than it is to die of starvation from worn-out teeth, or from some dread disease.

Cheryl and her academic partner in this program, Sarah Cunningham, make sure to prepare students for this kind of eventuality. The very first lecture the students get is on death, an immediate inoculation against the "Animal Planet" mentality.

And the first (lesson) shall be the last (lesson).

All are well

2011-04-09T04:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it's two days since Poppy the balky shearling momma gave birth to her male twin lambs, and things have only slowly improved for the two near-orphans.

You may remember that Poppy dropped her first lamb on the cold hard ground Thursday morning, initiating a series of minor lamb emergencies. She failed to lick and otherwise stimulate the newborn, which then failed to get to his feet and quickly became hypothermic, while shepherd-boy here was looking the other way. The little wain was saved only by twenty minutes under a heat lamp.

After which Poppy refused to feed him, or his little brother. Each time they tried ever so pathetically to find the teat, she'd shy away. The little brother was born in the lambing pen onto warm bedding, and so was at least warm and didn't require the heat lamp. But lambs require a feed within the first hour or two or they lose energy and die. The first feed also contains a lot of the mother's colostrum, vital for lamb health.

So Thursday morning we (the Royal we -- herself was off at work, clean and dry) spent quite a lot of time on our knees in the lambing pen holding Poppy down with one or the other lamb on the teat.

Then "we" had to go to work for so-called essential meetings beginning at 11am. Racing home at around 3.30 pm, we arrived to find both lambs alive but a little cold and losing energy.

So it was back to force-feeding for Poppy, our flock's official Worst Mother of the Year.

They survived the night, and it was during the night that Poppy began to relent, allowing small, short feedings if one of us was in the pen with her.

I think she must have realized that this was preferable to being held down. Even so, she was held down for the penultimate time at the 3.30 am night check.

Friday morning dawned to find two somewhat cold lambs still, so Poppy was held down again. This turned out to be the last time this was needed. I hurried off for a long day at a high school energy event with two of our graduating seniors, who were presenting. I made it home by 3.30 pm and since both lambs were standing and it was warm and sunny, I let them out, and instead of holding Poppy down, I gave them each a bottle. They drank a half a cup of milk replacer each, which is a pretty big feed for such tiny babies, so they must have been hungry.

Later that evening I saw them both jump around a little and test out their legs for the first time, a very good sign. Momma Poppy was still not minding them properly, and they were still the hungriest kids on the block.

Finally, during the 3.30 pm night checks I saw both lambs feed together, one teat each as nature intended, for a good long time.

Home free?

We'll have to see. But it was a very hopeful sign.

So far this year we've not lost a single lamb. We've been lucky. Last year we lost three lambs and two ewes (one and two), mostly because we were even busier at work and so not there when lambs were born, but also because we had a warmer spring and so the standard sheep diseases, tetanus, listeriosis, and fly-strike got going before we were quite ready for them.

So, although the cooler, snowier late winter weather has been a downer, it's been good for the ewes and lambs, and good for the Womerlippi bottom line.

(Meaning we lose less money on the sheep herd than we usually do.)

Time to call the shearer, though, and we'll get those fleeces off before the really warm weather comes.

Cold lamb

2011-04-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

Today's "Lambing Live" drama was a hypothermic lamb. Poppy, a shearling ewe, didn't quite know what to do with her first baby, so she left it on the cold hard frosty ground for quite a while.

I'm not sure how long. It doesn't take long when the ground is iron-hard and twenty degrees.

Of course, we try to watch them like hawks this time of year. I'd been up on night checks at 9am, 2.30am, 4am, and then every forty minutes or so.

But once the sun was up, I was struggling with a big round bale and a balky tractor and trailer, trying to feed the rest of the sheep. I heard the little one before I saw it, and picked it right up, but it was already cold.

Poppy had her own problems. She was backing into a brush heap, totally terrified of what was happening to her body.

To begin, I just bought Poppy and the lamb in and put them in a lambing pen with a heat lamp.

But Poppy didn't so much as lick the newborn even once.

Holding Poppy down, I squirted a little milk in his mouth, direct from the teat, but that didn't bring him round either.

After about another half hour of this, I bought the little one in, popped it in a blue WalMart tub in the kitchen with a heat lamp. Normally they go under the wood stove, but the stove was out.

Yet another use for those blue WalMart tubs. We must have twenty of the things around here.

Then I sterilized the intubation kit, just in case. But I didn't need it.

After a while the lamb was trying to stand in the tub, but his mouth was still cold when I stuck my finger in. Still, he did suckle. When they really go down they can't even do that. So back in the pen with mom he went. He tried gamefully to find the nipple but he was still too weak, and mom was more concerned about her second newborn so she didn't help much. She kept putting her leg in his way, and he'd fall over and have to try again.

So then we laid Poppy out once more, and put the lamb on the nipple. After a little initial confusion, with Poppy pinned firmly under my left knee (complaining loudly at this treatment) so she had no choice in the matter, I got him a good feed.

And then back under the heat lamp. If he follows the usual pattern, he'll sleep off that first feed and then when he gets up the next time he should be strong enough to find the nipple on his own.

And when I last saw them Poppy was giving the cold one a good licking.

And yes, the BBC does actually have a reality TV show called "Lambing Live." It's my new favorite show. Right up there with "University Challenge."

But Aimee prefers "Survivor."

I'm not giving you a link to Survivor.

You can find it yourself.

Lamb-book

2011-04-06T03:04:00.000-07:00

Aimee's pictures of this years lambs, so far, on her Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2009689&id=120000357&l=5ba7948c82

Three more

2011-04-05T11:45:00.000-07:00

I came home at 1pm expecting a trip to go get another round bale, but Molly had given birth, so I needed to get mother and child into the second
lambing pen.

Then I noticed Tillie was missing. And, of course, she had chosen to give birth to a little white lamb, in the rain in the mud down at the end of the loafing area.

So it was another game of lamb rugby. Luckily I won, dropping the lamb inside the outside door of the lambing pen just before Tillie dropped me.

Poor little lamb, born in the mud, and to cap it all, Tillie is very aggressive at kicking lambs and hoofing them until they get to their feet. The lamb was just covered in mud as well as blood from the birthing.

Here's the area of mud that Tillie tilled up trying to get this lamb to stand.

Then Tillie squeezed out another, this one black, with no trouble at all. So she has one black lamb, and one white one covered in mud.

Mollie, on the other hand, was sensible this year and gave birth indoors, to a nice clean lamb.

Last year she gave birth all the way at the end of the North Paddock, in the dark.

Sh**ty little lambie sits out silly snow storm

2011-04-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

We had to bring one of Nellie's new lambs in for a bath. The orange-yellow poop that lambs have while still at the teat sometimes sticks to their fleece. Most mothers will clean it up, but not our Nellie, I guess. Shameless! This lamb had a fairly big old slab of pure lamb-merde encrusted to her leg.

A little soapy water and she was ready to go. Mom was glad to have her back, but says can we use scented dish soap next time?

In other news, we had a fairly big dump of wet spring snow yesterday, seen here on Aimee's beloved Camry.

Yes, there is a car under that snow drift.

We got one last snow day for the year, making six or seven total, plus 14 inches by Aimee's reckoning. I have to say it may have been more like a foot and a half of snow because she was measuring on the picnic table, and there was a stiff breeze throughout the storm which would have blown some of the snow away from the table.

It took an hour with the tractor yesterday and two hours today to move all the snow out of the way. We were on our own for this one. The town plow only just showed up, 30 hours after the storm began. But neighbor Ham plowed out to the road sometime during the night, so we were only snowed in temporarily. The power flickered off and on quite a few times and we know that 3,500 homes in the county to the south went without power for a day or so, but despite some flickering, we have power still. It probably helped a great deal that the line crew cleared the Great Farm's power distribution line where it comes through the woods, widening the corridor and taking out hundreds of trees that were crowding the line.

Now it's 40 F out there and getting warmer in the sun, and I expect much of this new snow will melt today or tomorrow, and what is left will be rained on Tuesday, so we expect to be back to spring-like conditions by the middle of the week.

Luckily, no more lambs appear to have been born. I say "appear." We may not know for sure. I greatly dislike late spring snow storms because a ewe may decide to drop her lambs off in a snowbank somewhere. The lambs can't dry off and if not found right away may die of hypothermia. We then find one or more dead lambs after the snow melts.

So we've been extra careful to get out every few hours and observe the ewes, including in the dead of night. Night checks are a drag, but it helps I have an aging bladder and have to get up anyway, while Aimee generally stays up late, and so can check before she comes to bed.

I think Tillie will be next to give birth. She's huge, her teats are swollen, and the lambs seem to have shifted in her belly. Mollie, on the other hand, has a bright pink vulva, so she may be getting ready too.

Of the two year-and-a-half-old ewes who will give birth for the first time this year, and whose P-names I can never remember (Poppy and Penelope?) only the white one is obviously "showing."

This year is "R," and Aimee has decided on "Roxy" and "Rhea." The first ram lamb we see is likely to be "Rivet."

I thought of that one, and am quite proud of myself. I might see how "Rigger" goes down too, whether or not I can get the wifely approval, and then we'll have a series going in honor of RAF technical lingo.

When we get to "S" next year, we can have "Sooty" and "Sumpy" (RAF slang for engine-bashers). Especially if they're black lambs.

Something to look forward to.

Dead Cheryl

2011-04-01T02:18:00.000-07:00

I thought I would get into trouble yesterday. I killed our rooster Cheryl.

Murderer Mick!

This little tyrant has been tormenting me for months. After my last rooster, which also attacked me regularly, I swore "never again," but relented when one of the hen-chicks Aimee ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery turned out to be a rooster.

But I finally had enough. I was out in the woods close to the barn with the dogs, trying, of all things, to take a quiet whiz, when Cheryl sidled up. He came a little to the left, a little to the right, coming in at diagonals, getting closer every time, trying to stay on my blind side.

Like I couldn't actually see him! What a sneak. The Libyan opposition could learn tactics from this rooster.

Naturally, I felt just slightly more exposed than usual, with my fly down and all. Is nothing sacred? When a guy can't take a leak in his own woods, there's something wrong with the world. But I kept an eye on him, and nothing much happened.

Until I pulled up my zipper and turned my back to leave, when the little bugger flew at me, all spurs and beak!

This was the last straw. Not only has he attacked me about thirty or forty times, but he lords it over the hens like a monster, and it's only a matter of time before he attacks someone else, our elderly neighbor to the west, or the young mother and baby that live to our north, who come by with stroller every day to get the mail.

A short hour after this, the last of Cheryl's attacks, he was in the crock pot with the power turned up to full. End of. I fed his entrails to the hens.

Waste not, want not.

It was while I was hanging him to be plucked that it occurred to me that I should probably have talked this over with Aimee. After all, she raised him from a chick, and he was a very pretty rooster, in Pittsburgh Steeler colors and all. But Aimee was at work.

This gives you an idea of the capriciousness of my death sentence decision: If I hadn't come home early to watch over the new lambs, Cheryl would still be alive.

So when Aimee came home late after giving an exam, I told her that I'd done "a very bad thing."

"What did you do?"

"I killed our rooster?"

"Oh." "OK..."

"...give me a hand to unload this stuff, will you?"

I guess Cheryl's life didn't amount to much around here.

Pretty good sized bird though. Almost couldn't fit him in the crock pot.

Lambs!

2011-03-31T07:49:00.000-07:00

The best moment in the shepherding calendar arrived at about 8.15am this morning. I went out to feed the sheep as usual, a little late because today is not a teaching day. I heard them before I saw them, bleating away.

I couldn't help but laugh out loud in glee.

They were Nellie's. I wasn't expecting them for a couple-three more weeks, but sometimes they come early. These were fairly small lambs, and Nellie is on the skinny side right now. They probably popped out pretty easy, which is good for the mother. They'll catch up in weight soon enough.

Nellie was pretty hungry, and we expect snow tonight, so I grabbed both lambs and mom and put them in the indoor pen by themselves. Nellie got a good feed all to herself, and the lambs have a heat lamp to offset the nasty weather.

So it begins. Who's next? Molly here is lying down, just like Nellie was yesterday.

Molly is not, however, a skinny sheep. She always reminds me of Shirley, the fat one on Shaun the Sheep. She may need a little assistance to give birth.

Spring begins -- indoors at least

2011-03-26T02:02:00.001-07:00

The first item on our annual farm calendar in any given year is always the plant "starts" or seedlings. This is one of Aimee's jobs, although I'm put in charge of setting up the shelves and getting the grow lights to work.

Tomato and pepper starts need about 65 to 70 degrees F to germinate, and unless the night-time temperature is above 55 degrees F, they don't grow much at all even if they do germinate. Despite the fact that we heat primarily with wood, the house only occasionally drops below 60 F, so starting them indoors this time of year works out well.

There's a south-facing window in my den that is used for these baby plants. We could use the greenhouse, and just heat it, but with nights still easily capable of getting down to 20 F or so, that would use a lot more power or fuel. Later, when the risk of a hard frost is much less, we'll move the growing plants to the greenhouse, using either a small electrical heater, or, in extreme circumstances, the kerosene heater, on the coldest nights.

I'd love to get my hands on one of the slow burning kerosene heaters especially made for greenhouses that my grandfather always used, but I haven't ever seen one in the US.

We always grow at least six varieties of tomato and at least four peppers. Later we start a lot, and I mean hundreds, of basil plants for Aimee's pesto operation.

We can always sell off a large proportion of our seedling stock. Some we sell at our farm "stand" at the bottom of the road. Others are sold to colleagues at the college. Aimee is the "sales girl," and handles the entire process. She'll cycle several different sets of starts through these shelves and the greenhouse, starting with tomatoes and concluding with trays of densely sown basil. Late in the spring we give away what we can't sell. Our neighbors usually take what's left. We only bring in a hundred dollars or so of sales in seedlings, but that's a fair proportion, a little less than ten percent, of farm income.

Once our own seedlings get put out in our own garden, results are variable. Despite our high altitude, we generally do well with tomatoes here on the Great Farm, and we are able to put up a large supply of canned and frozen, enough to last all winter.

Peppers do less well here unless we have an exceptionally warm fall, and in fact our most reliable source of hot stuff in the winter is the hot pepper jelly put up by Aimee's dad in Virginia.

But we can grow both tomatoes and peppers out of doors, which you can't manage in most of Britain, so there are rewards for putting up with that horrendous winter weather we get.

I sometimes think we eat a version of the "Mediterranean Diet," with tomatoes, basil, other herbes de Provence, lamb, and so on.

Our plant starting system tends to produce "leggy" seedlings. There's just not enough light in that window. The grow lamps help, but not by much.

But once they get out in the greenhouse, they harden off fast. The cold early summer nights make sure of that. Night-time temperatures don't reliably exceed 55 F until July in Maine. Leggy tomato seedlings put into the greenhouse in late April will often lose "shade" leaves and grow sun leaves before they get going, but they usually thrive in the greenhouse.

Once in the garden, they seem to get yet sturdier, saving up growth potential until July and August, when they rocket upwards.

In other indoor activities Aimee has also been busy. She decided the cats needed a new cat "tree." We liked the one Dick had made for the Virginia cats, and Aimee decided to make her own version. She used cheap rugs from the iconic Maine surplus store Marden's, some two by fours and plywood, and a cedar post from one of our cedar mills. Here it is awaiting its final level.

The cats were quite exited by this new climbing frame, especially when some catnip was strewn around. They've been competing heavily recently for this particular spot on a cushion of the back of the sofa, and the new cat tree should give them some other options for a lounging spot in the living room.

So what has the husband been up to while Aimee's been doing all this work?

Not much.

I did repair the greenhouse, switching out some of the panes. Our greenhouse was built using all the left-over storm windows we had after renovating the house. We put in double-glazed windows throughout, which meant we had a stack of about forty storm window panes. Unfortunately, we break one or two panes every year in the greenhouse, usually from rocks thrown up by the lawn mower, and so our stack is dwindling. We will run out this year or next depending on how careful we are. Then we'll have the choice of building a new greenhouse to some better design using stronger glass, or perhaps buying a greenhouse kit, or we could kick the can down the road a bit and try to find more old storm window panes at yard sales.

I also dug the lawn tractor out of the snow bank in which it has resided all winter. I was amazed that it started first try, although two tires needed air. We mostly use this beast to pull a 4 by 8 trailer around, on which we can load, hay, firewood, fencing and other bulky loads. It's a kind of motorized wheelbarrow, and works well for that purpose, although I can never keep air in the tires and am always pumping them up.

I'll need the trailer for my first big job of the year, which is a major renovation of fencing. Our fences get destroyed by snow plowing each winter, and this year we have also a number of rotten wood posts and rails to fix. I decided to put in stronger fences in several key spots.

There's also the knotty matter of chicken fence. Our nearest neighbor has decided that free-range chickens are not her cup of tea. In particular she wants to grow flowers in unfenced flower beds, and our birds are always over on her land scratching around.

We fence the chickens out of our own flower gardens so they can patrol everywhere else. This keeps the slugs and ticks down, and gives more opportunities for the chickens to escape any loose dogs or predators, so we're quite happy with the situation. But the law is quite clear, as is neighborly practice. I could build a regular coop and chicken yard, but that would allow the slugs, which are otherwise rampant, to eat our garden. Plus, it would cost us considerably in chicken feed. The chicken feed consumption around here dwindles to almost nothing in high summer and fall, when they can find their own food.

So I have to find a way to fence the chickens in on our own property, or at least that portion of it which surrounds our main vegetable garden. This could be expensive, and it may not work that well, but we'll give it a try.

But first I have to fix the sheep fences. Lambs are coming soon. They need to be kept in, and predators kept out.

I've been spending time observing the sheep as lambing season is coming. Of the four ewes, Nellie, Molly and the two P-year two-year olds whose names I can never remember (Poppy and Penelope, I think), Nellie and Molly and the white P-ewe probably named Poppy are clearly showing.

Penelope, not so far. Durn it. Ewes that don't lamb in their second year often don't make good mothers later.

Nellie, my favorite, has a big bag and seems like she will lamb first.

But Tillie, the older "head" ewe, may also be showing. The ram broke out once, so this is possible. But not good, and may indeed be the end of Tillie, because she's a very old ewe. But we'll see. She's still sturdy and really shows no signs of old age. She may be able to pull off another year. If she is pregnant, then there's no choice.

We definitely need those studier fences. We couldn't afford good fences when we first started here. But we'll need to rectify things now.

Beside the worry over Tillie, all these activities are healthy signs of spring.

Now, if it would only stop snowing, maybe it would be spring!