Archive for category Homesteading

I love to post about all the exciting and happy things that happen at The Wallow. I tend to leave out the aggravating things. But there are times when I just want to say, “FUCK IT ALL” and stay in bed all day.

Yesterday evening, we discovered that the pigs had broken their waterer a second time in exactly the same way. As a result, all of their water (about 40 gallons of it) had drained into their shed, creating a pool. The shed could have drained, in theory, but the pigs like to sleep against the back wall, and they have built up a packed dirt berm about 12″ above where ground level used to be. As a result, the shed had basically become a little swamp. Images of Oregon Trail’s, “You have died of dysentery,” or plagues of mosquitoes floated through my mind. I couldn’t leave their living quarters in such a state, so I spent the next hour or so, my galoshes calf-deep in muddy water, mucking out the stall.

That still left the need to figure out a drinking water solution for them. The last time they broke their waterer, we used 5 and 7-gallon galvanized steel buckets. The pigs were delighted with this new toy, and immediately knocked it over so that they could roll in the water. That this left them with nothing to drink seemed to matter not one whit, and I ended up refilling the water several times a day. So, to sum up: an hour calf-deep in muddy swamp water, doing hard labor; and the pigs are now without an effective watering system, so that’s a problem that needs solving immediately.

The next morning, I got up and went out before the heat of the day to move the sheep. Our attempts to do MIRG have met with mixed results. I had this idyllic vision in my head of the sheep happily grazing on the field while I saved time and gas money not having to mow. Instead, I’m mowing MORE often to encourage the “right” sort of growth for good, nutritious grazing, and I’m moving the sheep every day instead of every three days like I had originally imagined. If I don’t move them every day, they tend to over-graze the area they’re in, and eventually, that road ends with us not having sufficient forage for them to eat. If that happened, we would have to feed them off of hay, which makes the meat much less cost-effective. Setting up the fence each day takes about 30 minutes to an hour, and I was just not in the mood for it this morning.

Well, at least my garden is doing well, right? Ha! So much has gone wrong in my garden. The wind blew all of my tomatoes over (I am never using tomato cages again). My wonderful trellises that I built for my squash? Well, wrapping the vines around the trellis horizontals caused the vines to split and they’re all dying. No squash for me! On top of that, with building the electric fence to keep the sheep from escaping, I did not keep up with weeding, and now my beds are basically a total loss. I have essentially given up on them, and the plants can fight it out as best they can. Come fall, I’m just going to till the whole thing under and plant a cover crop of clover.

So there I am, standing in the field, looking at the pigs’ broken waterer, the chickens cackling madly to be let out of their coop, the sheep baaaa-ing at me (because, you know, I might have CORN!!!!). I think about how little meat we got out of Jake, and how Baby Jebus died last week, and now it’s going to be another year at least before we have another batch of lambs. Another year of moving them every day. And then they MIGHT have lambs and the lambs MIGHT survive long enough to be processed. And, just like in a Looney Tunes film, the sheep start looking like steaks to me. I think, “Hell, they were about to be sold for food when I bought them. They’re probably still young enough to eat. I could just send them off to the processor and be done with.”

Send the sheep to the freezer. Till under the garden. To hell with all of it!

As I’m standing there, pondering my sheeps’ demise, Buck sits on his butt and bends his head backwards trying to get at a fly on his back. He can’t get it, but he keeps shifting and trying to reach the spot, until, I kid you not, he tumbles ass-over-teakettle down the hill, legs splayed out in all directions. The fall proceeds as if in slow motion. He starts to go off-balance, and realizes it, and tries to shift and not fall, but it’s too late for him to right himself, and his shifting just makes it worse, and this goes on for a short while until he somersaults sideways down the hill. He rights himself, walks a few steps back up the hill, and does it again, this time on purpose, I suppose in order to scratch that spot on his back.

And I burst out laughing uncontrollably. On some level, I kind of wish I had a camera with me so I could share the experience with you, but on some level, I think these sorts of things are the special reward that I get for actually keeping livestock, and if you want to share in them, you should have to pay the dues.

Later in the day, I saw him do it again, as if he had learned a trick. Watching a 200-lb ram somersault sideways down a hill never really stops being funny.

Good or bad, I have a strong sense that what I am doing is necessary. It is wrong that I have lived so much of my life without participating in the production of my own food, and if production of my food is hard, then that is part of the lesson that I am learning.

In conversation the other day, I mentioned a sure-fire way of discerning between sheep and goats, to which a friend replied, “What do you mean? It’s easy to tell sheep from goats!”

Hah! As if. Sure, if you think all sheep look like this:

And all goats look like this:

Yes, then it’s pretty easy. But what about this?

Uh uh… not so clear now, is it? It turns out that, once you get outside the realm of stereotypical breeds, there’s a fair amount of superficial similarity between sheep and goats, such that telling them apart isn’t always easy.

The answer, as illustrated by the photos above, is that sheep’s tails hang down and goats’ tails are held up. When our sheep poop, we say they’re doing their goat impression.

… and now you know!

I realized something about myself today: I tend to take people for who they are. Example: we once asked one of our neighbors to feed our pigs while we were in Atlanta for the weekend. He said fine. We showed him where the food was and Issa even set the scoop and the bowl neatly on top of the food bin for him. When we came back, they were in exactly the same spot. Not, like, “He put them back in the same spot,” exactly, but, “He never fed the pigs,” exactly. Okay. No harm done. No hard feelings. I’m just not going to ask him to feed my pigs any more, but we can still be friends.

This comes up a lot when interacting with animals too. I’ve heard people call chickens and sheep stupid animals, and I suppose I can see what they’re referring to. My chickens can be incredibly slow to decide what they’re going to do, if the situation they’re presented with is unfamiliar. They’ll all wander around the door of their new house, each one eyeballing it from every possible angle, before finally, one of their little brains decides to give it a go and hop up into the thing. That’s just how a chicken works.

And sheep! If I so much as raise my hand quickly, the lot of them will startle and bolt ten feet in any direction before they turn around and look back to see if I was actually intending them any harm. Regularly, when I go to visit the sheep, they run up to the fence excitedly baaa-ing at me and then bolt away in response to me stepping over the fence. They’re kind of indiscriminate when they bolt, too. I’ve seen a sheep try to fit itself through a gap that was 1/5 the size of its body. When a sheep’s brain says, “run,” the sheep runs, and physics be damned. When they bolt away from me, I’m like, “Did you not know I was going to step over the fence? We go through this every time!” But that’s just how a sheep works.

Until I moved to the Wallow, I was never really a pet person. I had pets as kids, but from college on, I just didn’t want them. Pet and livestock owners won’t be surprised to hear me say that there’s a lot you can learn about being a better human from animals. I’m not talking about emulating their positive traits, because, honestly, I think a lot of those are just projected onto the animal by the romanticizing human. Rather, I’m talking about things like respecting the animal for what it is, and extrapolating that you can treat other humans that way too. I wouldn’t expect a chicken or a sheep to act like anything except what they are. I wouldn’t expect it from a human either.