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The grass in the pasture is growing quickly now,
although the ground is still very wet. We brought two ewes and two lambs down
from our neighbor's barn last week. We don't have a proper "sheep transfer
truck" so we had to tie them in the back of our old pickup. Sheep do not
like getting into pickup trucks and we had a bit of a struggle. The lambs are
fairly easy to just pick up and lift into the truck, but the ewes weigh about a
100 pounds and have a mind of their own. You may think that the English
expressions of "sheepish" or "like a sheep" imply that
sheep are interchangeable in a crowd. This is not so. They do like to travel
and graze together, but they are individuals. If you get to know a small group
of sheep you will get to know their individual personalities! One of our ewes
really did not like the back of the truck and kept jumping out, even underway.
We finally managed to get them to the new pasture and they were grazing happily
on the new grass in a matter of minutes. We will not feed them much of anything
for the next 3 or 4 months or so. Usually by late August the dryness of the
summer withers everything green and fresh hay may be used. There is a small
stream that runs through the 4 acre pasture and they get water from that, also
until the summer heat dries it up. A small number of sheep are really quite low
maintenance and actually improve the land they are using. They keep the grass
down and fertilize the soil in an organic closed system process.
August 03, 2008 August Cornucopia
March 02, 2008 Spring 08
May 04, 2007 New sheep for spring
December 04, 2006 Winter comes early
August 30, 2006 Harvest Time
May 29, 2006 Spring 2006
February 03, 2006 Wet and Windy Winter
December 04, 2005 Getting ready for winter
July 27, 2005 Summer's Here
May 31, 2005 Spring Planting
March 20, 2005 Almost Spring on Salt Spring Island
March 12, 2005 Salt Spring Island in Winter
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