From the monthly archives:

January 2007

Part One — Grandma’s Backyard

January 15, 2007

Frank’s mother, Ginny, has been terrified of animals her whole life. She worked as a home economics instructor for Detroit Edison, and often visited houses to teach women how to use electric ovens and do lighting plans. She said she dreaded going to houses with animals. She is very nervous even around our cat. But [...]

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Part Two — Bucky’s Backyard

January 15, 2007

Bucky is an older guy who lives in the village, about a mile away. We’ve been on waving relations since we moved here in 1990. He’s the local handyman, and we pass his house on our way to town. At different times, he’s had horses, chickens, and dogs, and it was normal for the chickens [...]

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Part Three — The Quinns

January 15, 2007

In the late summer of 2005, the Quinns asked us to have our sheep help them reclaim a pasture, because their horses were cherry picking, and they’d seen the fabulous job the girls had done on our driveway. Since we were down to nothing and about ready to have to put them on hay, we [...]

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Sorting and Resorting

January 14, 2007

So, with the Shelties gone, we had an empty winter pen, and I really wanted the boys off of my front garden, so sheep wrangling ensued. Keeping spare rams is a pain in the neck, necessitating extra separate pens from just the breeding groups, and this year was particularly bad. Also, remembering that we lost [...]

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Bye, bye Shetlies! Sniff.

January 12, 2007

I posted this story on a couple of sheep boards: Sheep Production Forum and Homesteading Today Sheep We had settled on breeding Icelandic sheep when friends of a friend needed to get rid of this flock when they lost their farm in Vermont, so we took them in. (free sheep in winer — the start [...]

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Wood Floors and Mud

January 6, 2007

Keith is bringing a hundred bales of hay tomorrow morning, so we had to get a floor into the hay storage thingie. (I’ve got to come up with a better name for it. But it isn’t a barn! It isn’t a shed! What should I call it?) We got out there right after feeding the [...]

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This wacky weather

January 4, 2007

We worked outside almost all day yesterday, finally finishing putting up the Clearspan Storage thingie that will we use to store hay. We bought this one except that we got the 3 foot rafter span to handle the snow load. It took much longer to put up than we expected, but Frank said the next [...]

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