Sensitive Sheep in the Vineyard Yes, it’s okay. The sheep are supposed to be in the vineyard. As you can probably see, the grapevines haven’t yet budded out, which is why they look so awful and scraggly. So we let the sheep in to graze down the grass, which will set it back considerably, thereby […]
Fiber Fanatic Finds Favor with Farm’s Fleece We never thought our wool was much good, so we stuffed it into massive bags the shearer provided, stored the bags in the barn, then every few years all the shepherds in the area rented a semi and shipped the bags off to a mill, where the wool […]
Another Successful Shearing Day! Last Saturday we pulled off another one—lots of volunteers wrestling with uncooperative sheep, a shearer shearing 46 sheep, people milling about gates and fences and other sharp objects—and no one got hurt. That’s our idea of a good day. We usually have 10-15 insane people—oops, I mean volunteers—who come down to […]
My New Position For the last few years I’ve called myself Ms. Backup Farmer, happily puttering in the background while Melissa has taken the helm as Primary Farmer. For the next few days, however, I have been promoted to Primary Farmer. It’s all because I had a birthday party yesterday. It was a lovely party […]
Accepting Cobwebs If you meet me on the street and ask me how I am, I’ll tell you my hip hurts, my kitchen floor hasn’t been cleaned in months, and I am coming totally unglued over the idea that I will soon turn 50. We memoirists love to tell the truth, even if it makes […]
Heads Up, Gentle Readers, for this blog entry contains the word “scrotum.” Today the New York Times reported that the word ‘scrotum’ shows up on the first page of an award-winning children’s novel about a scrappy 10-year-old girl who hears another character say a rattlesnake bit his dog on the scrotum. The word has shocked […]
The Cost of Cold It’s been a rough few days out here on Rising Moon Farm. I did chores five days ago, and even though it was only 5 degrees, it wasn’t too bad, and if truth be told, I was feeling smug out there pitching hay and feeding corn and refilling water troughs,. We […]
The Perfect Nest, a Story in Three Parts: Part 1: So a few years ago I’m in the barn, and I hear something banging back in the corner behind a feed barrel. I timidly peer down into the darkness, afraid I’d see a rat. Instead, I see what looks like a chicken’s body and a […]
A Brief Study of Sheep Sex on Rising Moon Farm Exhibit A: This is Erik wearing a harness and green marking crayon. Theory is that as he mounts a ewe, he leaves behind a green mark, thus reassuring us he does know what he’s doing, and is actually doing it to all the ewes in […]
2007: Looking Ahead on a Farm I’m not a big one for looking back at my life. (That’s why Hit By a Farm will likely be my only memoir!) I’d rather look forward. Besides, in my life, looking forward is often the same as looking back. That’s because farm life is a life of cycles. […]