Sigh

I had to earn my Farmer in Training t-shirt today. Our first arrival of this year's lambing season was listless and, when I checked on her between shoot drives, her belly was distended and she was struggling to breathe.

I rushed her to the vets but the only vet on duty was a young, newly qualified girl. She did her best but her inexperience showed. Still not knowing the cause, we both could see the lamb was fading fast. The vet could put her to sleep, but it would cost me another £40 including disposal charges. Or, I could take her home and put her to sleep with a .22 round.

I made the fiscally smart, emotionally challenging decision.

The lamb was made comfortable and I drove the few miles home, resolved to do what was necessary. I laid her on a soft, dry spot on the lawn and got the rifle from the cabinet, loaded it, and readied myself.

I came back to find the lamb sitting up. Sort of.

Maybe I should rethink this.

I mean, maybe she could make a miraculous recovery. I don't know what's caused it after all.

So I ran indoors, leaned the (unloaded) rifle against the kitchen cabinets, and rummaged in my animal meds drawer for a syringe. I was intending to load her up with antibiotics, as a start. To fight any infection. Maybe.

I was only gone a minute or two, but came out to find the lamb lying on her side, and starting to bloat up again.

Sigh.

I swapped the syringe for the rifle. As I loaded and pulled the trigger, I thought "Where there's livestock, there's deadstock.". It was cold comfort.

I saved the lamb's body in a covered bucket, in case a triplet is born tonight or early tomorrow. I might be able to foster one onto my grumpy - now lonely - ewe. If not, I'm going to have to catch her up and milk her, saving the milk for tubing any cold, late or small lambs in our future. I'm being as pragmatic as any proper farmer.

And it really sucks.

What did I tell you?

Babies come when they're ready, not when the book says. My grumpy ewe gave birth early this morning, on the tail end of a horrendous rain storm, to a single ewe lamb. It was an easy birth, my only contribution was to put some iodine on the lamb's navel, then back away from a seriously hormonal new mom giving me the hairy eyeball and stomping her foot.

I just hope her daughter doesn't inherit her mother's temperament.

Once More into the Breeks

Our first shoot day was this past Saturday, a full month later than usual. 2012 is "The Year of Being Perpetually Behind": crops were late to harvest, sheep were late to shear, lambs are late to be born, and so on. The pheasants and partridge grew slower in the cold, relentless rain which passed for our summer, and didn't reach maturity - their "shooting weight" - until this month, so we postponed our start date to give them a sporting chance.

This is the first year of being a keeper's wife that I know enough to run on autopilot. Dogs got fit, socks got mended, cooking for staff got done alongside daily chores and gardening jobs. The night before our first shoot day, Mike realised his keeper's tweeds no longer fit him. A new suit has been ordered and, in the meantime, he's wearing my breeks and a mismatched plaid waistcoat, which seems to be the height of fashion in the field anyway. Sometimes it pays to simply adapt and fly by the seat of one's pants.

A few new additions arrived while we were muddling through our shoot preparations -

Three very inquisitive and charming turkeys. Unfortunately, one has met a curious and unusual death, hanging itself in the poultry netting put up to protect them from predators. So now we are two, a hen and a stag by the looks of them, which means they will probably survive becoming Christmas dinner to become parents in next spring.

The two hens squabbling over a nest of eggs both abandoned their duties, but our little chocolate hen, Mrs Cadbury, hatched a single chick in the corner of her nestbox -

We've called him (or her) Chip. 

We've also had relatives and friends to visit us this month. All were good sports and got stuck into the chores du jour from sheep wrangling, to worming, to chicken judging. My aunt Meg helped me to select the best Orpington cockerel to keep for breeding, and the others went to ice camp a couple of days ago. She even answered the call with me when our neighbours needed help with their in-lamb ewes. They are lambing in a purpose-built barn, and much more organised than I've ever been at lambing time. I smiled to read their bulletin board with all their lambing records posted underneath the title: "Lambing 2012. Our Motto is 'Help or Shut Up'".

My own lambing starts this Saturday. On paper anyway - as with all babies, they will come when they come. My mornings now start before sun up with a trip across the road, while still in my pyjamas, to check the mums-to-be. Then it's coffee, chores, and shooting or work, before finishing with supper for all of us, and late evening livestock checks - again, in the dark.

But I love this time of year. Shoot days are the culmination of months of hard work. And I love the cast of characters that come shooting. On the first day we had Mrs H. and her new labrador pup. The pup's parentage is in question as Mrs H let her husband's (rather friendly) terrier Pepper keep her old labrador company the night before she went off to the stud dog. The resulting pup is slighter than a labrador and, when sat next to Pepper, the resemblance is hard to miss. 

The pup is slightly gun shy, too - nervous of the loud banging when shots are fired. Mrs. H tells me her solution is to stuff cotton wool in the pup's ears. It's certainly helped with the gun shy problem, and gives the pup a great excuse to ignore Mrs. blowing her whistle to come back. Still, both the pup and Mrs. H seem satisfied with the arrangements, unconcerned by dubious parentage or lackadaisical recall. 

Quincy had her first day in the field too, chaperoned by Pip. I was impressed by both my girls' work. As she gains experience in the field, Quincy is going to be a superb gun dog. 

I love shooting season.

If you're late with dinner in this house, don't worry...

someone will remind you -

Fill'er up please

Preparations

I believe the Buddhists are right about living in the present and being mindful. I tried to learn meditation (is that an oxymoron?) after reading my share of Thich Nhat Hanh books at college, but I was a poor student of Buddhism (especially the "no intoxicants" precept) and could never quiet my mind. At my core I'm a planner, and a list maker, and that means I live perpetually in the future, making preparations.

I'm preparing for relatives visiting tomorrow. There aren't many of us in my family, a dozen or so, and we're spread out all over - we seem pre-programmed to continue the diaspora our ancestors began, though thankfully not driven by potato famines or civil unrest anymore. Now it's curiosity and better job offers. My family stops in England on their way to different European destinations, and I lumber them with my daily chores, which they gamely accept and even enjoy. I have some sheep moving lined up for my uncle this week, and some poultry grading for my aunt in a fortnight's time. She was a renowned poultry judge in the US, and I plan to exploit her expertise on my crop of roosters: which to keep and which to eat.

Mike is preparing for his nearly-grown partridge to arrive tomorrow. We have stocked a pond in a wild area on the estate with some duck too, for our rough shooting clients, and continue to keep the ducks there with a daily feed. Partridge and duck season started 1st September, but we don't host our first guests until 13th October, which is very late for us. Weather and the economy have both had a hand in our late start.

I am preparing for the change is seasons, and celebrated the last of the dry weather and the first day of autumn by camping out overnight. Some dogs came with me to celebrate, at least the ones that could fit in the back of the Land Rover -

I'm also preparing for lambing which starts - officially - on 20th October. However, looking at Gregor, one of my ewes with triplets, I can't see her making it a whole month without either giving birth or exploding -

She's so fat that she sits up like a dog. Like a dog that's eaten another really fat dog -

Needless to say, she's not getting supplementary barley or oats at this juncture.

It appears that it's not just baby lambs I need to prepare for -

The lavender pekin was the original sitter, but the big buff hen decided to join in. They may end up sharing the brood. It's not common but we had two old brown hens who shared a brood of chicks very successfully. I'm never prepared for the diversity of behaviours displayed by individuals in a flock or pack, but I welcome them and the chance to observe such variety. In fact, if there's ever a time when I feel do "in the moment", it's watching the animals being themselves.

Mike and I finished our preparations with enough time to enjoy a ride to the local pub on our horses. There's a small field where we can "park" them while we have a glass of cider. 

The ride back is a very relaxed occasion, and I'm grateful that our horses are slow and steady, and know their way home.

Intellectually I know that one can never be prepared for all eventualities, and my compulsive list making - although deeply satisfying - will never change the course of the universe. But, no one can fault a little bit of forward planning. My house will be sort of cleaned in time for guests, I have a stock of colostrum and prolapse harnesses for lambing ewes (just in case), and a spare broody house for chicks and hen(s). The only thing that died this week was the washing machine, and the only thing that would really improve my quality of life is socks that wouldn't slip down into my welly boots when I walk up hills.

Other that that, I think we're doing OK.

Ewe news

After last week's hay and goat-no goat debacle, I was feeling less than positive about my tasks for today: worm counts for horses, deliver bantam chicks to their new home, and get ewes scanned to see if they're in lamb. If the universe was still against me, today could be disheartening.

There are two ways to cope with worms in horses. You can administer an all-purpose, just-in-case wormer. Simply squeeze the anthelmintic paste into your horse's mouth, catch what falls out, try and push it back into the corners while your free hand maintains a death grip on the halter, give up when you're physically lifted off the ground and half of the paste has soaked into your sleeve. Experienced horse owners compensate by giving an extra third on top of the recommended dosage. Alternatively you can get a faecal sample to the vets that they will look at under a microscope to identify which, if any, worms are present.

More poop.

And it must be fresh poop. And, if you have more than one horse, you must be sure which horse produced the sample. A watched horse never poops. I spent 1 hour and 41 minutes waiting for Kitty and Alan to produce the goods while I sat in the Land Rover knitting, and Dakota laid under the Land Rover waiting for something more exciting to happen.

I dropped off the samples on the way to deliver our five bantam chicks to Nurse Chris, Mike's home help nurse. It was her twice-daily visits that allowed Mike to leave the hospital and recuperate at home. When she wants chickens, she gets first pick. I could only find an empty mineral lick bucket with lid to contain the flighty chicks for transport, so Nurse Chris got Chickens in a Bucket.

Her lone hen instantly gathered up the chicks and mothered them. When Chris's kitten got too close, the hen defended her new brood from the hairy interloper. Hormones are a funny thing.

By now I was running late. I still had to collect my trailer, hope I could gather up the sheep and separate just the pregnant ewes, and load those ewes into the trailer and drive to the mobile scanner guy, who was visiting a farm up the road. The trailer didn't have a flat, the sheep were semi-cooperative (even my grumpy ewe), the ewes fit into trailer and the breeze kept them cool, and I turned up just in time for my turn.

Scanner Guy only needed ten seconds per ewe. The farmer called out the ear tag number, Scanner Guy shouted out the number of lambs inside, the scribe wrote it down, and a helper marked the sheep appropriately: orange dot for singles, green dot for twins, purple dot for triplets, none if a ewe isn't in lamb.

We have: two purples, one green, and four oranges. One ewe is empty. That's potentially twelve lambs for eight ewes put to ram; a return of 150%. That's a great result. A good shepherd would be happy with that. I'm thrilled that we're expecting babies. You may remember N1125 (Gregor) who was on her back, too fat to roll out of a tractor rut? She's got a purple dot. No wonder she's so big, making room for three babies.

On my way home from the scan, the horse vets called to say that both horses were free from worms. So, a crop of new babies, a pair of worm-free horses, and a high pressure system over our part of England giving us dry and sun and ripe tomatoes at least for the next few days.

This week is definitely better than last week.

A Decision and a Nomination

I finally gave up trying to sleep at 4 a.m. this morning, worrying about hay and goats and weather.  Of course I woke my husband to get his opinion and, to be fair to him, he was a good sport about it. He got up and made us tea while I worked through the business plan again, sans our own hay.

I couldn't make it work.

My creative solution? I called Kevin and Lynn, who own the goatling, and together we decided that the goats would stay with them for another year.

I haven't given up on goats, but I've had to concede defeat this year in the face of our hay crisis. Lyn has more than generously offered her herd for me to come and practice on, so I can get my goat fix and gain experience at the same time. When it comes to livestock, goat people are some of the nicest people you will ever meet.

It feels like a setback in some ways, but it's a mature business decision too. I really want a goat to pet and milk (that's not the mature part of the decision), but I really don't want to fall out with my bank manager over an overdraft either. (That is.)

The local farmers gave us advice on our grass, and we found someone willing to bale it and take it away. He's spending time and money of a crop of poor fodder with limited feed value, but hay will be short this year and he can feed it to calves. We get the long wet grass off our field so the new shoots can regrow, and we can overwinter our expanding flock of sheep there. It's not a perfect solution, but it is good enough.

We're still left with having to purchase hay to feed our sheep and horses this year, but, with the money I've had returned from the goat purchase, plus another gardening job, and if I shoot some extra deer which are plentiful, then I can keep the bank manager from the door.

Among all this worry, a bouquet of roses was delivered to the door. Mike nominated me for an award given to gamekeepers' wives and apparently I was the runner up - hence a beautiful bouquet of flowers. I am honoured to even be considered for the award, and therefore feel kind of guilty wondering what feed value a bouquet of roses might have for a milk goat.