Lowerpondfarm

The Daily Slog – January 2020

Hi Folks. This is a test, and I’m hoping that you don’t see it. I am trying to figure out a way to keep this post (The Daily Slog) as a sort of journal, one that I can add to in bits and pieces without notifying everyone who has signed up every time I add a paragraph or a picture. I want the posts to be available for anyone who is interested, but I don’t want to clutter up people’s email with (what I think of as) unnecessary alerts.

If you do get this notice, then I need to look for other options.

Back to Mud- Friday, Jan 24

We are back to rain and temps in the mid-40s. I got the 210 gallon rain-water tank repaired, and yesterday’s rain filled it up again. The sheep yard has melted, and we’re back three or four inches of mud. Every time I take a step my foot slips an inch or two.

It rained most of the day yesterday, not hard, but steady. The ground is saturated, there’s standing water every where. Last night about 8:00, it was still drizzling, and I was trying to get Mike up to the barn to feed him. My goal was to get him to spend the night there. He’s big dog, about 8 years old, and is starting to suffer from hip dysplasia, so I try to get him to sleep in the barn when it’s either very cold or very wet.

Anyway, I was carrying his bowl, his food, and a flashlight in one hand and had Bobo on a leash in the other, and as I was trying to get Mike to get up and come with me, I slipped, fell, and covered the entire left side of my jeans in a thick coat of mud.

I guess the sight of me hitting the ground spurred Mike, and he got up (a bit of a struggle) and lumbered to the barn. By that point, wet, muddy, and mad, I locked him in with the goats and came down to change pants for the third time that day.

Frozen Morning – Monday, Jan. 20

It was 19 degrees when we woke up this morning at 5:30. After a couple cups of coffee and perusing the daily news we went out to feed. (Big news is that The New York Times endorsed both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobachar, arguing that the Democrats are still determining the direction of the party, and they feel that Warren and Klobachar represent the best options for either direction. Fine by me.)

The first problem I noticed was that the valve on our 210 gallon rain tank had busted/burst (take your pick–I’m still trying to determine the direction of this blog) and about half of the water had spilled and frozen onto the surrounding ground. That’s not as big a problem as it might seem. The valve and pipe that froze are made of PVC, cost about five bucks, and shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to replace. The biggest headaches will be driving into town to get the parts and waiting for the ice to melt so I can get to it.

The second problem related to the cold was that the chick water was frozen, despite the fact that last night I set the container inside their coop under a heat lamp. The chickens’ water container was frozen, too, even though it’s heated electrically and was plugged in. This is potentially more expensive than the frozen PVC valve. Also, in case you’re wondering, yes, we have two chicken coops and two sets of chickens–Boomers and Millennials. Or Centrists and Progressives. They have their disagreements, but their unifying goal is a desire to keep the Fox away.

The sheep, of course, were screaming for their grain–normally people think of sheep as quiet animals. Not ours. If we’re late to feed (by late I mean, after dawn), they stand at the fence and bleat. Baah! Baah! Baah! Give us our grain! Where are you! Come on, Old Man! Hubba! Hubba! This morning, because of the cold and the lengthy NYT endorsement, the sheep were on a rampage.

Despite the problems, it was a good morning. The ground is frozen, and I could walk all the way back to Ram-Shackle without stepping in mud. There was little bits of snow in the air, like tufts of dried dandelion, and the barnyard and pasture had a sort of gray, bleak beauty.

We’ve had so much warm, wet weather this winter that I walk through two or three inches of mud every morning and every evening to feed the bleating sheep. The cold is a nice change.

The Hardest Thing So Far

We have been on this farm for five and a half years. It wasn’t even a farm when we bought it, really. It was a house, a couple of out-buildings and a pond on a little over twelve acres. There was an rusty, old wire fence around most of the perimeter, patched in places with pieces of cattle panel and baling twine, a small raised-bed garden near the well, and a couple of old peach and pear trees. That was it.

We have, by ourselves and with the help of a few friends, built a mile of fence (literally) and three sheep and goat sheds, put in a large garden, cut back brush to get pasture, painted the barn with rollers and brushes, rebuilt fences that we didn’t build right the first time, played midwife to a couple dozen sheep and goat births, and buried a few who didn’t make it.

One day I spilled half gallon of primer from the top platform directly in to Jordan’s hair.

I won’t try to speak for Vanessa (I’ve learned… the hard way), but the hardest thing I have done so far is build this damned web-page.

It’s confusing.

It’s confounding.

It’s ephemeral.

I began a couple of years ago on Valentine’s Day. I did some research on which platform to use, how to get started, and so on. I decided to use WordPress.org, rather than the simpler, free site WordPress.com. That was my first mistake, though of course I didn’t know it at the time.

I ordered a book (because in America all new adventures should begin with a purchase) titled WordPress for Dummies. That was my second mistake. When it arrived, it was 820 pages long. That’s like the size of a Russian novel.

And that was the version for Dummies–can you imagine the number of volumes in WordPress for the Reasonably Smart ? And WordPress for Those with Extremely High SAT’s would have to be delivered in boxcars.

It wasn’t just the size of the manual, either. It was the way they describe things, things I didn’t understand, with words that fled to the ragged edges of comprehension. Here’s a example, from page 289: “In the section ‘Adding Custom Fields to Your Template File,’ later in this chapter, I show you the template tag you need to add to your WordPress theme template in order to display this Custom Field, which appears in my post like this: My current Mood is: Happy, shown in Figure 5-3, where the Custom field appears an the end of my post.” WTF?!?

I just want to write about my sheep and my goats.

For a long time, I told myself the best way to learn to do this was just by doing it. So I would write a story or post some pictures, and they would be there for a while and then they’d disappear, or turn upside down. That was okay because nobody was looking at the cite anyway. It was just me playing along frontier of some dark and vast cyber universe. Then, last fall, for some reason I don’t understand, a lot of people I don’t know in real life started visiting the site and signing up to be notified of new postings, which I didn’t know how to do.

So I didn’t do anything. There were two problems, really. First, I wanted the web site to be good–when someone visited it, I wanted the experience to be pleasing. Second, I didn’t know what I was doing.

I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m tired of being a closet blogger.
So this is my coming out post.

There are some things I want to write about that I don’t think are right for FaceBook–they are either too long, or too sad, or too… something. The first is titled “Eating Lulu.” You get the idea.

My plan is to post stories on this site and link to Facebook, if I can figure out how to do that. The subscription doohickey is working now, so if you sign up for notifications, whenever I post a blog, it will come directly to your email. It even has a link for unsubscribing.

There are a lot of things I want to write about and a lot of pictures I want to post. I will have to figure things out as I go. The website is still under construction, but that’s okay. There are three or four pages already working, with half a dozen or so posts, and more to come.

I’m not sure what to do about the hundred or so people who signed up last fall. I have their email addresses, but I don’t know what to do with them. Maybe a road trip.

I feel strangely liberated….

The Lipoma

There’s an old song keeps going through my head. “Mama said there’d be days like this. There’d be days like this my mama said.”

Mama didn’t mention this one.

Our buck, Buck Henry, has been limping a bit for the past week or so. It hasn’t been real pronounced, but he was definitely favoring his left rear foot–not putting much weight on it when he walked, holding it off the ground when he was standing still.

We figured we needed to trim his hooves. That is a nasty job at best, because of course the owners of those hooves never cooperate. They pull and they tug and they flinch and they act like you’re trying to stash them in a trunk. Add to that a hundred and fifty or so pound animal and one who has been walking in mud for weeks and weeks, but now that mud has completely dried. It’s like concrete. I figured we’d need a jackhammer. I was really dreading the job.

Then I had an idea.

Drugs.

For him, not for us. (That was my second choice.)

On Saturday morning, I called the vet’s office and asked if I could get a tranquilizer for Buck. I told them what I wanted to do, and at first I got the “I don’t think so, but I’ll ask the vet” response. Fortunately, the vet on duty was one who we’ve worked with before, and she approved the overall plan. So I drove up and got two shots–one to put Buck to sleep and one to wake him back up.

On Sunday, we did the deed. Vanessa gave Buck the first shot, and about three minutes later, he went into this woozy three-tequila fugue state. He staggered around for a while, loved everyone–Buck has always been a happy drunk–and slowly started dipping. Lower and lower. Lower and lower.

About fifteen minutes in, he’s on the ground, and we start working. We don’t know how long he’ll be out. Could be two hours, could be ten minutes. We had to guess about his weight, which of course determined the amount of the sedative. It’s really hard to weigh a goat with any accuracy. They won’t stand on the scales long enough for you to read the meter.

Vanessa is working on his rear hooves, the one he’s limping on, when she finds some sort of strange growth. It’s about the size of a grape, growing between his hooves (which is why he’s limping, we guess), and it’s very fatty. She clips off the top, and it starts bleeding. And bleeding. And bleeding.

Then for some reason I still don’t understand, I’m down there working on his hind hooves, and blood is going everywhere, and I’m thinking, “I gotta cut this whole fatty-grape thing off.” I find where it connects, deep in between his hooves, but every time I try to clip it, Buck flinches–even though he is completely unconscious. This is not good.

So I do what I always do when things get really tough: I call Vanessa. “Sweetheart, can you do this?” I ask. “I’m not good at it.” There is a part of Vanessa that really wanted to be a surgeon when she was young, but that part of her got blocked by the part of her that enrolled in chemistry.

So Vanessa-the-wannabe-surgeon comes down and just clips the bleeding grape right off at the root. Then, we go from blood oozing to blood squirting. There was a steady stream, like a hole in a radiator. Blood was splattering everywhere. On the bucket, on the tarp, on the little bottle of rubbing alcohol I’d brought to sterilize everything.

“Surely, we are killing him,” I thought.

“Pack it with paper towels,” Vanessa said.

So I did. And after about 15 minutes, we got the bleeding to stop, and eventually even got to clean and disinfect the hoof.

Then I gave him the shot to wake him up. It didn’t work nearly as quickly as the first shot. For the next two hours, the most common utterance between us was, “Is he still breathing?”

He was. Every time.

Later, Vanessa told me was a lipoma–a fatty cyst growing between the muscle and the skin. Generally, they are benign, but this one was badly placed. I looked it up.

Buck is getting better now. He’s still limping, and I’m sure he’s sore. He may even have a hangover.

But I swear he is the most magnificent beast.

And Vanessa is pretty great, too.

Stuck Truck

I got my truck stuck in the mud yesterday. We’ve had rain and rain and rain and rain for the past month, and the ground is completely saturated, so the water is draining slowly, if at all, especially in the low areas.

We were painting a spare bedroom that we use as an office, so I drove down to the pond-house (a shed, really, where we keep supplies) to get a couple of tarps and some paint. I knew this was a bad idea when I did it.

It’s a low-lying area with a narrow turn around, lots of brush, and mud. It’s on a slight incline, so when I backed out of the turn around, my tires started spinning. Once again, I kicked myself for not getting four-wheel drive when I bought the truck three years ago.

This morning, I’m going to get the tractor, which is four-wheel drive, load up three 80 pound bags of concrete, drive them down and lay them in the truck bed, over the rear axle. With luck, then I’ll get enough traction to drive out. If not, then I strap the front of the truck to the back of the tractor, get Vanessa to drive one of them, and hope for the best.

Life on the farm.

The Way Back

A few nights ago, we had one of those moments. It was about six pm and we were done feeding, ready to make dinner and relax for the evening. We were having pork chops, and I went out to start the grill. When I came back in the kitchen, I told Vanessa I needed to send a short email about school while the grill warmed up. She said “okay” and went on about her business, like married people do.

She left the kitchen a couple minutes later, and I went into the office to use a computer with a real keyboard. I figured it would take about ten minutes to write the email, but as usual I was overly optimistic.

Twenty-five minutes later I went back to the kitchen, couldn’t find Vanessa, and thought Oh crap, I should have already started the pork chops. I figured she’d be mad that I was slowing down dinner. This is a pattern for us. She’s early, I’m late.

So I took the pork chops out to the back porch and that’s when I heard her yelling. Fortunately, I am deaf enough not to have made out the words, but I could tell from her tone that she wasn’t happy. So could the dogs. We all huddled in the back while she came down from the barn.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“In the office?” I said, timidly because that seemed the safest. “I told you I was going to write an email?”

“I thought you were dead!”

Then I understood. Death is her go-to thought when she can’t find me.

“Sorry… I was in the office the whole time,” I said, then added. “The pork chops are on the grill.”

“I was afraid that Jose (the ram) had gored you.” Jose has no horns, but he does like to head-butt. About the worst he could do is knock my back out of joint. “I was afraid you were dead in the Way Back.”

The Way Back is the farthest, darkest part of our property. Werewolves live there. In Vanessa‘s mind I had been gored by a hornless ram and wondered into the dark Way Back to be eaten by werewolves.

And it turns out that when she was coming down from the barn she wasn’t yelling at me, but yelling for me.

I think I would would have preferred the quickness of a heart attack punctuated by a fall from the hayloft onto the concrete floor. But we don’t always get to choose our exit.

We sorted out my imagined demise, cooked our pork chops, filled our plates, and sat down to eat. That’s when I poured salad dressing all over my pork chop instead of the salad beside it.

The Egyptian

We sold most of our lambs yesterday. That always brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, I am relieved that our flock is down to a size that’s sustainable through the winter on the 250 or so bales of hay we already have in the barn. I’m also glad to recoup some of the money we spent on that hay last summer. It’s also a lot easier to move six or eight sheep from pasture to pasture than it is sixteen, which is what we had earlier in the summer. On the other hand, it’s distressing to the animals. We have to catch them and, once we do, carry them upside down by the legs to a trailer where they are locked in. As you can imagine, they aren’t fond of the process.

We sold them to an Egyptian man. He and I had been texting back and forth for a week about the lambs I had available, the breed, the price, and when he could come to get them. He wanted four young Dorper ewes, he said, because he had a Dorper ram. I told him that’s what I had, and that I had the registration papers. He wanted to come one night at eight o’clock, and asked if we had lights in the barn. Yes, we have lights, I said, but eight o’clock is too late for me.

At that point, I didn’t know he was Egyptian. We had only communicated via text, and his texts were like most people’s—short, lacking context, and mostly grammar free. At one point he wrote, “This [the lambs] is full blooded for pet right?” I asked him what he meant by “for pet,” and he responded, “sorry for the auto correction I meant dorpers”. Okay, I thought. I was suspicious because 1) texts have no tone of voice, and 2) I had gotten other weird texts from my Craigslist ad, some from bots and some obvious scams.

He arrived with his family about six o’clock last night. An American wife and two adolescent children, a boy and a girl. Very nice people. The kids jumped out of the car and started playing with our dog, Mike, while he and I walked to the barn to look at the lambs. We chatted, turns out he is a policeman. He wanted the ewes, and decided to buy one of the ram lambs, as well. For about an hour, he and I wrangled sheep while Vanessa entertained the kids, and his wife maneuvered their very large SUV (I think it was a GMC OhMyGod or possibly a Ford BiggerNshit) and trailer around the pasture as we loaded up the lambs.

The key to loading up animals, I keep having to learn over and over, is to have them in a contained area before the buyer arrives. No matter how friendly the animals are when you are holding a grain scoop, after you snatch the first one, the others get skittish.

It turns out that my Egyptian friend—I say friend because catching frightened animals will make you friends, even if just for a short while—is a kind man. When we had a couple of long walks to the trailer carrying a kicking, bleating,upside-down sheep by the hooves, he would ask “Do you want to stop and rest?”He did not add, “old man.”

He had told me earlier that he slaughtered and butchered his own sheep. I think that’s a very humane way to do it, since what stresses the animal most is being transported and thrown into a new environment for a short period. If I had a stronger stomach, I might learn how to do it myself…someday… after the zombie apocalypse… and after I’ve eaten all the peanut butter. Anyway, after we got all the lambs loaded up, we were standing in the barn, signing the papers, and he asked, “Do you have an air compressor?”

“Yes, right over there.” I thought maybe he had a low tire.

“Let me tell you a trick,” he said. “After you slaughter a lamb and hang it, poke a little hole in the leg somewhere, and use the compressor to fill it with air.”

“The lamb?” I asked, imagining a large, woolly balloon.

“Yeah, it separates the skin from the meat. After you fill it, put your thumb over the hole to keep the air from escaping. Then just tap all around it with a little stick.”

Kind of like a piñata? I thought.

“Makes it very easy to skin,” he said. “Just peels right off.”

We finished signing the papers, he paid me, and they left not long after that. It was dark, their taillights bobbed down the drive and disappeared over the hill. Vanessa and I fed the dogs, put up the chickens, and had a late dinner. I felt a mix of relief at having fewer animals to feed, the familiar sadness of saying goodbye to animals I have cared for, and pleasure at having met a new friend. When I went to bed around ten, Vanessa was already asleep. I was too tired to dream.

Thursday’s Child

Thursday’s Child
(Written April 6, 2018)

Last Saturday, Lulu, one of our ewes, had a lamb that I named Thursday’s Child. She was the last lamb of the season. All the others were at least a week old, and they pretty much knew the lay of the land already. They were at the romping stage. This lamb was born late in the afternoon, in farthest part of our pasture, what we call “The Way Back,” and when the flock saw me carrying a grain bucket, they all came running. Except for Lulu. She hung back. When a ewe first has a lamb, she will separate herself from the others for a while, maybe a day.

I walked back to check on them, it was a couple hundred yards, and when I got there, things looked a little strange. Lulu hadn’t completely cleaned the placenta off the lamb and she seemed confused. I wanted the two of them to get back into the main pasture, which is more secure against coyotes and other predators, so I picked up the lamb, still wet, and tried to get Lulu to follow. Lulu kept acting like she was drunk. Looking around for her lamb, she’d come forward a few steps and then run back and bawl for a while. We did that all the way to the pasture. I got her up to the Sheep Shack where she was laying on some straw and doing fine. Then we took a video, which I posted, and then about 10 minutes later she started having contractions again.

In a normal lamb birth, the first thing you see is lips—it’s kind of freaky, actually. Alien-looking. It’s lips, then a snout, then you want to see a little section of cream-colored hoof, which means they are coming out the right way. It takes a while, especially for the first birth, but soon you will see a deep purple tongue hanging out of the inch or so of mouth that’s sticking out of the womb, and then you’re certain the lamb is dead because that tongue just ain’t right. But it’s not dead, it’s just a droopy purple tongue. Half an hour later, when you’re already digging the grave in your imagination, the head makes its through the birth canal, and the lamb slides out and plops down on the ground. Within a minute, it’s on its feet and Ma is licking it clean. It’s an amazing thing to watch. Goats are the same, only difference is the color.

When Lulu went into labor again last Saturday, it didn’t look right. She was pushing hard and when the lamb finally emerged it was breach, still wrapped in the placenta, and dead, of course. I helped her push it out, since the head was the last part to come, and after that she expelled her uterus, the whole damned thing. It hung out behind her, inverted, about the size of a football.

It’s called a prolapsed uterus. I had read about it, but never seen one. We’ve had three or four dozen lamb and goat births since we started this adventure, and this was the first real trouble we’ve had. The first time a mother was in danger.

While I tried to keep Lulu stable and as comfortable as a creature can be when her private parts are hanging out, I sent Vanessa to the house to get the sheep book, which turned out to be useless. So I did what we all do in times of uncertainty now-a-days, I Googled. ‘Prolapsed uterus in sheep’ on my iPhone, right out there in the pasture, still trying to keep Lulu calm and the baby alive. “It’s okay, baby, it’s okay. We’re gonna take care of you.” Little white lies.

“Call the vet,” Vanessa said.

“It’s five-thirty on Saturday. They’re closed,” I said.

“Maybe they have an emergency number.”

OMG, they did. In about 30 minutes, Dr. Bates was there. Dr. Bates is amazing. I absolutely mean that. She’s 5’2” and maybe 110 pounds, and she is fearless. She brought her husband to help wrangle Lulu, who had been getting up occasionally and wandering around the pasture, lamb at her teat, womb dangling behind her, me at her head, trying to keep her still.

Dr. Bates’ first goal was to put the uterus back where it belongs, and she worked at that for about half an hour or so. Lulu was still awake, of course, no one thought to bring an anesthesiologist. So I parked myself in front of Lulu, and I had her in a headlock, while Dr. Bates’ husband straddled her (Lulu, not Dr. Bates) and the two of us managed to keep her (again, Lulu, not Dr. Bates) more or less immobile. Vanessa’s job was to hold Thursday’s Child and provide a blow-by-blow account of the actions in the back.

At one point, Lulu decided to lunge forward, and she knocked me on my back. Later, Dr. Bates said she was worried Lulu would step on my glasses. I was more worried about the bridge of my nose.

The most intriguing thing was that Dr. Bates brought a 5-pound bag of sugar to rub all over the uterus to try to get the swelling down. It did get the swelling down, and she managed to untangle all of the after-birth from the uterus, but in the end it didn’t work. Every time she’d push a little uterus flesh back in, Lulu would expel it again.

So she did an emergency field hysterectomy. I won’t describe that. I didn’t see it, but when I tried to unlock my knees after an hour of holding Lulu in a headlock, I wished again for the anesthesiologist.

The Husband and I carried Lulu, by the legs, swinging upside down, into to the barn and to a small pen we have there for just such a situation. We kept her and Thursday’s Child in that pen for three days until the stitches seemed to be healing. For a couple of days, we didn’t know if Lulu would make it. She just stared a lot, and slept. Poor girl. Thursday’s Child was confused, slept beside her mama, occasionally tried to play. By Tuesday, though, Lulu was eating well, and by Wednesday, the sun came out and they were both ready to rejoin the flock. I went to the Vet’s office and paid the bill on Thursday. It was a lot. And worth every penny.

When I first saw Lulu and her new lamb in the Way Back last Saturday, I was listening to a song by Sam Baker, my new favorite Texan songwriter. The song is called “Thursday,” and it’s about a woman who has as many babies as she has ex’s. Clearly, she has not managed her life very well. The song ends with the nursery rhyme.

Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesdays’ child is full of grace
Wednesday’s child is full of woe
Thursday’s child….

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Sick Goats

(Written August 7, 2018)

Some days the farm is idyllic. Since the barn is on top of the hill, the highest point on the property, and the rear door faces west, the sunsets there are wonderful, especially when it’s partly cloudy. On those days, after we feed, I generally linger a while and watch the sun go down. It is a peaceful end to a satisfying day.

Then there are days like today. For context, we have spent a week or more nursing three sickly goat babies. They have been lethargic, barely eating (and losing weight as a result), walking around as if in a daze and, last (for emphasis) suffering diarrhea. (Goats with loose bowels are not fun.) The symptoms could be caused by parasites—goats are prone to worms—or just a virus, sort of a caprine summer cold. Anyway, we gave them worm medicine and have been giving them daily doses of vitamins to get their red blood count back up. All of this is done by drench. A drench is a syringe with a pencil-sized, blunt steel tube instead of a needle. The idea is that one of us (me) holds the goat while the other (Vanessa) squirts the contents down the goat‘s throat. The goats, of course, have other ideas. They squirm, they fight, they spit. We try to get enough of the contents down the goat‘s throat to achieve the desired result. And it is working. The babies are getting better—eating more, gaining weight, getting livelier.

Then this morning, when we fed, I saw that Buck, the sire, was having trouble walking. His hind legs were wobbling, bad, and he was having trouble standing. It was like he was good and drunk. It was worrisome.

I cannot overstate the importance of Buck to our whole operation. He was in the first set of goats we got. Along with Clara and Clover, he is a founding member. He is the only male source of genetic goat material (goat jism) we have. We bottle fed him when we first got him, and he is part of the family. If you have ever had a dog that you loved, but that stunk really bad, especially in the autumn, that’s Buck. In my head, I could never stop farming as long as Buck is here. (I feel the same about Clara and Clover, but this post is about Buck).

I called the vet and arranged for a farm visit in the afternoon. In the meantime, I got my teeth cleaned and inspected—I’d had the appointment for six months—and looked up the symptoms for “goats with weak back legs.” Turns out there is a thing called Meningeal Worm Infection. It comes from infected deer. The deer eat a parasite, it passes through them without any harm, then lands on something that the goat eats. It does not pass through the goat, however. It gets stuck in the spine and causes neurological problems—shakiness, weak hind quarters, plus skin lesions, etc., that Buck only has minimally.

The cure. Drenching. Just like with the babies, except instead of a 15 pound kid, which we are giving 6cc of vitamins, we are giving a 4-year old intact 170 pound male 50cc. 50cc is about the size of a Starbucks lotte.

He squirms, he fights, he spits.

I, on the other hand, wonder “Where the hell is my sunset?”

Image may contain: cloud, sky, tree, outdoor and nature

Image may contain: cloud, sky, tree, twilight, outdoor and nature

Image may contain: cloud, sky, outdoor and nature

Patty, The Raccoon

Apparently, we held a racoon hostage in our garden. I’m not sure how long—anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks—but maybe long enough for her to get Stockholm syndrome. We named her Patty.

It all started about the middle of June, when Roma beans began disappearing as quickly as they came up. The beans, the leaves, and the vines, all nibbled down to a nub. Every day, a few more feet would disappear. At first, I figured it was rabbits, so we put wire hoops over the bean rows, covered the hoops with bird netting, and secured it all with weights and clothes pins.

That worked just long enough to lull us into a false sense of security. Then, we went out one morning, and something had reached through the netting and snatched practically every bean in the row. Rabbits can’t do that. It didn’t stop with beans, either.

A row of sweet potato vines was decimated—every single leaf chewed off, in some cases leaving nothing but a single stem sticking out of the ground, kind of like a middle finger. I got mad and built a twenty-foot long cage out of some left-over horse fencing and baling twine. We replanted a few sweet potatoes, caged them all in, and moved on.

Not long after that, we started seeing weirdness in the barn. We keep a large box of dog bones on top of a refrigerator in there. For two or three days in a row, the box of dog bones was knocked over and dog-bone fragments scattered everywhere. This was too high for even the jumping dogs to reach, and it was way too heavy for mice. So, I went to Lowe’s and bought a plastic container with a snapping lid to secure the dog bones. That worked for about twenty-minutes.

A couple of evenings later as I was walking to the barn, I saw something gray and furry lumbering over the fence between the barn and the garden. It looked at me, it was wearing a mask.

We have an electric fence that we use for the sheep-n-goats. It’s portable, about four feet tall, four-hundred feet long, and sends out a 6,000 volt pulse every three seconds, enough to get your attention, that’s for sure. The next morning, I put the electric fence up inside the regular garden fence. With two fences, surely, our garden was safe.

Evidently, however, Patty was in the garden when I put the fence up—or she got in some time later, maybe when it was off. Vanessa and I were in the garden a few days ago, finding half-eaten eggplants, bites out of tomatoes, and so on, when I happened to look down and see that something had been digging under the electric fence, trying to get out.

Then I looked over and saw Patty slinking into a patch of ground cherries. We stared at each other for a few minutes, and then I removed the electric fence.

Then Saturday morning about six, when we went to feed, I looked up on the top shelf of the counter where we fill the feed bowls and saw two masked eyes looking back at me. Vanessa screamed and, as she later reported, nearly peed herself. All five dogs went into a yelping frenzy, though, honestly, at least three of them were just howling in sympathy, having no idea why. The sheep-n-goats started screaming at the delay of their morning grain.

Poor Patty, if it was Patty, just hung behind the counter, out of reach of the dogs, frozen in panic.

She spent the day on top of that shelf, curled-up, sleeping. I wasn’t sure if she was injured, sick from eating too much dog-food, or just comfortable. Whenever I would go in, she’d look at me, figure I wasn’t a threat, and go back to sleep. We had to keep the dogs out of the barn all day. That was the biggest challenge.

I woke up about three in the morning on Sunday, wondering about Patty. By three-thirty, I had convinced myself she had a broken leg, and I was going to have to deal with her, probably put her down since I’m not going to pay a vet bill for a wild, foraging raccoon, even if I did keep her hostage for a while.

But when we went to the barn on Sunday morning, she was gone, and things pretty quickly went back to normal, except the dogs keep sniffing around the feeding counter.

This morning, the lid was off the dog-food container, so now we’re back to where we were two weeks ago.

Of course, it could be more than just Patty—we could be feeding a whole village of raccoons. I often wonder what happens up in the barn at night, when we’re sleeping safely in our beds.

Dice and the Isis Bride

In Vanessa’s version, she gets home from work and finds me in a safari hat, carrying a shotgun and a camera. “What are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m going to kill Dice,” I say.

“Oh… okay,” she says.

In my version, I don’t own a safari hat. I’m wearing my straw hat, the one I wear when I’m on the tractor or the mower. It’s my mowing hat, not my shooting hat. I don’t have a shooting hat—I was improvising. Also, I don’t have a shotgun. The weapon I was carrying was a 1930’s Winchester .22-gauge single shot bolt action. We have two rifles, which we bought when we started farming. There’s the twenty-two, for putting small animals out of their misery (or ours), and there’s some Big-Ass Rifle that I’ve only had to use once, and I hope to never use again.

I was carrying a camera. We agree about that.

We also agree about the mission—to kill Dice. Dice has been torturing all living souls for over three years. We got him when we ordered a couple of dozen chicks from a McMurry Hatchery in early spring 2013. They put day-old chicks in a box and send them through the mail. When they mail chicks during cold weather, they sometimes put in a “free gift”—a rooster to increase the mass and the temperature for the others. Roosters are cheap because people don’t want them. Dice was a “free gift.”

And he was mean. He fought with Arthur (the nice rooster), he had his way with the hens, he attacked us, usually from behind, when we weren’t expecting it. He really pissed me off. Often and a lot.

So about a year ago, we put him in a secondary chicken coop we have on the other side of the property, away from the main coop—yes, we have two chicken coops. We put one of the hens in with him, and Vanessa named her “Isis Bride”—I’m not sure if it was a political reference or just a good slant rhyme. But “Dice and the Isis Bride” did fine. They had a small coop, access to an outdoor run, plenty of food and water, and each other. Most importantly, Dice couldn’t attack us, though he would glare at me through the fencing and threaten every time we changed their water or cleaned their feeder.

I had been threatening (read: talking myself into) killing Dice for over two years. I have dug many animal graves since we bought the farm—a dog, three full-grown sheep, a goat, several newborns, ducks, a goose, and a bunch of chicks/chickens. I didn’t have the heart to kill Dice, even though I hated him.

But at the end of May, we got a new shipment of chicks. They spent the first five weeks indoors, a few days outside in the chicken-tractor, and now they have to go to the secondary coop. It was the chicks or Dice.

Good-bye Dice.

I won’t describe shooting him—except to say it took four shots. Dice, it turns out, was mostly feathers.

In Vanessa’s version, I come down from the barn in my safari hat, carrying a shotgun, a camera, and a dead Dice. “What are you doing with him?” she asks.

“I’m gonna clean him,” I say. “The water’s already boiling.”

In my version, the water’s not boiling, it’s 145 degrees. I looked it up on YouTube.

Though I have killed a few animals and buried many that died on their own, I had never killed one with the intent of cleaning and eating it. I didn’t want to waste the Dice experience. Partly, that’s because as the hens that came with Dice get older, they will stop laying. Then we will have to make some hard decisions—fourteen hard decisions, actually. On the one hand, it feels a little icky to eat a chicken you’ve fed, watered, and cared for and that has given you eggs for four or five years. On the other hand, they’ve had a very good life for a chicken, and it’s a quick end. I keep telling myself that if I’m going to eat meat (and I’m going to eat meat), then I need to be aware of where it comes from.

I won’t describe the actual cleaning, except to say two things. If you do it, wear gloves and sharpen your knives.