The Crazyness Gets Crazier

Whoever convinced everyone that a farm is a laid back, bucolic place to relax, chew on a straw, go fishing, and just be lazy obviously never saw or visited a farm. It's crazy. Not some of the time, all of the time, and then some more. Our craziness has gone into overtime. Here's a typical time slot:
Get up before dawn, make coffee, wash the milking equipment, get dressed. Feed hogs, milk cows, strain milk, rinse containers. Feed quail, chicks and chickens. Wolf down breakfast (thanks to Wendy, we at least all get breakfast). Then go chase sheep out of the neighbor's pasture. Some of us go to the greenhouse - it gets watered 3 times daily right now - while others go to the field. School starts for the kids at 9, but is usually delayed while we chase sheep out of the hay field. Mulching, manuring, weeding, planting, plowing, tilling, and maybe a wee bit of harvesting are interspersed with school, and chasing sheep out of the crops. Did you know that one sheep times 2 days can take a quarter acre of kale down to ground level? Neither did we until recently.
There's always fence to be built or repaired. Some of the fences are vintage 1950. They qualify as genuine antiques, but nobody is buying. And the sheep don't care. You'd think they would appreciate something that is as old as me, but I guess I should know better. They don't respect the fences any more than they respect me. The problem is getting some better. All the ones I can identify as repeat offenders are given a free one way ticket to the butcher.

All this takes us up to and through the lunch hour. You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but I've forgotten what lunch is for. I think it's punctuated by chasing sheep from somewhere to somewhere else. Come to think of it, I guess the solution has been staring me in the face all along. I just need to figure out where the sheep want to be, and take them there. Problem is, they are so fickle.

Things are growing very slowly this spring. I thought it had been a warm March, but the fact is, it's been the coolest one for some years. What lulled me to sleep was the fact that we've had very little truly cold weather this spring; we've just had very little warm weather, either. Just this week is it warm enough for things to take off and grow. I can tell that, because where we had tiny peas last weekend we have giant weeds now. Where we had greens showing through, we have grass now. Oh well, at least something is growing. Maybe if I let the sheep in to graze?

Not all of the news is bad. The blackberries appear to be coming back after last year's late freeze. Some of the fruit trees didn't survive, but the blackberries, a few raspberries, and some of the strawberries that we feared were gone have come back. It's too early to tell whether they'll fruit this year or not, but at least they came back. And the chicks that survived our bout with wormer-resistant parasites are laying eggs. We lost over 150 of the 200 layers we had nurtured over the winter. In desperation we fed them diatomaceous earth, and it worked. They appear to be hale and hearty. The sheep are looking at them hungrily, though. Thank goodness sheep are not carnivores.

I'll update crops at least weekly. Right now I need to go -you guessed it. I haven't run nearly enough yet. I hear sheep noises from the wrong direction. Lamb chops, anyone?