Learning to milk & make sheep's cheese

In late September, I was able to spend two days at the farm of Richard and Sylvie near Oxford Mills becoming better acquainted with the East Friesien dairy ewes I will be bringing home in November. After the girls are bred once they arrive, they will lamb in April and when the lambs are weaned in late May, I will begin to milk twice a day and to make cheese daily for the first ten or twelve days. After the initial lactation rate slows down it'll be cheesemaking every second day throughout the summer and early fall. The unpasturized sheeps milk cheese has to age 60 days so it will be late summer before we have cheese available (and hopefully my cheesemaking skills will be adequate even in the first year). I am really looking forward to my new career and as we already have a couple of these sweet sheep in our current flock, I feel acquainted with their personalities already. The three we have are very much "people sheep". They run over to get petted and they like human company. My Navajo's are more stand offish...they aren't afraid of people but they are more intent on their sheepish pursuits and less fond of being hugged. (although you can win their affections easily with food treats).

I've sold about a third of my Navajo flock in the past couple of weeks. I would love to keep them all but we have only so much room in the barns and we'll be filled to capacity when the dairy girls get here on Nov 11. Ironically, that is the very day two years ago that I brought my first sheep home here to the farm in Donegal. It's been a very changeable two years!! But progressing exactly as I had hoped.

As well as getting organized with all our belongings now piled up at the farm, I also have taken on the challenge of participating in National Novel WRiting Month. The goal is to write 50,000 word novel in thirty days. I am at ten thousand words and on schedule! I know from years ago when I lived here and did a lot of writing that setting up my computer (now a compact lap top instead of a huge Apple two GS) here on the kitchen table works best. I can roast pumpkin, bake, make soup or stew, keep an eye on the barnyard, wash eggs, do some cleaning, all interspersed with sitting down and writing. It's the perfect combination of mental and physical effort!

mid summer farm, shepherdess, my novel

Almost the middle of August and these last few nights of chilly temperatures remind us that blessed summer is coming to a close. Far too quickly, for my liking!!! We have been busy with our two farmers market booths this summer and my attention to the cafe has suffered as a result. And I made the mistake of starting into my Spanish research for my NIP (novel in progress) which leaves me totally spaced out in some imaginary whitewashed village in Andalucia instead of in present time in Wilno.
Last Wednesday I made a rare daytime trip home to the farm and immediately let my poor bear-oppressed sheep out of their barnyard confinement into the long grass beside the driveway. Because of the predator problem, I had decided that they would go out only when I have time to be a shepherdess...a task I have much youthful experience with. In my childhood years, we raised sheep at the home farm on the McGrath settlement and as soon as the hayfields were cut and baled, we used to send the flock out to eat up the new grass. We had stone fences and a dearth of gates in those field gaps and it was one of our tasks to spend the day sitting "in the gap" keeping the sheep from straying into the adjacent unharvested grain field. Needless to say, as an avid reader, it was my favorite farm job, and armed with a Nancy Drew novel and my writing paper and pen I would head out to the field. I liked sheep even then and had my favorites...grandly named Jacqueline and Josephine....and I was happy to read and work on my "novel" (a rather blatant plagiarism of the Swiss Family Robinson where the family was much more pleasant than my own annoying brothers.) Thus lost in reverie, I would lose all track of time, and even more importantly all track of sheep and then have to frantically round them up in the grain field and herd them back to their proper field. I confess this now, only because all these years my father lamented the trampled grain along the fences and blamed it on raccoons when in fact it was MOI.