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.

Just another bale on the load

We were fortunate to get these 300 bales of hay from Leslie and Carl...and are able to store it in their barn until needed this winter. Was a great haying day....we had a funeral luncheon at the cafe from noon till three and then I rushed out and started throwing bales in piles while Henning and Tom loaded the truck and drove to the barn...ten trips. We were home at the farm at 7 pm...tired but happy!

After two years of blessed peace with only the occassional wolf sighting, we've lost two sheep to predators in less than four days. First missing was a white dairy lamb, and two days later, Carmelita, my Navajo-Churro ewe with the beautiful horns, didn't show up in the evening. Initially suspected wolves, but no sign of the dead sheep in the big back field and I can't see any wolf being strong enough to drag them into the bush...and now, I hear there's a bear in the neighbourhood and that seems a more likely option. Knowing what happened might help in preventing future losses.
I looked in all the nooks and crannies in the barns, hoping against hope, that Carmelita would be lying there chewing her cud, but no luck.
I am going to keep her lamb as well as the other grey girl, Blossom, who looks so much like her....but there will never be another sheep like Carmelita!!

R.I.P Carmelita

Bears//wolves/losing our sheep

Carmelita has gone missing. My very first lamb; my little blue-grey princess with the beautiful curled horns is not in the barnyard; Her lamb is there but she is not. It's been an unnerving week with our white Garner lamb disappearing earlier and local reports of a huge black bear and my own sighting of "our" wolf in the hayfield on Saturday morning.

organic farm tour