Category: Food Sources

At last, a beautiful spring, the ewes and lambs were out on pasture, and life was good once more! The kids were counting the days until school would be out, and so was I, as it would mean I would not have to attend to two ponies and a horse every morning, along with my other chores. We had lovely pastures, and it was a temptation to just turn everything loose in them! Unfortunately, our ponies were prone to founder, and our sheep to bloat.

The year did not start off well, we were going to have to find a new home for Bob, the Old English Sheep Dog. My attempts to mollify his aggressive behavior toward the sheep were a total failure. The defining moment came when he broke his heavy chain, and was chasing ewes through deep snow drifts in late January. This was just unacceptable, the ewes were due to start lambing in late February. One of them, “BoPeep,” died as a result. Bob had to go!

I had bred for early lambs, so by the end of February lambing was done. I wanted to hit the early July market, as in recent years that had been the best market. There would be a slightly over 100 head of ewes and lambs on pasture. There would have been more, but I sold 25 of last years’ ewe lambs to another sheep producer, and only retained 3 for our flock.

1976, Early April: Lambing, as always, was stressful, but out of 64 lambs born we lost only three. That was just under 5%, which was considered quite an acceptable loss to most producers. It was not acceptable to me! I had a dream of a year when no lambs were lost.

We had an early fall, with first frosts on September 12. Lisa and I covered the tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, watermelons and cantaloupes with plastic tarps so we were still harvesting them in October, otherwise they would have been long gone. Our young orchard produced a huge apple crop that fall and my sister, Merle, also had a bumper crop. We decided we should make apple juice and can it for winter enjoyment.

After a hard day’s shearing was accomplished, all the beautiful fleeces were stacked under a window near the front of the barn. The price of wool was very low, due to the prevalence of polyester clothing, and also to a large influx of imported wool from Australia. At a price of thirty three cents a pound, I did not intend to sell the wool at that time, but would add it to the last year’s clip, which was stored in my sister Merle’s dry basement. Hopefully, the price of wool would rise to a decent level before her basement overflowed, so the wool was awaiting transport to her farm the next morning. Mother Nature however, had other ideas!

After the traumatic episode of the bloated sheep we began penning them in the barnyard overnight, and in the morning we gave them a good feed of hay before turning them back into the alfalfa pasture. We did not leave them in the alfalfa too long at each grazing session.

For some time I had been considering how to improve my pastures, and where to start. The native grass pastures had been adequate up to now, but the sheep flock was growing and the pastures were not producing much growth after the first spring flush.