Animal Antics!

One of my main motivations for writing this blog is the hope that one day our children will look back on it, remember & understand.  So for this post I want to focus on the livestock, which brings some comic moments.  It’s not that we don’t have anything else going on; we’re expanding our delivery service and opening our farm gates to the public next week.  It’s all very exciting, but it’s having the animals here, doing their thing, that makes it feel like a real farming venture. 

Let’s start with our new arrivals.  Last Friday night, Ian and I toiled in the dark to finish a homemade ‘cap’ for the truck.  We were quite pleased with our $160 lid as they cost thousands to buy new.  Of course, being homemade, it made us look like hillbillies!  Anyway, early Saturday morning we set off to go and collect the first four of our pedigree piglets.  We worked really hard to source heritage hogs rather go down the commercial route.  If you’re interested in the differences, here’s a small article that outline some of the reasons for this decision: http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/6-reasons-to-buy-heritage-pork-from-small-farms

We got them home and off the truck without incident and settled them in.  They were very nervous but appeared to like their new pasture.  They tested the electric fencing causing quite the cacophony, but no harm done, they learn fast.  We named them John, Paul, George and Ringo.

That night, Ian went out at about 10.00pm to check on them.  He came running back into the house exclaiming that the pigs had gone!  Now I tend to be far less reactive than Ian when it comes to the animals but perhaps my “gone where?” question was a little daft, even by my standards.  So off we went with flashlights to traipse around an acre of chest high grass in the dark.  Nothing.  It was starting to look like our four heritage pigs that we had paid for that day had indeed gone. 

Ian and I met back at the pig house in despair.  It was at that moment we heard a faint snuffling noise.  Relief flooded over us.  We heard them, but where were they?  Further investigation revealed that they had tunneled underneath their piggy mansion and decided to make their bedroom underneath the structure intended for them. Pests! 

Underneath the house is where they choose to stay.  I call them 'the troglodytes'.  Seriously, why rent the basement suite when the mansion above is vacant?

The baby chicks have moved into the big girls’ hen house.  They’ve settled in now but were rather upset by this move at first.  Being free-range, the chickens go where they please during the day.  The babies were adamant that they were going to move back to their cozy nursery.  As the nursery is all closed up now, they persistently got lost.  Off we would go again, trawling the field in the dark looking for the chicks.  We usually found them snuggled into the sheep, apparently not quite ready to give up the comforts of a Mothers love.  This made for some late nights and I hate walking through that snake infested field at night, but at least the animals are giving me plenty of opportunity to become adept at it!

Let’s talk about the sheep.  Sheep must be one of the easiest livestock to look after.  All I do is change their water once a week.  Other than that I barely see them in all that long grass.  However, the oldest lamb is a ram and is getting a bit above his station.  He’s been testing us recently by threatening to butt us every time we go to check on them.

Last Friday, a delivery driver left the farm gate open unbeknown to me and I hadn’t properly shut their field gate.  Chaos ensued.  I wrote a brief Facebook status about this incident but it didn’t fully capture the comedy of the situation. Let me fill in the gaps.

I had come into the house to do some baking.  As I put 9 layers of cake batter into the oven I caught a glimpse of four fluffy sheep bottoms disappearing out of the farm gate.  Off I went, panicking.  There was no real need to fly into a blind panic; our farm is at the end of a single track road so very little risk of them causing a multi-car pile-up.  As I got down to the end of the drive, they were happily munching on the roadside foliage.  But, because the road is so narrow, I couldn’t get passed them to usher them back towards the farm and they were ignoring my food offerings and bribes to follow me back to the farm.  Every time I tried to get past them, I just frightened them further away from the farm and towards 256^th Street.  256^th Street is not a major carriageway, this is rural Langley, but the cars do come along there quite fast and there are a lot of trucks delivering feed to the many farms around here, so as they trotted out onto this road, I was quite worried.  Luckily for me a kind man stopped to help me.  He introduced himself as Farmer Rob.  I’m not sure if he was Christened Farmer Rob but that’s exactly what I called him.

I feel it’s relevant to tell you what Farmer Rob looked like at this point.  Contrary to what I told Ian, Farmer Rob can only be described as a bronzed Adonis.  He was beautiful in a masculine, country kind of way.  Approximately 30 years old.  In any other circumstance, I would have found this meeting very pleasing.  While I drawled over Farmer Rob, the sheep continued to refuse to comply and it was almost 30 minutes later that we got them back into their field.

As I turned around to shut the gate, Farmer Rob bid me farewell (sigh).  I raised my hand to wave and shouted “bye Farmer Ro….”.  I didn’t get to finish the word “Rob” because the ram butted me.  Right on my bum!  He put so much effort into butting me that he sent me flying onto my face…in the mud….and the sheep poop.  I lifted my head from my disgraced position to see Beautiful Farmer Rob, still with his hand in the air, mid-wave, staring at me with his mouth open in disbelief.  For some reason, I decided to remain aloof about my predicament and uttered “Thanks again Farmer Rob, bye”.  With that, he shook his head and left.  It was all very Bridget Jones and highly embarrassing.  I shall never forgive that sheep for my humiliation and will feel avenged every time I put part of him into my oven.

During this episode, my nine cakes had burned to a crisp!

As I said earlier, it’s the animals that make this feel like a farm.  It’s also the animals that keep us humble and remind us of our naivety.  Time for us to work on our animal smarts before we can really call ourselves Farmers.