Coe Creek Farm and Product News
I have just finished reading a memoir by Ivan Doig, one of the novelists whose books I most enjoy. He grew up in western Montana in a family whose livelihood was based on sheep ranching in one way or another. Mostly, his father and maternal grandmother raised him on various ranches, while working for other owners, taking on the responsibility for several bands of sheep. In one episode when Ivan was a teenager, these three people and two dogs moved four bands of newly shorn sheep with their young lambs from an unsheltered corral four miles, finally pushing them through a narrow coulee to an area where there was some brush and terrain shelter. A storm was on the way, and the sheep and new lambs in a corral would have been at the mercy of terrible weather, with huge losses inevitable, especially if the sheep panicked. They still lost many ewes and lambs as the storm broke, but in this desperate drive managed to save most of the animals. Reading a true account such as Doig related in This House of Sky puts our own work in perspective. We do not lose many lambs, either at birth or later, but once in a while, a ewe delivers stillborn lambs or loses them when they are small. And four hours of doggedly herding sheep--in horrendous weather--where they do not want to go, is my idea of a nightmare. What did strike me, though, was the "funnel" of the coulee, forcing many animals until they moved through an area where only a few could pass at a time. Inexplicably, this reminds me of our lives at this time of year. Necessary tasks are converging, piling up like a flock of panicked sheep. We have turned part of the flock out into the yard adjacent to the hay barn, and another bunch will go out today. But, inside, we still have three pens of lambs to dock, castrate, and inject with shots--a selenium compound to protect them from white muscle disease and an inoculation against "overeating" disease. In addition, the ewes will have injections of dewormer. The rams and the llama must go out to the llama hut and yard. We don't want Carlos the llama with the sheep flock until the lambs are a little bigger. Then, the yearlings are still inside and just beginning to lamb. We need to give them the same worm medicine as the others and keep an eye out for new lambs. In the barn, the cows are still standing in their stalls. We were randomly selected for a herd TB test, and that was done last week, so they can now go out for the summer. However, the snowplow's winter banks broke innumerable insulators on the electric fence along the road in the pasture where the cattle will initially go, so they must be replaced before we can let the cows go free. Then, there's the garden. Our first greenhouse needs a new cover, and the plastic we ordered is standing, still in its roll, waiting for us to have time to put it on the building. The other greenhouse has claytonia and spinach from last fall ready to pick again, new spinach, lettuce, and radishes ready to eat, and new spinach nearly ready, as well. In the basement of our cabin and on the floor in a sunny room of the farm house stand flat after flat of tomato, pepper, and assorted other plants that need to make another move--either to the greenhouse or to the garden. In the outside garden, some beds are planted to potatoes and onions, and there are peas showing now, but other beds are neatly laid out, waiting for us to come with seeds of the cold hardy plants to sow. And, yet other areas of the garden still need stakes to delineate the eventual beds. In the house, spring cleaning is only a dream. Someday, it will be accomplished, but right now, it is not a high priority. In the farm house things are a little neater. We have done some work in the kitchen to prepare for certifying that room by the Michigan Department of Agriculture to allow us to bake, make jams and jellies, and prepare certain other foods for sale. So, when the Leroy Farmers' Market opens the last Saturday of this month, I hope to be there with organic baked goods in addition to the usual products we have at the market. The certification process went smoothly, and we are ready to go. So, all we need is time. I don't mean that we are generally overworked and have to find time for additional tasks. But, all of us know that certain times of year are like this, that keeping up is like trying to funnel four thousand ewes and their lambs through a narrow coulee. We keep on the run and don't catch up. But, that will come later. There are intense periods in every year, but they are usually followed by times of more leisure and less hectic scheduling. Those days are just over the horizon at the present. In the meantime, we take tiny breaks from the various jobs, sitting for a few minutes with a cup of tea or coffee, reading a little in the late evening, or visiting over our meals. And, just looking over the flock, seeing the lambs jump and run in their newfound freedom, or admiring the shiny red sides of a little calf full of its mother's milk, makes the work load seem lighter. And, at least, we have the satisfaction of knowing that we do what we do of our own free will. We are not sitting in cubicles in some corporate office, wondering who will be the next to be "downsized." We are not on our feet in a restaurant or a store, waiting on impatient customers. We don't answer to a boss other than the one inside each of our heads. I suppose that is the lure of the small farm for us. Nobody tells us what to do. Whatever foolishness we contrive, it is our own.
FARM PRODUCTS FOR SALE BY MAIL SOCKS! SOCKS! SOCKS! HANDMADE FELTED MITTENS FROM THE FLEECE OF OUR FLOCK $35 POSTAGE PAID HANDMADE FELTED BABY SHOES FROM THE FLEECE OF OUR FLOCK $20 POSTAGE PAID HAND DIPPED BEESWAX CANDLES $5 PER PAIR POSTAGE PAID SOCKS FROM THE FLOCK ARE NOW HERE! WE HAVE THESE SOCKS MADE FROM OUR OWN WOOL IN A CANADIAN MILL. WE SELL SOME OF THEM IN A NATURAL SHEEP'S WHITE, AND SOME WE DYE IN BEAUTIFUL COLORS. SIZES SMALL AND MEDIUM-LARGE FIT MOST MEN AND WOMEN. $15 FOR WHITE, $18 FOR COLORS, POSTAGE PAID. CALL US AT (231) 829-3328 OR CONTACT US THROUGH THIS WEB SITE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON ANY OF THESE PRODUCTS. TRANSLATIONS OF DOCUMENTS OR LETTERS FROM SWEDISH TO ENGLISH ALSO AVAILABLE. CALL OR E-MAIL FOR DETAILS.
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