Unbelievable Event!

This blogger, who only posts every 10 days or so (let's face it, not everything that happens on a farm is all that interesting), is taking six days off for a rare event: a vacation. (True, it's a working vacation, but still...)

Even more unbelievably, Farmer Melissa will be coming along, head cold and all.

How will we survive the shock of going from -20 to 80 degrees? Will we listlessly roam the streets of Palm Springs, CA in search of a flock of sheep and a few llamas to feed?

Or will we spend all six days sitting around the pool below?



Stay tuned.

Hay Circles

So, here's a typical winter morning out on Rising Moon Farm.


See that small hay circle at the feet of the ewe in the center? The first winter we had sheep, one snowy morning I walked out and found hay circles. It was puzzling.

Here they are again,



and again.


Do the sheep pull hay out of the feeders and make little nests for themselves? A sweet thought, but no.

Here's what happens. As they eat hay from the feeders, they pull it out and drop it. They walk around with it in their mouths and drop it. Soon there's an island of hay in the snow. (The hay's totally wasted, I might add, since now that they've walked and peed on it, they don't want to eat it. Go figure.) Then it snows on top of the hay. Then more hay goes down. Then more snow.

Some people think that sheep need access to a barn all year long, that it's cruel to keep them outside.

Please.

These girls are carrying their own barns on their backs, about five inches of wool. They are wrapped in about eight pounds of the stuff. And when they lay down at night to sleep, they are so warm that the heat from their body melts through the snow, revealing hay from the layer below.

Voila! Hay circles.

The sheep do go into the barn during ice storms, since these can be nasty. And after they've been sheared the end of March, they need shelter because they no longer carry their own with them. But otherwise, our girls are content to hang out in the snow.

Now if we could just get them to stop wasting all that hay by spreading it around.


"Fat chance," says #101. "Back off."

Backing off now...