A long day, tiring day today — it occurred to me that this is the first place that is actually fully engaged in what I always thought of as farming. I know that realisation is a bit slow to hit me, but it is very different from the other two places. So we started with the baby animals as always. They are quickly becoming ‘work’ rather than ‘baby animals’, though I am trying to fight it. I am still learning, and realised feeding a big lamb half a bottle and a small lamb a full bottle in one pen is a really bad idea. I ended up mostly sitting on the big lamb once it had finished, but the poor little guy got his full meal. Then off to feed Lilly the Kid, and Bob joined us there and so part of the morning was spent mucking out the goats. When I came back to start it was quite a crew, attracted by the corn and the hay:
This is now clear with the help of a 15 year old German boy, here because Steiner schools require all children that age to spend a month on the farm. He likes to be always clean, he wears almost only cobalt blue shirts with a little straw fedora of a matching colour (though he broke out the white tank top today), has very cool mirrored sunglasses, and he wants to be a DJ — I have heard a lot of German dance music in the past two days.
That done, we got the sheep shed ready for Bob to come in with the tractor and take the immense amount of muck away — disassembling the pen and removing all the layers of disgusting from the troughs and things. Thank god the tractor can be used to rid the place of several feet of ugh. I weeded for a bit. Then we took a little break to watch Bob begin mowing our field — I do really love tractors. We had some German dance music. We span around clockwise three times to make sure the skies stayed blue, on pagan advice. It is quite a team we have here.
Then I mucked out the front of the cattle shed for a few hours. But it was made better by a few episodes more of Night Vale.
I took no pictures of the muck.
Fed the baby animals, and the rest of the goats as well.
The view from my caravan at the end of the day, with Molly’s destroyed football in just the right place to ruin everything tomorrow when the neighbour with the bailer comes to roll all of this up for silage (a process where grass is collected wet and sealed up to ferment through an anaerobic process — anaerobic, how cool is that? Meaning without oxygen, like early life on the planet don’t you know…):
