Welcome, Spring!!!!!

Wow! Spring has sprung around here! The sun is shining, temps are in the 60's and it is wonderful. (The weather is always a key factor on a farm, so you will see I usually open by mentioning it.)

So, my theme for today is farm issues. Well, this post will be considerably different today than it would have been a week ago when we were still in the iron grip of winter. Sunshine and knee deep mud is so much more encouraging than thick cloud cover, snow flurries, and knee deep mud.

Actually, we have been doing some serious soul searching this winter and have decided to make some substantial changes around here. The llamas are gone, and we just found a new home for the horses. I am now trying to find a buyer for the sheep (anyone here interested in some Soays?). I think we just gave up for a while. I know I for one was tired of fighting.

Our farm is an old Appalachian hillfarm that never was a showplace. When we bought it the barns and fences were in horrible condition. We had worked hard for 7 years to get them all the way up to merely bad condition. But horses are hard on a barn--they had rubbed against a couple of the support posts and had them off their bases, so the stability of the barn was compromised. Sheep are hard on fences. No, that's not true. Sheep ignore most fences. They are blowing through ours like they are invisible. And we can't afford to pay $25,000 to fence in a flock worth a fraction of that with fence that will really hold them. Not to mention that our old rocky soil and steep slopes mean that most of the hundreds of new fence posts would have to be set by hand, if they could even be put in at all.

So for safety's sake the horses had to go, and for the sake of not making the neighbors go blind by having to see me running around in my pajamas one more time, screeching at the escapee sheep, we decided they had to go. The sheep, not the neighbors. On fiber day (I'll have to check and see when I promised to write about that!), I'll reveal my plans to become a fleece farmer, instead of a sheep farmer. Also, I finally realized that I want more of an emotional return on my investment of energy than I was getting from the horses and sheep. I'm tired of rescheduling my life to care for animals that don't want to give me the time of day if I'm not carrying a full feed bucket.

In the future, we may get a couple more llamas since C. really likes them, but I'm in no hurry. Right now the cats, dogs, and chickens are plenty of "livestock" for me.

My new scheme, you ask? Well...I am seriously considering going into the business of growing and harvesting cultivated, wild simulated, and wild medicinal herbs. Not ginseng, mind you. I do not plan to cultivate a crop for 5 to 10 years only to have to put it under constand guard with a shotgun for the last couple of years.

I would be looking at possibly goldenseal, wild yam, black cohosh, etc. It would involve a lot of research and even more planting on blind faith that there will be a market and buyers if I can get a crop up to marketable size. Some actual field sowing, but more of what they now call silvaculture--planting the seed in the woods where the plants grow naturally.

We've got the land and the woods. We've got buyers and some market support here in the area. I think I will certainly investigate this more fully.

So, that is it for today. The house is as clean as it is going to get, school is over for the day, and now I am going to settle down and work on...quilting? No. Knitting? No. Baking goodies? No. Taxes! Yay! I get to sort out all of last year's various receipts and various other numbers we need for a farm return. I expect I'll be just a ray of sunshine by the end of the day.

Here's hoping your day will be bright too!
Lori