Jumping in at the Deep End

Someone described us once as never doing anything by halves, and we're not about to change either.

We arrived at the farm on 1st February, right in the middle of lambing, at the end of a cold snap and just as the rain had broken after more than a week. The fields were sodden, the sheep had been cooped up for days, and the jugs were full of new mothers. There was no time to "feel our way", no grace period, and certainly no time to sit back and enjoy the peace and tranquility of life on the farm while we eased into things.

Jen is a bookworm. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders know us well. She'll read a dozen books and digest every word so she knows what's supposed to be done. Me, I'm a "dive in get your hands dirty and learn on the job" person, so we complement each other well. Running a farm requires both types of personality. We learned that on day one.

So there we were, feeding, docking, cutting tails, castrating, worming and moving newborns around all on our first morning, and loving every minute of it. Things have settled down now that we know what we're doing and there are only a half dozen ewes left to lamb. We have our goals set for the coming weeks which includes constructing a proper examination chute, replacing some gates and fencing, and I'm off to Portland next week to do a short course in Cheesemaking at Oregon State University.

We have a long laundry list of things we want to buy and we've slowly started to redecorate the inside as well. Everything at the moment seems to be a "work in progress" as we try and divide our time equally between all of the things that we want to do and that need doing. We've had a couple of neighbours drop in already as well and it seems that our intended exploits (the cheesemaking) have already got the locals talking.