Sylvia's Farm (15 page)

Crossing through the wire Tom's men had restrung, to get to my side, was no easy task, but I did it. And there, five feet away from the first gooseberry bush, on the opposite side of the wall, were several more, smaller, more easily manageable gooseberry bushes. I dug them as carefully as I could while the farm wife in the blue-and-white-checkered dress reappeared, intently surveying my work. I couldn't get enough dirt around their roots and so, absolutely bare rooted, they went into the back of the truck. The farm wife seemed satisfied and disappeared.

Nearly two hours had passed before I could even think about placing them in the vegetable garden. By then they had wilted. To do something the correct way or to compromise has always been a dilemma for me. I decided I'd put them in the most perfect spots even if the rest of the garden around them wasn't properly prepared. I couldn't do a very good job of the digging, but I did what I could, putting composted pig manure on the top of the dirt and left them, wilted and distraught.

I spent too much time indoors today. My chores were more of the farmer's wife category rather than those of the farmer. It wasn't until afternoon that I began to feel trapped and raced outside to become alive again. I had been told that the bridgeway next door would be closed as soon as they put the cows in.

Steele, Samantha, and I went to see if we had a day or two of grace left to be able to cross it. And it was there that I spotted the three sheep. Small dots in the distance. Keeping the dogs near me I raced across the bridge and up the hill. The sheep disappeared.

Suddenly, as I climbed a rise, I saw one. She ran. The dogs ran. I ran. And they were gone. I walked back toward the pink gate, calling to the sheep I could not see the call that brings them home. It could be only a futile gesture. Not a sign of them anywhere.

The line fence appeared. And there they were. Frantically trying to come home. But now there was a woven wire fence keeping them out. The fence that was to keep them in. They tried the pink gate. It was closed. They ran the line fence, the dogs closely after them. Running through the swamp, two made it through the barbed wire. One became mired. Her fleece was too thick. The two others, seeing she was trapped, came back to her; they had to be too young to know how to get home without her. Grateful that I wasn't wearing boots to slow me down, I managed to open the pink gate. The young ones broke free from the swamp and ran through the gate. Home. I went back to rescue the mired ewe. Connelly's cows suddenly manifested between me and the swamp. I had to go around my woven wire fence again and see if I could reach her from my side.

Of course, when I got there there was no sheep to be found. In my barnyard, having leaped the fence surrounding it, were two very muddy, very wet sheep. One let me hold her. She had always been wary of me, standing behind her dam when I'd come into the carriage house where she lived as a lamb. Her mother was young, nursing twins, and I kept them separate to feed her extra grain. An hour or two later the third ewe appeared, wet and exhausted. She, too, let me pet her. “What took you so long to bring them home?” I said. It had been raining intermittently all day. We were soaked. I went back in the house. The gooseberry bushes were wet as well. Their leaves were no longer wilted and forlorn but rather alert and gleaming. They had taken.

I
N THE
never-ending debate between the right way and the wrong way in which to do things on this farm, very often a compromise becomes the only choice. Yet compromises here are almost always a mistake. While expediency can sometimes be a successful choice in the rest of the world, on a farm, what is expedient most often necessitates returning and doing it all over. On the other hand, how does one decide or have the courage to say no to a load of hay, as an example, that is about to be dumped on some old moldy hay left from the year before, on a floor that had been rained on, through a now-repaired hole in the roof?

Last year I tried to say no but was sufficiently ambivalent that I allowed myself to be persuaded against my better judgment. And while I was profoundly grateful for the hay, I always believed I had made a very big mistake. This year is different. My resolve improves in the fullness of time, and there have either been too many different experiences, or the beginning of some better experiences, that have strengthened it. There will be more animals than ever this winter. I am keeping back at least seventeen lambs as both replacements and additions to the flock. The hay, therefore, must be the best I can buy and the feeders must be the most efficient. The entire feeding operation must take as little time as possible, and I must be able to have more control and less waste than ever. What this means, in part, is that a great deal of construction shall have to be in place before the hay begins to be delivered.

In one of my reprints of old farm books, I have found a picture of what was thought to be an ideal sheep barn. Loose hay was fed out in those days, both lighter and in some ways easier to handle. Part of the mow floor consisted of what is in effect a trapdoor on hinges with a weighted pulley system on the nonhinged side. Hay was tossed onto this trapdoor. When the weight of the hay exceeded the weight on the end of the pulley, the door slid open and the hay slid into the feeders below. The trapdoor itself formed part of the short chute that carried the hay to the feeder. The feeders are situated and built to accommodate the angle of the trapdoor-cum-chute, and the sheep can easily eat from it.

I want this trapdoor in the floor of my barn. Badly, very badly. I had hoped to have it last year. But the sudden arrival of hay, and a lot of it, prevented me from having it built in time. And so I allowed a compromise that was in essence the absolute wrong way to put the hay in the barn. This year, I am determined to put nothing whatsoever in that section of the barn until the door has been installed. The recently installed barn floor is also begging to have some extra posts put in to help support it. That too must be done before the hay goes in. If I were truly courageous, which I am not, I would not allow the hay to go in until those posts had been installed.

A small amount of hay arrived by a circuitous route today. It was unexpected but came in small enough increments to make it manageable. I shoveled and raked and hauled and spread much of the damp and spoiled hay that had matted onto the upper level of the floor, outside. Most of it was sent, to my intense satisfaction, to places that it best served. I was pleased. The little bits of hay that escaped lay on a relatively clean floor and could be raked out onto the mow. No waste here. It also became far more easy to walk, carrying bales to throw over the mow, when the floor was unencumbered by wads of hay clumped together.

Some of the matted hay went to a section of the barn that is about to be shoveled out. Some went over the bridgeway. And some went onto the pasture where the donkey now lives. With any luck, the seeds will be pushed into the earth by his feet, and the manure from the sheep that got mixed in from their occasional visits to the loft will fertilize the ground and the hay scraps will mulch it all to bring back a little grass. I planted some tomato plants yesterday and today. There are a few more left to do. I also planted some radishes and radicchio, both to sell and to have for the house. Rather than waiting until I had properly prepared the entire vegetable garden, I prepared several beds as perfectly as I possibly could and planted in those. I even managed to get the rows relatively straight. The seedlings had come from Georgia, are relatively inexpensive, and are of special varieties that I have not been able to locate in garden centers in this area. It shall be a task to keep the roosters out of the mulch. I love best to use a mixture of sheep manure and chopped hay. The roosters think it makes a great place to take a dust bath. In effect, what the mixture does is provide a source of a slow-release fertilizer each time it rains. By the second year it has disintegrated well enough to lighten the soil and make it far more friable.

While the twelve small, rectangular beds that are left unplanted are in stages ranging from absolutely overgrown to in need of a quick raking, those three well-planted little stone-edged plots have all afforded me guiltless satisfaction. The remaining plots bear no reproach, as yet, because the very correct neat ones are simply offering promise, examples of the absence of compromise.

A clear section of hayloft floor and the well-ordered garden plots gave me somewhat of a change in perspective. I began to view some other little space in the environment with fresh eyes. The yard where the geese are fattened became a source of interest. The manure and bedding had become packed so firmly that barely a blade of grass has
had the courage to break its surface. It is fenced to about four feet with chicken wire, a fertilized, fairly sunny spot next to the barn bridgeway.

For several years I've wanted to grow kale to add to the diet of my sheep. I even have some two-year-old seeds. The fenced-off area is next to the barn. It can be easily cut and fed with relative ease, only a few feet from the barnyard. I took a pick and dug a small trench. Sure enough, beneath the concretelike texture of the goose droppings, matted hay, and seven-month-old mixture was some of the blackest, richest soil I'd ever seen on the farm. I immediately thought of planting beans there as well.

Tomorrow I shall watch the sun to see if there is enough to support a garden in that spot. And if there is, I'll plant beans, interplanted with kale. The absolutely right way. Not only shall the nitrogen from the beans support the kale, the beans will be pulled long before their canopy stresses the kale. What is amazing is how doing something without compromise leads to still more solutions. Correct ones.

A
PREGNANT EWE
was killed by a pack of coyotes the other night on my farm. I didn't hear a sound. The horror of it lingers with me. My farm has been severely menaced by coyotes since spring. They have been bringing my lambs to their pups and feasting on my sheep. I called the Department of Conservation and a conservation officer was dispatched to the farm. Contrary to public opinion, here, at least, no reimbursement is offered for sheep killed by coyotes. The officers themselves can do nothing except make recommendations. They suggested I hire a trapper and offered me the name of one with a sound reputation. For the past several mornings he has been coming to set and reset a series of traps around the farm. The elusive coyotes avoided them. An innocent sheep did not. I've lost fourteen lambs to date, plus two ewes, to two- and four-legged dogs. It is all too heartbreaking.

We are in the midst of a drought, and the sheep have been eating hay for about a week now. The cows stand in the evening, their chins resting on a gate, waiting for a bale to be brought to them. Today, I shall bring them hay in the morning as well. The sheep get some at night, but I shall begin to morning-feed them also. Winter hay fed out in summer.

This was the drought I never believed would happen. The third in four years, a nearly impossible sequence. I remember the first drought. It was a glorious summer, clear and beautiful. The summer people were raving about what wonderful weather it was.

I walked up to Tom Connelly's hill often that year, to get my sheep and bring them home. The incongruity of the absolute beauty of the countryside and the impending disaster, resulting from the summer use of the winter's hay, was constantly on my mind. I knew the year's profits would be lost, fed out on those beautiful sunny days. The winter seemed so far away and yet was ever-present. No matter how hard I was to work that next winter, no matter how many lambs would be born and no matter how many would survive, the profits of it were all burning under my feet. And I knew it. Walking up that pretty, pretty path on those lovely summer's days to Connelly's hilltop to bring my sheep down to parched pastures said it all to me.

A wind blows across the page as I write these words, and the sudden sound of rain accompanies it. I leave the windows open to feel the rain rushing in. The unvarnished floor changes color and becomes suddenly beautiful. The roof in my dining room has begun to leak. And I don't care. The sound above my head is childhood and summer and gratitude all rolled into one. Rain. We have had some whispers of it for a day or two. An hour of a haze so thick it almost could be called rain. And last evening for a quarter of an hour before dusk there was a touch of something so gentle it could hardly be called anything at all. Rainbow weather without the rainbow. But this is the first occurrence in six weeks that could be called rain. Hard, solid drops, straight from the sky, with wind and noise. A gray light between the house and the hills. Thunder. Tree leaves rustling. A faint chill in between the waves of heat.

Between the intimations of rain we've had for the past couple of days, and the sudden effort being made as I write, there is new hope for the meadows and pastures. It is too late for the cows, at least until autumn. The grass will not recover fast enough for them, even if the rains persist on a more normal course, but it's not too late for the
sheep by any means. An hour after Nature's gesture, yesterday's clover darkened in intensity and became green again. I shall still see my winter's hay fed out this summer, however; it is a long way from autumn. I still shall see the profit from my winter's labor lying on the summer's earth wasted around the feeders. But we are still alive. At least most of us. Whoever as has not been killed by coyotes.

Last winter I believed there was a possibility I might get killed here. It comes as a shock to me. I feel so alive today. So alive that it comes as something of a shock to realize that last winter I believed I would die. Here. On my farm. The words, “My way of life could kill me,” kept running through my mind. Some people's way of life, smoking, drinking, driving carelessly holds the possibility of killing them. Mine is the country. Fresh air. Pink cheeks. Exercise. On a farm, living as farmer. I thought my chances of survival were fifty-fifty. Well, maybe sixty–forty. And I went through the process of accepting it. Every day. Wet firewood. Forty degrees indoors. A dangerous barn. Restless cows. Never enough to eat. I may die today, I thought at least once every day. Because of my way of life.