Myfanwy (Price)

Myfanwy Price and Dylan.

Welcome aboard Myfanwy Price, a very Welsh name for a Southdown x Hampshire ewe. She is so named because she continues our run of female members of the cast of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood which already includes Polly (Garter) and Lily (Smalls). She comes with a young (June-born) ram lamb at foot whom we have called Dylan (as in Thomas, of course). When I last posted we were all ready and with a working trailer tow-hitch, eagerly awaiting a phone call from Mayo-Liz our 'supplier' out by Kiltimagh.

Myfanwy and Dylan check out 'Hen and Two Chicks' on the
front lawn.

As it happened, the phone call came just as we were preparing to go out shopping for new bed linen. We were expecting Sparks and his good lady for an overnight on Monday and thought it would be nice to fit out 'their' room with all new linen. We were just drinking that final coffee before departure when the phone rang. I had to look pleadingly at Liz for a change of plan; she probably saw a future of trying to keep me focused on linen shopping when there was a ewe and lamb awaiting collection. Anyway, plan B was set in motion - hitch up trailer, nip to Kiltimagh to collect sheep, drop sheep back here, leave me to commune with new sheep while Liz took off for Carrick, solo, for un-pressured bedding shopping.

Our full complement on the front lawn.

Off to Mayo then and we knew where the pair would be even as we pulled up, so we got a good look at them over the split shed-gate before Mayo-Liz and husband Ray had even appeared to welcome us and we liked what we saw. The ewe is a relative youngster (18 months), so rather slight and slim compared to our 'mumsie' 3 year old and 5 year old, but she will fit in well with our plan to roll 3-4 ewes through the flock at 2-year age intervals. That way any anxious new first time mums can get reassurance from the calm, experienced old timers as their bodies go through all those unfamiliar and potentially upsetting changes.

We're big chicks now, so we want to sit
up in the grown-ups chairs.

The new ewe here is, in fact, a one time Mum and has her first lamb already with her; him a fine sturdy chap reminding us of our own first-born, Feste who was also 3/4 Hampshire. He is not quite weaned but he is big enough to need to kneel down to get at Mum's teats and she is already a bit impatient with him and walks off after he's had only a quick suck. Our plan is to put all three ewes to the borrowed tup (Rambo) at around mid September, so the ram lamb needs to be weaned fairly soon, so that she can come back on heat by then. We do not anticipate a problem. Ideally the tup serves all three ewes quickly on arrival, so that we get a nice synchronised lambing (Feb/March) but if she's not quite ready to stand for him, he will be around for a month and will catch up with her later in the visit if she's a bit slow.

Light summer fare ? In the awful wet weather we have been
lighting the range some evenings and using up frozen
winter-warmers like this haggis, neeps and tatties.

Rambo is good and ready and will almost certainly have tupped the ewe 'Pink' whom I sheared recently and may also have had a go at one of Sue's goats to produce a 'Geep'. The goat is looking very pregnant when we last saw her but Sue tells us that Geeps are a rarity. The mother (generally the goat) may go to full term but will usually pass only still-born 'babies'. However there are American 'experts' on the internet who say that, no, they have loads of them running about as fit as fleas. We wait with eager anticipation but also disquiet - no-one wants the gentle mother to suffer or even experience the anguish of still birth.

Not the brightest place to sleep, Soldier.

So, we trundled home with our new purchases and had a quick discussion on how to introduce Myfanwy and Dylan to our 'old' 4. We can no longer drive car and trailer across the front of the house and right into the East Field due to the new gravel/rose garden and the combined rig would ground out on the slope at the end of the cattle race.  Liz came up with a cunning manouvre where we move the 4 to the East field and then let the new ones in from the lane into the top of the Primrose Path. We were not sure of the keen-ness of the newbies to follow me and my unfamiliar feed bucket, but we knew we'd have no problem with the 4.

Some first outdoor mange-tout, went in well to the Indian
(Madhur Jaffrey) meal Liz cooked for Sparks plus one. 

The new animals got an hour or two alone on the front lawn while Liz shopped and they got their bearings and shouted much baa-ing conversation to the 4, one field away. When Liz got back we distracted the new pair while I ran the old 4 on to the lawn so they could meet. That went off as smoothly as you could hope, so, come 6 pm, all 6 were run back to the East Field to spend the night, a little minor stampede after my feed bucket which was actually led by Myfanwy and Dylan. Job done. Our little flock is now complete.

Another classic depression cruises up the Western Seaboard
- no Summer sunshine for us just yet.

We will have 'produced' 4 lambs this year which meets all our needs. We have had a little rash of friends and relatives asking 'can you do one for us' but we are not inclined to go down that road. However, we have an outstanding order in with our old friend, the elusive Scarlet Pimpernel, Kenny O'C. He never replies to texts, calls or voice messages but has been known to turn up without warning with a trailer of "the sheep you wanted" and if he does, he's such a nice guy that we'd not want to let him down by saying "Ahhh, but we've gone elsewhere because we thought you weren't interested....". We may end up with 9 sheep yet, these 6 and Kenny's 2 (female) store lambs and a breeding 'yow'. Don't put the Under MIlk Wood back on the shelf just yet.

The Ten-Stitch Blanket

Flushed with the success of the red and white striped jumper shown in a recent post, and needing a break from a more intense, complicated, ribbed Aran knit number she is knitting for the Sparks, Liz has nipped off down a completely new side-road on the knitting adventures this week. Browsing the internet recently on a tip off from an internet chum, she came across the 'Ten Stitch Blanket'. You'd think to knit a blanket you'd need an enormously long pair of needles and you'd be there for weeks just casting on, but this cunning design has you only casting on ten stitches and then working your way out in a rectangular spiral ten stitches wide. For the interested, this is all described by one Frankie Brown (though inspred by an "Elizabeth Zimmerman design") in a website called www.ravelry.com (as follows).

http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/ten-stitch-blanket

Frankie says "All my ravelry patterns are free to download but, if you enjoy them, you might like to consider making a donation to the Children’s Liver Disease Foundation, a charity which funds research and supports the families of children with a liver disease. You can do this easily by going to my fundraising page www.justgiving.com/frankiesknittedstuff 
Happy Knitting!"

As long as you know how to turn the corners and then stitch in to the knitting to your left as you go, you can presumably go as big as you like, but Liz is using a very chunky wool bought for a different purpose and using up only a few small balls so, though she covers the territory quickly enough, will only get to just over tea-tray size. Maybe this will be a cat or dog blanket.

The pigs get a treat of strawberry 'offcuts'

Meanwhile, back on the 'farm' we suddenly have a strawberry glut, with all the fruit on our 8 by 4 patch coming big, bright, red and fully ripe all at once. We have been eating them as fast as we can, but we are unable to keep up, so we have frozen some. In my head I have the idea that you should not freeze strawberries because as they freeze the water in them forms into long, needle shaped ice crystals (I have the word "pipcrakes" in my head for some reason) which lacerate the  cells of the flesh so that when you thaw them back out they are reduced to mush but they should be good for cooking or maybe dropping, frozen, into a chilled glass of elderberry 'prosecco' like a fruity ice cube.

The gift that keeps on giving. 2 more barrows of turf from our
earth-bank drying in the yard. 

A surprise beneficiary of all this was the pigs, Mary and Isabelle, who found themselves thrown a half bucket of offcuts - the calyx end of fruits, pieces with slug damage and ones which had already gone a bit over for human consumption or beauty. They have no such scruples and hoovered up the fruit with delight. I have invented a new game with them. When I am cutting grass they love to be given a couple of mower-bags full of cuttings to rootle through and, if I get there before they have finished spreading the grass about, I lob in some apples cut into 8ths which disappear in among the grass pile and have to be rootled out by the pigs. It is fascinating to watch how they quarter the ground (or grass pile) with their directional noses. You can see them questing around and then suddenly dive off to their left or right to track down every last, buried piece of apple. They know when it has all gone even though there must still be apple-y smells hanging around, and come back to me to "ask" for more. It's a good game.

Turkeys #3 and #4 coming up to 4 weeks.

We have had to get hold of vet, Aoife, today as the young male cat Soldier has now reached that stage where he is smelling more of tom-cat and has unfortunately started 'spraying' indoors including (foolish boy!) in Liz's favourite chair. Rather than have our house smelling like the proverbial mad cat-lady house, he is now booked in for his op. The downside of this as far as 3 year old Westie bitch Poppea is concerned, is that she gets to be part of the package, and she too, will be spayed.

The Gang of Four. 

We had been happy to keep her entire, though we had no intention of breeding from her and could cope with the 7-monthly 'events' (at least we knew what stage she was at as she did the behavioural changes, the blood spots and the change to straw-coloured discharge in text-book fashion). The locals, though, do not in the main, believe in confining their dogs, which are to a man, allowed free run of the garden and nearby streets. When we walk on-heat Poppea down the lane for that week we are inadvertently laying a scent trail from the village right back here and we attract a regular supply of the local 'bowsies' coming to see what this hot woman is like. Unfortunately our sheep do not like strange dogs coming around (though they are now well used to ours) and get very nervous. They start running around and trying to get some distance between them and the dog, even though the dog is (so far) completely un-interested in the sheep. There is a risk that they will try (or even succeed in) jumping fences and hurt themselves on barbed wire or (in Feb/March) miscarry or abort their lambs, so it is much simpler if we do not have visits from stray dogs. Sorry Pops, but that is just how life is.

In the sheep dept, I think I have mentioned that we have bought (but not yet seen) a third ewe with lamb at foot, from our chum Mayo-Liz. This might not seem sensible but Mayo-Liz is well inside our "trusted supplier" category as she also supplied us with Polly and Lily. I have now had the tow bar moved across from the old car to the new, so we can now pull the trailer again. I have been able, then, to contact Liz who wanted a few days notice to seperate the new sheep from the flock down in the bottom field and we await her call to say that they are ready and we can nip across and collect. We just need a name. Polly (Garter) and Lily (Smalls) are named after 2 female characters in Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' as it was an anniversary of DT when we bought those two. I should probably go back and check UMW to see are there any more ladies names in that story.