March- The Will to Live

It's just barely March and the trees have been triggered to bud and blossom. Daffodils are smiling flamboyantly at the foot of the houses that May and I drive by en route to school. Spring bulbs got the signal to start the show from both the soil which warmed early and the overnight temperatures staying sufficiently high for enough consecutive nights. I suppose daffodils are March's birth flower. But it doesn't abate my fear for them...they came to the party too early...before their host could even get set up!
Our incredible, wild world is a conglomeration of organisms built with the will to survive. This is something I often keep in mind when managing our vegetables and animals. I always reach back to the story of my Mom's potted fig tree which she believed to be dead once upon a time. She laid it to rest in the woods outside her house, only to find it leafing out months later despite being uprooted. The will runs strong.
This past few weeks, we have seen our yearling (very young, first-time mother) ewes give lambing a go. The first yearling to bear fruit lambed a stillborn ram lamb and a miniature ewe lamb with floppy ears. Named Rosie, she was born in cold rain with hardly any meat on her bones. Her mother took to her innate duty immediately, licking Rosie off and staring me down whenever we came for a visit. Most importantly she stood for Rosie and allowed her to nurse colostrum, the almighty mammalian elixir of life. Just as her own mother ewe did for her and her mother's mother too. It's Rosie's good fortune that she was born to a line of natural mothers. Some aren't so lucky.
Today, a Saturday, I pulled up the driveway after a full morning spent facilitating our weekly retail order pick up. With big hopes of spending the rest of the day seeding trays upon trays of flowers for our spring plant sale, I was determined not to be delayed. I stopped to take a good gander at our flock of sheep who had weathered a dramatically heavy and prolonged rain storm the night before. And in keeping with the tendency of labor to commence in conjunction with a big storm system, another yearling ewe had given birth in the torrential conditions. I have a fondness for storm babies. Just hours after I had hopped a fence and run to help move a heifer (new cow mom) who was in labor to higher ground in the midst of a wild spring thunderstorm, I went into labor myself with May (eleven days before she had been projected to join us). The nurses in the maternity ward were sure my admission was just the beginning of a crazy night of laborious mothers. It would turn out they would have a tough time finding rooms for all of us!
In no time, it was evident that the lamb hadn't been fed, moreover her mother seemingly didn't know she had anything to do with her babe, who she kicked away, headbutted, and ran from to get to greener pastures. The little one, who had never been licked off after birth, continued in desperation to try nursing from Rosie's mom, then a pregnant ewe, and even from Teeth, our studly ram. Rosie's mom would have been a fantastic wet nurse or adoptive mother as lactating ewes easily nurse twins. This babe was not endowed with luck, but at the least had that inherent will to survive.

She turned out to be Pom-pom the ewe lamb (dubbed by Jack). And as soon as we showed interest in her, she glommed on, a smart little babe, knowing that after hours of rejection, she needed to find someone to depend on. We carried her outside of the paddock and onto the driveway. She proceeded to trot along with us by choice, all the way back to the house. She wiggled her tail and tried to nurse from the kids and me as we sat around her, all of us steeped in the sun's comeback. While we waited for Rich to pick up a bag of colostrum replacement from the feed store, the barn cats came out of the woodwork to spy on the new kid in town.

This infant, who was delivered into the shock of a chilly March morning, without so much as an acknowledgment of her birth, and was starved in the crucial first 12 hours of life, proceeded to pursue food all around her paddock and then 200 feet to our house. She guzzled six ounces of warm colostrum replacement from our bottle and then climbed up onto the stoop where Rich sat and fell into a most peaceful sleep. It was almost an immediate slumber, like she had descended from survival mode into surviving mode.

She's our first bottle lamb in the five years we have cared for this flock. And she won't graduate from the bottle until she is ready to ruminate three months from now. By then she will have all the green, lush grass that the June pasture can offer at her disposal.

I'm so pleased to offer her a way to survive, one of the boons of domestication. She's strong-willed and sure to launch herself into the gang of lambs that we are accruing in the field, including rebound Rosie.

Thanks to the generous folks who paid to subscribe to our Foxhole Journal last year, we were able to fund this site for years to come. More importantly, you all encouraged me to expand on my writing, something which I have now learned to make time for and which I love to do. Going forward, we are making all publications available for free. No more pay wall! If you'd like to contribute still, you can fund my writing by 'buy(ing) me a coffee' any time you'd like. The button you see below will be at the end of each publication going forward. Thank you for reading :).
Updates from the Farm:
-Spring Plant Sale: we are working with two different partners (one in Washington Township and one downtown) to pop up with our spring plant sale in mid-May. We are so excited to be able to expand on what we are offering this year, including veggie, herb, and flower plants for your garden. Stay tuned for the save the date if you're local.
-Seeding has commenced: we've begun seeding the slow-germinating seeds for both our field and plant sale. This is the slow and steady beginning to another season :). Our ginger seed arrived yesterday and we CAN NOT wait for another August-December of fresh ginger :).
-Lambing: We are just starting our lambing season...if you follow us on Instagram, I'm sorry for the inundation of lamb photos :P . 'Pom-pom' is sleeping in our mud room tonight, beside Mel the Dog. We want to coddle her the first few nights-week as we aren't sure she will benefit from the cuddling a ewe generally offers her young during the night. Head to our Instagram page (instagram.com/foxholefarmer) to see some videos of little bit running up our driveway with the kids ;)
-Expanding the layer flock: we welcomed chicks last month and they are just starting to feather out. The survival rate was fantastic: 100% to date, a testament to our excellent Ohio-based hatchery and maybe to the warmth and safety of our brooder :). These latest additions will quadruple the egg laying here by July.
-Online Ordering Continues: Online ordering continues with veg coming in from the hoop house and baked goods coming out of our kitchen. Pick up is every Saturday in Oakwood. Next month we will have some great Easter specials, including a malted chocolate pie and more.
-Our CSA-We still have CSA memberships available to purchase on our site any time. As our program is credit-based, it's a great way to get the exact items you want from us whenever you want, with the benefit of receiving $20 of extra credit to spend with us for signing up.