When we published our goals for 2020, I really wasn’t expecting to get started on them right on January 1. I was truly expecting to sort of lazily glide into the new year and start tackling goals by the first weekend. Unfortunately, that’s not the way life goes on the farm, and we lost one of our sheep overnight.
Verse was born on our farm on March 18, 2019 to Haiku. She was an adorable little lamb who was our only surviving lamb between the two ewes. For the last few months, she has been dealing with an unknown illness. We’ve had the farm vet out to take a look at her, Verse received some medication, and good food, and she continued to decline despite her extra TLC. Last night, she passed away due to an injury caused by the complications of the illness that she couldn’t recover from. I removed some of her wool to be used in a project in the future. It’s wonderfully soft.
We were both very upset, and sort of abandoned some of our plans for the day. However, as other farmers know, you can’t just give up when one thing goes wrong. We took care of some other chores, and then we headed north to another farm to bring a new ewe home. A Romeldale/California Variegated Mutant sheep fell into our laps recently, and we couldn’t say no to her. While picking her up from the farm about an hour away, she attempted to jump through a gate twice, and was generally quite rambunctious. That is until we got the halter on her and tried to lead her. Apparently, she forgot she has legs, and just turned into a bag of bricks. Robert carried her to the truck and loaded her in, where she happily rode the hour back home in a large dog crate surrounded by hay bales. When we got her home, we introduced her to the rest of the flock through a gate. The boys took an immediate interest in her, even though she should already be bred. We will see what happens in May when she is due! We named her Calypso, which follows our “hop variety” name theme for 2019. (We were supposed to pick her up in 2019, but scheduling just couldn’t work out)
As much as it hurts to lose Verse, she is no longer in pain. We need to continue to build the farm even when we suffer losses like this. We will continue to grow throughout this year, and we hope to share the ups and downs with all of you.
Frontière Farm House 