Peaceful Pastures Farm Trip, Part 2
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Horses
There are several horses around, if you know where to find 'em. The one hanging around the main part of the farm at this time was Sutton, a horse being boarded here. He had a little medical condition, so he has to have some special feed. He's fed in a trough, and half his food would go to the chickens if you don't stick around to fend them off... [Nov 2012 update: Sutton has passed...]
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| I don't know why Jenny hates me. I'm not sure what I did to her. The blue lines is the path up the hill... |
Sunday Morning. 7:45am. I get a text from Jenny. Breakfast in 30 minutes. I'm still drinking my coffee. I quickly get my act together. It's really 8:45, but we lost an hour overnight. Because a majority of the goats have their kids during the first hour after daylight, she's operating on sunrise time, which doesn't respect daylight savings time.
It's going to be a beautiful day. Sunny, almost cloudless skies, and the warmest day so far. The drive from Edgar Evins to Peaceful Pastures is uneventful. I have all the navigation landmarks memorized by now, so the drive feels much shorter.
Breakfast is the best. Eggs, bacon, scratch made biscuits and berry pie. Perhaps I should have suspected something.
We go out to the barns to check on the kids. One doesn't know where to get food. Honest. So Jenny bottle feeds it to get it some food. More later.
We get done with the goats, and Jenny gets a couple of halters and we're going to go for a walk to get a couple of horses. Something she's been threatening me with for a couple of days.
"You mean we're going to walk up there?"
"That's where the horses are."
And so we start up the hill. Not just any hill. This is an almost 400' tall hill. I am comforted by one fact, once were up on the ridge, cell reception might be good enough to call an ambulance for me...
About 3/4 of the way up, which I later find was only about 2/3 of the way up, I stop and rest for the first time. I take some pictures, and watch the dogs running up and down the hill. Maybe that's it. I need two more legs. When we get to the real 3/4 way mark, all the dogs are trying to get something out of a hollow log. Hmmm... I should mention when I left on Tuesday, Arwen had been skunked...
About the time I think we're at the end of the trail, I find out I'm wrong. When we do get to the gate to the pasture, the pasture is empty. No, there are two horses at the far end of the pasture, but soon disappear.
We cross the pasture, and it has more manure per square foot than Disney has gift shops. We look into the tree line, and nope, no horses. Maybe someone rustled them all. No, they're not in the trees, they're at the bottom of the hill. The other side of the hill. The other side of the hill where Jenny specifically pointed out that it was the steepest grade on property...
We have a choice. Go back the way we came and go around, or just go down the hill. I don't want to go back, and it's darned steep going down. Let's call for a helicopter. There's room here to land... We go down the hill. This is how people win darwin awards.
Jenny sez there used to be a path down. Jenny lies. Well, the horses made it, right? I half slide/half fall down the hill from tree to tree and get to the tree line. Gee, look at the horses down there. They look so small. Ah, the irony that we could have walked a quarter-mile around the hill instead of up and over it. We might have walked just as much as getting up the hill via the switchback.
We eventually sorta parallel the slope for a while, and eventually go straight down the slope. At the bottom, Jenny can get Tess, but the others walk away. Nice. We walk Tess down to the next gate, and Jenny gets a horse named "Murphy". These are the two she wants to take to another pasture, but a third horse just comes out the gate and wants to go along.
We walk the horses across the farm to a holding pen outside the house. Walking Murphy wasn't different than walking a dog, only horses don't stop at every tree and lift a leg.
Still, the stairs at the room at Edgar Evins would remind me of this trip... Did I mention you had to go up stairs just to go to the bathroom at night? I looked it up when I got home. It's about a 390 foot elevation. (That's 39 stories for us city-folk.) No, I'm not complaining. I knew this job was dangerous when I took it.
Swine and Cattle
Pigs never used to scare me until I saw Deadwood. When they sit there and stare at you, I never thought of the 'looking at you as food' aspect. Then there are those wild boar stories in Louisiana and Florida...Cattle was actually a rare sight on the farm. I saw two cows. We would have to go to another farm they lease to see cows... :-)
Farm Animals - Swine and Cattle
Sheep, goats and the guard dogs
During the evening of my first full day at Peaceful Pastures, Jenny was going to go to the barn. I think I was working on taking the software off of one machine that was going to be decommissioned and given away. I asked if I should come along."I don't think so. I probably won't need any help."
10 minutes later, the FRS radio goes off. It's Jenny. She needs my help. sigh. She sez I can drive there, but I'm not running over any of her animals.
I walk to the barn, and pass through the chicken area. Uh-oh. I soon have some 50 chickens following me. They're waiting for me to trip and fall down, then I'm going to be a future component of an egg. I wonder shortly what it would be like to be pecked to death. I don't trip.
I get to the South Barn. "Jenny?" No answer. I go to the North Barn, and Jenny is holding two just born kids, and is trying to get through the gate to the barn without 20 other goats following. So we get the new kids in the barn with Mom and a guard dog that won't leave the kids. We then attempt to to segregate a bunch of non-pregnant goats from the really pregnant ones. Remember the goat herder puppet scene in The Sound Of Music? It was nothing like that.
I don't think I was cut out to be a goat herder.
Jenny keeps look up at the North slope. There's a pregnant ewe, and she's lagging behind the rest of the flock. She worried something's wrong, like she's miscarrying a lamb. So, we get to go up the North Slope! As soon as we approach the wretched creature moves away, so Jenny determines we have to go *above* the sheep, the try to drive it back to a lower elevation.
I suspect all of this was concocted to get some pictures of the farm. :-)
Two days later, we're in the barn, and we've segregated the mom and two kids born, because one of the kids don't know where it's food is supposed to come from. Really. We have them in a isolated stall. She's bottle fed the kid, but doesn't want the kid to imprint on her. So, she will give the kid lessons on how to get milk from the mother. I end up helping. She corners the mother so it can't move, and has me put one knee in front of mom, and the other knee on the side, and while mom is trapped like that, show the kid where milk comes from.
Had someone taken a picture from the door, I could have been the "Pervert of the Week" for months...
sigh.
Farm Animals - Sheep, Goats and the guard dogs
Peaceful Pastures pictures from my DragonCon trip. It was technically my first trip there, but I only stopped for a few minutes...
Just a couple of miscellaneous pictures. One is of a house I passed on the way to Edgar Evins. The other is a...uh...rubber band used to...uh...make male animals into non-male animals, and I don't mean females.
There should be a link to the video here, sometime in the future...
West Nashville Market
I accompanied Jenny to the West Nashville Market on Saturday morning.
West Nashville Market (Nov 5, 2011)
On the way back from my Sept/Oct 2012 Disney World trip, I stopped by to say hello, and got stuck helping Jenny set up. But I digress. So long as I was there, I took some pictures.
West Nashville Market (Oct 6, 2012)
End Peaceful Pastures Trip - Part 2.
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