Vaccinations, trim the skins and fencing round bales...

The new ewes we got last week need vaccinating against Toxoplasmosis, which is a nasty parasitic protozoa which causes sheep to abort. The vaccine is live so has a shelf life and must be used within 2 hours of opening it, so we pick it up from the vets and head to Wallace field. I’m anticipating getting some practice of injecting sheep, having never done it before and being on a very ‘learn by doing’ farm. No such luck, I am reading the instructions in the packet and discover that it should not be handled by pregnant women (fair enough, causes abortion in sheep, not very good for humans either) or women of ‘childbearing age’. As the only person present that this applies to, me helping goes right out the window. I’m handed a marker spray and told to stay out of the way and mark the ones we have done. No problem, I’m fairly sure I’ll get a chance to practice injecting things at some point. The vaccine that is left after we have finished must be disposed of carefully, by incineration or by boiling. Makes me a little worried about toxoplasmosis, pretty awful stuff, but at least the sheep should be alright now and we shouldn’t lose any lambs to it.

We are bundling up the skins at Willowford. The wool from the many different breeds and crosses is looking lovely so we are having some skins sent off to be tanned and made into rugs. It’s good to use every last bit of the animal and make sure there is no waste, with such lovely wool it would be a shame to not to. They have been cured with salt (salt; wonder mineral) and now need rolling and sending to the tannery. I have a weird surreal moment when I see that the skins still have little legs on them, not something I would have thought about. We trim them off and package them up. Farming is full of weird little moments for someone who doesn’t come from a farming background.

We have round bales at Wallace field. We took another cut from one of the fields and as it was still a little wet had to get it made into what I think of as sausage rolls. Now this makes life a little difficult as we don’t have a tractor so will have trouble transporting them come winter. This is why we love small square bales of hay. But there is a solution to everything and the way round this is to lay each roll on its back with space around it so that we can pop one open and unravel some to put in the quad trailer. This means they need a bit of space in one of the fields. Anyone who has been following my blog will know that there is an obvious problem with this… the cattle and sheep will get into anything that has food in it, as proven by the shed in the hay meadow; now pretty crumpled and suspiciously lacking in hay. A fence is needed. So I am dispatched with instructions to strain two lines of barbed wire onto the posts which were knocked in yesterday, and to fashion some kind of gate to enable access with the quad. It’s my fencing exam! Turns out I can use a monkey strainer unsupervised without decapitating myself, who knew? With a little help from our French student (who has very little English and has never made a fence, but soon catches on) we soon have a very respectable fence around the bales. I am quite ridiculously proud of myself. I do realise that one of the cattle is bound to find a way to destroy it, but at the moment it looks good.