Sheer nonsense

 It's shearing time for the sheep, so here is Benbecula, the sheep who lived, after her Spring haircut. Beligerent as ever, I had to tie her up (just for a few minutes) while I hand-sheared her thick, sticky coat.

You staring at me?

She will be more comfortable with the short back and sides, as the weather turns hot.

A Plum Job

Benbecula, the sheep who lived, likes plums. We have a plum tree in her field, so when I'm picking plums it's one for me and one for Benbecula, and one for me and one for Benbecula...

It started with a seed...

...that got caught in Fidget's (the sheep) neck. 

Then some more got caught there, and then Quim the shepherd told me that this is a common problem. Some sheep feed with their heads low down, near the ground - and get covered in the grain that falls out when the rest of the flock eat.

It had become a real problem, so I replaced our tall upright hay feeder with a home-made one, knocked up from scrap wood from around the Croft.

Bits, and a bit of a plan

It's made

It works!

Scrap is SO useful!

Tender moment

"Just nipping down to the butcher to get a bit of meat."

"Get something tender, dear. A nice but of lamb, maybe?"

Millions of households, millions of Saturday mornings. It's the butcher, or it's the supermarket, but the story is the same; a bit of meat for lunch or supper.

We said goodbye to Fat Face the lamb, yesterday, off to the butcher's too...but from the opposite direction.

It's a difficult moment, even when you have been doing it for years. You know that the lamb has had a good life, probably better than millions of other animals, with care and affection and, in the case of Fat Face, a visit to the village to be blessed by the priest on St Anthony's day this February.

You know all of that. And yet it hurts to hand him over to the butcher.

And it should hurt. Because meat production is not some distant, automated, faceless process. The meat you bought this morning in the supermarket used to walk around enjoying the fresh grass and hay. We should treasure it, not just fry it. For those like me who do not want to be vegetarian, we should remember the animal before.

Keeping sheep makes you tender.

Flame of life

Yesterday night we had to put out the flame of life of our wonderful tup, Phoenix. 

He was born here on the Croft on 8th November 2007 the son of a black sheep, Mildred. Black sheep represent good luck here in Catalonia and I was lucky with him. Phoneix was the ram with hay fever, and the father of all the lambs born on the Croft in the last seven years.

Mum, son, and daughter

You learn from animals, and I have learned a lot about sheep from Phoenix. Starting with his birth; I thought that Mildred was just a bit overweight... I went up to the field on that day in November and found a new lamb, and an old sheep (Polly) dead of natural causes. His flame of life ignited as hers went out.

Butt me no buts

And now the cycle has been repeated, although this time with more knowledge - on the part of the humans - about what is going on. For one day before Phoenix' flame was put out a new lamb - we called him Flama - was born.
 

The new flame

The flame of life burns on.

Make hay while the sun shines...

...and it has been shining. Rather too much in fact - today we hit 30ºC at mid day. The Croft is 330m (1,000 ft) above sea level, and even here it's roasting.

Hot spot

 We cropped a record 63 small bales from our two main fields:

Baling hay, the old way...

The sheep have been sheared:

Cool sheep

 It's summer, but it's early, so everyone here in Montseny is starting to worry about forest fires...

Man in Felt Hat

There is no demand for the wool from our Ripollesa sheep.  Each year we have sheared the sheep and then thrown out the wool. Local farmers burn it.

Shear madness

That is, until this year.

This year my friend Jordi asked for our wool. He wanted to try making felt. So we gave him a couple of bags of not-very-clean fleece, full of bits of straw and worse.

And look what he made:

Mediaeval Selfie

My new felt bonnet is like an oven inside - with a hat like this you would be a very comfortable mediaeval peasant, or possibly a cosy Almogàver.

Yes, I know. It's not the latest in headgear fashions. But by goodness it works.

Benbecula and Bramble

 The latest addition to the Croft. Here is Bramble, just 2 hours old...:

We hate to boast...

...but we couldn't resist:

We keep Ripollesa sheep, so we are members of the breeders association, ANCRI. As part of their improvement programme we keep records of lamb births, weights and ages. ANCRI compile all of this data - from 48 farms around Catalonia - so that each of us gets a picture of how well, or not, we are doing.

The 2013 data has just arrived...and the Croft is the most productive Ripollesa farm in Catalona. Yes! Un-B-Leavable!

The numbers: Our "Numerical Productivity" (the numbers of lambs that went to slaughter, divided by the number of ewes) was 1.8 in 2013. The average across the 48 member farms was 1.03.

And of course this is where the boasting ends. We are managing our tiny flock differently from other farms. We don't keep lambs to grow up as ewes - because we have just one male (Phoenix), so if we kept the lambs he would be mating with his own daughters (er, not good.) So all our lambs went to slaughter, boosting our "Numerical Productivity." And the fact that ours is the smallest flock in the data set also makes a difference.

But we are also the top in one other score, which is more relevant: our lambs are the heaviest births in the national Ripollesa flock.  Average birth weight here at the Croft in 2013 was 4.8kg, against the national average of 3.5kg.

All of this is no credit to us, because we are rank amateurs compared with the other Ripollesa shepherds. But it is credit to Pep Martinez, our wonderful vet, who has been able to transmit to us innocents a load of sheep-care knowledge. Thanks Pep!

Ovelia modiale, nou nascut

Ballachulish has given birth to a new Ripollesa lamb, born yesterday :

I've named her Ovelia Modiale in honour of my brother-out-of-law, Jonathan Jarrett whose paper* on the use of cows, sheep and possibly pigs as monetary units in 10th century Catalonia is a must read. Our tiny new lamb (3.8kg at birth, so small) probably is not yet worth a modius of grain, but I'll love her all the same.

Unfortunately when I explained to the residents at the Croft that we were calling her "Ovelia Modiale" they all, er, laughed. So she's to be called "Oli" for short. 

Difficult to imagine this animal currency really working. Here's an early manuscript from Catalonia, cerca 975 AD: 

Shopkeeper: Thank you ma'am. That will be three Bovo soldare and half an Ovelia modiale.
Customer: Half an Ovelia modiale? Not sure I've got the change. Just a moment while I fetch an axe...

Bloody business, shopping.


*Bovo Soldare: A Sacred Cow of Spanish Economic History Re-evaluated, in Naismith, Rory, Martin Allen, and Elina Screen, eds. Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn. Studies in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland. Farnham, Surrey, UK ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014.