Day Labor

Well, sort of. Today was the beginning of the beta test phase for the vineyard sheep. We're starting them in a small patch of the vineyard (four rows of the new 2009 vines) to see how they do and how best to use them. Use Them? That sounds terrible! I know, but really it's a win-win. They love weeds. I hate weeds. Grapes hate weeds. The sheep could care less where they are as long as they have something to eat. They might as well be in my vineyard.

These sheep are so funny to watch. You really only have limited options in how to direct them or get them to cooperate with you. Mainly, that involves, again, the food and the bucket. They will pretty much go in the same general direction as you, as long as you have the bucket and are shaking the feed in it. They startle easily though, and will go scattering off in all directions. They hate to be apart from each other so as soon as the perceived danger passes, they clump back into a big woolly blob again.

Greg went out to the vineyard this morning and made some final adjustments to the hot wire and came back to the house. I figured he could follow us and sort of push us along if things didn't go exactly according to plan when I let them out of the gate.

We fed Sophie and took her out of her pen on her leash, opened the main sheep enclosure gate, and I started shaking the hell out of that bucket. We walked as a group toward the pasture gate. I opened it, walked out and off we went. From the gate to the vineyard is about 400 feet or so, straight down the north fence line. Greg and Sophie brought up the rear and when one or more sheep stopped to eat on the way, he encouraged them forward. We all walked out to the vineyard, through the gap in the hot wire and down one of the vine rows. Once they were all in, Greg closed the gap, completing the circuit of the hot wire. I dumped the feed on the ground and stepped back. They swarmed the little pile of food and I scooted around them and stepped over the hot wire, which is about 12 inches off the ground. He has it pulled taut and it's definitely live.

Once the sheep finished their snack, they got to work eating the weeds (an overwhelming task at this point because we did not spray these four rows to kill the weeds when we sprayed the other 8 rows). They ate, and ate, and ate, and ate and then took a nap. Then they ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, and then took another nap. So it goes. They work when they want, and when they need a break, they just take one. I think these are Union sheep. When one flops down for a nap, they all do. It's hot today and I realized that there really isn't anything out there that provides them with shade so I took an 8 x 6 blue tarp and some bungee cords, and rigged up a nice shady tent for them, using the four posts of two adjacent H-braces on the north end of the vineyard.

Greg and I watched for a while to see which one of them tested out the hot wire first. My bet was on Cocoa. He has been the most inquisitive of the three lambs, and can't seem to keep from poking his nose into anything new that enters his environment. Like the other day with my tool belt. I had set it down on the ground and he immediately came over and checked out each pocket.

Anyway, it didn't take long for him to get pushed into the hot wire by the yearling wether I named Tebow. From the moment these sheep got here, Tebow has been head butting the lambs all over the place. He does it if they're in his way, or if they're trying to eat out of the same food pan, or just for the heck of it. He has a thing about ramming them. They just seem to take it in stride, like it's a normal thing. He does it to Jill too but she just turns around and knocks him right back, and I think she has at least 40 lbs on him at this point. She is a much more docile sheep but she is definitely at the top of the pecking order in this little flock.

Tebow knocked Cocoa into the hot wire and he actually went under it, and it zapped him. After a few moments of panic, he managed to leap over it back into the row, none the worse for the experience. Sheep hate to be singled out so once he was outside the hot wire, all he could think about was getting back in. The adult sheep seem to understand the hot wire already. It looks just like the hot wire at the farm they came from. The lambs apparently will need a few shocks before they figure it out. Later in the day, Tebow knocked Pancho into it and Pancho was touching two or three other sheep at the time so I think they all got a dose of it.

We are keeping Sophie tethered up there so she doesn't blunder into the hot wire. As long as she's there, the sheep should be safe. I don't think I will leave them unattended up there until we see how this is going to go. From what we've seen today, they will need to be out there a lot in order to gain control of the weed situation. Next year, we will start putting them in there a lot sooner and they should be able to keep things from getting out of hand.

There is one weed species that gets a very early start, and in fact it goes dormant but does not die over the winter, and then comes to life, even before all the snow has melted. It is the only green thing in the vineyard in March. Even the grass is still dormant at that point. The sheep should be able to clean those weeds up pretty quick so they don't become the problem they became this year. They started off as cute little dark green plants, and by the end of March had put out lovely white flowers that made the vineyard look like a postcard from Burgundy. Then, almost overnight, out came the seed pods. We did not deal with these particular weeds early enough so of course they got away from us and released their seeds. We'll be seeing them again next year as a result, but next year the sheep will be ready for them.

The other thing I will need to do is run the mower through the rows the sheep are currently working on, cutting the grass between the vine rows pretty short. I'll probably only have to do it this year because the sheep should be able to keep up with the weeds and the grass if I put them out there in late March or early April. I noticed that the lambs were focusing on the grass instead of the weeds, and I think by cutting the grass very short, they will look for more interesting things to eat in the vine rows. This is one great big experiment and some things will work and other things won't. We'll just have to try different things until we figure out how best to work with these sheep. You cannot make them do anything they don't want to do. If there is a sheep user's manual, that statement is on page one.

They seem pretty content to stay in there for now, and as long as there's something they want to eat, I shouldn't have any problem containing them with just the one strand of hot wire.

Hot wire (no not that one)

When I was a kid, I loved to spend weeks in the summer with my Aunt Bibby and Uncle Joe. They had a farm with cows, horses, chickens, a huge garden, and what seemed at the time like a million acres of land. They lived in a big farm house and the entire second floor was used as an attic and man was there ever some cool stuff up there. I could spend hours up there poking around in boxes of Life Magazine and newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Incredible stuff! I never went home from there without some treasure I'd dug up in the attic.

When I wasn't sleuthing around in the cubby holes in the backs of closets I was roaming all over the farm. Yes, part of the point of being there was to earn some summer cash helping out collecting eggs in the chicken house (imagine the scene from Napoleon Dynamite without the pitcher of raw eggs) but the majority of my time was spent crawling around the barn loft, messing around with the cows, trying to get them to chase me, and basically pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Anyway, hot wire. The whole point of getting my miniature sheep was so they could work in the vineyard, eating weeds and mowing grass instead of me having to spray herbicide for weeds and run the mower for several hours per week. In order for the sheep to stay where I want them, I need to have some form of partition so they only work in the rows where I want them to mow/weed and not go running off all over the property. Originally I had thought about using several wires attached to the vineyard posts, about 8 inches apart, forming a multi-wire fence and blocking off the ends with cattle panels or snow fence or something else that would be easy to move, but we're talking literally about several miles of galvanized wire to do the whole vineyard that way. After visiting the vineyard where I bought my the sheep, I noted that they were using a single strand of electric fence to keep the sheep where they want them. When they wanted to move the electric fence, they just rolled it up on a spool and moved it to the new rows. (by the way, that also opens up the potential of never having to mow the yard again).

Back to Aunt Bibby and Uncle Joe's farm. Back in the day, when I was around 9 or 10, I had my first encounter there with electric fence. I happened to reach out and touch it after being told by my cousins, who shall remain nameless, that it was not plugged in. After being knocked off my feet by the jolt, and vowing revenge, (and also crying), I learned a valuable lesson about electricity.

Greg spent part of last weekend attaching the hot wire to four rows of the new vines, which have yet to be sprayed for weeds. He closed the circuit and ran everything up to a battery charged by a solar panel. Neither one of us has had the nerve to touch it to make sure it is working; me, because I know very well what that feels like, and Greg, because he doesn't! We'll know soon enough when we put the sheep out there this weekend. We will both be working out there training the new vines to the trellis and we'll see for certain whether this little sheep experiment is going to work. Based on my observations in the pasture thus far, the sheep seem to select weeds over grass when they have the choice of both. In fact, I've watched them eat some incredibly unpalatable looking stuff, including the noxious, skin-shredding, multiflora rose that is endemic here, as well as the wild gooseberries, also covered in thorns, which we have all over the place. Oh, and they love poison ivy. More about that later...

We still have the grow tubes on the new vines so they are safe from nibbling, and once the vines are mature, any leaves that grow on the trunk and any water sprouts that come up from the base, down low, are fair game for the sheep because they need to be pruned off anyway. We've set the cordon wire (the lowest horizontal wire where the vine's lateral arms grow, and where the fruit develops) at about 42 inches which should be high enough to be out of reach of the sheep. They do stretch their necks and reach up when eating sometimes but I don't think they can reach the cordons. If they can, I'll just move them higher. Once the vines are weighted down with big, ripe clusters of grapes, the sheep will have to be taken out of the vineyard, as the grapes will prove to be too irresistible to pass up, even if it means climbing up on each other to get them. Based on what I've read, until the grapes are actually almost ripe, and full of sugar, there isn't much interest in them from the sheep, or the deer for that matter. Once the ripening process starts, all bets are off.

From the moment I brought the sheep home, I've been using a little bit of sheep feed in a bucket to condition them to follow me. It worked. They practically bowl me over now when I walk into their pen shaking the green bucket. They make an incredible amount of racket over a couple of handfuls of grain. I guess the pellets are sort of like crack cocaine. It's hilarious to watch them inhale their food. The lambs in particular sound like little piglets when they're eating. My plan is to lead them out to the vineyard with the bucket of feed, (they are powerless to resist it) into the hot-wire enclosed rows, dump the bucket, and close the circuit. Based on what I've seen thus far, this should work. I've managed to cause a stampede all the way across their pasture just by shaking the bucket a couple of times. Even Jilly Bean comes thundering as fast as her stubby legs can carry her so she doesn't miss out on the treats. She is rotund and looks more like a hippopotamus than a sheep when she is running. I don't understand it because she runs everywhere she goes. She never walks. She shouldn't be fat at all.

See? That's her on the right!