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There are two things on our farm on the palouse that signify spring is here. The first is the winds. They are always blowing... hard. they usually start in mid February and blow most of the way through March. The upside is that it starts being sunnier here when all the clouds get blown right past you. This morning dawned partly cloudy and surprisingly only mildly windy. Today was the first day that the sun peeked above the hills before HannaMae's bus arrived.
The second thing that signifies spring on the palouse is restless sheep.
Makes sense, right? No more snow covering the ground and things are starting to warm up and grow fresh green grass. WAAAAAY better than all that dusty dry straw they've been eating all winter. Grass, oat or alfalfa, it doesn't matter how much they've been spoiled or not because the fresh green stuff is always better than any type of hay.
The ramboulliets apparently just whine. Baa, Baa, Baa.
The Jacobs are too smart for that. They have learned that sometimes the people hide the good grass outside the fences. ometimes next to the red barn, sometimes over past the gardens. Sometimes the people even hide the grass up the road by Betty's house. The Jacobs have also learned that barbed wire, especially ancient falling down fence, doesn't hurt. Those fences are really more of a suggestion than a rule.
The main reason those fences never have been fixed is because they are on the border with a grain field which happens to be uphill. Those particular neighbors are better than others about plowing more soil downhill on top of the fence but there's still a nice cliff between the edge of their field and the old fence. We are working with our landlord to be allowed to build a new fence for that section on top of the field. We just only have room for so many projects each year.
That all aside, the Jacobs or rather a few particular escape artists, have figured out the easiest sections to climb through. The easiest fix? grab one of our small panel sections, climb the pasture hillside, attach the panel section over the wooly area of fence.
The hard part is to then go find the adventuresome sheep and convince them they need to go home. The first part of spring is easy: there isn't really much grass to argue over. Give it a few weeks and the sheep probably won't believe me anymore...
