Animals vs. Plants

Baa...the bleating of sheep made me sit up with a start! It was too loud and too close. But I didn't think too much about it, took my time getting up and dressed and mosied into the kitchen to put on the coffee pot. The "Baa" had been my alarm clock a full 20 minutes before I intended to get up so I wasn't too happy. The coffee would do the trick and finish the task of waking me up.

But one look out the sliding glass door and my boots were on and I was out the door, forgetting all about coffee and anything else. I didn't even think to grab a jacket. The sheep and goats had somehow escaped their pen and were munching on garden goodies. Oh no!

I quickly chased them back toward their pen wondering how they had escaped since half the herd was still inside.

A quick call to my daughter, the owner of the herd brought her running with a bucket of feed and she was able to bribe them back into the pen. We all decided that they didn't like the grass in the pasture area they had been given the previous night. With the help of cattle panels, my daughter had set up a movable, portable sheep/goat pen and was pasturing the herd on the steep sides of the dam where goats and sheep do a better job of mowing than we can manage to do ourselves.

When all was under control, I did a quick survey of the damage to the garden. Apparently they had just discovered it only minutes before I found them since only a few leaves had been nibbled from places that were unimportant. Whew!

The whole incident reminded me of the time when John was young. He had decided to raise geese. He invested in a large basin so they would have plenty of water, built a fence that he thought would contain them, etc. They were beautiful white creatures. Then one day they escaped and he found them chowing down on his orchids, and other plants. I'm sure they had been planning their attack for some time since they could see the plants enticing them from not too far away. They quickly became dinner the very next day. His plants were too important to him to sacrifice them to the geese.

I'm not sure what we're going to do about the sheep and goats. They are definitely NOT going to become dinner. A fence around the garden as well as a better fence around them is on the horizon.