Dearest BOTLiebers,

The cool mornings, the pup under a blanket, and the dinner time sunsets all tell us the same thing: another summer is drawing to a close here at BOTL Farm.  As we put the following touches on our third year here in The House, it occurs to us that we have many words to share with you.  Many words.  Gather round the pixels we will sequentially illuminate, and let us illustrate and elaborate on another general farm update:

The herds live on!  We've got the boys and the girls separated still, but we're getting ready to combine them again for winter to produce next year's baby sheep and baby goats.  We did our best at shearing our own sheep this spring, which is a bit like mutton busting while trying to use hair trimmers on a shag carpet soaked in crisco.  We're looking forward to another attempt at that this fall.  Except for on our boy breeder sheep.  He's huge.  Shearing him is going to be like giving a haircut while riding a bull.  Several members of the sheep herd have been selected for a free trip to sheep camp this fall.  They're looking forward to the trip, and we're looking forward to the neatly packed boxes they'll return in!

Editor's note... this was published a few weeks after it was written... Sorry about the timing, oops.

Greetings!  It's been a long winter since our last update, but spring is beginning to sprung and with spring comes BABIES.

Tess, one of our seasoned ewes, gave birth yesterday evening to twins.  As Experienced Farmers who have owned sheep for several months, we totally knew it was going to happen.  She had mostly stopped eating yesterday morning, was hanging out by herself for most of the day, and when she finally went into the shelter she growled at anyone who tried to join her.  Tess and Goaty McGoatFace (GMGF) seemed to compromise in the afternoon that GMGF could sit half-in, half-out of the shelter as long as GMGF was quiet.  That's quite a compromise for Goaty.

By late afternoon, Tess had started to occasionally twitch, gasp open her mouth, and then grind her teeth -- I don't know much about giving birth, but i told myself that her contractions had started.  However, our farming mentor had assured us that most of her sheep give birth overnight.  Whew, that was going to be lots of hours of contractions.

So we did what responsible farmers would do and went to the bar to hang out with our Friends and eat chicken wings, thinking that we'd be back in time for the birth later at night.

When we returned to the farm and exited the car, it was immediately apparent that there were new tiny animals and one of them was giving pathetic little cries.  One of the twins had gotten separated from Tess and was still wet and sticky (yuck) and was trying vainly to nurse from Sesvanna (who named these ridiculous sheep), who hasn't given birth yet and was having none of it.  We were able to scoop up the sticky twin and put it back down by Tess, who started licking and nursing it.  A great success.

One more farm story: so we're hard-boiling extra/cracked/small eggs for the pigs, right?  Pigs LOVE eggs. 

Two days ago, we took out a bucket of eggs for the pigs, but it appeared they had slept out in the forest somewhere because they weren't around the feeding area and weren't in their shelter.  We said fine, whatever, they'll come up for food and water at some point and eat the eggs then.

New farm lesson: crows LOVE eggs.  A group of nasty, too-intelligent-for-their-own-good crows proceeded to spend the morning trying to figure out how to efficiently hold whole, hard boiled eggs and fly at the same time.  They ended up scattering at least 5 of the eggs over the two fields and nearby forest, which pup was happy to run around and find and eat.  It was like pup-easter.  It's tuff to tell how many the crows successfully stole and ate.

So yesterday in the morning, we go out, no pigs.  So we put a lid on the egg bucket and set it outside the pig area, thinking we'll put them out when we sees the pigs return at some point that day so they'll eat them right away.  The pigs never returned, so last night while we were paparazzi-ing Tess we put the eggs out for the pigs, thinking the crows wouldn't eat them in the dark.

This morning we go out with another bucket of eggs and last night's eggs are still there. Those lazy goddamn pigs had already gone to sleep in the woods and hadn't woken up or returned to their feeders yet.

So we went to find them.  They were all in their pig-pile about 200 feet from the feeding area, but didn't seem inclined to get up just because a farmer was approaching.  So we let pup in.  She got free pig-butt-licks and snout licks because they still wouldn't get up.  Sheesh.  Pigs are not morning animals.  We kept trying to get them to wake up and go eat eggs for about 10 minutes before it worked.  At one point, I had a foot under one of them and was urging it up while pup was licking its butt.  It just laid there, placidly snorting and steaming. 

​Hello there good person.  Let's have a general update on the goings-on here at the Back Of The Line Farm.  Come with me, dive right in:

1) The chickens.  The chickens may be our greatest success.  Birds are gross.  Have you ever met a creature that has such disregard for where it poops, and that has an attention span that facilitates transition from dedicated guardian parent to clueless lost dinosaur in just a few seconds?  All you have to do is reach under their butts and grab their eggs.  It's kind of amazing this species could ever survive in the wild.  Anyhooo, it turns out we're having grand success at producing eggs, and we're currently collecting between 60 and 80 per day.

In addition to the state-funded fencing grant we wrote about before, the good people of Connecticut have decided to invest further in the BOTL Farm infrastructure and we have been awarded a second grant for animal paddocking and road construction.  The internal roads will be used to support cement trucks to pour concrete footings for our barn.  We are very much looking forward to our future barn, as it will reduce the amount of feed and equipment storage that we currently have in our garage, and in the contractor's trailer we purchased and parked in the lower field.  Have you ever tried to dig through a contractors trailer to find the right bag of minerals to feed to your sheep?  It's not a good life for a farmer, nor for a trailer.  The trailer wants to be on a job site, cooking Hot Pockets in the generator-powered microwave and hosting skyscraper blueprints.  The farmers want a barn.  These things too, we wish shall come to pass.  Other dark specters loom over the fate of BOTL Farm, but alas, let us not dwell on why the barn construction is financially delayed, and let that battle rage on silently in the background much as Godzilla fought Mothra and Optimus Prime in Pacific Rim 3.  Instead, let us look with optimistic fervor on that which we can positively influence in the world.  Like delicious eggs, and thinking to yourself "how can I eat eggs for every meal today?"

And animal paddocking, our next great adventure!  Currently animal moves still involve manually setting up and tearing down electro-net for each fence line.  Let me paint a picture for you.  Imagine it's 5°C (42 deg F), raining lightly, and in your hands you have a hundred pounds of electric and nylon fencing and you're trying to drag it through a pasture of pricker bushes and poison ivy to set it up again in a straight line, while being berated by the bleating of animals that don't understand why they can't eat the new grass already.  Also this has to be done every day.  We're looking forward to proper animal paddocking to help stream-line this effort.

Until next time, keep fighting the good fight, believers in the BOTL !

Hello there BOTL Farm fan club.  Today we explore a tale of success and failure, a story of victory and defeat.  A tale of lovely stock and tail.  Let's talk about sheep.

When the farm was first established in the summer of 1965, we wrote a business plan using a primitive text editor, similar to vim and not at all like a typewriter, but actually maintained by Microsoft.  The business plan said BOTL Farm would primarily focus on the development and sales of swine products.  We self identify as pork enthusiasts and our hobbies include home-made sausage and bacon, and hosting an annual pig roast.  An aspiring pig farmer never imagines they will own sheep.  Sheep are not pigs, and pigs do not need to be sheared, and nobody has ever eaten sheep bacon.

We were going upon our merry ways, doing BOTL Farm things, cutting down trees, collecting giant buckets of eggs, trying to figure out how to make a bee hive live to celebrate a birthday, doing cold laser therapy on our dog's shoulder and our farm laborer's back, and that's when it hit us.  Like a phone call from our farm mentor.  Our mentor, guide, hero, inspiration, and general moral compass had decided to quit farming and move to a distant island in the Pacific and buy a sailboat.  After decades of building a successful farm, teaching us everything we knew about stock piling yogurt cups and how to mend electro-net, she was throwing in the towel.  Also she wanted to give us sheep.  We didn't want sheep, but we also do whatever she says.

Dearest believer in the BOTL, 
 
Have you ever awoken at the break of dawn, stepped out of bed, stretched your legs, and thought to yourself "I really wish I could hear some screaming right now"?  Oh man, you should get goats.

Goats serve an uncountable number of uses on the farm.  Really just two.  They eat poison ivy, and they make a delicious osso buco [Editor: At BOTL Farm, we have no expectations that our goats will learn to cook].

Hi there, poultry connoisseur.  We should have told you long ago, but BOTL Farm has chickens.  A lot of chickens.  We've had them for so long that they wander both the pasture and the freezer.  You may ask yourself, why have we been keeping this information from you?  We have no excuse.  All we can offer you is apologies, and the story that follows... a story of the birds and the bees.  Just kidding, the bees all died last fall.  Let's talk about the birds.

​​Today we begin with a poem:


    There once was a sawmill from the north,
    A tide of joyful lumber it brought forth,
    It sawed with a study blade,
    A feat of board feet it made,
    And now we sell lumber of course !

This concludes the poem.  Now we will move on to a hypothetical scenario.  Imagine you were a young farmer with stars in your eyes, a dream in your heart, and two mortgage payments.  What would you do?  That's right, you would watch the sun rise each morning, watch it set each evening, and try to monetize everything around you.

And so it was that we wondered if we could sell trees.  Building 4400 linear feet of perimeter fence and clearing two potential barn sites had left us with piles and piles of logs: