Michele Hewitson
Our babies take a step towards sheephood when their curls hit the woolshed floor.
The lambs, Xanthe, Elizabeth Jane and Shirley, have had their first hair cut. We knew they were going to have to be shorn, otherwise they would have been vulnerable to fly strike and might have ended up looking like Rasta sheep with particularly ratty albino dreads.
But we knew, too, that they would lose their darling lamb curls and so be another step along the way to being sheep. And, so, boo-hoo.
The trio, and others without names that we refer to as the wild lambs, all went back to Miles the sheep farmer’s farm to be shorn. None of them had previously made the trip on foot. The wild lambs had come to us on a trailer, whereas Xanthe and Elizabeth
Jane arrived by the sheep equivalent of stretch limousine: in the passenger seat of a car. This may partly account for them believing themselves to be celebrity sheep.
This time, Miles, shepherdess Carolyn and Red the sheep dog herded the wild lambs along the road. But because our lambs are so domesticated (Miles might say spoilt), they did not have to walk with the mob. They are now too big to go in a car so we had to catch them, load them into Miles’ trailer and drive them the five minutes up the road to his farm. I would, I announced, ride in the trailer with the lambs. That was fine, said Miles, but I might accidentally be shorn. I didn’t go in the trailer.
Catching the lambs was not a problem. The trick is biscuits, preferably Snax or rosemaryflavoured wheaten crackers. You can get a greedy lamb to do just about anything if a biscuit bribe is involved. I always have biscuits in my pockets and so I always have biscuit crumbs in my pockets, along with other sundry items picked up along the way: particularly splendid chicken feathers, bits of plants I have dead-headed, secateurs, bits of twine for tying up plants, raisins for chick- ens … I am turning into William, of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books, whose pockets were always stuffed with an assortment of equally useful things: a penknife, stones for chucking at rival boy gangs, ancient dust-covered sweeties … Well, you never know what will come in handy, or when.
In the summer, I like to listen to podcasts of that quintessentially, often eccentrically, British radio show Gardeners’ Question Time on BBC Radio 4. Like the pockets of those of us who muck about in the countryside, it is full of bits and pieces that might one day be handy. Or not. My favourite panellist is Bob Flowerdew, who is a mad recycler – his potting bench is a defunct freezer – and whose garden sounds as though it owes more to a junkyard aesthetic than any typically charming English garden. He once experimented with grafting cabbages onto other vegetables in an attempt to prevent club root. I don’t think I’ll be trying that. Not that I could find a cabbage, or any other vege, in my plot. We have had a summer of torrential rain followed by searingly hot days. It is like living in the Bible. Visiting the vege plot is akin to going on an expedition to the Amazon rainforest. It wouldn’t surprise me to find monkeys living in there.
Still, the agapanthus are thriving. That is one good reason to live in the country. In Auckland, if you grow agapanthus, you are regarded as an environmental thug – and fair enough, they escape and get into the native bush and behave like colonialists. Here, there is no bush for them to conquer, so we grow and enjoy them – yet another reason to never again live in Auckland. The longer we are country people, the more our root stock is firmly grafted to our plot of Masterton soil. We are as happy as the aggies.
The shorn lambs returned by trailer looking like different animals. They looked, in fact, like a Bob Flowerdew experiment: elegant but very strange goats crossed with sheep. What they do not look like is our baby lambs.
You can get a greedy lamb to do just about anything if a biscuit bribe is involved.