What has changed? Well for one thing, my relationship with Tom ended late last year. Ultimately we have grown into such different people with different thoughts and goals… while we’ve learned a lot together it was simply time to move on. I’m still dealing with various thoughts and feelings associated with this but I assume this is pretty much standard when you’ve spent so long with someone.

With that came a refocusing of my life and my priorities. With only one pair of hands on the farm, it is simply impossible for me to both fund this place AND run it as a farm, so I have had to put my farming dreams to the side for the time being. I struggled a bit to find a home for the sheep but I do believe I have found a nice farm for them. The other animals were easy to place, save for the Maremma puppies who I am still trying to rehome… but I have faith that this will work itself out.

During all of this time I have been reflecting very deeply on myself, who I am, what I want in life. Deep thoughts, the truly scary kind that most people rarely if ever experience, let alone when they’re 24. At first it is hard to be critically honest with yourself, your failures can pile up and seem daunting and overwhelming, especially when you put yourself at the bottom of the pile. But with a simple shift in perspective, accepting that your failures are simply a path to future success, you can start to understand that even by not succeeding at that moment you have gained valuable knowledge and experience which helps shape who you are and who you want to become. The only way you DON’T gain from failing is if you DENY it, find other reasons, scapegoats, anything to distract yourself from the truth of the matter.

The truth really does set you free.
Also, it IS better to have love and lost than to never have loved at all.
Turns out a lot of those sayings have good amounts of validity…

It is already the second month of 2011 and the wave of change continues to sweep over us. I find myself now in a new romantic relationship I never imagined I would be in! I have developed some plans of things I want to focus on this year and accomplish. I am taking steps to ensure success, but also taking time to look back on the trail I’ve made to ensure I’m walking the right path in the right way.

Throughout the past half year, and two months specifically, I have been in the midst of becoming a new person. I am finally getting ready to emerge from this cocoon and show you my new beautiful wings!   My deepest thanks and appreciation go out to all my friends and family who’ve stood by, offered a hand, given me words of support, and were simply there for me during these times when often I couldn’t be there for myself. Your support means the world to me, and I will do my best to honor and respect it, from this point out.

Watch out world! Here we come!

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October. So far it’s consisted of an awesome event (Beau’s Oktoberfest) and another awesome event (Laura and Devon’s wedding). I fused them together and captured it in this picture. The flowers are officially gone and done, their death was quick but I enjoyed their beauty and smell for the days they were with us. And yes this is the bride’s bouquet which means I officially have one bride’s bouquet credit karmically speaking. Here’s hoping something comes of that.

I took Frankie and Ruby to the slaughterhouse. Here is his last picture, being rowdy as always. The two also met some very nice pigs in their final home. Frankie is delicious, only a mild flavour of lamb, replaced by the memories of a delicious and soft beef. Ruby needs a bit more tender cooking to find her peak of deliciousness but we’ll get there.

Both of their hides are upstairs in my barn, being worked on for further use down the road.

I feel so much greater of a person for having raised animals that now provide my meals. At the same time I find it very interesting seeing the variety of people’s reactions to this fact. They range the gamut from passionately supporting (such as wanting to get right into the act of slaughtering or birthing) through to absolute repulsion (such as admonishing me for eating “a pet”). What I find interesting is that so far the most negative/critical feedback has come not from vegetarians or vegans who already oppose animal use, the folks I figured would get riled up, but regular old people who buy regular old meat in the grocery store, traditional consumers. At first I was puzzled – how can they think what I am doing is in any way wrong or bad when they too eat meat? I respect if not exceed all laws regarding animal welfare, I give them a great life.

Thinking on this point actually lead me to a revelation about this topic: it is precisely because I am giving a face and name and a great life to what was previously thought of as a final product, I am re-instilling that relationship between meat and animals that had been all but eliminated from grocery stores, and in doing so I am allowing people to re-evaluate their purchased meat and consider what kind of a life that animal had. Sure it might be awkward at first to meet and pet a live animal knowing that it will end up as your dinner, but it becomes easier once one understands that these animals aren’t pets like dogs and cats, they are livestock whose existence revolves around an exchange of some kind. For some animals that exchange can be done while leaving the animal alive and intact, such as shearing wool, milking a cow or goat, or collecting eggs. For others the animals give us their largest item of value, their bodies, and with it their lives. In return we ensure those animals have indeed the best life, free of trouble and disease, left to roam with their own kind and eat the green grass under the warm sun.

To me, this is much more fair than the way most meat is actually produced, which is to say, produce as much meat as possible with as little financial costs as possible, viewing the animal as a meat factory instead of a creature that is deserving of some form of freedom.

I’ll take a moment out here to express the fact that while I agree with the ethical treatment of animals, I do NOT in any way support the organization PETA, who IMO are a group of lying hypocrites who strangely value animal rights over women’s rights. They are just one example of how you cannot trust any name or label. An ‘organic’ lamb might be made to suffer with a heavy wormload instead of being given a chemical de-wormer to alleviate the burden. A ‘free range’ chicken only has to be provided with access to the outdoors, it doesn’t have to actually use it.

Similarly I don’t believe becoming a vegetarian or vegan is the solution to animal mistreatment. All that does is leave your ration of product available for the next mainstream food eater, of which there are many. By choosing to support ethically raised animals, and by telling your friend when they eventually inquire as to why you’re not buying the grocery store’s discounted meat of the week, you vote with your dollar; that’s the only thing that modern industrial agriculture cares about. But purchase wisely, don’t rely on a misleading label on a container, go out and find a local farm where you can see for yourself how the animals are treated.

Eventually, as I continue to establish and grow my farming business, I want to move towards a policy of complete disclosure regarding how my animals and crops are raised. It is not enough to want to claim your product is organic/free-range/nonGMO/whatever other trendy label is popular this week, because that doesn’t mean it is the best for the animal or crop! I want to let you make that evaluation for yourself, with your own two eyes, because I respect that you are wise enough to make that decision. If I give an animal a chemical treatment, I will tell you that. I mean I can tell you these things anytime, but I want to make this sharing of information a key tenet in my food production.

Ultimately the success of my non-industrial farming relies on educating consumers about the food they eat, where it comes from, how it was made, how it was treated, and how it got to be on your dinner plate. In that sense it is sort of like The Food Matrix: the vast majority of people are willfully ignorant of their food sources nowadays, being unplugged can come as a shock to many and an unpleasant one at that, but ultimately I believe it is more important to see the way the world really is than to live your life in a shrouded imagined world. That way you know you are actually living true to life instead of living in a false and unsustainable dream.

It’s amazing that we as first world humans are at this point. Industry has done such a great job at disassociating meat from animals and culture has advanced so quickly in a century that it’s actually a challenge to try and recollect a time when the majority of humans farmed in some way or another. As I’ve mused before, I can understand why a farming family would want to send their children into the city for a bigger and better future, and I can understand why our civilization is ultimately more effective in its modern distributed format, I appreciate these things. But nothing comes without a cost, and I have a large suspicion that the cost in abandoning agriculture (whether large or small) is related to things like an increase in obesity and depression rates, an increase in food waste rates, a decrease in spending power, etc. And of course an increase in people who can’t recognize a bean bush growing in the ground.

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• Happy Chickens for sale
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Today I’m going to talk a bit about how I administrate my websites nowadays and how that has changed over the past decade and a half.

This blog, my HPRF site  and my yarn blog all run on a content management system called WordPress. What is a CMS? It’s a tool that lets you manage the content apart from the visual display and functionality of the website. A good analogy would be to think of the way a pressroom works. Each writer works on the content of their story and hands it off to the editor, who wraps it up in the newspaper’s theme and presents it as one whole work.

This simple concept has changed the way I’ve chosen to develop websites.

I was a relatively early adopter of HTML given that I was like 8 at the time. Back in those days content and presentation were one and the same, you had one file with both things and to change one you could potentially mess up the other. Jump forward five years or so and while the adoption of the internet increased you still had one webmaster who was responsible for combining content and presentation. It was taxing work.

Nowadays though, with the adoption of the internet and blogging and social media in general, people are more confident with their abilities to create and manage the content. But it’s still a great idea to keep the presentation separated off in its own area, that way it can be changed independent of the content and vice versa.

Combine this concept with the open-source movement and you get a project like WordPress. Here’s another analogy for you, making a website with WordPress is a bit like going to a Build-a-bear store and making your custom stuffed animal. There are shelves of themes, tweaks, and plugins for you to modify your site with, and in the end you will end up with a website suited to your liking. As a designer I love this because I hate reinventing the wheel. If I want to integrate my Flickr pictures, I can simply install a Flickr plugin, authenticate the plugin with the Flickr site itself, and bam it’s done. Now with one click I can insert a picture from my Flickr account. The ease of plugins like this lets me as an admin improve my site constantly to end up with a great user experience.

This is what the screen looks like for writing a post on my blogs and sites. You can see I have my Flickr pictures loaded in below and clicking on them puts it right into the post!

And thankfully my skills as a coder and designer are not for naught. While there are tons of themes available for free and for money, having HTML and CSS skills lets you create and modify themes on your own. So I can still build you the exact site you want if you started out with a sketch, it will simply be powered by WordPress underneath, which lets you come in and put your content whenever and wherever you want.

Speaking of which, I have some time nowadays so if you’d like to have a website created or know of someone who does, give me a shout! From little personal family blog to serious money-making websites I can do them all for you.

In the coming days I’ll be posting more posts here about my WordPress love, such as listing out some of my most valued plugins and tweaks.

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• Project 2 – New Website
• Up and running
• New Theme

I’ve been spending the past weeks doing tons of farming stuff: deworming the sheep, harvesting the garden as it produces stuff, and trying to figure out what the next steps are for my farm’s growth.

This is Lee. He is my new Border Collie. We’ve been together for just under two weeks now and I think we make a great team together, me being an eager-to-train person and him being a dog that needs a bit more of a firm hand. Every time we go out he gets compliments and snuggles. The last time we went out he met a fellow breeder who then wanted his contact information for a breeding in a few months’ time. Just like that he makes friends and clients!

Mom and I picked up two sheep from Bill’s farm: Macaroon, pictured here, and Rolo, not pictured. I am heading back down there on Thursday to pick up another two sheep, one more ewe and a ram. This will bring my numbers to 12 in the first year. Amazingly fast yes but I really do love these gals and guys.

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Here is the second set of stamps I carved for the stamp swap I participated in. This person’s theme was tattoo flash. Ideas that went through my mind included a I love Mom tattoo, the traditional anchor tattoo, and even a koi fish. The idea of a pin up girl was right in there of course. I really like how the rose turned out, you can see the closed-up center portion very clearly, though truth be said I am proud of all of these stamps. I think my pin up girl started looking a bit like Counselor Troi from Star Trek TNG but hey that’s life!

Best of all, Canada Post delivered these stamps in under 18 hours, from dropping it off here in Alfred to being signed for in Toronto. That certainly made up for the $8 tracking number I chose to put on it!

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• Hola and stamps!
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But here is a special post with some pictures of crafts I’ve done recently.

I participated in a stamp swap with two other Canadians. One partner sent me this quartet of stamps. She did a great job on my logo stamp and it’s so hefty that it stamps wonderfully and authoritatively. I will get a lot of use out of it! In fact I used all but the sewing machine stamp when I replied to a friend’s wedding invitation. Yup, I stamped the heck out of the return envelope

This is  a set I made for one of my partners. It’s The Veggie Bunch. They were super fun to carve. I’ll make up a set for myself eventually.

I am waiting for the second partner to post pictures of my stamps before I post the picture here. Her theme was tattoos, so those stamps were things I had never really carved before and were a lot of fun to carve as well.

Oh, and what’s that secret stamp on the letter? It’s a sneak preview of one stamp in my first series of Farm Sketches prints! I’ve been casually sketching and carving stamps based on living here on the farm. In the near future I will be making some prints involving these stamps for people to purchase. Since most of the proceeds go right back into the farm and animals, it’s a great way to support the farm and get something of value in return. These prints will range in size from business card individual prints to 8.5×11 montages, and as with most of my creations, will be available in the best of colors: rainbow!

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• New Stamps
• Yoga part two, and a note about stamps
• More Swap Stamps

I love my little boys! Look at Volcano God! Those tender loving eyes! That pink nose! (Yes, it changed from black to pink, how magical!) That timid but inquisitive attitude! That frosted mouth and white ears! That soft and luxurious fleece! And best of all, he’s now in the mood to come and say hello (if you don’t spook him by moving suddenly) and accept pets and snuggles. I feel confident that I have picked a great herd sire. He’s like a super better nicer version of Frankie.

Who would have ever thought sheep would give me so much pleasure? Look at little Peebs. Well he’s not so little anymore! I can still pick him up, barely, but the next time I do so I’ll probably end up injuring myself. He’s still as full of love as always, and he’ll tell you when you aren’t snuggling him enough. Look at that gorgeous fleece. It’s crimpy and jet black at its base, although I did see one grey hair mixed in so I expect he’s not a pure super black. This is the kind of sheep I want to raise, personable but not aggressive, soft and loving and happy.

And my golden boy, Price. The timidest of them all, he still won’t come up for pets. But since his older brother is, I expect he will soon. His horns are growing faster than Volcano God’s. He also has a chocolate brown nose. How can twins from the same mom and dad be so different! This is part of the wonders of Shetland sheep, their natural color spectrum and varied genetics means your sheep aren’t carbon copies of each other.

I honestly had no clue how happy these guys would make me. No matter how you feel, no matter what the weather is like, these guys are always there ready to distract you from your worries. They have no worries of their own. They live happy fun-filled lives. In fact, I’m pretty sure sheep are happy batteries, they save up their daily happiness and share it with you when you snuggle them. I never knew that my life was incomplete without these sheep. Now that they are with me, I could never think of letting them go.

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• Shetland Ram for Sale or Trade

Cleaning out the barn by hand is probably the most hellish task I’ve ever had to do in my life, especially when the weather is 40 degrees C. And that’s with a ton of help. Being a farmer without any type of heavy implement seriously impedes your ability to do anything. As a farmer, you need to spend money to make money, else you’re spending time to get a fraction of the benefit.

One of the spotted hens hatched her eggs yesterday. We moved her inside just to be safe. There’s 4 so far and 3 eggs yet to be hatched – two gold ones, one black and gold one, and one black one. How cute

Jane and her duckies are doing great. The duckies grow bigger every day. They still have little tiny wings, and when they get wet they stand up high on their duck feet and flap their little nubs around, just like a T-Rex would. It’s so adorable!  Jane has gone back to cooing instead of squeaking, and is willing to fly up to the deck for food again.

The turkeys are doing great, but as they get bigger it becomes so apparent how dumb they are. We will be letting them outside soon, clipping a wing to make sure they don’t fly away.

Rabbits are enjoying the outside weather, though I think I’ll be bringing Riker inside with this hot weather.

I am participating in a stamp swap with two other Canadian gals. I have completed carving a set of stamps for one partner and am getting inspiration to carve up the other partner’s stamp(s). The completed ones are so cute I wish I could keep them, but it’s good knowing they’ll be off to a home where they’ll be appreciated!

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I couldn’t begin to list all the things I’ve learned so far: raising all sorts of animals, gardening, home repair, growing plants from seed, country living, and the sounds of a coyote pack. Then there are the tons of things that I’m made aware of that I want to start doing: growing all sorts of other plants, raising other animals, preserving various foods, and all sorts of neat crafts.

Just this month some brand new activities I’ve experienced include dehydrating blueberries (in my new-to-me electric dehydrator) and seeing baby ducklings.  Another new activity is cultivating a successful garden, and successful it is – every day the tomatoes get taller, at least four of them have exceeded the height of their cages, many have flowers, and the leader plant already has a baby tomato on it. The cauliflowers are massive and I fear I’ve planted them too closely, perhaps I will harvest one at a younger age to make way for others. Tom thinks he planted the leeks too close together but at least we will have baby leeks this way. Best of all there are no pests or interference – the biggest pain has been a maple tree whose keys landed in the garden, forcing me to do some weeding. I wish we had constructed the beds a bit earlier, the mosquitoes are killer right now down in our dirt source and we could have been eating some carrots and beets by now. Oh well, we can’t do everything at once!

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• May Farm Life
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This is Ewenique Franklin #S28147 June 5 2008, a grey katmoget ram. He is for sale or trade.

This year he sired three rams, two twins (a moorit or dark brown and a grey) and a single (black).

I call him Frankie cause he reminds me of one of those guys from the movie Grease. He’s a bit of a punk, a bit of a rough guy, and you can certainly never trust your back around him at all. But when you’re safely behind the barn fence, he loves to have a scratch and a snack. Please don’t mind his scruffiness, it’s fleece that I have yet to trim.

I would prefer to trade him for other Shetland ewes, preferably registered ones, but I’m willing to consider non-registered purebreed Shetlands or Angora goats. I might also consider other fine wool sheep breeds.

If you are interested in Franklin, please contact me at meaganhanes@gmail.com, or pass this on to anyone who you think might be interested

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• Happy Chickens for sale