Willing Workers

Having Russell in charge of our work for the weekend certainly changed the pace of things a bit. He was decidedly more relaxed than he'd been during the work week, and we were finally allowed to do some REAL farming. No silly weed pulling work while Russell's the boss. No, we were going to spend the day drenching the sheep (whatever that meant).

Before we headed out to get the sheep, Russell again looked out our outfits and asked if we minded getting dirty. Oh, no, we replied. We'll be fine. "Well, you might want to put a work suit on," he said. "You're going to get shitty." Of course, I'd never heard the term shitty used in quite this way, but after mulling it over for a minute, I decided he meant we were actually going to get shit - sheep shit- all over us. Okay, then! we said. We'll take a work suit! Work suits look a bit like what a mechanic wears - just a baggy cotton body suit that goes over your clothes and zips up the front.

Thoroughly ready to get shitty, we went to gather up the sheep. Sheep are incredibly silly animals. They are terrified of humans, so they'll flee as soon as you approach them, and they're followers, so if one of them walks off in one direction, the rest of them follow. It, therefore, can be quite easy to herd sheep. One person gets behind them, one to the side, and you just walk forward, directing them where you want them to go (which is usually through a series of fences). So, if they're being good, they will move en masse. If one of them decides he's nervous about the direction he's heading and takes off, though, others will follow, and suddenly you've got mass sheep chaos on your hands, and you have to start the herding all over. One or two times, the whole herd would get through a gateway, but one really stupid sheep would stop to eat grass and suddenly look up to find himself all alone in the paddock. Then real panic would set in. The sheep would spot his friends in the neighboring paddock, and just take off running in their direction. Sadly, that usually meant that sheep would smack himself straight into a fence. Don't ask me how, but I witnessed it happen several times. The first time I giggled nervously and felt really sorry for that poor sheep, but after seeing it happen repeatedly, it became just an annoying nuissance. One day we spent probably twenty minutes trying to get one idiot sheep out of the paddock.

Once we finally got the sheep where we wanted them to go, we forced as many of them as would fit into a small holding pin. If you can get the sheep shoved up against each other, it makes it harder for them to move and therefore easier for you to get your work done. Our first task was to "drench" the sheep, which meant giving them their anti-worming medicine. One of us had to put on this little backpack full of liquid that had a little hose running out of it and into a squirt gun. We had to straddle a sheep, grab it by its mouth, shove the gun into its mouth, give it two full squirts, and then hold its mouth closed for a couple seconds to ensure swallowing. You then had to sort of push the sheep to the other side of the pin, so you could keep track of who you had drenched.

After drenching a group (we could do about fifteen sheep at once), we had to "clean them up". This entailed using the electric shearing shaver and shaving all of the dirty wool off of the sheep's bottom and legs. If you've ever gotten close to a sheep, you know that the poor thing just spends the whole day pooping all over himself and consequently gets quite a lot of it stuck to his fur. So we were literally shaving the shit off of the sheep. I attempted to do this on about three sheep, but it just wasn't for me. You had to literally run this shaver right around the sheep's anus, and I'm not trying to be disgusting, but I couldn't do it. I was so scared of nicking them in the wrong place. So Bjorn did all of the shaving, and I did all of the drenching. Team work! It took us probably four hours to do this to all of the sheep, and it was seriously exhausting, hard work.

We worked WITH Russell all day on the sheep, which was great, because it was sort of what I had hoped we'd be doing a lot of, and you can learn a great deal more about something when you have someone knowledgeable working with you who will answer your questions and explain things for you. I think that's probably was WWOOFing was designed to be - an educational experience, heaving on mentoring. With Biddy in charge, we ended up doing a lot of grunt gardening work (at least when the weather was nice), which was fine and enjoyable to some extent, but it sort of annoyed me that she was inside doing this and that while we were outside working. I wanted her to be working with us, telling me about the flowers and how things grow and things like that. TEACHING me something, not just having me work for her.

The following day was Sunday, and we woke to pouring rain. There was nothing we could do, and with laid-back Russell in charge, we basically sat around the house all day. This was a welcome break from the heat and the outdoor work, but as it turned out, this was the first of FIVE straight days of rain.