In my outline of the roadmap for Les Pierres moving forward there’s obviously room for livestock, extending our options to become more self-sufficient while at the same time tapping into the romance of becoming a small farmer.
I am not necessarily sentimentalizing the hard work it entails, but experience has taught me some noteworthy details about my heart and where it usually takes me.
Also, I don’t think it’s fair to put all my caretaking needs on our two cat babies alone; they deserve some downtime from my over-boiling affection every now and then.
However, it’s mostly lack of room that is keeping us from turning these fantasies into some kind of reality, since we need most of our land for producing our vegetables, fruits and nuts plus the floral splendor we also prioritize. Les Pierres is still tiny and although we have lots of ideas about its expansion, there’s absolutely no guarantee that the people who need to be on the same page for that to happen eventually will be.
That’s fine, we still have much to figure out.
In our French life we do have a few years of conversance with farm animals, being responsible for their care when we were managing chateau life, before coming to our senses by buying Les Pierres.
There are many hilarious stories to be told about the trouble we got ourselves into by wanting to help but not knowing how, like when we offered to incubate the fertilized eggs purchased by the owner because of her sudden irrepressible desire for blue-egg-laying hens and allowing her to go overboard with the numbers, resulting in a crowd of chicks in our living room, mostly roosters, ironically.
Or having the aggressive ram of the Ouessant sheep flock bleed on my lap (over-boiling affection, remember) after his harsh castration, the punishment for impregnating his own daughter who had to give birth whilst still being a child herself, not having any instinct yet for breastfeeding, forcing Ivory on his knees to…well, you get the picture.
These dramatic disasters didn’t cure me from my needs at all, but I do try to be more responsible. We’ll start small and prepared with chickens next year as we can surely use their eggs. They won’t be blue though.
