Goals, Dreams & Aspirations

[herdcentral]

My plan is to continue fencing some of my land into smaller paddocks - it is hard going in rocky country with only myself as labour., Improve the pastures and build my sheep flocK and plant more trees - all put on hold this year due to tight finances and only 4 inches of rain.

 

Dogwise - continue competing in agility when I can. My future aspirations are to one day compete with one or more of my 3 youngsters in herding. So much to learn but maybe one day it will be attainable. For the present they are very handy round the farm with my own sheep. I certainly coudnt do without their help.

[Maja]

7) Especially persuade younger son that certain vegetables (kale, chard, okra, baby bok choi) are, in fact, delicious and are not a sinister plot.

You'll never look at your veggies the same way if you read The Celery Stalks at Midnight (it's about dogs too )

 

 

maja

[Smalahundur]

Keeping it dogrelated; Making working farmdogs out of Táta and hopefully Dagur (who I got as a kinda rescue, and was a bit screwed up on arrival).

No trial aspirations (though not excluding trying it out should the dogs be up to it), but that does not mean the bar isn´t pretty high, as a good working dog here in Iceland should be able to work in the so called "göngur". That is the rounding up of free range sheep from huge area´s of pretty difficult land, sheep from several farms share the area, and some of them have pretty strong ideas on which direction they want to go....

It involves very long "look backs", and a dog should be able to drive big herds for very long distances. These are events that take sometimes several days, and the dog should be on its feet the whole day.

[Alchemist]

Anne and Donald McCaig are cooks with dedication, authenticity, and expertise that I no longer aspire to. They make their brown sauce from stock which they boil down from hooves. I never had their Bordelaise; I can but dream. Eleven years later I remember their brown sauce. I'm from New Orleans and we remember culinary events like that. If he isn't convinced by now about greens, he never will be. Suggest cold kale with sesame. I don't know a recipe. Whole Foods does it well if heavy-handed on the soy sauce.

 

Penny

 

Penny: dang, you've dashed one of my hopes. Here I was hoping it might be something that younger son would grow out of, eventually, if I just kept offering greens that were properly cooked. I'll look for the cold kale with sesame next time I'm in Whole Foods, but I suspect I'm spitting in the wind.

 

You'll never look at your veggies the same way if you read The Celery Stalks at Midnight (it's about dogs too).

 

Maja - you may just have hit upon it! That's one of the books in the "Bunnicula" series - very popular around my house some years back. In fact, this summer when we were sorting books to keep vs to give away, my 18-year-old moved the "Bunnicula" books into the "keep" stack. Never thought buying these might come back to haunt me in this manner!

 

Oh well. Having abandoned my dream of getting younger son to eat his greens, I'll have to concentrate on the dog-related ones: maybe finding a trainer willing to work with me and my 1.5-year-old pup?

[juliepoudrier]

Alchemist,

You should have good access to excellent trainers in that part of the country.

 

J.