Mark detests bullies. As a result, he was fully willing to take Abigail to the butcher --- or at least to separate her into a different pasture --- weeks ago. But Artemesia seemed to like being close to her herd mate, so I left the pair together.

This weekend, though, something shifted in Artemesia's behavior. Depending on whether she takes after her father or her mother, she's due Thursday or a week from Tuesday. And with kidding so imminent, our first freshener suddenly stopped wanting to go back in the coop with Abigail after grazing and feeding times. Instead, she kept trying to walk down one of the fallow pastures toward the trailer as if maybe it would be okay to move in with me instead.

Unfortunately, Mark's not quite soft enough for that to fly. But since Artemesia appears to finally be sick of her bullying herd queen, we separated Abigail from the mother-to-be.

If Artemesia continues to prefer solitary confinement to life around a bully, we may even see if we can step up our butcher appointment to this week instead of next. In the meantime, we'll continue to coddle Artemesia as much as possible while we wait for her kid(s) to arrive.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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