Rolling Dog Farm Blog

I'll be taking a blog break for the next week and will resume posting for Monday, September 13th.  For our readers in the U.S., we hope you enjoy your Labor Day holiday weekend!

Alayne got this shot yesterday morning through the window of our Chief Barn Cat, Smoke, sitting on a fencepost above the pond.  He had walked across the rail and then parked himself on top of the post to look for any small munchables in the tall grass below.  That's part of the old cedar split-rail fence that our fence crew was supposed to take down and haul away earlier this spring, but they didn't get to it … and apparently that's a good thing, as it serves as a useful observation tower for feline hunters.

I mentioned in the previous post how many of the dogs in the front yard have taken to "denning" under the ramps.  Blind Dusty, on the other hand, picked a totally different spot for his den — the base of the big fir at the other end of the front yard.  He loves this spot and hangs out there all day long … literally.  After we let him out in the morning and he drinks, attends to his business, and stops to smell the roses along the way, he heads to this spot under the tree.  He will stay there the entire day until we call him back to the house late in the evening. 

Rooting around in the dirt does a number on his white coat, of course, and some evenings when he comes back inside he looks like the canine equivalent of a coal miner.  I haven't seen him do this yet, but given how covered he is in dirt some days, he must like to roll around upside down in his den too. 

One thing I'd like to get on video one day is his evening routine, so people can see how a blind dog uses his "mental map" to navigate.  We'll get everyone else inside, and then I'll go out on the ramp and call for Dusty.  He always has to be the last one in, so he's waiting for me to do this — it's like his curtain call.  His spot at the base of the tree is about 30 yards (27 m) away from the front door.  He'll climb out of his den, walk out to the grass, lift a leg, then head right for the ramp.  Dusty is usually within a foot of either side of the ramp by the time he gets there, if he doesn't make it straight in on the first try; if he's off-course, he knows it instantly and quickly readjusts to get on the ramp and head towards the door.  I'll hold the door open for him and he bolts through, then follows me by voice command down the hallway, into the dog room, and right into his crate.  Elapsed time is under a minute.  I never touch him or do any guiding other than with voice.  

Of course, it would be nice if he'd shower every evening before coming in, but then again I can't ask for everything.

—

Blog readers keep asking how the animals are adjusting.  I thought these blog posts would show how they're adjusting — in a word, just fine!  They're all settled in, developing new routines, and finding their niches.  I haven't posted anything on the cats because we have been building a cat room on the second floor of the barn and they've been in temporary quarters here.  The room should be finished by next week, we hope.  The horses are doing great and I will get a photo of them up in the next week or so.  

—

I have always disliked mowing grass. It seems such an incredible waste of time and effort, especially when grass is the perfect food for so many animals.  Grass should be grazed, not mowed. 

Back in Montana, we couldn't grow much of a lawn anyway around the house and dog cottages, so rough pasture grass was what we had.  This was easy to deal with, because all I'd have to do was hook up the rotary brush cutter to the tractor, make one run, knock it all down, and be done.  With the climate there, the grass rarely ever grew back enough that I'd have to mow it a second time.  Although this meant we had to carefully manage the pastures to ensure enough grass for grazing animals, for mowing humans, it kept things pretty simple and made mowing only an annual chore.

Welcome to New Hampshire. 

Now, one of the big attractions for us of moving here, as blog readers know, is the lush grass and a climate that keeps grass growing all summer long — great for livestock. 

The downside, of course, is that growing means mowing.  When I got back here in mid-May to stay, I marveled at how green and rich the grass was around the house.  I'd stand on the porch and look out over the lawns, loving the greenness of it all.  After the second week I noticed, um, how fast it was growing.  By the third week I finally realized, holy cow, I'm going to have to do something about this grass — it's getting really, really tall!  That's when it dawned on me that we didn't even have a lawn mower.  Oops.

The yards around the house are too small to use a tractor, and a tractor would have been too heavy and rough on these lawns anyway — especially for weekly mowings.  And while I do detest mowing grass and believe nature intended it to be grazed, I wasn't about to bring our horses into the dog yards in the evenings to do my work for me.  The last thing we need is a whole lot of dogs rolling in horse poop and eating it when they're not rolling in it.  (That's not why we called it the Rolling Dog Ranch, by the way.)  The two goats wouldn't eat enough to make a difference, so that wasn't an answer either.

No, I finally admitted that we needed a … gasp! … lawn mower. 

What I detested even more than mowing lawns was lawn mowers themselves.  Noisy, stinky things, always requiring maintenance when they weren't leaving you smelling like gas. 

So after doing some research — quickly, because by then I swear the grass was growing an inch a day here — I decided to buy a battery-powered mower called the Neuton.  (I considered an old-fashioned reel mower, but exercise is one thing we don't lack around here.  If I could have a battery cut the grass while I pushed the mower, that was a good compromise.)

I was skeptical at first that a mower running on a rechargeable battery could really mow a lawn, but Alayne and I are now fans of this green machine.  It really does work incredibly well.  It's amazingly quiet, is completely clean and odor-free, and requires no maintenance other than plugging in the battery.  On a full charge, and if the grass isn't out of control, we can do all four dog yards on one battery.  I think that's probably close to, or maybe a bit more, than the 1/3 acre (.13 hectare) the company suggests you can get on one charge.  If we've let the grass get too tall, we'll need to swap out for a fresh battery to get everything finished.  The Neuton is also very light, so it's easy to push around. 

It's so quiet, in fact, that the dogs pay no attention to it at all.  If you click on the photo for a larger image, you can see blind Molly snoozing under the ramp.  The dogs keep right on napping wherever they are, even as we push the mower around.

—

Those ramps, by the way, have become the favorite place to nap these days.  When I took that photo of the Neuton mower, there were at least four dogs under those ramps — Molly, Priscilla, Cedar and Spinner.  Cedar is at the far left of the ramp in back — you can kind of make out the dark shape underneath.  Two more dogs were under the other ramp you can't see in this photo, the one coming off the people wing.  Originally we were going to put up lattice-work to finish off the ramps (like you see under the existing porch), but the dogs clearly enjoy "denning" underneath them so much we haven't done it.  There are usually more dogs sleeping under the ramps now than there are on the bright, green lawn or on the beds on the front porch!

I've been working on our fall print newsletter, and we recently did the photo shoot for the photo of Alayne and me that goes on page 2 of each issue.  Earlier this year I posted the outtakes of the photo shoot for the spring/summer newsletter, so I thought you might enjoy seeing some from this latest session.  Our new admin assistant, Judy L., was pressed into service as the photographer.  Alayne had already warned her what this would be like … i.e., taking direction from a fussy "tyrant photographer" (can you believe she calls me that?), having to take dozens and dozens of photos until Mr. I'll-Know-It-When-I-See-It is finally satisfied, and making sure that all three subjects are posing just-so for the camera. 

Our co-subject this time was blind and wobbly Briggs, who alternately wouldn't stay still or, worse, would suddenly go limp in my arms and look like he'd just died.  That first shot above gives you an idea of the challenge that day.

Then Mr. I'll-Know-It-When-I-See-It stepped out of the shot to take another look through the camera, and this is what he saw:

Stepping back into the shot, a few frames later and someone is still having a problem managing a small, wobbly Beagle:

We then changed sides and things quickly fell apart, though Miss Marker seems unaware that I have lost complete control at this point and is still staring at the camera:

Canine control problems continue, and Miss Marker now appears not nearly as cheery as a few moments before:

But, somewhere along the way to taking 67 photos, we get the right framing, have the dog cooperating, and Judy gets the photo Mr. I'll-Know-It-When-I-See-It wants:

Whew!