There Is No Blueprint
I was recently struck by how different this past winter was from the year before, and the year before, and so on, and it got me thinking about how when it comes to “making it” on the land, flexibility is the name of the game. And yet, we made plans for how to handle the newborn lambs and how to protect the garden next year, in light of what we experienced this year. We are definitely shaped by our immediate experiences, but we can’t cling too tightly to the plans we develop as a result of them. Recently, I was asked for a blueprint for developing a resilient group of sheep by some inexperienced folks who had never raised sheep. My advice was to read everything they could find about small…