This week was exciting, fluffy, and wet! We welcomed a Great Pyrenees puppy named Everest, born December 15th. Our family named him after the Yeti in Abominable, which was white, fluffy, loveable, and also a guardian. As a fun coincidence, the main character of Abominable, Yi, is played by a woman named Chloe, which also happens to be the name of our other LGD.
But the best of this story runs deeper. Everest is the offspring of a previously unknown intact brother of our late dog, Gandhi. When Gandhi died last year in a car accident, we believed that his bloodline had ended. We had been told there were no intact siblings, that the door had closed.
But it hadn’t.
I got news from a friend that a breeder had one more brother of Gandhi’s, and when I called her, she had one puppy left from the litter — just one — and was preparing to fix the dad, making it the last available from his bloodline. The timing was narrow, and it felt meant to be. So Everest came home.
He doesn’t replace Gandhi. But there’s warmth in knowing that part of his instinct, his presence, and his big blocky head continues here. As a livestock guardian dog, Gandhi impacted the farm’s safety and culture in ways we didn’t fully appreciate until he was gone.
In the garden, the wind from the last storm knocked over our fava beans, and we spent time staking them upright again so they can continue maturing until they’re finished pushing nitrogen back into the soil through their roots. The excess rain made parts of the garden difficult to navigate without damaging beds, so some of our team shifted to projects off the field while we wait for the ground to firm up.
We’re also fertilizing with organic fish fertilizer to fill nutrient gaps that compost alone can’t fill. The fertilizer smells… truly awful. If there were a more polite way to describe it in a worse way, I’d use them, but the words we have for the smell of fish fertilizer are not polite. Now that the summer seed starts have begun to take off, the whole team walked the garden today to map out where they will go.
Rain followed by sun means weeds are growing. And now weedwacking is back on the list. Again.
