Good news/bad news:

This is a thistle plant in the rosette stage, mostly eaten by my sheep over at the Woodbury place today.  I’ve written before about my struggles with thistles in my pasture and all the work it takes to remove them; it would be a triumph of grazing management — and good luck! — if the sheep took over the thistle eradication project.  The catch (always a catch) is that I might have miscalculated the flock’s grazing area today, leaving them with less forage than they really needed, pushing them to hunger sufficient to ignore the sharp thorns on thistle leaves. The fugitive optimist in my head wants to believe that someone in the flock discovered that thistle is her new favorite food.