Family Farm Friday #93: Gran Was a Liar

*I know it's not Friday, but I forgot to hit publish last week and wanted to get this one up.*

Last week, I made a road trip to Iowa with my dad and The Boy from Texas to go and pick out a new ram.  While we were at one of the farms where we stopped, I noticed a lot of dandelions near the sheep pens.  

I asked the owner, "Do you guys have trouble keeping the sheep from eating these?"  He looked confused and said, "No, we don't care, they can eat them all they want."  I said, "No!  They are poisonous to sheep."  My dad and The Boy from Texas jumped in and asked what the heck I was talking about, informing me in no uncertain terms that this was completely untrue.

Immediately, I said, "Yes it is!  Gran told us that we had to pull all the dandelions in the yard because they were poisonous to sheep."  

Continuing on the investigation, I called Little Brother and the conversation went something like this:

Me:  "Are dandelions poisonous to sheep?"  

Little Brother:  "Yep."

Me:  "How do you know what?"

Little Brother:  "Gran said so."

By this point, my dad was rolling at the fact that my Gran managed to convince us to pull all these dandelions on the farm simply by lying to us and telling us they were dangerous to the sheep.  She didn't want to deal with the weeds and knew that if you tell farm kids they will kill the sheep, her work was done.  While I was a bit offended at first, I couldn't help but laugh.  For those of you who knew her, that was classic Gran behavior.

She set us up when we were little kids running around, and kept it up 30 years later.  Good work, Gran.  Good work, indeed.