It seems like I talk a lot about fencing.  I do actually, that is because I am constantly fencing!!  Fixing old fencing is a skate in the park compared to building it from scratch.  I removed the bottom three strands from the ram pasture (had smooth wire and sheep just used the entire fence as a gate), I drug them around to the front orchard fence and installed them above the sheep wire I put in last week.  I was tightening the wire with a come-a-long (i wanted it really tight) and I pulled over my end post on the far end.  I had buttressed it incorrectly and allowed the railroad tie to move about 3 inches at the top.  Now, I have to cut the bottom sheep wire loose, apply a new tightening wire going the opposite direction and stretch the bottom sheep wire again to get the little wobble out.  I have been installing used gates in all my new fence sections.  I keep scrounging all over the farm and finding ancient sheep gates.  They look like the bottoms of spring mattresses only longer.  So, my mother-in-law saw the one I was going to install up front between our houses.  So tomorrow we are going to go shopping for a new vehicle gate and people gate to install on that visible section of the fence.  It lets me use that gate for another section of the farm.  As soon as I can get this fencing done, I am moving to the barn.  The sheep need a place to hang out in the winter.  We had an amateur photographer come spend a day and night taking pictures of the farm and buildings over the weekend.  Once we get a copy of the pictures we will post a few to show everyone.

Well, I checked the live trap this morning to see if my chicken killer was caught.  I had a kitten and her mother in the trap.  I shook them up a little and dumped them on the ground, so hopefully they won’t be back.  I opened both doors (exterior door to run, the killer would have to climb over the electric fence, then open the chicken door to coop that was latched shut) so my chickens could free range .  I had 29 chickens before the foul play and only have 23 now.  A 21% loss.  No more 24 eggs/day…  Sarah collected 18 eggs today.  Tonight when I was locking the chickens up I spotted something in the trap.  I ran over to confront my killer and it was a chicken.  Stupid hen had gotten stuck in the pen trying to steal cat food.  Chickens love cat food.  So I let her out and shooed her into the coop for lockdown and baited the trap again.  Hopefully, I will catch my villain soon.  I didn’t have time to weed eat a kill zone around the coop today.  I need to get the ram pasture fence completed so the sheep will have a new grazing area.  So back at it again tomorrow!  I found some new muscles in my back I didn’t know existed, just below my shoulder blades.  Nothing like digging those fence posts by hand.

We keep trying to get a picture of the baby lambs playing king of the hill.  Our ram lays down on the ground and the babies stand on top of him and then push each other off of him to be king of the hill.  I looked out the living room window and they were both standing on top of him.  Our first lamb used to do this also.  We are amazed at how tolerant he is of the lambs.  We will keep trying to get a picture of this in action.

It figures.  I finally get the chickens laying and am able to sell all the eggs we are collecting from our true free range flock and the big bad chicken predator comes in to destroy my plan.  While I was off at work the nasty predator came in and started killing my chickens (graphic picture to follow).  Now mind you I have been just letting the chickens do their chicken thing.  I never lock them up at night, they come and go as they please and whenever they get tired of free ranging for feed they can come back to the coop and get the free – all you can eat buffet.  A good life for a chicken if you can get it.  My only problem with this scenario is predators.  Now that I have the cat issue fixed, I still have to deal with the wild animal problem.  I have the electric fence running around the top of the coop run, but that only works when I shut the door. So tonight, I shut the run door, and I even shut the coop chicken access door and used the latch on the door in case my perimeter electrified fence was breached!  I also set up the live trap.  I used a dead chicken wing as a plate and poured cat food on top of it.  So as I am sitting here typing my post, both Annmarie and I start smelling skunk.  So I grabbed my boots, Walther p22 pistol with laser sight and a large bright flashlight to scope out the coop action.  I walked all over and all I found were 3 cats.  One of them got lucky, he was hiding behind a rock crib and I had to put the sneak on.   It was just a cat, Indy our inside cat.  I have learned to not shoot first at night, gotta have a positive ID before I pull the trigger.  On top of it all, I am going to have to borrow my father’s weed eater tomorrow (I killed two today at my wife’s grandmother’s house.  different story) to clear a kill lane around my chicken yard so I will have a clean shot at whatever is killing the chickens.  And I really need to get the ram pasture fence completed because the sheep are running out of forage in the barn lot.  It just never ends.
Here is my poor defenseless dead chicken.  I did not include the two different piles of feathers I found.  insert warning here courtesy of the spouse, not for the weak of stomach.

This is that same creek last August. The photo was take a little bit further downstream than the one above, but you still get the idea.

It was supposed to rain today.  That would have prevented me from building any fence yet again.  It did not rain.   Late morning time I went down to my in-laws to see if my teenage nephew was available to help me out today on the fence.  He was (on the computer) but more than willing to come help me out.  We drove metal fence posts in the Orchard fence then braced a corner and end/gate section of the fence.  We also managed to roll out and attach sheep wire to the bottom of the fence we were working on today.  Cooper also dug the holes for the fence braces to continue the fence on the other side of the front creek.  Of course while looking for tools I could not find my post hole diggers.  Things grew legs and walked away.  I was amazed at the amount of progress we made today.  At that rate, I can have the back fence of the Ram pasture (with gate installed) done next week in 2 days.

The front creek is running high, we went up to the upper pasture to look (I thought the back creek had gotten dammed up again and diverted to the front one.) around and see what was going on.  I had to turn the pickup around and gun it back down to dry land.  The entire pasture is one seeping, oozing mud pit.  There is 1-4 inches of standing water over the whole thing.  I had a duck jump off a pond in the middle of the pasture land. We walked the creek and no diversion, just all that surface water trying to go somewhere.

Will try and get some photos up soon.  It is of course raining very strong outside right now.
Sarah is hoping it rains so she doesn’t have to mow the lawn.  The weatherman and I are hoping we are right.  We shall see who is right on Monday.

It is another month, so time for the monthly egg report for May 2010.  I will try and keep the same format so it is easier to read.  I always agonize when I should count the eggs I have sold.  I sold 9 dozen on June 1 because of the holiday weekend.  The chickens laid all the eggs in May, but I will count them in June.  I figure as long as I am consistent it all works out in the end.  Here goes for all those curious egg connoisseurs. 

 So May was a profitable month(two in a row).   I made a whopping $23.24 net profit on 30 hens laying (yep, lost three hens from last month, no trace of them.  Not really sure what happened) (for the year my net income is –$6.77/month.  I had $60 in expenses mostly food (remember, I had to lock up all the chickens for almost 10 days until I made Fort Knox for the babies to keep the cats from killing more chicks.  This drastically increased my feed expense for the month.  Also, my feed store sells feed at the daily market price for grain.  The feed cost jumped 17% in the middle of last month) (for the year my monthly expenses are $46.02).  We collected a total of 559 usable eggs averaging 21.1 eggs/day collected (for the year the average is 10.9).  The chickens ate 0.46#food/egg (for the year are averaging 0.77#/egg, remember I count my feed expense against the laying hens.  So when I am feeding babies the adults are responsible to make up the difference and the cats killed off 13 of my 24 babies last month).  In May it cost $0.09/egg (up slightly from last month, due to me locking them up until I could get the upgrades done to the coop) (my yearly average is $0.18/egg or $2.16/dozen.  I have been selling my eggs for $2.50 dozen since the beginning of the year.)  I am –$33.85 for the year.  Still haven’t broken even yet and we are almost halfway through the year.  I will hopefully break even for the year this month.  Luckily, all the improvements to the coop last month were done in scraps so I did not have to pay for anything. 


At the beginning of May I was paying $8.55 for a 50# bag of layer feed.  Halfway through the month it jumped to $10.05.  I bought some today and paid $9.03.  Now for all those naysayers, this is a great price.  The local places sell it for $13-$15/bag.  So I am getting a much better deal, I just never know what the price will be when I go into the store.


I am not having any trouble selling my eggs, between Annmarie and I and our local customers we could easily sell about 2-3 times what we do know.  That is just a lot more chickens.  I do get to buy another dozen babies in about 6 weeks to make up for the ones the cats killed.  Now that we have the chicken Fort Knox they are safe from predators and have a space to spread out into.  It got too crowded in the coop, they needed an external run (insert wife comment here “I told you so” “last year”).  


It keeps raining nonstop here.  I cannot spray any weeds and the grass is getting very tall.  The real problem is we have a lot of cheat grass and it is already forming heads.  Hopefully, I can get the ram pasture fence done in a couple of weeks (needs to stop raining when I am off work, not happening today) so the sheep can be turned loose in the pasture to eat it down.  


If anyone knows where we can get some Barbados Black belly sheep at a reasonable price let us know.  We love not having to shear them.  We would like to get up to about 15 ewes.