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.  

We went camping for the weekend and had a nephew feed the animals and collect eggs for us.  We came back today to torrential downpours.  Luckily, it only rained the first day for us and was beautiful the other days.  We had a great time camping and catching up with old friends.  I checked on the twin sheep babies when we came home.  The really pretty multicolor one is kinda skinny!  So skinny that Annmarie went in and mixed up a bottle of formula for him.  He didn’t want to drink it.  So we will try a couple of times a day for the next two weeks.  He is noticeably skinnier than the other baby.  We also locked the ewe and her two babies up in the loading corral.  That way she cannot run around the whole barn lot.  The babies won’t have to burn off so many calories keeping up with her.  She is very flighty.  It is late and I will give the monthly chicken report this week.

They are both boys, but the multicolor one on the right is way cool looking.  He is the bomb!!!  It is really too bad he is related to too many females we currently have, or else I would love to keep him as our new ram.

Well, I must be improving on my fence building skills, the sheep were still in the Barn lot this morning.  They stayed there all day.  So no holes so far, they are pretty persistent and I saw two this morning sticking their heads through the woven fence to get to the grass on the other side.  Forget that they were standing in grass 18 inches high, the stuff on the other side of the fence just tastes better!  Here are our sheep in the Barn lot hanging out today.

Yes, there is a creek running through the bottom 1/3 of the picture.  That is the “Front Creek” it is fed from a spring that comes up about 100 yards from here.  It runs year round and is around 40 degrees F all year long also.  It never freezes in the winter.  Need I say, that one of the reasons for getting the sheep was for them to keep the grass short.  Since they feel that the short scrub grass on the hill is more healthful for them, I have had to step up the fence construction.  One down, five to go!! (actually, I think that is an infinite number since fence repair is an ongoing thing)

I also fixed the SE fence yesterday in the Ram pasture.  Added a ton of stays, now I still have to add woven fence to the entire Eastern fence line, a gate and a bunch of stays.  This of course needs to be done yesterday.  The grass is starting to get very tall and needs to be cut or eaten.

This is the Ram pasture, Annmarie’s grandparents used to keep the ram sheep in this pasture.  It was smaller then, I have moved the far fence back and moved the fence line up onto the hillside.  If you look closely, at the back fence you will see stays or fence post every five feet.  That is with sheep wire on the bottom half also.  I need to get the sheep in here before the cheat grass dries out or it is gonna be a bugger to walk through.  The colored spots in the foreground are my chickens free ranging.  The grass is so tall that they just disappear.  One of the problems with tall grass like this is ticks.  They climb up on it and attach to everything. We have had to start treating the dogs with tick repellent already this year.  The chickens being unlocked again should help with the tick problem.  The baby chicks are locked up safe in their metal cage enclosure now.  The gully on the upper left corner of the picture is the “Back Creek” (how do you like those names?)  Our house sits between the Front Creek and the Back Creek and to our knowledge has never been flooded. The front and back bridges have floated away, but no damage to the house.

Here is the rug I sprayed down and hung out to dry.  Obviously, the rug is drying.  No cats on it yesterday when it was soaking wet.  Now  you can see one lounging on the right end.  I shooed them off all day long today.  The rug needed another day to dry out, but the weather was turning bad, so Annmarie and I went out and took it down.  We hung it in a “U” shape in the trailer, not 15 minutes later it was raining.  We just pile the rugs on the floor in our medieval pavilion.  It makes it way more cozy and comfortable with the rugs down.

I spent the day outside today.  It was a gorgeous day, sun was shining and virtually no wind.  I even opted to not have some form of music playing in my ears while working (unusual for me) so I could listen to the back creek run.  The runoff is very clean and running at a great rate.  We are hopeful the runoff creek will last through June this year.  The longer the better, we can use the water.

I worked on the Barn lot pasture fence today.  I had stretched a 40 foot section this fall but since I did not install sheep fencing the sheep just jumped through it.  So I added a four foot tall woven fence over the barbed wire and tied it all together.  Nice and strong now, the sheep won’t get through it.  I took a container of chicken scratch up on the hillside and enticed the sheep off of the rocky hillside down into the barn lot.  They love corn and we have been working on being able to call them and get them to follow us.  It is far easier to catch an animal that will follow you into a small area for food.  A month in the front yard has given us all a lot of time to tame them down.  We were petting them whenever we went in and out of the house.  So far the fence is working, the sheep were still in the Barn lot when the sun went down.  The true test will be if they cannot get out tomorrow.  I am with Annmarie, I think a couple of the ewes are ready to drop babies.
I also restretched one side of the Ram pasture (we use the names for things from when Annmarie was a kid, very confusing if you were not around 30 years ago) and added stays to stiffen the fence and prevent the sheep from squeezing between the wires.  I have stays or posts every five feet on the SE side of the Ram pasture now.

Annmarie and Sarah locked up the baby chickens in their new enclosure over the weekend.  All 11 surviving (out of 24) chickies were out in their new 360 degree wire protected domain, plus one chicken.  They trapped one hen in there with the babies.  So I chased her out and in the process left the door open and now there is a different hen trapped in with the babies.  On the positive side, we thought the first hen was laying white eggs because her mother is a Polish chicken.  Not so, I found a green egg in the baby enclosure.  Not sure who the second white egg layer is at this point.  I had an egg today punctured by a foot.  I need to add some more calcium to the chickens diet.  I keep oyster shells for this and will put some out for the chickens to snack on out in the chicken yard.  In a month or so the babies should be big enough that the cats won’t mess with them.  Then I can get more babies!!!  Wooo, hooo!!  I really do want a naked neck chicken.  I also want some more Easter Egger or Aruacana chickens.  Would love to have blue eggs.

I also hosed down a braided rug and hung it over the fence and grape wire tonight.  We are camping for the weekend and use the rugs on the floor of our pavilion tent.  You can never have too many rugs for a medieval tent floor.  So tomorrow I will clean out the pickup and get the trailer ready to go.  We have so much stuff we bought a trailer just for this hobby!  I will get some pictures and post them here.