lambs

Been a doozy 2020

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well it has been a resounding and expected lousy ending to 2020. I ended up catching Covid despite living like a hermit and wearing a mask. I don’t say that to discourage hermit living or mask wearing as I believe those are two things that prevented me from getting it earlier in the year. I work in healthcare in an ER. I was getting exposed. The disease is horrible, some get just a little cold, some get no symptoms and some get deathly ill. I was in the middle and only wanted to die for a few days, oxygen saturation only dropped for a few days and I was able to stay at home and be miserable. I am now on day 11 and have been vertical since this morning which is a new record. I can tell when I start to overdo it as my head will start to pound. As long as I take it easy I don’t get a headache. In celebration of my feeling better I have started a ham for a batch of ham and beans. As the entire world knows, ham and beans will cure most of what ills you! Since it will be a large batch I will have to freeze some for use at a later date. I should really think about learning how to can my ham and beans! Honestly, just putting it in old yogurt containers and tossing it in the freezer is a lot easier. I wanted to thank all of those who have offered to help out Annmarie and I for the last couple of weeks. We have had food delivered a couple of times and Mr Professional has come out and fixed a little fence and kept the cows in large bales. Luckily, its wintertime and there are not a lot of projects going on. In January, I will need to start back up on the upstairs bathroom and get it done! I could of used that while I was sick.

Currently, that is my only project in the works. We plan on keeping the upper 7 acre field bare and idle this entire next year so it can be planted in grass. I do need to still rent a backhoe in the next 6 weeks to get the rest of the flood damage corrected in the upper fields. That has to happen or the upper fields will flood again. I am waiting on 3 custom gates to be made so they can be installed. Our cows should start having calves soon. I am going to see about getting last year’s financials published as I never did that.

  • Lamb update
  • 17 lambs born
  • 11 ewes delivered
  • 23 pregnant ewes(maybe)
  • 5 single lambs
  • 6 twin lambs
  • 1 bummer lamb
  • 16 lambs on the farm
  • 155% birthing rate
  • 145% production rate (goal >150%)
  • 100% survival rate at birth
  • 100% survival rate at 2 weeks (3/3)

Mr Professional came out to feed the cows and discovered that the alpaca had broken open a large bale. I was sick and asked him to just pick it up and feed it to the cows. Unfortunately for him the alpaca had laid claim to this bale and were unwilling to give it up. He was convinced the alpaca were going to bite him. Spit on him maybe but they are not biters. He was not convinced so I had him come to the yard and get our two border collies. He was going to only take one but that is not good when dealing with the alpaca. They will gang up on the dogs and the dogs have to be pretty agile and persistent to get them to move away. He came back for Mouse and then I told him to just turn them loose and the dogs would push the alpaca away. He didn’t have to do anything but encourage them to get them. It was over in five minutes, the dogs moved all the alpaca away from the hay so that he could pick up the hay unharassed. The dogs were happy as they got to work, the only one unhappy were the alpaca as they did not get to finish eating their claimed hay.

Odds & Ends

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Today was a catch up day. I had a list of things I wanted to accomplish but I made sure to eat my breakfast and drink a cup of coffee before I went outside. I was sure there would be more lambs, I would have given odds on there being more lambs, there were no lambs. The cows needed food so I pushed a large bale to their area. I also decided it was time to thin out the chickens. I had multiple free loading roosters from the unsexed chicks gifted to me this summer from a friend. I managed to kill five roosters and a very old hen. I loaded them all up into the tractor bucket and took them to a boneyard. Tomorrow will be a good day to look for coyotes, the raccoon carcasses and porcupine carcass are undisturbed. That left me on the tractor with the urge to go up into field number two and move some dirt. I could spend the next six hours doing that still not be done. I resisted the temptation to spend time with the mistress and went back inside.

I did spot the Quail on the way home. They are so fluffy due to the cold. I have been learning to use the delay bake on our oven. I use It when I am making baked potatoes or something else that needs to bake for long stretches of time. I started the butternut squash, then I spent an hour and a half cleaning the bathroom. Once all that was done it was time to tackle the spare bedroom.

I had to hang four pictures of the seasons, girls in circus clothing, we had framed earlier this year. I then had to clean out the cedar bench that has been sitting at the foot of the bed for three years needing to be sorted and some decisions made. I made them fairly quickly and we now have some more space to store wool blankets. Now I can buy more wool blankets. We had been using the room as storage for our giveaway items so I moved all that up into the attic after I bagged it all up so it would stay clean. I also rebalanced the heat distribution so more goes downstairs. Both Annmarie and I went out to feed the sheep and lock them into the barn, they are going to have babies tonight! I also fixed a latch that had fallen off our main hay gate between the sheep area and our first hay room, the old nut had fallen off.

We are looking forward to Thanksgiving. I pick up the prime rib tomorrow and start the dry rub process. I will rub spices on it every evening until we cook it in a salt casket on Thanksgiving. We are having Brussels sprouts as the vegetable. We have this same meal every Thanksgiving. I even managed to snag the last bag of Rhodes frozen dinner rolls at the grocery store. We will cook at least 16-20 even though there are only five of us!

The needed but dreaded sorting of animals

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It had to come, the animals all needed to be worked and sorted but it is always a painful task.  Making matters worse is the fact that we decided to work the sheep and the cows in the same day and to complicate it even further the barn lot flood damage has not been repaired.  Annmarie went down stream with Mouse to push the cows up to the house.  They were doing great, one of the cows then the herd tried to bolt around and Mouse headed them off and got them turned around.  Five minutes later one of the cows decided she was a greyhound and took off, Mouse was unable to get ahead of her, he was able to catch up to her but ran alongside her and could not get her to turn.  This caused all of the cows to break and Slim and I and Zeke had to go down to the school house to help bring the cows back up.  This event seemed to crush Mouse’s ego and he then became a terror towards the cows and would not listen.  He was determined to get a few licks and bites in before we quit working the cattle.  Despite a couple of warnings he persisted in ignoring us until it was pointed out to him that he was not the boss by me.  He kept ignoring Annmarie, which is unusual as he prefers to work for her and not me.  It took us an hour to get the cows up into the corral.  The bull and boys were just on the other side of the gate.  We needed to pour insecticide over the cows and to tag and band Cupid who is another boy.  The really screwy part is that we thought there were two calves that needed to be addressed.  Nope, one of the calves managed to rip its ear tag out.  I had to grab its ear and find the hole to make sure.  We sorted the cows and took our original green tag cow and three more heifers off of the main herd then let the bull, the steers and our little bull in with the the rest of the cows.  The little bull is only six months old and the cows are in heat so by the time he is ready to breed them they will all be pregnant.  We are going to eat him this winter.  Cupid doesn’t have the true white heart on his forehead like Valentine does.  I took more pictures of Valentine while he was in the corral.

 

I am going to have to work on the corral next year.  When I built it I had talked about installing thread all bars between the railroad ties in the chute.  I decided that it would stop me from walking down the corral on top which I like to do.  The cows have spread the chute far enough apart that my two internal gates are no longer latching and we had to chain the chute exit to stop them from pushing out.  I may just use cable and bolts with an inline tightener and some thread locking compound so it doesn’t come loose easily.  I will shrink the chute back up another three inches.  I won’t lay boards over the chute as it would form a tunnel that would cause the animals some consternation.  The four separated cows will go up onto the Upper Prime field.  They have lots of food and fresh water.  This will get them two fences away from the bull.  The old cow will just become hamburger and stew meat.  Annmarie and Donna have both been victims of this attacking cow and they will be very happy when she is gone.

 

Slim was helping us with the cows and then the sheep.  The sheep were a lot harder.  First, we did not know how many we had, I assumed we had about 105 and Annmarie thought we had 120, in reality we had 112.  Getting to the number 112, that took us sorting the sheep five different times and four people counting.  On the plus side, both Annmarie and I had the count right the first time but Slim and Mr Professional had different numbers so we kept counting until  the numbers stabilized and matched.  It’s hard to sell what you cannot quantify.  I realize this sounds easy but we spent almost two and a half hours sorting sheep.  We thinned the herd again hard this year.  It was time to do another heavy cull, we do this about every 5-7 years.  The first time we sorted off breeding ewes we had 48!  Our ram has a hurt foot and is kinda fat, he needs fewer females so we sorted ewes until we had 34 ewes and 1 ram.  This herd went into the upper prime pasture with the cull heifer cows.  We have 77 sheep to sell, 28 of them are cull ewes and we are keeping 9 lambs for us and for local customers.   We will put them into the orchard after I finish getting the hay put up.  The rest of the cows went down into the lower bottom, winter feed field. It has peas growing in it but the thistles and cheat grass are still present in significant quantity.  It will not be hay this year but the peas are good for the soil and good for the cows so it is a win regardless.

Slim and I then went onto fixing creek crossings to keep the sheep in their allotted space. Mr Professional went to go bale the hay in the orchard while the Future NASCAR driver worked on getting lawn beat down with a weed eater.  It is out of control and our mower needs more work.  The flooding caused some severe erosion in Stewart creek.  The picture on the right shows the ripples in the stream bed, every one of those ripple edges is part of a volcanic solid rock shelf, those were not visible prior to the flooding.  It just tore the earth away until it hit something solid.  We tried to move the stump out of the creek but its too heavy.  We cut branches off and once the creek dries out I will get in there with the chain saw and cut it up.  We needed the branches moved so we could drop the panels back down into the creek.  A new cable was installed across the top of the fence from rock crib to rock crib.

We then went down and tore out the panels and fencing from down by the Mother-in-law’s house.  I built a new fence alongside the spring in the orchard so this small fifty foot section was no longer needed.  We took down all the fence and salvaged the panels crossing the spring to use down below at the creek crossing.  The stream widened the bank by at least four feet down by our other crossing so we needed a couple more panels to bridge the gap.  I have also started to install my horse shoe latches at the gates.  Once we had that done it was time to call it quits as it was almost 1700.

Slim beat me to the house as Annmarie, I and Mr Professional were discussing a weed and trying to determine what it was so she called it quitting time and headed out.  She did send me a text but I had her take a picture of the lower creek crossing as my phone was dead.  LOL.  The plan is for her to come out and help shear alpaca next week.  .

 

 

 

Feverish farming

Steve HardinLeave a comment

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It’s spring time and we are still trying to clean up from last year.  This is the field I tried to burn last fall and just could not get the fire to drive through the weeds.  It got mowed down and I wanted to plant right through the weeds but there is too much biomass on the ground.  So we ended up pushing up piles of weeds by skimming the ground with the tractor bucket.  Once those piles were made they were so dry you could light them with a lighter and nothing else.  Two days of burning has cleared off a lot of weeds. The wind has been kind enough to blow and making the fire spread as needed.

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I bought spring barley on Friday and want to get it in the ground this week.  It is supposed to rain on Wednesday and I would like to have the seed in the ground by then.  I have a small 1/2 acre plot that we saved for peas.  We sprayed every field but that one so that the 2-4-D won’t affect the peas.

I have another set of helpers out and set them to hardening the spring bank.  I only finished one side last fall.  Now both sides are blocked in and it should stop the dirt bank from falling into the spring.  We also lined the bottom of the spring with gravel in that area.  The sheep would know this if they would quit trying to jump over the water.  This did require the teenage helper to redo the wall three times to get it where it needed to be.

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I have been working on my sheep calling abilities.  I have managed to post a couple of successful videos to Instagram.  The key to success is in choosing the right time to call them.  They are used to coming in at night for food and to be locked up in the barn area.  I have had zero luck trying to call them down off the hillside midday.  But if they can hear me in the evening they will come running.

We sold three more lambs off this weekend to someone who is going to raise them all summer long.  We sent our old brown ewe and her 3 month baby over with the lambs so they could try and hand tame the lambs.  Our old ewe will come to anyone who she thinks has food.  We also do not want her getting bred when we release the ram into the main herd.  90E31C90-FECF-4C46-B18B-0822D40F0E68I spent last night on the tractor for 4 hours driving around in circles pulling a disc trying to get the flooded out field from last year ready for spring barley crop.  The ground was full of ruts from the back creek flooding the field and making rivulets.  I hope I got most of them smoothed out.  We are hoping to get the seed in the ground tonight as it is supposed to rain 0.1-0.25” tomorrow and the hope is the seed will all be in the ground by then.  One must have goals in life.

 

 

In like a lamb, out like a lion!

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Well one would think that spring was in the wind, but winter is not quite ready to let go.  Two weeks ago we had snow on the ground!  It snowed three days ago at our house but did not stick.  We have now started the constant daily rain.  This is going to make the weeds and hopefully the grass we planted grow.

Unfortunately, the Coronavirus is slowing us down.  I am working way too much at the hospital getting ready for our Surge.  This  has left very little time for me to work around the farm.  This is going to cause us problems if I cannot figure out how to balance a work/life ratio.  I realize it is probably necessary for my health but I continue to work and worry and plan for something that I hope never comes.  This is causing me to not have the time or energy for the blog.  I will keep at it but there will be a noticeable dip in the quantity of posts I make.  As I use this medium for my official farm history to pass on to the next few generations I felt it necessary to add this in here.

 

The thing about Spring Winter is you get used to warmer weather so when the Mother Winter snaps back and reminds you she is still in charge it just feels colder!  Annmarie still persists in her belief that we cannot sleep at night without two windows open in the bedroom.  This is in blatant defiance of the outside temperature.  Our master bed looks like a blanket display at a market, dominated by Pendleton Wool Blankets.  We have decided that we don’t need a weighted anti anxiety blanket as we sleep under multiple wool blankets.

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Our sheep continue to have babies!!  Just when we think it is all over someone else pops out another lamb.  So the ram is still stuck in with the bull and a couple of steers.  There is hope that in a few more weeks they will all be done, as a five month lambing season is brutal.  We want two months only for lambing season.  We need to give him two months to get at everyone.  There are too many ewes for him to service everyone in one estrus cycle.  He is fat and needs to go on a diet anyways.  This will make him work off some of that extra lard.

The sheep are not really any smarter than normal.  I had to let this lamb out of the feeder.  It managed to get into it but spent the day inside as it could not get out.  We have noticed that the brown and white lambs are probably the cutest we have but definitely the weakest.  We had another one die this week.  I had to put it down.  This has caused us to rethink the lambs that we will be saving when we cull this spring.  We are going to have to avoid the brown and white ones.  The weirdest part of this is that the color is what is separating them out.  It makes it easy to pick and choose but it is kinda weird that  the most deaths this year have been those sheep with those color markings.  We were going to cull out the older ewes anyways and have lots of lambs to choose from so picking won’t be a problem.

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