Big Decisions

Today, I realized something.

I went out to the barn, cleared out Sasha’s stall, and got everything ready – she will calve soon, and I am really looking forward to milking. Weird, eh? I love my cow so much. I don’t even get it. I feel about her the way I feel about some of my best dogs. She has a personality and we partner together in the whole milking thing, and … well, and we eat her offspring, but somehow, in the whole bigger picture, that seems awesome, not awful and yukky.

Now the sheep …

I like the sheep, I do. They are cute. Some of them are friendly, others a little more skittish. There is nothing so adorable as lambs doing the sproinging thing around the pasture in the spring.

But sheep need much tighter fences than cows. I can put Sasha on a tie out and let her graze the ditches (true, I can do that with Cherub, one of the bottle fed lambs, now a grown ewe, but not most of the sheep). We like lamb, but mostly, we prefer beef. I love fibre arts, but I am just not in love with processing raw fibre.

And most of all, my resources are extremely limited.

I can’t get around to the feedings, the shearing, the vaccinations … I can’t do it all. The Boy has, thankfully, picked up most of the slack, but really, I can’t keep up.

I can keep up with a cow, though. In fact, I think I could keep up with two cows and a calf – I would like to have two dairy cows, who take turns being the one on milking duty, so I don’t have to worry about sending one off for breeding right in the midst of milking time … and we’d have a beef animal to put in the freezer every year. Only three or four animals to deal with at any one time, just a few vaccinations, no shearing, everyone halter trained and able to be tied out to eat or moved from one place to the other.

Today, I realized that I need to find another home for the sheep flock.

There are three that will stay – Lambie, Natalie’s last lamb, who we raised on a bottle and who just gave us a pretty little black ewe lamb named Jellybean, who would also stay, and Cherub, The Boy’s 4-H bottle lamb who nudges you to pet her every time you go outside. She’s such a character. They will stay.

Everyone else, though, needs to go to another home where there is grass and fences and space (and hopefully a guardian dog), someone who will happily shear them and delight in them.

I do love them. I just don’t have what it takes to be a good shepherd – I thought I would, but with the onset of PTSD? Nope. I don’t have the energy.

So … if you know anyone who’d like a lovely flock of fibre/meat sheep, send ‘em my way. There are five ewes (three of whom are still due to lamb – so nobody is moving anywhere until that’s done, that wouldn’t be fair), two rams (one of whom is the most beautiful and even tempered Icelandic ram you can ever imagine), and one wether … plus the two lambs on the ground so far, and probably three or six more to come.

I feel … well, I’m sad, but I also feel like it’s the right choice.

I’ll miss them, definitely. But the honest truth is, I’m not well enough to do all that’s needed to care for them. We’ve managed, we’ve done okay, but they need a different home.

Sigh.

The new sheep feeder

Today was the first test of the new sheep feeder, designed by me but built mostly by The Boy (I did help a little).

The prototype was built earlier in the summer, as I mentioned here. We did modify things a little: instead of cutting the hog panel in half, we bent it, so that if you look at it from the side it makes sort of an L shape, with the long side of the L coming off at an angle. This way the feeder is deeper and can hold more hay – the smallest squares of wire are along the bottom (and yes, some hay will fall through but they will eat it off the ground under the feeder … if it becomes a problem I can always lay boards in there, as well), and then the larger squares are up on the angled piece where the sheep poke their noses through to get the hay.

I’m hoping that because of the height of the feeder and the way it angles down, they will stop pushing their heads all the way through the wire squares, which is seriously annoying (and not good for either the sheep or the feeder). The feeder looks like it’s taller at one end than the other, and it is, but it’s level in the larger scheme of things … the pasture itself is on a bit of a slant. We went with level as opposed to ‘even height from the ground’ so that one end is closer to the ground than the other, which will make it easier for sheep of different heights to eat comfortably.

There’s still a bit more to do out there – those posts leaning up at the end are going to be needed for fence repair and to get the cow’s feeder built – Sasha is out on a tether munching the long grass in the ditch this afternoon, she’s easy to lead out to other grass, so she will be fed that way for a while longer. The grass is free (hay is not!) and she’s portable, so that just makes good sense. Plus it makes her easier to catch when she knows that “most of the time when the person puts that long leash thing on my halter I get to go out and eat all the grass I want”.

Rolling a couple of bales over (with a lot of help from The Boy, whew those are heavy bales!) and feeding everyone and picking up a few things was all I had energy for today. But, I had energy for that, and I did it, and so yay.

Oh, did you notice the bales are all up by the feeders? We didn’t have to move them! My Hay Farmer was able to drive the truck right up the hill and drop the bales where we needed them. Yippee!

Now I can do some indoor work on the computer, which is tiring to the mind but not the body. Oh, but first I need to call the butcher and arrange for some of those sheep to be turned into lamb meat – anyone want some? :)

Another week for George, and a new sheep feeder

George the calf has has his two summers and a winter, and it’s time for his ride to the last stop before the Big Pasture in the Sky. However, he was originally scheduled to go last Friday … but there was a snag at the butcher’s and they needed to rebook to this Friday … and then today when we went to hook up the trailer to the borrowed truck, we found that the hitch ball was the wrong size (and very firmly stuck in place). So, we just rebooked for next Friday when the Cruiser will be home, which we know for sure has the right hitch. George can mow the pasture grass for one more week.

So, instead of heading to the butcher I built a sheep feeder. I’d been doing some research on different feeder shapes, again. The one we’ve been using wasn’t bad: it’s essentially a piece of hog panel stapled to the fence posts with a piece of plywood tied to the back on an angle, making a sort of V shaped trough into which the hay is pitched twice a day. The only problem with that set up is that the bigger sheep climb up on the panels and reach over to eat, which is hard on the panels and sometimes pulls the staples out, and the smaller ones stick their heads right through the squares on the panels and occasionally (or frequently, depending how stupid the particular sheep is) get stuck there. Yanking them out several times a day gets old fast (but they STILL put their heads through).

I was also hoping to find something that could hold a little bit more at one shot, so that I can maybe get down to one feeding per day instead of two. I settled on something like the Premier fenceline feeder, as I think the angled base will help the hay settle to where it’s easily accessible, and with higher sides, I can get it pretty full.

I built a small one in the ‘sleeping pen’ today as a test run, and it worked out pretty well. It wasn’t even all that difficult.

The Boy assisted by cutting a hog panel in half the long way, with the side with the smaller openings being reserved for the base of the feeder (the other piece is actually attached underneath, to serve as a fence and prevent anyone from escaping under the feeder).

The front and back are made from fence boards screwed into fence posts: the back posts were already there, they were part of the original fence, and the front two posts were added today and not pounded in as deep so that the front of the feeder is high enough that the sheep can’t climb up on it (or jump over it).

Two thicker boards (2x4s, well, I think one is a 2x6, but whatever, it’s the 2 that matters) are screwed to the inside of the posts, the front board higher than the back, and the cut hog panel piece laid on them. Fencing staples are hammered over the wires of the panel to hold it to the boards, and then thinner boards are screwed to the inside of the fence posts going up the front and back of the feeder, creating a big trough. I left gaps between the boards to allow air circulation, save on lumber, and let me see how full the feeder is without having to go outside and peer down into it.

Here is a sheep’s eye view:

I can probably lower the whole thing a little bit, most of our sheep are pretty short. I’m also going to cut the hog panel one more ‘square’ up from the bottom on the next one, making the angled base a little bigger in area.

The hay is going to fall through and collect on the ground under the feeder, but the sheep will eat that stuff too – they do quite well eating off the ground, actually, if they don’t end up lying in it. We’ll see how these go – the plans actually call for a tray underneath to catch the hay as it falls through, so that’d be another option (I figured the ground made a perfectly acceptable tray … we’ll see).

This is a small one and won’t hold very much hay at one shot – hopefully if I extend the bases on the long row of feeders I have yet to build, I can widen the whole assembly a little and get a bit more in at one time.

It’s really hot out today, but it was good to get this done. I’ve wanted to have a feeder next to the sleep shelter for some time now, because we can use that area as a catch pen (with a little creative fencing, which is on the list of things to do before winter as well). If you fill that feeder, everyone will run into the pen and then you just slam the gate before they figure out that you are trying to catch them in there. Sheep are very easily bribed with food.

Okay, that’s enough hard work for one day … I’m going to go rest now!

New watering strategy for the stock

The shape of the pastures and barnyard is an evolving thing, still. I would like it if we could just figure it out and stick with one good, workable design … but we are farm rookies, really. Every year we discover something else that sounded like a good idea until we had to live with it for a whole winter.

The impetus for this current change is that I wanted a way to have the water trough ‘downhill’ from the house, so that the water cubes we have to capture rainwater from the roof can be hooked up to the trough all summer and keep it filled without any intervention from us. Lots of fresh water, no work for the humans, that’s a good deal, right?

I also wanted it positioned so that in the winter we don’t have to run the water heater’s extension cord through the barnyard. It gets stepped on, unplugged, and generally abused when it is in the way of animal traffic, so there needed to be a way to go around. The spot downhill where the water could go for the summer would work well in that regard, but there’s just one problem: sharing.

In the past, we’ve kept the sheep and cows completely separate all winter. They run together in the summer, sharing the pasture, and they get along just fine (the calf chases the sheep around sometimes, but it’s all in good fun), but in the winter it is important to feed the two separately, or the cows will bully the sheep away from the hay. Also, after the lambs arrive there definitely needs to be a place to get away from the Big Creatures.

What we did before was keep them completely separated, with the water trough under a fence so that one half of it was available for the cows, and the other for the sheep. This works, mostly, but there are always headaches of one kind or another.

The solution (well, the solution we’re going to test out this winter) will be to have the water in the new watering pen area, and everyone will walk over there to get a drink. It isn’t very far from the feeders and shelters, and keeping the animals walking a little bit in the winter is good for them, so that’s a feature, actually. The cows will have their winter shelter and pasture area,  like before, and the sheep will have theirs … and there will be a passageway into the sheep pen the sheep can fit through but the cows can’t. That way everyone can get to the water, and the sheep can go wherever they like … and get away from the cows when they need to.

Today I got the fence up around the new watering pen – The Boy had gotten one end fenced and most of the posts put in, so all I needed to do was stretch the wire and staple it on, put up the gate and pound in one additional post. I always end up redesigning the solutions when I’m outside working, and as I was moving fences today I realized that with one small shift in the position of a gate, I could eliminate a whole lot of work and at the same time meet the requirement that the animals be able to get from any of the pastures back to the barnyard and watering pen. As it stands now, they can get from any of the three main pastures to the barnyard area, which has shelter for them from the sun or from a summer storm and has access to the water area as well. We have a fourth pasture that will have to be treated as an extension of it’s neighbour for now: it needs some more fence work done on it to be sheep-secure anyway, so there’s no urgency there.

The good news is that for the remainder of the summer, the water should be a low-maintenance thing … as long as the water barrel is full and the float valve doesn’t get knocked loose, we’re good to go. There are some finishing touches necessary – the float valve needs to be screwed in place, the fence needs barbed wire run along the top and bottom (we have discovered that woven wire alone does not stand up to the cows, dogs, and sheep – they lean on it or wiggle under it and in no time it’s bent and useless), and there’s one spot at the end where the wire didn’t quite reach that needs some boards put across it for reinforcement. However, what did get done is a good day’s work, so now I can sit down and knit with a clean conscience.

Resting

Apparently, I can still overdo it without realizing it.

I spent most of yesterday weaving – trying out different ways of working with a point twill draft. I made a bunch of squares – sort of napkin or large coaster kind of shapes, all different. I think I might sew them together into a little bag, actually.

I finished off the warp this morning, got it in the wash and started winding on for the next project – tea towels. Well, that’s the intent, we’ll see what happens when I start weaving.

(If you’ve read any of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Chalion books, you may be able to identify the colour scheme. I hope to do all five.)

I got a little over halfway and had to quit – my back was aching and I was very, very tired. I lay down on the couch for awhile, then we had supper and I went outside to close down the Cow Buffet (i.e. put Sasha and George back in, they’ve been out eating down the hay bales now that I have a tie-out for George) and feed Izzy the Bottle Lamb again. She’s loud, but cute.

And then I got back on the couch and realized … yeah, I’m absolutely knackered. Can’t breathe properly, and I’m so tired. It’s like when I was first off work, that kind of feeling. I expect it’ll pass soon enough, but for the moment I’m resting with the laptop and surfing weaving designs.

I hope you have a restful day!

Two more lambs

Hughie:

And Henrietta:

They appeared this morning, their mama managed everything just fine on her own, as usual with Icelandic sheep. We have everyone in the barn for awhile to let mama rest up and get a chance to eat all she wants and get her strength back, she’s put all her energy into the babies and needs to recover!

Awesome little twins though, so cute and tiny. Just what we like to see!

The new lambs

On April 20, we had twins born here: however, the mama sheep was quite sure that only one of the babies was hers, so we have a bottle lamb. He’s very cute though. :)
Here is our bottle baby, Herman:

He’s kind of a messy eater, so he has drips of milk on his face and his coat. :) And no, he doesn’t drink that whole big bottle at once – that’s a 2 L milk jug with an opening cut in the side: the big bottle fits nicely in the fence bottle holder from the feed store, and then I slide a small pop bottle with milk replacer into the milk jug. It works better than most of the other things I’ve tried!
And here is Hermans’ sister, Hattie:

Doesn’t she have the cutest markings?
This morning I opened the curtains and looked out to see a tiny white and black shape that was definitely brand new. She is so very small, smaller even than most of the ‘smaller twins’ born too our Icelandics, but she seems to be doing fine. Her mama talks to her and seems very interested, which is good, as she is a first time mother and sometimes they are a bit puzzled by the whole thing.

She and her mama are in the barn now, where they are out of the wind and rain. I think this little one will need a few days to get her strength up before she and her mama can go back in the pen with everyone else. She still  needs a name  … it’s an “H” year. What’s a good name for a tiny girl that starts with H?

Weird spring blizzard: the perfect day for lambing

Very early yesterday morning I woke up in need of a glass of water, and I heard rain on the windows.

“Great,” I thought, “that’ll help wash away some more of the snow, and since we’re down to bare ground in a lot of places, it will go quickly.”

I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the rain had stopped. Oh well, sunshine melts snow too.

Then I looked out the window.

All that arrived in just a few hours. Whoa. I was very glad not to have to go anywhere in the car, not with that heavy wet stuff all over the roads.

I flipped the switch to make sure the batteries were charging from the grid power and got the dishwasher going: with all that snow a power outage was probably coming and although there is enough solar power to keep us quite comfortable for a good long while, it’s best to be topped up before a storm if you can. We did have power outages off and on all day, though they were all short lived.

The next thing I thought was “some sheep is going to decide that today is the perfect day to have a lamb”. Storms and bad weather don’t bother the Icelandics much, so it could happen. Sure enough, The Boy came to the door and said “can you come deal with this lamb please?” I was just getting into my coveralls when he appeared at the door again, this time holding a tiny little lamb. “Here,” he said, “deal with this one first. It got out of the  pen and couldn’t figure out how to get back in, so it’s kind of cold.” Sure enough, the little lamb was shivering, and when I stuck my finger in his mouth it was cool, but not as chilled as some we’ve had to work with in the past. He was trying hard to suck my finger so I knew he’d be okay once he warmed up, so I put him on a wool rug (which is actually the felted coat of one of the Icelandics, who didn’t get shorn in time) in front of the fireplace and headed outside to check on his twin. The other lamb was up and nursing and doing fine, so we put him in the barn with his mama and I was able to get a bit of milk in a jar for the chilly lamb. The lamb greedily drank the colostrum from the oral syringe, though he was still shivering. I put a heated barley bag over his chest and belly and he went to sleep, peaceful as anything, with the cat sniffing at the milk droplets on his chin.

Once the lamb was good and warm, I helped him to his feet. He immediately started butting at my leg, a sure sign that he was ready to see his mama again, so I got into my outside gear once more and took him out to the barn. The ewe wanted nothing to do with him: she sniffed him and seemed unimpressed, and when he tried to nurse she butted him away. Then I realized that there was a second ewe in the barnyard bellowing that “where is my baby?” sound – aha! We didn’t have twins, we had two ewes who had delivered at the same time! Sure enough, once that mama caught sight of her baby she was ecstatic, talking to him and licking him and quite happy to let him nurse. She needed a bit of a trim around the lower half so that the poor lamb could find his way to what he was after, but that mama was really calm, and just stood there chewing her cud while I did a quick haircut.

Today, all is well outside, we have two happy lambs with two happy mamas.

This mama is a Southdown/Columbia cross, and her lamb is clearly an Icelandic cross – the curly fleece and short tail are the giveaway there:

And the other mama is a similar sheep – a Columbia/Southdown cross, and her lamb is very clearly a Southdown baby … one of Jack’s last offspring.

Look at those big feet and that adorable face.

I do love my sheep. :)

Spring must be around the corner!

We have lambs! The two ‘early ewes’ (the Columbia and Columbia/Hamp cross) had their lambs this week … of course after several days of lovely weather, when it dropped to –31, they decided to have their babies. :)

We were anticipating just such an event, though, and were ready to warm up the babies and get their mamas into the barn for warmth and peace and quiet.

This morning, The Boy saw this out the window:

Love, sunshine, and peace.

If *this* were my job…

… I tell ya, things would be different.

If my job were keeping the house and farm running, keeping up with everything would be so much easier. The fences could be mended as the problems are noticed, the heavy lifting could be done a little at a time, and the garden could be visited and weeded every day. Of course, the bills would rapidly overwhelm us, which is why keeping the house and farm running is *not* my job … but boy, it would be nice to be able to do the house and farm work every day, instead of all crammed into the weekends or evenings.

What amazes me is that I feel this way even though I have a kid and husband at home during the week who actually do take care of the majority of things! I must be getting old.

Today’s mission was to start on Chickenville. We’ve been lucky enough to free range our chickens for the past several years, and have had no noticeable losses (we lose a few, yes, but nothing substantial). This summer, though, we had about 30 chickens when everyone got let out of the winter coops … and now we have fifteen. There’s been a hawk circling the property and The Reluctant Farmer saw a coyote sneak in by the garden the other day when the dogs were all on the other side of the house … so those two critters might explain our dramatically reduced chicken count.

Thus, Chickenville is in progress: a pen over by the barnyard, within sight and smell of the dogs’ usual sleeping spots, and in the centre of the pastures, so that no matter where the sheep happen to be (which is where the dogs will be), the chickens aren’t far. We’ll still let them out to roam and scritch in the dirt, but we’ll be bringing them in at night for their own safety.

The Boy and I also realized today that we’ve not seen the littlest bottle lamb at all. She was weaned a few months ago, but would still come up to you if you were outside. The Boy and I saw her ‘adopted sister’ (the two usually hung out together) today and realized that the bottle baby was nowhere in sight. We can’t seem to find her – so perhaps whatever took the chickens took her too. She was tiny enough to sneak out of the fences if she wanted to, but she always went back in on her own. I suppose without a mama to keep an eye on her, she wandered off too far. <sigh> Farming has rough spots, that’s for sure.

The bright spot, though, is that the demand for local, grass-fed meat is huge! We could easily have double the flock we’ve got and still sell out every year. Unfortunately, as this is *not* my job, we can’t scale up … not yet, anyway. Maybe someday, though …

Maybe someday, when I finally grow up, I can be a farmer.

Harvest & the Garden Cleanup Crew

Today was the day to harvest the remaining things out in the garden – the rest of the potatoes, beets, the squash, and the few stray onions that were left behind in earlier diggings. Oh, and the wheat and sunflowers.

The veggies were piled on a tarp (tarps are easy to load and drag around): a generous pile of potatoes, then the beets and onions, then the spaghetti squash. We only grew a little wheat this year, as an experiment, so it was harvested with scissors, one head at a time – the heads plunked into a bucket, and the straw left on the ground. The sunflowers were broken off at the stems and taken to the shed to dry out.

Once the harvest was complete, the strawberry bed was covered with boards and the sheep were let in to graze all the leftovers. There’s a lot of grass in the garden area (not all of the fenced off area was planted this year, so it really got to be quite a jungle), plus all the leftover beet tops, squash leaves, sunflower stems, and assorted weeds. The pastures are dry and overgrazed, the sheep are hungry, and I don’t want to spend two days hacking my way through all that vegetation … they might as well eat it!

So the cleanup crew is on duty in the garden, and I’ve started the preservation tasks indoors: potatoes were washed, sliced, and boiled briefly then bagged and sealed with the vacuum sealer. The boil-in-bag packages are in the freezer, where they’ll be very convenient come winter time.

Next will be the beets, but I think I’ve done enough for one day. :)

A whole new flock for Apple Jack Creek

We've been thinking about shifting our flock base over to Icelandics for some time now - the Icelandic sheep we have had just seem to be better suited to our shepherding style: they are seasonal breeders, so our inability to keep rams on one side of the fence and ewes on the other isn't a problem; they are very hardy and deal well with cold weather (Iceland ... yeah, lots like Alberta!); they are small, so easier to handle (small is a disadvantage if you're marketing to the auction houses, but we sell direct to customers, so it's not a problem for us); they have gorgeous, colourful, high quality fleece (which should explain itself!).



We had two purebred Icelandics in our starter flock, but culled one a year ago for infertility and discovered this spring that our much loved Natalie (amazing mama and all-around awesome sheep) is suffering from one of the common chronic sheep ailments (OPP for other shepherds out there). It's invariably fatal, but it doesn't condemn the carcass ... it's a chronic lung infection that just makes the sheep sicker and sicker over time. So ... Natalie will be added to this year's butcher list and we will honour her life by making sure her suffering is alleviated and by enjoying the lamb sausage and toasting her memory!



However ... all that left us with no more purebred Icelandics. Some nice cross bred sheep, yes, but what we really needed was some good breeding stock.



Then, an online friend of mine let me know that she was selling her entire flock: they have no pasture where they are located, and bringing in hay all the time was just not working out. Prime breeding stock, lovely sheep, from someone I know, needing a home.


Well, that was an easy decision. :)



Okay, not quite, but it was so clearly the right thing for us to do that we did our thought experiments, checked and double checked the budget, and said "okay, we'll go for it". All but two of our existing flock will be headed off to freezer camp (the Immunity Challenge winners are Jack, the Southdown ram and Cherub, the Columbia/Hamp bottle baby ewe), and our new flock has arrived:

Everyone survived the trailer run from BC quite well, and they are out nibbling on pasture grass very happily with no troubles at all. It's already been grazed down quite a bit, so it's not too lush and we should be able to avoid any digestive troubles with switching from a hay diet to a pasture diet, but we'll be watching closely to be sure.

It's sad to be saying goodbye to some of our existing ewes, we have some real personalities here and letting them go is a tough decision. However, we have found a new butcher who does small runs of sausage, which is an excellent use for older animals, and we have to do what will work best for the farm as a whole. Icelandics fit the bill for us, but we are grateful to have had the opportunity to experience the other breeds first hand as the only way to really learn what works well in your particular circumstances is to experiment.

So, we give our thanks and love to the sheep who have served us well during our apprenticeship, and welcome the new flock as we say farewell to the old.

The first purebred Icelandic lambs have arrived

Natalie *finally* delivered her twin lambs today! The Boy was keeping an eye out for a delivery, as we knew it had to be fairly soon, and he was right there, ready to help if need be. Nat was pretty tired by the time the second twin arrived, but she managed without assistance ... still, it's really reassuring to know that we have a skilled shepherd on hand just in case. What a kid we have! :)

These are the first purebred Icelandic lambs born on our farm: Natalie miscarried her fall pregnancy some time during the winter, possibly due to toxoplasmosis exposure, and was rebred by our new Icelandic ram lamb just after he arrived in mid February. Today, the lambs arrived at long last!

Two lovely ram lambs, a solid black one and a solid white one, with perfect little Icelandic faces and short little Icelandic tails and curly soft Icelandic fleece are walking around the pasture with their mama - one of them was even nibbling on grass and he's not eight hours old. :)

So, that should be it for lambing for this year - we had a couple of ewes who didn't settle at all ... and with the new breeding ewes coming to us from Flannelberry Farm later this year, we are reorganizing the flock a little. We love the Icelandics - they are the perfect sheep for our management style and our weather, so we'll be phasing out most (but not all) of the Columbia/Hampshires. It's always a tough decision, choosing who goes off to freezer camp, but for the good of the flock, it's a decision that has to be made.

The Boy and I will have some more conversations about our choices, but I think we're pretty much in agreement. There are a few who have "won the immunity challenge" and get to retire here ... Cherub the annoying but sweet former bottle baby, and Jack, the superb Southdown ram (who fathers excellent sturdy crossbred lambs, with that sumo sheep build of his, so he earns his keep). The rest, though, have to earn their place ... either in the pasture or on the plate!

At last, Cherub’s lamb!

Cherub was expected to lamb back in February, based on our observations of activity in the pasture last fall. Apparently, though, the activity we witnessed wasn’t as productive as one might’ve hoped and Cherub needed to let the ram have a few test runs before finally settling into pregnancy. February passed with no lambs … then March … then April and May. Cherub was clearly pregnant … but where were the lambs?

My dad always looks at the presents under the tree on Christmas day and says “Oh, they are too pretty to open! We should just put them away until next year.” (This elicits the predictable cries of protest from the rest of the family, but it makes me laugh every time!) Anyway, The Boy started saying that Cherub had obviously decided to just save her lambs for next year … either that or she was planning to deliver a market lamb, ready for the butcher from the get-go!

In the end, Cherub finally had enough of pregnancy, and a single ewe lamb was standing all alone out in the pasture when The Boy went out to top up the hay feeder the other night. Cherub wasn’t particularly interested in her offspring – the sight of a pitchfork full of hay was way more interesting than a bleating soggy newborn.

This is the first lamb we’ve had born with an orange fleece: she wasn’t actually orange, just stained orange from the birthing fluids. I suspect that is a sign of meconium staining, similar to what happens in humans, an indication of some stress just before birth, although I’m not quite sure and the quick research I’ve done hasn’t told me much. Regardless, we got the little girl dried off with a towel and convinced her mama to go into the barn by offering her alfalfa pellets (food is a very reliable bribe for Cherub!).

In the barn, Cherub still seemed to be in some pain, even two hours after lambing and passing the afterbirth, which is unusual … as is having a single in the second year, we were really expecting twins. We kept a close watch on them both: Cherub wasn’t really thrilled about letting the baby nurse, and we weren’t positive that there wasn’t a dead twin inside, but after another couple of hours went by the bleeding stopped and Cherub was letting the lamb nurse, and being her usual self.

We are keeping them in the barn for a bit longer than usual, as I’m not quite convinced that Cherub won’t abandon her baby nor am I completely sure that she has recovered entirely … I’ve read of other shepherds finding out several days later that a dead twin wasn’t delivered. That’s a situation I really don’t want to find myself in, but at least with her in the barn, if anything is wrong, we have a decent chance of noticing and of getting it dealt with properly.

I think we might need to name this little one Endurance – she was very persistent and was not at all put off by her mother’s kicking and fussing. She’d struggle up to her feet, stagger to her mama, and butt her nose against fleece, legs, sides, and udder until she found what she was after, and a kick or a shove from Cherub did nothing more than convince the lamb to try again. What a trooper.

Oh, she’s clearly Jack’s baby too – she has that adorable little Southdown grin, and the really long tail. We’ll dock that in the next few days (we don’t dock medium or short tails, but this one’s pretty much guaranteed to get mucky enough to be a risk for fly strike), and see how she does.

One more lamb, yay!

4-H Achievement Day

Today was the annual 4-H Achievement Day, but it was different than the previous years as we had no animals to go with us. All our sheep have been exposed to orf (contagious ecthymia, basically, cold sores on sheep) and pink eye (same as in humans) and although both are fairly mild illnesses, they are not ones you want to share with other flocks, so our critters are home under quarrantine.

The Boy, however, went along to help, and was in the show ring leading lambs for other kids who had mama sheep with babies, and one of the other members loaned him a sheep to use for the showmanship classes. He did an excellent job in showmanship - one of the best performances I've seen him give! - and took second in the two classes he competed in.

We are home now and enjoying the late sunshine - it's almost solstice, and it is very nice to have such warm sunlight so late in the day.

At long last...

Despreaux, our black mostly-Icelandic ewe, born here last year, finally delivered her lamb!

Despreaux is a small one-winter ewe, not quite fully grown but she did a great job and is doing really well as a mother. Her own mother, Natalie, is a fabulous mama, and this is a trait you can breed for so ... good to see that coming through! Her lamb was born this evening, and was up and looking for milk within about 30 minutes, with mama doing a great job of cleaning him up and taking care of him. For a first-timer, Despreaux did awesome.

We've been waiting a long time it seems for these last couple of lambs - Despreaux started showing signs about a week back, so we knew she was close, but we still have no idea if Cherub's ever gonna decide to deliver hers ... and I don't *think* the other two possibles are pregnant, but ... who knows?

Farming's definitely an adventure. :)

Sheep, for elementary students

Friday, The Boy and I volunteered to help the Alberta Lamb Producers show groups of elementary school students what the sheep industry is. There is a large exhibition with booths from the 'big producers' - canola, beef, dairy, poultry, pork - and room for some additional demonstrations as well - we were 'little critters', and the 'eat locally and think about your food miles' people from the Alberta Government had a really neat inflatable globe right in the center of everything and showed kids the difference between the honey you get from, say, Tofield, and the honey you get from Australia. Buying local makes sense!

My job was to convey to the kids a three point message: meet the farmer (so you can see who raises your food), explain what sheep need from us, and explain what products we receive from sheep.

Here's the blurb I ended up with (given about every fifteen minutes all day!):

Hello Grade Fives! (or whatever grade they are)
*You have to imagine me standing in a pen of about five sheep, emphatically gesturing and shouting to be heard over the general din.

I live on a farm about an hour west of Edmonton where we have about 15 sheep. The lady over there, who you'll go see in a bit, has over ONE HUNDRED sheep - and all their babies! And this boy lives with me 'cause he's my kid, and he actually does most of the chores at our house so he's a shepherd too - anybody who takes care of sheep is a shepherd!

I am here today to tell you that A HAPPY SHEEP IS A TASTY SHEEP! Did you know that? It's true! What do you think a sheep needs to be happy? (Lift up some hay) ... kids usually shout 'hay' or 'grass' ... yes, they need hay to eat, hay is just dried grass and they will eat it when there's no fresh stuff around, but in the summertime they like to go out and eat the fresh grass - so they are the lawnmowers! No mowing the grass, they do it for you! What else do sheep need? (point to the water bucket) "Water!" yup, they need fresh water and what else? Grain ... yes, some sheep eat grain, not all of them but some do. Some kids also mention pellets, and I usually pointed out the table where they could see the different kinds of feed sheep can eat. (Hold up the bucket of mineral). What's this? (usually nobody guesses) ... what do you put on your french-fries, besides ketchup? Salt! Right, sheep need salt and special minerals, it's like taking their vitamins every day.

Okay, now when it's time for the sheep to go to bed at night, do we need to tuck them into a nice warm bed and cover them up with a blanket? NO! Because sheep wear their blankets all the time! They have nice thick coats of wool (point to the unshorn sheep - or the plastic model of an unshorn sheep, late on Friday afternoon!). They can be outside all winter and be just fine wearing their nice big coats. But if we don't give them a haircut in the springtime, that'd be like sending you out to the playground in your snowsuit in July! Would you like that? No way, and neither do the sheep. They really need their wool taken off so they are not roasting all summer.

So we give the sheep food and water and haircuts, and in return they give us wool (The Boy would walk along the rail with a sample of wool, wearing fingerless gloves made from our wool) ... wool is a wonderfully useful renewable resource. Have you talked about renewable resources yet in class? (expanded on this for the older kids, sometimes mentioning that sheep can use marginal land that wouldn't be able to support grain or even cattle, so it's a good use of land that couldn't be used otherwise.) Some resources, like oil, aren't renewable - when it's gone, it's gone - but there's a new crop of wool every spring and the sheep are really happy for us to take it. Does it hurt to give them a haircut? Not really .. sometimes they get a little nick but it's just like a shaving cut and it doesn't sting for long (we had one return from the shearing demo with an obvious cut so had to mention this). What can we use wool for? We can make mittens (hold up my fingerless-gloved hands), or hats and scarves, blankets, sleeping bags, you can even insulate your house with wool, that's a good environmentally sound choice and much nicer than the itchy pink stuff! Over on the other side we have a place where you can see some more things you can do with wool. (The cowboy hat was a big hit, most had no idea felt was wool.) So using wool is a good choice, it's not wasteful - there's lots of it and there'll be lots more!

What else do sheep give us? A happy sheep is a TASTY sheep right? So they give us meat. Who eats lamb meat at their house? (We had at least one in every group!) It's pretty good, eh? Not a whole lot different than cow - if you eat cow, you'd probably also eat lamb. (And to the occasional objection "but they're cute!" my reply is "so are baby cows, but I bet you eat at McDonald's, eh?") (And to the very occasional comment about slaughter, I mentioned that it's actually against the law to hurt them at the end, it has to be quick and not hurt, and so we honour the sheep by taking good care of them through their lives, and then by being grateful for the life they share with us at the table.)

Now there are THREE products we can get from sheep - anyone know what the third one is? (some could guess - although occasionally I got 'lanolin' which was an awesome surprise) Milk! Yes, you can milk a sheep (at which point The Boy often said "yup, I milked that one!" which was true, his ewe lamb was in the pen and we had milked her when her baby was born and wouldn't nurse!). It's a bit harder than milking a cow (some had seen the cow and the milking demo so miming grabbing big cow teats with my whole fist vs using two fingers to milk out a little teeny sheep teat was quickly understood). There are dairy sheep, just like there are dairy cows, and they are bred for milking ... none of these are dairy sheep. There are some traditional cheeses made from sheep's milk, like feta (lots of nods from the teachers there).

So for our sheep to be happy we need to give them good food, clean water, and regular haircuts ... and in return, they give us wool and meat and milk. Now if you go over to the green carpet, we will show you some of the neat things we can do with wool! (over at the green carpet we had a master spinner working with a wheel, and a table with different fibre things out for them to look at ... plus a dressmaker's form with a wool jacket and shawl, and of course, the cowboy hat!)

It was a really long, exhausting day but it was fun. It was really encouraging to see how many people do eat lamb and enjoy it. For the hesitant ones, I usually tell them that it's about as different from beef as turkey is from chicken - you know it's not the same stuff, but it doesn't leap out at you.

And, although I didn't mention this explicitly to the little kids, there were some grownups who came by at the end of the day who knew the actual reason why a happy sheep is a tasty sheep: if you stress an animal, particularly close to slaughter time, the meat doesn't taste as good. Handling our animals gently and treating them kindly, right up until the last moment, is not only the right thing to do - it's the way to get the best product, too. Nice how that works out, eh?

Ethan and Emily go to school

A little while ago, we picked up two bottle lambs. They are Katahdin/wool crosses, so they are definitely meat sheep (Katahdins are hair sheep, and the cross breed sheep don't have fleece that is useable for spinning) - we aren't having the most productive lambing season ever, so we figured we might need a few extra sheep around come fall.

Anyway, The Reluctant Farmer also wanted to take some sheep to visit the school ... and bottle lambs are perfect for that. He and The Boy took the two lambs to Dinosaur Boy's school a couple of weeks back, and the kids in the class chose names for them. These two are now known as Ethan and Emily!

They will go back for another visit and the kids in the class will measure and see how much they have grown. Hopefully on their next visit they won't eat the artwork off the walls!

Okay, THIS time it was obvious we needed to intervene!

I went outside around five tonight to do chores and check on things, and I noticed Pugsy was all by herself in the sheep shelter, pawing at the ground. Ah, good, I thought, finally she's going to have that lamb!

I headed over and there he was! A big ram lamb already on the ground, and Pugsy hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet. I managed to get her into the sheep feed pen (everyone else was distracted by the hay I set out for them in the pasture) and watched to see how she and the lamb were doing. The lamb was still wet, so I helped get him dried off and poor Pugsy was obviously in a lot of pain with the continuing contractions. She was also famished! She ate and grunted and ate more hay and pawed at the ground and fussed some more. The lamb wouldn't nurse for some reason ... but I thought maybe he was still a bit dazed from birth and she was obviously not comfortable so a few more minutes wouldn't hurt.

The Reluctant Farmer and The Boy came home right about then and helped me get the sheep into the barn, where the lamb STILL would not nurse. Pugsy let me milk her, though, and I put the colostrum into a bottle and tried to get the lamb to take that: no go. He just didn't want to suck, although he'd suck on my finger if I stuck it in his mouth, at least for a minute. Well, we have a solution for that problem: we stuck a tube down his throat (and checked to make sure he'd swallowed it and not inhaled it) and poured the colostrum directly into him. That strategy ignores his opinion of the process entirely!

We got him all the way dry and checked his temperature - which was fine - and then let him go back to mama. A few hours later, he still wasn't able to nurse even with encouragement and help, so in he came again - much to his mama's dismay, she is hollering for him from the barn. He did take some milk from the bottle, and newborns only need about 300 mL a day, so we don't want to overwhelm his system either. He's in the bathroom where it's warm, and he seems okay - not really perky but not really sick either. We had another one like this a couple of years ago, wouldn't take the bottle (and we didn't know how to tube feed yet, so boy was that a struggle) and after three days of babying she went back to her mama who took her right back and all was well! That doesn't happen often, but hey, it's nice to know it's possible.

We haven't settled on a name yet ... working through our E list. I'll get a picture up soon!

Update: He's taking the bottle nicely now that he's warmed up ... we have him sleeping in the bathtub (without water!) so that we don't have to worry about him being underfoot if we need to use the loo. He seems content to just sleep ... we'll give him some more milk in a bit and take him back to his mama in the morning.

Can't save 'em all

The new lamb only made it for a week. :(

In hindsight, we should have realized that he wasn't getting strong enough fast enough - they are sometimes a bit wobbly for the first few days, and we did check on him and his mama regularly ... but the time got away from us and we didn't really process the fact that it had been nearly a week and he was still shaky on his legs, and occasionally cold in the mouth.

If we had it to do all over again, we'd have brought him in for bottle feeding - I think his mama just wasn't quite enthusiastic enough about taking care of him, so although she'd let him nurse (and whenever we went to check we made sure he got something to eat), I think it was too much of a hassle for him to make the effort as often as he needed to. Of course it's always possible something else contributed, especially the cold (it was a very cold week) but ... well, you can't save 'em all.

The Boy was very sad, as was I. He and I talked about what we had done in this case, what we'll do differently next time, and what we have learned, and having learned from it, all we can do is move on and do things differently with the information we now have. We are still really new to this, and it's part of the process of learning - and experienced shepherds don't save 'em all, either. It's part of the process.

So, the Blizzard baby has passed on, and we're now anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next lamb. Pugsy is in the barn, as she was starting to show early signs of lambing - but that was a few days ago and now she's just standing there, irritated at being separated from everyone else and looking like she ought to deliver any minute ... and nothing's happening. Cherub is so heavily laden she walks on stiff peg legs when she gets up from chewing her cud ... but she still manages to jump the fence and get into the bale storage for her favourite snack.

Lambing is always an interesting adventure, that's for sure. :)