Yes, I’m here.

I haven’t written much lately … I’ve been quite busy, doing one thing or another, recovering from a cold, struggling to sleep, catching up on sleep, working, all sorts of things.

So I’ll just jump in with a bit of a generic update.

The past couple of days I’ve done a bunch of outside work, because Winter is Coming. There’s almost always snow before Halloween, so I have to get a move on if I want to get these things finished before I have to pull everyone in off pasture! With fewer animals, though, we are able to still have everybody out grazing, which is awesome. Some years I’ve had to start on hay by now, to spare the pasture from overgrazing. We’ve still got lots of grass, so that’s wonderful.

I’ve been making bigger changes, as the remaining four sheep are going to be gone by the end of the month: Cherub, The Boy’s 4H lamb (who is now 7!) will be going to a friend’s house for her retirement, and the remaining three will be turned into sausage. Two are Icelandic, Lambie and Jellybean, and I plan to get their hides back and make sheepskin rugs from them … I know for ‘city folk’ that may seem awful, but they are simply gorgeous pelts and I want to be able to fondly remember them and keep my toes warm at the same time. And we love the sausage our butcher makes, so it is a good way to honour the gift of their lives.

Since we won’t need a separate sheep area this winter, then, I removed some fences from the winter pen, making one larger area. I used the nice tall fence  wire to fully enclose the barnyard, removed one gate (which I will need at the Self Serve Cow Buffet), and built the alleyway entrance to the aforementioned Cow Buffet. My Farm Helper will have to come put in the rest of the posts for that feeding area, but it’s almost ready to go, which is good - then I can have my hay delivered and roll the bales in. (We are doing this, if you are curious what I mean by Cow Buffet.)

Basically, we will be able to have the bales dropped in the driveway, roll them into the feeding area by hand (they are easy to roll when they first come off the truck, it’s just impossible once they freeze in place!), remove all the bale string, and run electric wire in front of the front row. The cows eat the bales, then we move the wire backwards when they have cleaned up what they have dropped. No more pitching hay into a feeder, no more trying to get bales up the hill in the winter, just a self-serve Cow Buffet. The space we are using for feeding is what used to be my garden – the quack grass is unconquerable with the energy and resources I have, so this is a better use for the space. Besides, come spring, the area will be trampled down and matted with manure and hay and straw … and I can feed a few pumpkins and zucchini to the animals in there, then close the gate. This spring I fed Sasha a pumpkin in the barnyard, and we got two pumpkin plants in the spot where she’d left some seeds! I can put a few potatoes in as well, because potatoes will grow quite happily in a pile of straw, so I can at least have a few things growing in the nicely fertilized and cow-and-donkey-weeded space.

And donkeys really DO eat thistles! I watched Miss May purposely munching down on thistles in the pasture yesterday, which is just FANTASTIC.

I also tightened a couple of weak/broken spots in the fences, so that I can be sure the winter pen is reasonably snug (come spring everyone wants OUT ON THE GRASS and they will push if the fences are weak). I have also thought some more about my winter watering plans, though I haven’t done anything with that yet, I’m pretty worn out from all the work I did so far!

I took Miss May for a walk down the gravel road today – she did pretty well, stopping a few times to make sure ewerything was safe, and even though a truck came down the other end of the road, everything went well (my neighbours are very good about slowing down around stock!). We both can use the exercise, and it’s good training for both of us as well. I can see that training a donkey will be very good for me: donkeys need a lot of time to ponder things, to be absolutely sure everything is safe before they proceed. They freeze when they aren’t convinced of their safety … a response I completely understand. It’s my job to be empathetic and encouraging, to show Miss May that whatever she is seeing is safe: For instance, she didn’t’ want to walk through the narrow gate by the water trough for some reason. It looked unstable, perhaps, or too skinny. So I tied her to the post and let her look at it for awhile, I walked through several times, and tried to coax her through, and let her stand by the post when she said she wasn’t ready yet. Eventually she decided it was all right and came through. The next day when I took her through, she didn’t even pause. Donkeys have great memories!

I’ve been reading a lot on donkey training – and I measured Miss May again today to confirm her size and weight: she is 48” at the withers (12 hands) and about 700 lbs, which means I can ride her! Only with a very light saddle, and only after we get some solid ground work under our belts, but it is a possibility!

So I spent the day researching, looking at saddles and tack and learning about ground driving and surcingles and lunge lines and bitless bridles.

It’s all very exciting.

Oh, and when we got back from our walk, I put Miss May in the pasture with all the other animals. Everyone was totally calm about it, having been able to get to know one another through the fence for the past couple of days. Then when I went back outside later in the day and called her, Miss May came running right up to me! Yay!

She is such a great animal. She likes to stand there and have me scratch her chin and hug her neck. I’m so happy she came to live here!

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? :)

Getting ready for the snow

Before we know it, the snow is gonna be here. The pressure to get the summer jobs finished is now at maximum.

I split a pile of wood today, and then stacked it all (we really really needed that done - and the splitter is borrowed from a neighbour so I had to do it in one go, and then send it back).

This is what I did:

I am very happy with the new wood shed. Much tidier than what we had before, and it was pretty easy to build - those are giant long fence posts (which I got by accident, I didn't think to specify length when I ordered them) with scrap wood for the ends and a piece of metal roofing on the top. We did have to stand on something to pound in the posts, but the resulting structure is tall enough that I can stand in it. There are pallets on the bottom, to keep the wood up off the ground, as well as one in front so you can stand on that to get a load to take inside. The kindling goes in rubbermaid buckets that are kept outside – there’s bits of wood and bark all over the ground after splitting, I will ask the Small People to pick that up when they are here next, it’s a good job for people who start off closer to the ground than I do.

The Boy was outside working, so after I came in for lunch, I went back and helped him get finished. We now have finished sheep feeders, and the steps to securing the winter pasture are about 75% done, maybe more. All that's left is to get a gate mounted, so that the barnyard can be locked off from the rest of the pastures, make a feeder for the cow (that's easier than the sheep feeders, just needs a couple of posts and some existing panels and pieces of wood attached in different places than they currently are), and clean up of the barn and barnyard (i.e. shoveling and raking, and moving stuff around).

Then we have hay to be delivered and that'll need to be moved from where it gets dropped off, and the water trough will need to be put into it’s winter box (there is a lid that covers half of the trough, keeping the evaporation down). If I get organized enough, I’d like to set up a recirculating heat reservoir, but I don’t know if that’s gonna happen in time. Hmm, I’m not actually sure we have a working trough heater, either – need to check on that too.

The plan, of course, was to have a lot of this done earlier in the summer, but plans have a way of just doing their own thing and so … well, here we are. Further ahead than in many other years, thankfully, but we still have a few more important jobs to finish up before the snow comes. I still remember one October when it snowed and I said “oh well, that’ll melt in a couple of days” … and it didn’t melt. That was the start of winter that year! So, I try to be ready by the end of September if possible, mid October at the latest … just in case Mother Nature decides to pull a fast one on me again.

We’re not quite there … but we’re close. Whew.

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.

Spring is crazy busy on a farm

Springtime is nuts around here.

The weather has been a bit crazy – it’d warm up, then we’d get a heavy wet snow blizzard, then it’d warm up some more … the winter felt like it went on for absolutely ever this year. Of course, last week, after having most of the snow melt and some beautiful work-outside-kind-of-weather days all in a row, we got another late storm, super windy and wet and snowy … so of course we had twin lambs born that morning, and then another single born that afternoon! The twins were very cold and had to be brought in to warm up, tube fed colostrum (they were too chilled and weakened to nurse) and given a boost of oral glucose to get going, but they did perk up and are back with mama who loves them both, thankfully. All the lambs born that day are boys, haven’t come up with names for them yet.

On the warm day before the storm, I went outside and did some work on the front steps: our patio door opened out onto a low temporary deck that’s been there since the house was built, and it was time to replace it with something sturdier (and with less of a steep drop when you stepped out the door). I’ve been reading permaculture books lately, and so I had the thought of putting some garden space right outside the door for herbs and things you’d like have within reach of the kitchen. This led to the idea of a set of raised beds with steps in the centre, and so with stuff I found around here already, I was able to build something that works. Today I gave it a few coats of stain, so it doesn’t look like the scavenged and mismatched wood that it actually is. I do still need to add the trellis supports for climbing plants (I saw a climbing strawberry plant that I think would be really neat, or perhaps a grape vine, to take advantage of the extra warmth up here by the house). The beds are presently mulched with straw, and my Easter lily got planted though the snow may have done it in.

On the left side of the bottom bed there are some twiggy things: I went to a workshop hosted by the county on starting trees from cuttings, and learned how to start willow, dogwood, poplar and aspen from cuttings. The twiggy things there are rooted cuttings that are in some pots of soil so they can develop sturdier roots (not just the ones they put out when they are in water), and then they’ll be planted around the property. Free trees! From local stock! Perfectly adapted to our climate! There’ll be more on this topic soon, I have some big plans (those permaculture books got me thinking)!

Today was a day to work on fences. Our infrastructure is still evolving – not something I’m really all that pleased about, I’d like to have gotten things more settled by now, but, it is what it is, and as we change the way we do things, we keep finding better (or hopefully better) ways to deal with the shape of our land and what’s on it. The wind tower has three big guy wires that keep it stable, and the animals rub on the wires, loosening them. Today’s job was to adjust the fence line so that the entire wind tower and its guy lines are enclosed by fence (actually that’s not quite true – one of the anchor points is still outside the fence, but there’s another fence going in that will protect it). The Boy and I took down some very ragged and damaged fences then put the posts back in, tightened and attached new woven wire, and cleared up a lot of the mess of broken fences, leftover posts and destroyed gates that had accumulated in the general vicinity. We also mounted some ‘lamb stoppers’ along the fence and gate: there were some gaps big enough that small sheep could pop out through the fence, and I need to know that the lambs will stay inside the fences before I start planting my garden!

Lamb stoppers are just chopped off bits of trees nailed to the fence to make the gaps too narrow to fit through, even for a little sheep:

Nothing fancy, but I think it’ll work. The price is certainly right.

There’s a lot more fence work to be done, but what we did today should mean that we can keep everyone reasonably well contained until the pastures are green enough to let them out to graze. We have some more water and pasture access changes to make, so there’s a few more big fencing days ahead still.

Ah yes, pasture. Since the grass isn’t ready for grazing yet, we’ve still got everyone on hay. We’re all out of the hay we had delivered, but there are some bales in the pasture that belongs to our neighbour that we are able to use – they’ve been sitting there for a couple of years, but when I was out there last week, I noticed that though they’ve been sitting a long time, they had been baled when the hay was nice and dry and so they are not mouldy or anything. They still smell good! The Boy and I took the quad and the big trailer and headed over there to load up.

A Boy and his Dog … and a haybale.

I rode on top of the hay wagon on the way home. :)

It’s just grass hay, nothing spectacular, but there’s plenty of it, so we feed generously and everyone seems reasonably content.

I’m rather stiff and sore after all that work, but tomorrow I have a baby shower to go to so I’ll have some enforced relaxation time before I get back to the outside work.

What’s it like to be a small holder

Most of us have visions of what it is to be a farmer: driving a big combine, baling hay, loading a hundred cattle into stock trailers and driving them to auction, getting up every two hours to check the cows during calving season, and so on. These images are quite real for many farmers, including a lot of my neighbours.

A small farm, like ours, though, is very different. The modern definition of the word farmer doesn’t even seem to apply to us: we don’t make a living doing this. We do raise our own meat, have chickens that give us eggs, and maintain a garden and pastures. What we do is similar to the way people farmed a hundred years ago, when more families had a bit of land and just about everyone had a garden out back and a few chickens in the yard. I usually use the word small holder to describe what I am, because calling myself a farmer would confuse a lot of people and upset many of those who are full time modern style farmers.

A small holding is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “an area of land that is used for farming but which is much smaller than a typical farm”. Yup, that’s us. We have about six acres on which you’ll find a house, a creek, some fenced pastures, a couple of sheds, a small barn and a chicken house.

I thought I’d start out this series of posts by describing the routine of daily winter chores – later on, I’ll explain more about our infrastructure, the seasonal ‘big jobs’, and what the summer chores look like, but this is what we’re doing daily right now, so it seems like a good place to begin.

In the winter, the animals who live here need to be cared for every day. The chores are done twice a day – this year we’ve shifted to a schedule that has chores happening around 9:30 in the morning and 3:00 in the afternoon. This way, even at the darkest time of the winter, it’s still light when you go out to do chores, and the time fits reasonably well into the other schedules we have to maintain (minimal though they are). If we’re going to be away for the day, we’ll just put out extra feed the night before, or have things ready to do a quick top up before we leave or when we get back home, so it’s not like someone absolutely has to be outside twice a day … that’s the baseline, but it’s not a hard and fast rule.

So, let’s just walk through daily chores.

In the morning, I put on my warm chore clothes (if it’s really cold that includes insulated coveralls plus my coat, hat, mitts and a scarf) and head outdoors with Caleb the border collie cross. I walk to the quad which is parked next to the hay bales and pull the tarp off, spreading the tarp out on the ground so I can load it with hay. Using the pitchfork that stays near the hay bale, I unload enough to fill the feeders for the sheep and cows and pile it on the tarp, which is tied to the back of the quad and serves as a hay trailer – it slides easily on the snow, and since it’s at ground level, I don’t have to lift the hay, just peel it off the bale and slide it onto the tarp. Once the tarp is loaded up, I start the quad and drive up the hill to where the feeders are (in the early winter, there are bales up there near the feeders, but by this time of year those are used up and we’re having to haul the hay a bit of a distance from the drop off point to the feeders). Loading hay takes about five minutes, twice that if it’s a new bale and I have to deal with cutting the bale strings off.

At the top of the hill I park and drag the edge of the tarp closer to the feeders and tip it over. Using the pitchfork that lives near the feeders (note that we have two, one at the bales and one at the feeder, it makes life simpler) I load the hay from the ground up into the feeders, checking to see that all the sheep and cows are coming to eat and that nobody looks ill or has gotten themselves stuck in a fence or tangled in bale string overnight. That takes about five minutes, maybe less, unless you have a crisis of some kind to deal with but if you stay on top of things, usually everything is okay.

Driving back down the hill on the quad, I stop at the dog feeder and load up their dish with six scoops of dog food from the garbage bin that sits beside their sheltered feed spot (the guardian dogs have a little ‘house’ that they can walk into to eat: it keeps their food from getting rained on and gives them a spot out of the wind to chow down). Pour one extra scoop on the roof of the feed house for the cats, who are sitting there waiting for me. Three minutes.

Next stop is the edge of the house, where I park the quad and take the collapsible bucket (which is stored on the tray on the front of the quad) to the water outlet and fill it up for the chickens. Trudge over to the chicken run, tip their water bucket upside down and stomp on it to knock the ice out (it’s a flexible rubber dish, specifically designed so it can be stomped on to clear it in the winter) then flip it back over and pour the water in. Get a scoop of grain from the garbage bin that sits next to the chicken coop and pour it in their food dish inside, double check that there aren’t any eggs in the nest boxes (there aren’t usually any this early, but if someone laid an egg late the day before, sometimes you can get it before it freezes … frozen eggs are treats for the guardian dogs). Checking on the chickens is maybe another three or four minutes.

Eyeball the water trough – it should have enough water since yesterday, but it’s always possible that the breaker flipped and the thing’s frozen over, or that it  has emptied out sooner than expected. Usually water doesn’t need to be dealt with until afternoon, so we’ll assume that’s the case right now. That means we are done, just need to park the quad and cover it back up, and head inside.

Afternoon chores are identical to morning chores, with the addition of water. The hose is stored inside (because otherwise it freezes) so it gets grabbed on the way out the door. Load up the tarp and drive partway to the feeders with the load of hay, stopping at the edge of the house. Climb off the quad and take the hose to the tap, hook it up to the quick connect and walk up to the barnyard, laying down loops of hose as you go, dropping the end of the hose in the trough. Head back to the tap, turn on the water, and continue with feeding: by the time you’re done feeding everyone and checking on the chickens, the water trough should be full. Chickens don’t need water again in the afternoon, as they’ll be going to sleep as soon as it’s dark, but there are probably eggs now, so collect the eggs in the bucket and set them on the quad while you turn off the water and wind up the hose. Drive the quad to it’s parking space, cover it back up, take the eggs in the house, rinse them off, and put them in the fridge. Feed the inside pets, hang up your coat and hat, and you’re done for the day.

It’s about fifteen to twenty minutes, twice a day – a little longer when you have to peel a new bale, a little less when you can grab the core of the bale and dump it over the fence for the cows to munch on at leisure. Note that this can also be done without the quad – a human being can haul the tarp laden with hay (not quite as fully loaded, so two loads may be necessary) and all the other jobs are just as easily accomplished on foot – it’s not that far from the house to the barnyard. The quad is lovely to have, though, as it saves me a lot of energy … I only have so much to go around, and when I can conserve some, I am happy to do so.

So, that’s a winter day in the life of a small holder. More on this series shortly.