Lost Little Lovely

Something pushed part of the fence down and took our smallest ewe lamb Lovely with it.  There have been some teenaged black bears and whatnot running around.  It’s hard to say what happened.  We looked for any traces of her, but there was no sign on our land or the neighbors bordering us.

 

The rest of the girls are fine and boys were in a separate paddock.  I’ll have to record her as a probable predation loss.

We’ve had a lot of health issues, and scaled our flock down.  We have about a dozen total between girls and guys, plus a healthy wether in Zuko 4.  The land can support them even if we don’t get around to eating the rams this year.

Preliminary plans are to shear in a couple of months.  Should be interesting.

I was born yesterday, mega sheep update

This black badgerface ram lamb being petted by a mysterious stranger is Zuko IV, out of Brunhilde.  She had him Sunday afternoon right before my eyes.  She is going to be our first ewe cull for conformation defects, her teats are located in very poor positions for nursing lambs, equivalent to under the arms.  Her little guy is cheerful and of hearty spirits, but totally unable to figure out suckling.  He has the strength, but not the instinct.  She was one of the unexpected lambings.

 

So was Ripley.  Hers was sadder.  She miscarried 8/4/16.  (GRAPHIC FETUS PICTURE BELOW)

 

 

So we are at 15 lambs delivered of 9 ewes and 13 live lambs, of which one is currently a bottle lamb.  9 live males, 4 live females and sex indeterminate of the miscarriage.  Still waiting on Toph and Katara to give us a sign they got pregnant.  Nothing yet.

We got enough fencing in place to keep the yearling rams from roaming.  And roam and roam they did, apparently in the wild it is normal for young unbred rams to find a little pasture away from the herd Rocky-style and train (via eating lots, the sheep version of lifting big and posting gains) to take down the Big Ram.  So that is what Clovis and Zuko II were doing when they kept busting out of the fencing.  But now they’re stuck in our roughly 4 acre pasture, until we can send them to freezer camp.

We met several neighbors, who were pretty cool about things and have really nice pastures, at that.

We are done with breeding for the next few years and will just focus on fiber.  We will probably just eat and/or sell all the rams.

 

 

 

She’s gone to lamb heaven

The ewe who got sick with what was probably a very rapid E coli infection from being born in dirt is dead now.  She had a seizure and it was over.

 

So no baker’s dozen for us.  But we have a leaping, frolicking dozen lambs remaining, 8 boys, 4 girls.

Tear down these walls

The rams have twisted and bent cattle panels with their horns.  They also broke through the panels and are now hanging out with the ladies.  This is not really that bad, even though there are lambs there because it’s the tail end of the Icelandic breeding season and the lambs are unlikely to conceive anyway.

It wasn’t lack of food, it was hormones (they left their food to go do this).  Spring is a funny season.

first dead lamb of the season

Grey just lambed, and I was leaving her to do her thing, but after two hours, I went up the hill where she was hiding out and there was a dead black ram lamb, still in the sac.  The other black (ram, probably, couldn’t get close enough to check for sure) lamb was up, a little wobbly, but able to nurse.  She has only one teat, so that’s not the worst thing.  She hasn’t passed the placenta yet.  I took some pictures, will post them later today.  This is depressing, but she is the most skittish when lambing and I had to choose between hovering over her and risking more labor complication vs. leaving her to it and taking this chance of a dead lamb.  We may have to try in the future what we did last year, moving her to a small pen until the lamb(s) are established.  This year we let her lamb on the main pasture and she ran off into the woods where it was full of twigs and moss and fallen logs and branches.  Not easy to observe her or for her to move around, but definitely isolated the way she likes it.

SIGH.

Homesteading Diary, Thursday, January 8

Husband and I: Coming off a very sick holiday season, but doing better and may be up and about this weekend.

Sheep:  Pregnant ewes are pregnant, looking ok, we just have to find a Saturday to move them back in with the ewe lambs, hopefully it can be this one.  Scottie is bold as brass, which will make sending him to freezer camp easier, but that’s probably still a couple weeks away.  All the sheep are miserable about the rain.  We have to order a ton or so more hay and a bunch more straw this week.

Kids: It’s a rainy enough winter that even they don’t want to be outside constantly.  But they do want to run around and finding places for them to do that has been a bit of a challenge.

That’s all for now, next week should be more normal and busy.

Wingus choked to death on electronet

I was able to bail him out a couple days ago, but today he snuck by and we just didn’t catch him in time.  He was tangled where there is a lot of bramble and it’s not easy to see if a sheep is actually tangled or not without stomping out there in the mud and thorns.

No more electronet for us.  This is the first (and hopefully only) death from it, but we’ve had so many close calls with our other sheep that we’re just going to have to put up something else that is higher-hassle to move around for our temporary fencing.

I know it’s our first year (from when we got our initial sheep), and my husband keeps saying that part of starting out even on a small scale is losing animals due to inexperience, but we were really hoping to eat Wingus, he was really massive.  And the punchline is that we don’t know enough about dead animals to know if the meat is salvageable, so he’s going straight in the ground as fertilizer.

I’m just feeling very overwhelmed right now.  My own child is gaining like crazy, if his current gains persist, I’d have a 90lb one year old.  So it’s hard to wait for the old energy levels to get back up.  But it’s good to have a healthy, comically large newborn.

Anyway, we have a lot to learn, and in the meantime our bellies will have to be filled with humble pie as we gain that wisdom from experience.

Homesteading Diary, Monday, December 9

Husband and I: doing better on the health front, gearing up for holidays and the new year.

Sheep:  ordered lambing supplies and vaccines, everything should arrive well before Christmas.  Gotta put some more straw down, now that it’s winter they hang out in the barn more.

Bucky and Shaft fought, Shaft lost and his scur is a bloody mess.  I can’t get close enough to check it out at length, but when my husband’s home tonight we can probably catch him long enough to dump some antiseptic and maybe cornstarch on it.  Shaft seems ok and is behaving/eating normally, it’s just messy where it was either torn or broken off.  It was a loose scur in the first place.  I’m checking him and putting out treats to get a little closer every hour until my husband gets in from work.

Now that the goats are gone, we’re down to maybe 10-15% hay lossage.  They just don’t spill nearly as much even still having to use the manger.  The bunk feeder made it all the way to Oregon and should be here this week.  So we’re still at about a bale a week even though they are coming in for hay all the live long day with the increasingly cold, dry weather.

The ewes are fine, they look to be growing bigger, so I guess they are getting enough nutrition to grow their lambs.  I sure hope so.

Ducks: We’re gonna eat the two leftover ducks.  Even leaving the barn open during the day, they can’t seem to lay with the current amount of light, so we’ll just eat them and try again in March or whenever we can round up a few laying Khakis or runners.

Kids: Love going out in the weather, it is quite the challenge bundling them up sufficiently.

Well, it’s off to check on Shaft and hope he isn’t still battling Bucky with that stump/fragment.

Homesteading Diary, Tuesday November 26

Husband and I: still working through a series of health problems.  It’s all the bare minimum to get to the next day right now.

Goats: the goats were contained with our last fencing efforts, but two of them got unhappy and now just crawl under the fence, careless of the shocks.  Hunting season has slacked off, so one of the local butchers said they did have freezer space next week, so hopefully we can just go with that option, since the health stuff has really made it impossible to set a date to do it ourselves, even though the weather is really great for it.  The escapee goats have started nibbling a neighbor’s trees, so it’s time for freezer camp.

Sheep:  Unlike the goats, Bucky and Shaft are perfectly contained and happy to hang out eating hay and grass with the ewes and don’t even try to test the fence now.  So once the goats (even the sole non-escapee, little tame Taco) are turned into deliciousness, there should be no further misfortunes with stray livestock eating the wrong trees in the wrong yard.

Three of the ewes look pretty pregnant and one looks maybe sorta pregnant.  I am beginning to think we might actually have an out of season conception on our hands, but things will be more obvious around Christmastime.  Getting the sheep to notice where we put the minerals has been hard, they’ve only eaten a little and I worry about that one and have to hope the hay and alfalfa treats are good enough.  I still have the expectation that seven lambs are most likely if the ewes carry to term successfully and nothing about their growing size suggests fewer or more right now.

The hay situation is miserable, our homemade manger leads to spilled hay like whoa and the only reduction in lossage is by giving 1/5 or less of a bale at a time and “fluffing” the hay in the manger a few hours later so the fresh bits are back on top.  We ordered a bunk feeder, but it’s backordered and who knows when it will turn up with the holiday.  Until then, small amounts and lots of fluffing and sighing at all the hay on the ground.  The goats jumping into the manger doesn’t help.  I am writing this post so I will remember to try putting a screen on top in the next day or so and see if that helps reduce the lossage.

Ducks: Down to 2 eggs a day the last couple of days, if we stay on the mend, we’ll probably move them at long last into the barn this weekend.  They have ridden the frosty mornings and nights out like gangbusters, happy as anything even when their swimming water is frozen and their waterer is crusted over with ice.  Due to the health stuff, they haven’t been moved like they should have been and are down to mostly bare earth, so I am going to give it a try with my little arms today or tomorrow.  I’ve been keeping them on 2 quarts of feed, 1 in the am and 1 in the pm.

Kids: Not sick as far as we can tell, just a little stir crazy with the cold and rain.  It’s been warmer and sunnier this week, so we’ll get them both out more.

It’s been a hard week and is likely to continue being hard for another week or two.  But we’re all still here, the animals and kids are healthy and ridiculously well fed and we don’t have to cook Thanksgiving dinner, so that stress is off our minds.  We are going with these neat people who like to source local and organic and sustainable whenever they can.  They used to be a nice local go-to for us when we were living in suburbia and they are always worth the custom.

Homesteading Diary, Monday October 21

Husband and I: both tired from having to unload hay, straw and cattle panels this weekend since the co-op’s delivery truck broke down and we had to pick everything up ourselves.  This meant we couldn’t put up as much fencing and do as much patching as we wanted.  We’ve made some good plans though, and we appear to be getting physically stronger anyhow.

Goats: STILL ALIVE…for a little longer.  We have to do a bunch of maintenance with the sheep, so the goats get to stay alive probably another 2-3 weeks.  We will try to time butchering them so they don’t get any of the hay, but they might get some, since it’s getting towards that time of year.  They are giving less trouble, mostly eating a lot of grass and hanging out near the sheep.  Not so bad right now.

Sheep:  We have six now instead of four, and the new sheep have wandering feet.  Their bloodlines are IIRC from the original Icelandic imports, before Icelanders started altering their breed for maximum meat production, tameness and white wool output.  Our new sheep are named Bucky (white badgerface) and Shaft (moorit).  So there is a lot of curiosity in the new guys and a certain amount of skittishness that isn’t present in the other four, who are more mellow and happy to respect nearly any kind of fencing with or without electricity/hotwire.

I’m currently on sheep patrol, until we can patch enough boundary fence to let them roam during the day and not wander into the front yard.  Gotta round the little guys up every few hours until evening, when the whole flock gathers near the barn to eat.  Predation is not an issue right now (thankfully), but we do need to set a real boundary fence line, our current one fizzles out halfway across our back woods.  Shaft, the most wanderlusty of the two new guys, got tangled in some bramble yesterday and then decided to compound the problem by getting tangled in the SmartFence today, bramble, legs, head and all.  He ran away yesterday before I could really tell how bad the bramble situation was, but today I was able to use the tangled fencing to catch him and keep him from strangling himself and a lot has shed off or fallen off, but there’s still one clump we’ll have to hack out tomorrow, maybe today if I can do it by myself.  His fleece is pretty thick and awesome and low-lanolin, a shame I’ll have to hack it up.

Ducks: Still laying pretty steady, but we’re seeing the winter slowdown.  Will probably put them in the barn next month and possibly use a lamp, haven’t decided yet.

Kids: The eldest loves to spend her days as a ballerina alicorn princess and the youngest has decided crawling is not the only way to get around and is walking more than two steps AT LONG LAST.  And both kids love oatmeal and duck eggs, just not together.

General local stuff:  We made it to Fiber Fusion Northwest over the weekend.  I got to untangle the mysteries of how thread is made, and feel a bunch of raw fleeces.  I ended up with a light coat of lanolin for my troubles, but it was good to sample how a variety of other breeds’ raw fleeces feel after being sheared and minimally processed (quick rinse, trimming of poop and burrs/etc).  Eldest child was quite delighted at the fiber animals on display, especially the ultra-tame alpacas, freshly sheared and ready for treats from anyone.  Also got some information about machinery for fiber processing.  Nice little informative festival, hope to spend a lot longer there next year!