First-ever Fall-born Lamb!

There's a rhythm to sheep farming that I have become accustomed to. Today is...syncopated.

We returned from ram relocation (i.e. moving the mature rams to Brian's parents' lush pasture to prepare them for breeding) to find that the first of our fall-lambing ewes had delivered an adorable speckled ram-lamb. You could almost literally see 'clean out the barn' moving up on Brian's priority list! Meanwhile I was trying to remember all of the things we usually do at lambing time. Funny, it was second nature in April.

Mama and lamb are now safely tucked into a lambing jug for some bonding time, and now we wait for a flurry of lambs over the next couple of weeks.

A face any one could love!

This speckled baby boy is our first-ever fall-born lamb. He is definitely out of Dalton and his mama is definitely not full-blooded Dorper since she never fully shed her wool coat.

We spent most of last week sprucing up the farm in preparation for having our Bible study group here on Sunday. We rotate between houses, but we are so far off the beaten path that we aren't in the regular rotation. We mowed and ran the weed-eater, cleaned the garage, and just generally cleaned up the stuff that accumulates as we move from project to project. So things are looking really good around here right now. Which is a good feeling that I will thoroughly enjoy as long as it lasts! Plus the weather has really taken a turn towards fall with daytime highs in the 70s and overnight lows in the upper 40s. I even grabbed a jacket before heading outside to feed this morning. In the pocket of said jacket I found my headlamp, and that is perfect timing as I will be needing it for late night lambing checks.

Fall favorite: Autumn Joy sedum

Some kind of maiden grass, which I dug up from along the driveway and is now thriving. Gotta love that clear blue sky that comes will fall.

Asters. I have tried to grow these several different times from bareroot cuttings and had zero luck. So when I spotted these beauties at the Wal-Mart garden center I had to get them. When I planted them I discovered that some of the tulips that I planted in little pots (in an attempt to protect them from being eaten) last fall were completely gone. It was too late to tell if they had rotted or just died, but there was only powdery dirt and a papery outer skin left in my pots. One of these days I will resign myself to the fact that most tulips have to be treated as annuals, but for now I am still annoyed!

A Red-spotted Purple butterfly. I also saw the first Monarchs visiting butterfly bushes in the yard this past week.

Flowers and wild things

We have seen so many different creatures this summer, but I wasn't really sure which of them was responsible for nipping off my strawberries. One day last week all was revealed. I was sorting through a stack of books, looking for the one I planned to send Easton for his birthday, when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye.

I looked up to see a small doe up in the raised bed munching on strawberry leaves. I went to the door to shoo her away and I saw she was traveling with a friend.

This is one of the three young bucks we've been seeing on a regular basis. From the width and height of their racks, we are pretty sure they are all related to the huge deer we saw a few years back (who has since been poached by some ruffians in our neighborhood).

Butterflies and hummingbirds have also been frequent visitors this summer, especially in the last few weeks. We see the hummingbirds nearly every day and I can't even count the butterflies. They don't call the plants below butterfly bushes for no reason!

I think this is a Black swallowtail

Eastern tiger swallowtail

Another Eastern tiger swallowtail

 

 

 The yard is full of lots of color in addition to the dahlias, sunflowers and butterfly bushes you can see in the pictures above. There are still many black-eyed susan blooming, the four o'clocks and angels trumpets light up the evening hours, and the sedum and warm season grasses are just beginning to put on their show. A few of the daylilies are re-blooming as well.

The crepe myrtle finally bloomed! After seeing these blooming everywhere, ours finally caught up.

The delicate purple spikes of the obedient plant, which one of the ladies Brian used to work with dug up and gave to us.

Mammoth sunflower that has mostly finished blooming, but now is the time the gold finches have started hovering, waiting for the first delicious seeds.

The other sunflowers are still going strong!

Rambling Update

Broccoli! Saturday we set out 480 broccoli transplants. Rather than start them from seed, we purchased plants this time around. A lot less effort for about the same price as our "special" commercial pepper seeds. They look really good so far. 

Broccoli plants waiting in the garage

The same can be said for the lambs. We have weighed them a couple of times now, and they are right at 50 pounds and growing about a third of a pound each day. There is a lot of variability in the group, but overall they look good. 

The chicken on the hay feeder is one of two hens who flew the coop and have taken up residence in the barn. They have a stockpile of eggs, which I am hoping they will brood. I will give them a few more weeks, and if there is no evidence of setting, then I will have to clean up the old eggs and start gathering the fresh ones.

The pigs are also growing. They love getting sweet corn cobs as a treat and have started coming up to investigate us rather than running away at top speed. A friend suggested treating them with marshmallows, apparently pigs love them, but we have not tried that yet. We got four barrows this time, but they are all different colors. I can't pick a favorite because they are all adorable. But I notice I did take more pictures of the red one. The black spotted pig is a troublemaker who got out a couple of times a few weeks back. We seem to have gotten the fence right now and haven't had any escapes recently.

Our fall lambing experiment is just around the corner. Sunday I counted 10 Dorper ewes that have udders developing. I don't see any development on the Dorsets. We need to run them through the chute to separate out the Cheviot-Suffolk ewes and get a close look to see how many settled to the spring breeding and didn't slip lambs in all of this crazy heat. We should start lambing in about five weeks. 

The garden has really not been that productive this year. Between busy schedules and hot, dry weather, it is quite behind. We picked our first green beans of the season over the last 2 weeks. The first picking was just enough to eat, and I canned 11 quarts the second time around. First tomatoes of the summer this week too, yum! I also finally got some pictures of the garlic.

The larger bulb here is German Extra Hardy hard neck garlic, and this is an average bulb (the other pics are also of this variety). The smaller bulb is a California White, soft neck type, and this is the largest one we grew this year; most of the others are half this size. So, first year experimenting with hard neck...so far, so good. And it's delicious!

We have been doing a little pest management and harvesting deer under a damage control permit. What better way to use the meat than by corning and smoking some heavenly pastrami. Here are a few of the hams fresh from the smoker.

A pile of pastrami.

And my favorite way to eat this delicacy - pastrami slathered with coarse mustard and wrapped around a dilly bean. Now my mouth is watering.

 The deer aren't the only wildlife we've been seeing. This summer has been full of interesting visitors.

Brian found this beetle in the bed of the truck one morning. It was dead when he found it. It is huge! I think it is a female Eastern Hercules Beetle, which is a forest beetle. This is the first one we've ever seen.

I see the turkeys almost daily, amazing how much the little poults have grown!

We sent five cull ewes to New Holland Saturday. As we were loading them I got a good look at one who is the fattest sheep I have ever seen. She did not lamb two years in a row, and she's been in the barn eating free-choice alfalfa-grass hay since April. FAT. 

Brian has been traveling a lot the past two weeks and will be gone all week this week as well. In the meantime, I've been holding down the fort and dealing with only the occasional animal issue. One morning it was fishing a ewe out from underneath a truck, then chasing a wormy ewe around the field for a while. 

The ewe under the truck scared me at first because I figured she was dead, I mean why else would she be under there? As I got closer to her I saw she was quite alive, but when I tried to pull her out, she didn't come out easily. I stopped pulling and checked to be sure she didn't have her head caught on wire or her ear tag snagged on some mysterious metal. Nothing, so I grabbed her two front feet with one hand and her two back feet with the other and gave it another go. This time she popped out, and stood wobbling, looking at me a little dazedly. I think her legs must have been a bit numb, but she got herself together and teetered off to the water trough. 

A few days later I was moving sheep again and the wormy ewe was again at the tail end of the group. The fact she was still standing was very encouraging, as we have had very bad luck treating ewes once they are that far gone. We had wormed her a couple of weeks earlier, at which time she had very pale eye membranes, an indirect indication of worms. On the day of the truck incident she had clear symptoms of bottle jaw, a swelling of sorts under the lower jaw. But I could not catch her on my own, so she did not get wormed that day. Well, by the time a week had passed she had slowed down a bit. I moved the whole group of ewes from one field to the next without incident. Then I had to go after number 32 (the wormy one). Instead of running into the field she found a small opening between the tractor and the barn and got out into the yard. Where I proceeded to chase her in circles around the house. After a while I tired of the game, plus I had to run over to New Hope to feed the other ewes. So I left her in the lilac bush by the driveway and went to feed the others. By the time I got back it was almost dark, and my first glance around the yard revealed no sheep. I found her in the flower bed, chased her around the house once, and she ended up back near the lilac bush. She was worn out at this point and still refused to walk (I left that out, but that is why I had to leave her before, I finally caught up to her, wormed her and put on a halter, but she just wouldn't budge). I knew it was not a good idea to leave her out overnight. So I found a plastic feed sack and rolled her on it, keeping her on one hip and pulling her along by her upper body, using the feed sack as a sled of sorts. It worked beautifully, but I was going uphill backwards and I knew I couldn't get her all the way back to the barn like that. So I shut off the power to the fence, slid her over close to it, and put her front feet through. She leapt out of my arms and ran across the field to be with the other sheep. Two days later when we were moving the ewes to the barn so we could load them on the trailer and haul them to New Hope, she was again at the back of the pack and we had to help her through the fence. She didn't seem steady enough to go on the trailer, so she's convalescing in the barn for now. Poor thing, I do hope she can get her strength back as she seems to be quite the fighter.

Finally, a stroll through the flowers. I really need to update this more frequently as these photos are already behind what is actually happening outside. The dahlias are blooming quite a bit now and the sunflowers are in full bloom. The obedient plant has also just opened in the last few days. 

Dianthus - you can clearly see the beautiful petal edges that give these flowers their common name, pinks. I loved using the pinking shears as a little girl, so these are nostalgic flowers for me.

I am a flower fan. But if I had to pick just one flower (for summer any way!) it would be the sunflower. They are just so cheerful.

Mimosa tree in full bloom. The flowers attract droves of hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies. We didn't see hummingbirds as early as usual, but there have been plenty of them here lately.

A pretty gladiolus in the shade of a butterfly bush.

Another cheerful summer favorite, marigolds planted in the garden.

Drama queen. I love that the hibiscus has these tropical, extravagant blooms. It is all done for this year, but what a spectacular show!

Wildlife and Niagara Falls from the air

 I am pretty sure I took this photo through the kitchen window. I had forgotten all about it, but when I was sifting through files this afternoon I found it. I love how it is slightly out of focus and the hummingbird has an ethereal appearance. 

 While not strictly considered wildlife, these little buggers went wild on my flowers while I was in New Orleans. The pictures are sad, so I will not show them. Suffice it to say that ornamental grass, while it may be deer-resistant, is not lamb- or llama-resistant and apparently rudbeckia and gladioulus are special treats.

Niagara Falls from the window of a tiny little plane high above. For those who aren't familiar with it, the larger, horseshoe shaped falls at the bottom right are the Canadian falls, and the straight falls in the middle of the picture are on the American side of the border. More pictures from our Canada trip in my next post, but first I have to get my hands on Brian's camera!