Lambs!

Lambing season has officially begun for 2013! The very first lamb was born Wednesday the 13th, which was about 10 days early. That one didn't make it. Yesterday the next ewe produced a set of twins, this time about a week ahead of "schedule." Many of the ewes have snotty noses and minor respiratory illnesses thanks to the weather continually bouncing around from 30 to 60 degrees, often within the same day. This ewe is one of the less healthy ladies, so that likely contributed to her lambing early. At any rate, when we returned from church and a lovely lunch with friends, we found twins in the drop pen. One was stretched out with an extremely stiff neck. At first I thought it was already gone, but upon closer inspection it was just very chilled...still breathing, but in very bad shape. The ewe and the other lamb did not appear to be so desperate, so I scooped the cold lamb up in a towel and headed for the house. Brian headed off to put out a round bale for the fall-lambing ewes in New Hope, to be sure they had plenty to eat in advance of the winter storm that was headed our way.

I held the cold lamb in warm water to try to bring up the body temperature as soon as possible. Then I toweled her off, fed her some colostrum via stomach tube, wrapped her in dry towels, and headed back to the barn to see to the ewe and the other lamb. I tried for an hour to get the lamb to nurse on his own, to no avail. So I ran back to the house for more colostrum and the stomach tube. Since I was up close and personal with the ewe and the ram lamb for quite a while, I had plenty of time to observe the ewe. She was not acting normal. Muscle tremors and grinding her teeth and not very interested in her remaining lamb. So I ran back to the house again. This time for a calcium drench. When I got back to the barn the ewe was eating some hay, which I took as a good sign. I treated the ewe, tucked the ram lamb back into the pen and left them alone for a little while.

Later last night the ewe and ram lamb both appeared more perky, but we put a sock over the lamb to help him stay warm through the night. After about four hours in the warmth of the house, the ewe lamb had also started to perk up. She nursed some colostrum but was not able to stand up on her own, even if I got all four feet under her she could not keep her balance or stay upright without help. By this morning she was doing better with standing once I got her upright, but still couldn't get up on her own. By mid-morning she was finally getting up by herself. This afternoon I took her back to the barn, encased in an old hunting sock. The ewe didn't put up much of a fuss about this new intruder in the jug, so we'll see if that holds. I haven't managed to get the lamb to nurse the ewe yet, but I'll give it at least one more try tonight. If she won't nurse, I'll keep feeding her milk replacer. I offered some to the ram lamb this evening and he gulped it down. It is looking like I'll be supplementing both of them if they'll let me. But I would much rather supplement them than feed them completely from a bottle. I'm just hoping the ewe can pull through and keep her end of the bargain. Bottle lambs are cute, but a lot of extra work.

Amid all of this drama, another set of twins was born this afternoon. So we are well underway!

The ewe lamb who spent 24 hours in our bathtub. Isn't she adorable? She is a tiny 5 lbs 9 oz. Long legged girl, but skinny. Let's hope we can get her over the hump and start her growing into those legs.

Home again

All of my scheduled travel is over for a while now, and it is good to be home again.

I have had some wonderful visits with family in the past four months, but it seems I've done nothing but drive to Pennsylvania recently. Five trips between October and January. It is no wonder the blog has been neglected. Well, that and the cold weather makes it too easy to crash in front of the tv for a couple of hours every night instead of doing something productive. Ah Netflix, I love you and I hate you.

So, what's been happening on the farm over the last month and a half? As of January 12, all of our 2012 spring-born lambs have been marketed. We sold 42 and kept 6 of the best females for replacements. This is the first time since our first year (when we only had 6 lambs!) that all of them have been ready to go this early. Have I mentioned we like the barn? We did not lose any lambs after weaning this year, and I think that is in large part due to them not being on pasture and not being constantly plagued by worms. The fall-born lambs need to be weaned and separated from their mamas, hopefully we will get that done this weekend. At least at this time of year they aren't suffering from parasites on pasture, and we have been feeding them grain and hay, so they seem to be doing well. I am curious to get them on the scales and see what they look like. As the ewes have dropped off in milk production, there are some obvious differences in the lambs, so I'm curious how big of a difference it really is in weight. Part of the delay in weaning them is that we've been waiting for our skid loader to arrive so we can get the barn cleaned out before we put the lambs in it. That was a year-end purchase, which I am told will be so useful we won't know how we got along without it. I don't know about that, but if it helps get the driveway fixed that would be great. The chickens are completely on strike this winter. Most of them are pullets who haven't started laying, but the older hens have shut down. I have two eggs in the refrigerator and 43 chickens to feed every day. Something is not right with that equation! I did find a fresh warm egg in the nest boxes this morning, so maybe we'll be back in business soon. We have discovered that there are four or five roosters in the group of 30 pullets. We had noticed there were a couple that were larger and slightly different colored, and any questions were quickly answered a couple of weeks ago when the boys started learning to crow. This is not likely to work out for them. The Rhode Island males are a bit too aggressive for my tastes, and we already have one rooster. Some of them are probably going to end up as stew. I would like to be able to hatch out some chicks on our own and this could give us that opportunity, so maybe they will get a reprieve. Good behavior will go a long way with me. Randy roosters, take note: first one that attacks me is in trouble!

We enjoyed spending time with our families over Christmas, and both sides of the family expanded in January. Our new nephew, Jonah, was born January 5, and our new niece, Eden, was born January 31. We live too far away from all of the nieces and nephews, but at least these two are pretty close together. Who knows, they may end up being in the same class at school. What a small world, that my sister and Brian's sister would end up living 15 minutes apart, and both of them are nearly 5 hours from their hometown.

I leave you with a spot of cheer that helps the long winter days seem brighter. I received an amaryllis bulb and a potted orchid for Christmas, and both have bloomed recently. The amaryllis is finished now, but it was beautiful with four full flowers. Just as it had faded, the first orchid bloom opened. Definitely a bright spot in the corner of my office!

Still here...

I can't believe it has been nearly three months since my last post. It has been a very busy fall and somehow it really got away from me. So, let me see if I can remember most of what has happened.

When last we met, fall lambing was just beginning. We ended up having 13 ewes lamb, one of them over at the other farm, and most of them in the pasture with no assistance. The 'no assistance' part is great. The 'in the pasture' part, not so much. The weather started out really mild, but a few days into lambing we had one night of cold rain and chilly temps. The next morning we finally were able to get the sheep moved into the barn, which we had just gotten cleaned out the day before. There was one little lamb who apparently hadn't been getting much milk from his mama (despite having suckled frequently in the two days since he was born). He was shivering and as good as dead by all accounts. There was another lamb born that morning who needed some attention to be sure he got colostrum. So, the shivering, cold lamb was placed in a fluffy nest of straw to see if that would help. By the time we got all the ewes and lambs situated and the newborn fed the chilled lamb was no better. I dried him off, wrapped him up and held him in my lap trying to get some kind of response from him and get a little milk in his belly. I was able to tube-feed some milk to him, but he was very lethargic. There is no electricity at the barn, so I decided the best place for him was at the house where he could get warmed up and I could keep a close eye on him. So we tucked him in between us on the four wheeler and brought him to the house. I wrapped him in towels and put him in the bathtub. About an hour later he was a little perkier. I gave him some more milk and fashioned a lamb coat out of an old hunting sock. He steadily improved as he got warmed up, and I am happy to report that he made a full recovery. We did lose three of the lambs, so we are down to 10, but they are doing very well. All were singles and none were so large that they caused difficulties for the ewes. All in all a decent first attempt at fall lambing. We plan to try again next fall, and will be adding the shot of PG-600 to our CIDR protocol. It seems like that helps. We've heard of one guy who got 100% of his ewes bred with lutalyse, CIDR, and PG-600. I will have to do some research on this because it doesn't seem right to me that you would need lutalyse in ewes that aren't cycling.

Now, let me see if I can find a few photos from fall lambing and I'll continue the update another day.

The lamb that would later end up in the bathtub.

How can you not fall in love with such cuties?

Nestled in his warm tub and feeling much better after a little TLC.

Fall lambs at about 1 month of age.

Fall lambs at about 2 months of age.

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.

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!

Last lamb of spring and a lot of grass

 

 This little cutie is the final lamb born in our 2012 spring lambing season. Although I caught her mama sniffing her in this shot, something went wrong in their bonding process. Brian found the lamb at the morning feeding on May 11, but she had been claimed by another ewe. Despite penning the lamb and her mama in a jug for over a week and holding the ewe still so the lamb could nurse three to four times a day, the ewe never did catch on to what her role is supposed to be. She had a large udder, but very little milk, and she never let the lamb nurse on her own. The oddest part about this to me is that this ewe successfully raised a lamb last year - she is supposed to know the drill! So, we bottle-fed the lamb for a couple of weeks and have now transitioned her to drinking when she wants to from a bucket hanging in the creep area. She is growing very well, and at just over three weeks of age she is drinking about 1 quart per day of milk replacer and nibbling on corn and soybean meal.

Final stats on the spring lambing: 

Total lambs born: 70; girls win 36 to 34

Total ewes that lambed: 44; there were too many mature ewes that did not end up lambing, not sure what happened there, but the rams will all be getting breeding soundness exams before breeding this fall. We did have some hot weather last fall that could have contributed to pregnancy losses, but there's no way for us to know for sure what went wrong. Still, 70 lambs is the most we've ever had, and there are still fall lambs to be born for this year.

 We have had quite a bit of rain and temperatures in the 90s. The grass and the lambs are growing very well. The lambs have all received their first vaccinations and most of them have received their booster shots. We vaccinate for clostridial diseases to help prevent "overeating disease" that can happen when a glut of fermentable starch is available in the intestinal tract and clostridia bacteria populations explode - they produce toxins that can kill an animal very suddenly. One more round of booster shots to go and then we'll be ready for weaning in about a month.

First cutting hay has been started with about 250 square bales tucked away in the barn and 120 round bales already rolled and sold. We have three fields of corn this year, and all are planted and sprouted. The last field was planted a week later than the other two, and the slugs have really hit it hard. Soybeans should be going in the ground any day now. The wheat is turning golden brown and will be ready in a few weeks; the rain has contributed to some fungal disease on the wheat, but it doesn't appear to have done too much damage so far.

Two batches of chickens have been hatched and dispatched. We lost a lot more from the first batch of 50 than I would like, but the second batch turned out very well. The first batch averaged 4.8 pounds of dressed weight, and the second batch was 5.1 pounds, right on target. One more batch to go, but for now I am enjoying two weeks of broiler freedom. I love to eat chicken, so I won't stop raising them, but they are dirty, smelly birds. I do want to make some updates to the watering system. I had it figured out and then we changed coops (more on that another time) and while I thought I had found a good new system, it turns out it didn't work very well for broilers.

 The lambs have definitely figured out what the creep feeder is for! This pasture creep feeder is handy because we can pull it around the field easily but the grain is protected from weather and rodents. However, I think the design of the gate is terrible. We have a different type of creep gate in the barn and it is a much smarter design. On this pasture creep, the adjustable bars that can be moved to make the holes bigger or smaller are attached to the frame with a bolt. When the lambs enter or leave the creep the bars twist on the bolt, which, as you might expect, loosens the bolt. That wouldn't be a big problem, but the ewes like grain a lot too, and they are always nosing about hoping to get a scrap. So, when one of the bars is loose, the ewes can get into the feeder. Invariably that ends with a ewe dragging the feeder around the field because she can't figure out how to get out of the feeder, even though she had no trouble getting in. Now compare this to the other creep gate, which has plastic sleeves on rods, and the plastic rolls on the metal - no bolt to wiggle free. I don't think we can modify the pasture creep gate to work exactly the same way, but my thought at this point is to add some pvc sleeves to the bars and see if that will help take some of the pressure off of the bolts. Always tinkering...

The garden is mostly planted, although we don't have our peppers out yet. We're going to be counting on selling peppers right up through the end of the produce auction's season, and maybe we'll capture some of the late market after other people's peppers have fizzled out for the season. We also still have potatoes to get in the ground, but at least those are just for our use. All the plastic is laid and ready to go, we just have to get a window between the rain and our work schedules that lines up to give us enough time to get it done.

Much more to write about including Chicken Coop 6.0, bird nests, and a flower tour, but that will have to wait for my next post.