The rest of the story

I'm caught up to mid-September at this point. So here is the rest of what we've been up to this fall.

On September 28 we got new layer chicks, 15 Rhode Island Reds and 15 Barred Rocks. We are very much looking forward to the beginning of their egg laying and a return to having plenty of fresh eggs! Right now we are getting two or three every other day, and interestingly, the two best layers are the renegades that have taken up residence at the sheep barn. I guess their diet of grain and pickings from the bedding is agreeing with them. Anyway, the old hens are in need of some rejuvenation, and the new pullets are coming along nicely.

Rhode Island Red chick at about 2 weeks of age.

Barred Rock chick at 2 weeks. These are acrobatic and active chicks. They kept hopping out over the draft guard. In fact, I think it was the day after I took these pictures that I decided the draft guard needed to be removed.

Pullets at about 7 weeks of age.

Just after the chicks arrived, I left town for a quick trip to Madison, WI for World Dairy Expo. My flight out of Roanoke was canceled, so I ended up driving to Dulles and flying from there. I missed a Dairy Challenge event that I had really wanted to attend, but I did get to Madison in time for all of the Dairy Shrine events, which was the main reason for my trip. As always, it was a fun week. Catching up with people you haven't seen in a while, taking in the thousands of exhibits, and enjoying the cow shows. How could that be anything but fun? Best thing I saw this year? That would have to be a new-to-Expo artist, Valerie Miller of (Steel Cow).

Always an elaborate ringside display; this year it was a giant cornucopia and milk bottle. I can't imagine how long it must have taken to fill that cornucopia with pumpkins.

I watched a few hours of the Brown Swiss show and got to see the champions. Oh the pageantry! If you have never seen it, the parade begins with this group of yodelers. They fill the arena with their yodeling and bell ringing. Then the winners of each class enter the ring; the cows wear bells and the leadsmen wear colored jackets. It really is something to see.

After Expo, I took the first of several trips to Pennsylvania. This one was to Cochranville to vist Char and Matt, see their new house, help paint the nursery to prepare for the Little Dickens who will be joining us soon. Mom came down for the weekend too, so we had a good time and enjoyed the visit immensely.

October 24 we began fall breeding. We separated the ewes in two groups this year and ran Dalton and Bruce with 40, and the new rams (who I have dubbed Duff and Heath) with 36. Thorne got a bit of a break and went in with a group of 6 ewe lambs that we saved back as replacements. These 6 young ewes are really nice and had already hit 95 to 100 pounds by October, and Thorne tends to throw small lambs, so we thought they would be a good match. I am happy to report that he marked all 6 ewes. Now we wait to see how many actually settled and how many lambs they will have. The other groups also did very well. So far we are highly impressed with our new rams. Duff is a machine. The Duff/Heath group bred 33 out of their 36 ewes in the first 17 days, compared to our mature rams who bred 37 out of 40 in that time. All the ewes except one sickly looking one have now been marked. We have pulled the four rams out, combined the ewes back into one group and will let Thorne run with them for another week to catch any that are still open. Soon the boys will be back at Brian's parents, eating grass and refueling. They lose a bit of weight during breeding season as they tend to have things besides eating on their one-track minds.

Heath and two Dorset ewes.

Thorne and his small ewe group.

We ran the trailer around the county a couple of times that week, as we also purchased another group of Dorper ewe lambs. We will attempt to breed them and the ones that lambed this fall for another crop of fall lambs in 2013. They are interesting looking because some are out of a black-headed Dorper. They seem to have settled in and we hope they will make a nice addition to the flock. Now if we could just find a good Dorper ram, then maybe we will be done buying sheep for a little while.

November was a whirlwind. Brian had a three-day trip the first week. I had the annual Nutrition Workshop that I manage for Penn State (trip number 2 to PA) the second week, and then it was Thanksgiving, and another trip to PA to visit family and put on a baby shower for Char. All went well. Neither Brian nor I had major crises happen while home alone, and the visit at home was really nice. This was the first I had been back up there since Christmas last year. We live too darn far away! While I was in PA for Thanksgiving, Brian and his parents worked a bit on our basement kitchen. So it is progressing. The plumber should be coming next week to hook up the water and hook the sink in to the septic system.

The adorable tree stump cake and acorn candies Robin made.

Robin and Char

Taxing their brains with games about baby woodland animals.
Grandma Mowrey (Smith), Aunt Donna, Mom, Great Aunt Doris, Dad's cousin Rita, Great Aunt Val Jean, Great Aunt Evelyn and Char.

Aunt Debbie, Carol, Krissy, Colsey, Shelby and Jack

Aunt Ruth, Grandma Lindy, Aunt Ida, Great Aunt Betts, Aunt Janet, Shannon, and Mary Lou

Eliza, Robin, Aunt Diane (hidden), Malissa, Marcy holding Easton, Riley, and Alana

He slept through the whole shower!

Eliza telling Aunt Char about the gifts she made for the baby. So sweet! Love that girl!!

Jack gets in on the fun.

Kent is not to be left out!

It was so nice to have some of the Great Aunts there! We used to see them more often, but again, I live too darn far away.

I love the expression on Easton's face in this one. He is a cutie! Somehow I didn't get a picture of Eric this trip. But I sure enjoyed spending time with them all. Coloring, feeding calves, whatever, it was a really great time!

The week after Thanksgiving (last week) was full as well. We sold our pigs and 30 of our market lambs. The pigs left on Tuesday. We loaded them up and ran the trailer across the scale at the co-op. Then we dropped the pigs off and ran back over the scale. The difference in our weights said the pigs averaged 365 pounds of live weight. Those are big pigs! They were fed for 148 days and gained about 2.2 pounds per day on 7.4 pounds per day of grain. (That's an average, by the end they were each eating close to 12 pounds per day). The dressed weights were 259, 269, 251, and 264.5, an average of 261. That works out to approximately 72% carcass yield, which is not too bad. A pig and a half requires 15 cubic feet of freezer space. Now the fun begins: making bacon out of the side meat and a variety of delicious sausages from the shoulders. We tested a couple of recipes last weekend, as we had to clear out some freezer space to make room for the new meat. I think I have convinced Brian to also try some liverwurst this year. In addition to clearing out pig parts, I cooked down 45 pounds of chicken parts to make stock. I have canned 21 quarts, we've eaten 2 fresh, and I still have one batch (probably 10 or 11 quarts) left in the fridge that I hope to can later today. Last Saturday we sold 30 market lambs. The barn is much quieter now with only 12 market lambs left. The bred ewe lambs are back in the barn, so there are still three groups to feed, but we've switched them to once a day and they burn through hay at a much slower rate. Just one more group of sheep to consolidate and then we will be ready to go away for a few days and not feel like we are asking someone to take on such a huge job by feeding for us. Two more trips to PA before the year is through, and then one more in January, maybe two, after all there will be two new babies to see.

The pigs at the beginning of November. They were getting some size on them...

Pigs on market day (26 days after the previous pictures).

There's always one *ham* in every group.

Mmm...bacon.

It doesn't get much better than this! Maple breakfast sausage.

Maple sausage being cut into links.

Well, that's about it. Now we are caught up to the present. Speaking of presents, I'm off to Tractor Supply to buy me a birthday present - brand spankin' new boots. Muck boots. Happy birthday to me!

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!