Another ram lamb

Mabel is a yearling ewe (Cathy Gale's daughter from last year), and she had a ram lamb on Saturday, April 3. I generally only check on my sheep once a day, when I feed them in the morning. I can see them from the driveway, but from there, they are about 300 yards away. So on Easter morning I was surprised to see an extra lamb in the field. I wasn't expecting Mabel to have a baby so soon, because she didn't look very big. Just goes to show what I know!

We had a very nice Easter lunch with my stepmother, Brenda's family yesterday. Then we sat out on the back patio rolling hanks of yarn into balls for her mother, Marty. The weather was so pretty, warm with a pleasant breeze. We had to leave pretty early because I had to go home to feed my bottle babies, but it was nice catching up with everyone.

After feeding, Charles and I spent an hour or so in our vegetable garden, sowing seeds for spinach, lettuce, chard, and leafy herbs - dill, cilantro, parsley, par-cel, fennel and chives. Last year I missed lettuce season because it was too wet to till the garden. This year, we've already tilled twice, so I have high hopes. Seedlings are also coming along well, with okra, tomatoes and peppers already making leaves. Broccoli is slower than I expected, but I hope to get enough to put some in the freezer for the summer.

Just when it's all going smoothly

With animals, it's always hard to tell what they're thinking. One of our ewes, Cathy Gale, gave birth to twins on Tuesday (March 30), one ram lamb and one ewe lamb. At first she didn't want anything to do with either one of them, but eventually she allowed the ram lamb to eat. Cathy has completely, violently rejected her ewe lamb, so now I have two babies to bottle feed. Cathy and her ram lamb are living in the barn so I can milk her twice a day to feed the ewe lamb. Now that the lambs are four days old, I can start cutting the sheep milk with lamb milk replacement formula, but I will probably keep milking Cathy for another week to get a good supply. Then I will put Cathy and her ram lamb back out in the field with the rest of the sheep; the ewe lamb will be bottle fed for about 6 weeks, until I am sure she's eating grass and sweet feed.
Cathy had a dead lamb the first year we owned her - it weighed in at 14 lbs, and was too big to survive being born. Then last year she had a set of twins with no problems at all. So I don't know happened that this sweet little ewe lamb was abandoned by her mother. But we've had good success with our first bottle lamb, Emma Piel, who is still doing a terrific job raising triplets all on her own!

Triplets again!

Sunday morning, we received another set of triplets but this time in the sheep flock. Emma Piel, our first ewe that we raised with a bottle, produced her first set of triplets. Two ram lambs and a ewe lamb.
It was also my first time to see one born. We'd gone down to check on Emma at about 10:45 am, because she was acting strange at 8:30am. Sheep can develop pregnancy ketosis, where they lose the ability to metabolise carbohydrates, and they can die without treatment. At 10:45 am, Emma had started labor, so we left her alone to plant three boysenberry bushes up the lane. At 11:00 we went back to the sheep field because I'd left my gloves on top of their shelter.
By then Emma had one baby, and we could see the second one coming. She was completely professional, three pushes lying down and then she stood up for gravity to help. We left to pick up Ashley from town. At about 1:00pm we walked down so Ashley could see the twins, and to our surprise, Emma had three babies! The weather yesterday was really unpleasant - rainy, windy and cold - so I worried all night about those three little lambs. But this morning everyone was in really good shape.

One ram and three little ladies

On Wednesday afternoon (I assume because he was there Thursday morning) Tweed, our Lincoln Longwool ewe, gave birth to our farm's first baby of the year: a lovely little ram lamb. He has to run around a lot because Tweed is not a very trusting sheep, but it proves he's in good health. It took ten minutes to take his picture because Tweed not only kept him moving around, but she kept herself between me and the baby.

Then today, around 6pm, Eliza, our beautiful brown goat doe brought out triplets! And all three doelings! What luck to get three baby girls all at once - Grace is brown with white front boots and a white belt, Tabitha is brown with white-ish ears, and Anastasia is black with a white spot on her belly. I'm keeping a close eye on them to make sure she's taking good care of all three of them, but Eliza's a very attentive mother who makes good rich milk. The only goat that seems to be having problems is Lily, Eliza's only baby from last spring - she doesn't quite know what to do with herself now that her mother is completely occupied with the three new babies. Lily will be bred for the first time in October, so she'll find out what it's all about this time next year.

First new baby of 2010!

Our farm has its first new baby of the year, but he wasn’t born here. “Flint” comes to us from Merryl Winstein of St Louis, Missouri, and will be our new herd sire. At only four days old, it’s hard to imagine him turning into a stinky, horny, lewd billy goat, but that’s his destiny. He’ll be bottle fed for six to eight weeks, but hopefully he’ll be able to join the rest of the herd in a couple of weeks, once we have other babies on the ground, so he grows up as “one of the gang”. Then after about 8 weeks, all the males will be separated from the females to avoid any unexpected winter births.

Flint will be our only in-tact male goat on the farm, unless we get another one from Merryl in a couple of weeks. Since he is completely unrelated to any other goat on the farm, he will be bred with Eliza, Maisie, Sarah, Lily and Phoebe in October. Eliza and Maisie (the goats) are just about ready to have their own babies. I think Eliza will have her baby this week, but since it’s rainy and wet right now, I’m hoping she’ll wait until the sun shines. Maisie should be a week or two later. Up to five ewes are also expecting, but probably not until later this week at the earliest. Keep checking back for more babies!

Merryl has the most amazing set up, raising dairy goats on just half an acre in a normal St Louis neighborhood! This is her new website: http://www.cheesemakingclass.com/. In Missouri, she is allowed to sell raw milk from her farm.

Roof Stage 2 Completed

After we installed the board on the roof of our house, we thought the house would be fairly waterproof. We were wrong. It was better than before the boards went on, but we were hoping for even less water. Stage 2 was completed this week, when we put synthetic roof felt over the boards. Charles and I spent almost 4 days up on the roof rolling out, stapling and nailing. We’re both very glad we don’t have a steeper pitched roof, because it was very hard to stay in place as it is.
Our metal for the roof may arrive this week, but we don’t have a delivery date yet. In the meantime, Charles will be working on the last four interior walls and starting to figure out how to install the windows and doors. Once the windows and doors are in, we have to put some anchoring framework under the house to close in the crawlspace. Then the exterior metal goes on the walls, along with all its associated trim work – window framing, corners, soffits and the chimney for the woodburning stove. At that point the exterior work in done. Then it’s on to plumbing, electricity, wall board and flooring. “Eventually” remains my favorite word.

Finally up to date - February 5, 2010

It snowed last night - about 2 inches. That brings us up to about 1 foot of snow this year. I suppose I shouldn't complain too much - after last year's ice storm, snow is a welcome alternative. However I have shoveled snow out of my living room THREE times in the past month. I mean, it's good exercise, but it's very demoralizing.

All of the roof rafters were finished the first week of January (before the first snow), and then we worked on the plywood wall cladding for the upstairs. Last weekend we put house wrap on most of the upstairs walls, and started installing the overhangs for the roof at the front and back of the house. I suppose that if we were being filmed, it would be a comedy. It might be R-rated, though, because there's a fair amount of swearing going on. I hope we're getting the hang of it, because we're only 40% complete, and we hope to get done tomorrow. We had to take today off because it was too cold, wet, windy and icy to work upstairs on ladders and scaffolding.

We took two trips down to visit my mother in Tennessee in January. The first was the weekend of January 15 - 17, when we combined Christmas and Charles's birthday celebrations. We ate out with friends, went shopping in Birmingham, Alabama, and played on the Wii a lot! The following weekend, we stayed with Ma and Scott while we attended the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group conference in Chattanooga. It's the third time in four years that we've attended and we get something really good out of each visit. Around here, I'm known as the weird farmer - small livestock, bees, market garden, near-organic or natural practices. At the SSAWG conference, I'm way on the side of normal compared to some people!