Wordless Wednesday on the Farm

Lumi's Lambs and Chicks = Busy Day

On Thursday, April 10th Lumi shared with us the question of how many lambs she was carrying in her 54 inch circumference body.  Here's the shot of what she looked like prior to lambing.

Her first lamb came breech as I saw a hoof and a tail.  By the time I came back from the house with some lube to see which foot was showing, she had already birthed the first lamb.  A cute little ram.

Second lamb came an hour later with a proper presentation and turned out to be a cute little ewe.

Third lamb came about 10 minutes later ... another girl.  I waited a few hours later before I realized that she didn't have any more lambs in her.  Three babies for that large a body.  What a crazy thing.

That same morning, I found out that our chicks we ordered from the feed store were ready to be picked up.  I let Tim know and on his way home from work he brought these cuties along.  My friend, Susie, was here to see the lambs and saw Tim bringing home chicks.  Her comment was priceless saying that some husbands bring home flowers or chocolates but she liked that Tim brought home baby chicks.  We got 18 Black Australorps.  Here they are in their new brooding area, yes it's a kiddie pool with window screening binder clipped to the pool.

Going quackers!

We had a hen who kept wanting to set on eggs and was giving me quite the hissy fit every time I took the eggs out from under her. We had been discussing getting some Indian Runner ducks for Jack to learn how to herd with, so with that we started to look for fertilized eggs. Much to my surprise, a friend in the next town over has a pair of Indian Runner ducks. I contacted her and she was willing to help me with my little "experiment". How well will a hen take to duck eggs and will she have the desire to rear the ducklings? I did some reading up online and found a site that said that I need to sprinkle water on the eggs the hen is sitting on ... no, I don't think so! Since there is just one hen duck, I ended up going to her house two days in a row to pick up the egg she laid that morning. I moved the hen into the corridor in our hen house and gave her a small dog kennel for her nest. She was non plussed about the move until the day that I popped the first egg under her. She gladly accepted the egg and snuggled it under her breast. The second day, no worries as she could now balance the eggs on each side of her. According to a number of duck sites, the average time for a duckling to hatch is 28 days. The first egg was placed under the hen on June 21st. Then the waiting started.

On July 17th, after getting back from the Farr's property, where I moved the non-mammas to another section of the field that they rotationally graze, I went to release the chickens. Lately, Tim has been leaving the door to the corridor open so that the broody hen could stretch her legs and get a dust bath quickly before hopping back on the nest. So, first thing I do before allowing the chickens to free range is to close that door so that "mom" is not annoyed by the other chickens jumping into the corridor. First thing I noticed was a smashed looking egg pushed near the opening of the dog kennel. Oh crap, what happened, I started to think to myself, until I heard the tiny peeping under "mom".

One little duckling has hatched a few days early! Woo hoo! So far mom has taken to her little charge just fine. What an adorable little guy (why do I automatically assume its a boy is beyond me). Now to see if his little sibling hatches out as well. After snapping a quick picture of the little fellow, I noticed that the purple coneflower that I was given is in bloom. What a good day, indeed!

The very next day I worked on cleaning out the ram pen building for placing the mom and her babies, if the next one hatched out, and lo and behold, by later in the afternoon, the next chick hatched out.  This one doesn't exactly look the same, but mom and babies have bonded well together.  See for yourself!

Catching up ... again

Once again I suffered from blogunattentionitis. A truly serious disease where one forgets to do blog posts on a regular basis. This tends to happen to me over the winter. Anyone else have this horrible affliction which not only has the unintentional disadvantage of making others kept in the dark about farm happenings?


Many things have happened and so once again, into the breech to fill in the happenings on the farm.


NOVEMBER
November started breeding season for us. A tad later than normal, but what's one week among friends? I kept my breeding groups notoriously small to try to keep an eye on our flock numbers. Here's the rundown of the breeding groups:



SheltrgPines Uber (shown above enjoying a lovely pumpkin thanks to Riverview Farm) was given three lovely ladies: LaughingRiver Rosemary, Contented Darby, and Contented Helle



Contented Fimtan (being ever so gentlemanly and sharing his pumpkin with Mildri) was given four lovely ladies: Contented Brisingamen, Contented Rotinn, Contented Mildri and Contented Thyme.

DECEMBER
December came and Brisingamen was still in the breeding group but acting very funky and looking bloated. So, out she was pulled and put in with last years lambs. I consulted the vet via the phone and we gave her some therabloat, because we were thinking it was a frothy bloat. She responded well and so we kept her with the lambs; her breeding group having come to a premature end.




JANUARY
Since the sheep were starting to get fuzzy looking, we called the shearer, Gwen Hinman, to schedule a time to shear. We picked an early January day that surprisingly was nice and not freezing! We, and when I say that I mean she, sheared a total of 33 sheep (four from Missing Mountain Farm aka the Rice family). First on deck was Sabrina shown below.
Then we continue down the color continuum from light to dark until we're done.

The lower picture you can see Gwen getting ready to shear one of our smallest sheep, Contented Ingrid (from Underhill Mulan and Underhill Bach). Got to love those tiny Underhill sheep! Although, I'm sure she was cursing them under her breath!


Here's a better shot of more of the gang working away. It was funny because we had a 4 year old who when he saw that a sheep had been nicked kept saying that she sheep had and owwie. Gwen, jokingly said "That kid has got to go!" After that, they left because he was getting bored, she didn't see them go and got concerned that they took her seriously!
All shearing pictures are courtesy of Missing Mountain Farm, specifically Pam Rice. Thanks a bunch for sharing them with me.

Once all the sheep were sheared, I noticed that Brisingamen (the one pulled early from the breeding group) looked fairly skinny. I made a mental note to start supplementing her with extra feed. Unfortunately, within five days she was looking extremely bloated again and was down, not wanting to get up. Once again we sequestered her and tried to get her back on track again with another therabloat dose. The next day, she was still down, so we called our vet. They came out to look at her and said that something more was wrong since she was trying to bring up a cud and when she couldn't she would grind her teeth. I opted for euthanasia since she was "on the chopping block" since lambing last year. Her lamb last year lasted for a few days and then with no warning died. We were re-breeding her to see if this was a chronic issue with her. We necropsied her and found that her rumen was 3 times the normal size. All other organs looked normal. Once everything else was examined, the rumen was opened and we found it was full of dry foodstuffs. There was no liquid in there, nor the fiber mat that separates the liquid from the dry. It seems as if she lost her bacteria a while ago and I never noticed. Some of the contents included pumpkin seeds that we had stopped feeding about a month prior. She had approximately 20 pounds of food in her stomach and was essentially starving to death. On top of it all, when necropsied, the vet noticed that she had become pregnant (with how many I didn't want to know). More than likely, had I decided to try to fix her, the fetus would have been reabsorbed to concentrate her energy on living. That day I felt like a failure.

FEBRUARY
Nothing new with the sheep, but the chickens were slowly starting to lay more eggs. We also received our seed order from FEDCO seeds, so thoughts of spring were abound!

MARCH
Now we're more or less up to date. The ewes that took are looking nice and pregnant. There's at least one that has twins in her as she's looking very saddlebaggy. The black pussy willow is out and crocus are trying to peek their heads out of the snow. The promise of spring is coming!

More chickens?

More chickens you say? Well, yes. We needed to get more chickens as our supply wasn't keeping up with the demand. Since I'll be at the Windsor Farmer's Market now, I figured a dozen or two wasn't going to cut it.

Enter the Golden Comets, a cross between a Rhode Island Red and a White Leghorn. They're supposed to be good layers of brown eggs. I found out that my feed store carries 16 week old pullets to purchase. We ordered 12 of them and I went to pick them up yesterday morning. I'm hoping that I got the chicken that laid an egg in the crate while they were waiting to be offloaded. Wouldn't that be lucky? They're currently residing in the Boober's kennel. Okay, Boober hasn't resided there since we put breeding groups together (hence the hay chaff on the ground).

Tim and I worked on a small pen they could go into for the evening (nothing more than a modified breeding hut) with a roost and guess what they chose to sleep in last night? That's right, Boo's dog house!

All 13 of them (including Limpy the second banana Barred Holland roo - thanks mom for the phrase).

The girls have taken to Limpy, including grooming him. I've not seen my other chickens do this before.

The only time they dissed him was when I let the other chickens out and they got a good look at the Partridge Chantecler roo. According to mom, they ran over to the fence and left Limpy with a cold shoulder. Here's a shot of him. He is a pretty handsome devil if I do say so myself.

Do we have quail or chickens??

Today Tim came in after giving the chickens a little veggie snack and said that he had a special egg for me. I waited as he pulled out six different eggs from both the Chanteclers and the Hollands until he showed me the "special egg". It came from the Chanteclers, but I could have sworn it was a quail egg. Below is the picture of the crazy egg next to a nickel.




Here's another picture with it next to some of the normal sized eggs we've been getting.




We decided this wouldn't make much of a scrambled egg, so we decided to crack it open to give to Adrienne (aka Boober). The shell was very thick and took a good whack to get it to crack. Only a small portion of the top (or the bottom - if you're so inclined) came off. Try cracking a grape and you'll understand! It was very interesting looking with what appeared to be a fairly colorless yolk with only a smidgen of color that was comma shaped. How bizarre! Boober enjoyed it and downed it in one slurp.



On the sheep side of things, Bergelmir was placed in with the ewes for clean up duty. We figured that if he settled his mother or any of the other Wilkins children we have (Helle and Rafn) that the offspring would go into little white packages. Bergelmir is an old chip off the block, and was walking around with his neck stretched out looking for all the world like he's been walking around following his chin. On a side note, it will give Wilkins a break as the two of them have been trying to determine who is king of the farm. Wilkins wants to keep his crown and Bergel is trying to dethrone him. Arrgh! Why can't boys just behave??

Catching up on all the details

Okay. I know mea culpa. I've been away for a while. First things first. Lots have been going on/happening around here.

1) I had a birthday that another Shetland shepherd shares with me (hint: he's got a blog with Shetland sheep and his passel of dogs). It wasn't a big milestone birthday, just a normal another year older and hopefully wiser day. Tim got me a kitchen towel weaving kit for my Leclerc Artisat I've had taking up a bit of space upstairs. He's okay about enabling me with my fibery goodness as long as I do at least one thing on it. This is my first thing on my own loom. I took a class where I wove a scarf back about 2 years ago. So far so good. The edges are not even, but for a second time at a loom, it doesn't look too bad. What do you think?



2) A nasty ice storm came through brought a little ice and bit of snow. Even though we had not so much ice around here, we ended up losing our electricity from that Friday morning until close to mid-afternoon on Sunday. Our pellet stove requires electricity, so we were relying on a Mr. Heater that kept the place a balmy 60 degrees. I like it much warmer, so needless to say, I was bundled to the hilt! Tim kept looking every day for a generator, not knowing how much longer we'd be without power and wouldn't you know it, he found one on Sunday and was cresting the slight rise in the road to the house when the power came on. Murphy sure has a sense of humor. We're keeping the generator even so. Never know when we'll need it again. To water the sheep, we had to haul water from a spring house/collection point. Luckily we have a stream that runs by the property and a spring house on our property that are both downhill from the sheep and house. We opted to get water from this one that is right next to the road and on a much flatter surface. The picture was taken while I stood on the road looking at it. The water level is that dark area. The first time we took water from it, I had to break the small layer of ice and dip the water out bucket by bucket. It dropped the level down a bit, but by the next day, the level was back up to it's normal amount.


3) We split up the breeding groups the weekend after the ice storm. Round one done! We'll be using Bergelmir for cleanup around January 10th. Hopefully he'll not be cleaning up anyone, but if so, then so be it. Rams were put together and as Tim always puts it, it smelled like a bordello in there for a while. We do the scent and stuff technique which works for us. Here's a picture of the girls enjoying a sunny day today. All 14 are there. Can you pick them out?



4) We added lights into our chicken coop prior to the ice storm and wouldn't you know it, during the ice storm (when the lights weren't turning on or off) they seemed to kicked it into gear. They started laying much more prolifically and so now we're getting anywhere from 6 to 10 eggs a day. Woo hoo. I am an office supply freak, so I purchased some half dozen cartons and a stamper for the cartons that identifies our farm. No, the cartons aren't exactly office supplies, but you should have seen the stamper they sent with the rubber stamp. It's the biggest one I've ever seen. I can ink the whole stamper at one time. Yes, a bit over the top, but I really like the stamper and envision other uses for it too.



5) The holidays are upon us. So far we've survived Christmas unscathed. We opted to stay home and not travel to either parental unit household. New Year's Day will find us once again on the road to visit my folks.


I think that's all the major details for now. I keep trying to squeeze in some spinning, knitting and dyeing. I finished Tim's Freya mittens, so now he has matching (meaning the same sheep) hat and mittens. I just overdyed some musket roving to a nice blue color. It looks good if I do say so myself!

Take care and talk to you in the new year.

Just us chickens

Tim's away helping Nadine and Glenn put up 5 acres of high tensile electric fencing. So, it's just us chickens. Here we are, the Partridge Chanteclers. Mr rooster is in the center of the picture. They were created in Canada to withstand colder winters. Each chicken has a slight bump/nub of comb on them to prevent frostbite.

Another shot of the girls.
Here are the Barred Holland's. They are also a dual purpose chicken, like the Partridge Chanteclers, but they lay white eggs. Actually, they look more like eggshell white (not as bleach white looking as those in stores). Rooster in the center (looking a bit more greyish than the hens.

Here's another shot of them. Okay, now you see the sneaky part. We ordered two roos of each breed. The Partridges are down to one roo as the other was getting really persnickety (read mean). Needless to say, he was enjoyed in a nice wine based marinade. We still have two of the Barred's as they haven't been really mean to us. We will eventually take care of the one (who happens to have a crooked middle toe - like it was stomped on or has arthritis). Just not right now.Okay, it's more than just us chickens. There are the 2 cats, Adrienne the Border Collie, the 11 rams (we're trying to shrink that number down) and the 14 ewes. Since it's after Halloween, we've got a real good deal worked out with a pumpkin farmer to pick up his pumpkins to get them out of his field (before he discs them in) and we get pumpkins to feed the sheep for an extra energy boost. Here's some of the pumpkins we picked up over by the girls.

Normally we go for the pie pumpkins as they last longer, but as they say beggers can't be choosers. They pointed out to Tim where the pumpkins were this year (they rotate them each year) and unfortunately showed him where the regular jack-o-lantern pumpkins were. C'est la vie! Here's a shot of some of the girls. It's a bad shot, but you can see 3 black girls (Sage, Freya, and guessing Rosemary (can't see the ear tag). Fee Fee is also there (white) and one of the kat twins (either Rakel or Viveka). A grey girl (my guess is Mulan) lying down in the foreground.

In the next picuture, there is Celebrian (moorit in the background), Rafn (black ewe peering around bale box), Helle (grey in front of Celebrian), Sabrina (white), Sylph (grey lying down to left), Arwen (moorit) standing betwee Sylph and there's Mulan again.

Looks like we're missing a few girls. Brisingamen (black ewe lamb from Freya) and the other kat twin seems to be missing. Probably chilling out near the barn (that would be to the left of the last picture.

Soon there will be breeding groups. Stay tuned to see who goes to whom.

EGGADS!!

Tim has been having some talks with the chickens as they haven't started laying yet. He's told them that if they didn't start laying soon that he was going to eat them one at a time.

I didn't realize how persuasive his talks were to the chickens. Tonight, when closing them up for the night, Tim spyed an egg! The Partridge Chanteclers have done a good job! This is our first egg from our own chickens.

It's kind of small, but I'm really happy. He found it on the floor of the coop, even though there are nest boxes in there for them to use. We'll need to do some things to make the chickens feel confident to use the boxes.

Now we need to start cajoling/threatening the Barred Hollands!

I'm so happy!

Getting back into the groove

Okay, so I'm bad about blogging. There are only so many hours in the day to do stuff and my life is kind of busy. I had intended on blogging on a regular basis, but got out of the habit. Then I thought that it'd be fun to blog when there are only lambs on the ground. We all know that lambs are the cutest thing in the world, but I didn't get to that this year because we were in Hawaii during lambing. Okay, not during the whole time, but pretty much. We missed two out of four births because we were away.

We also got chicks this year and they arrived in the mail (from Texas) the day after we got back home. The picture below shows the Partridge Chanteclers. We have 6 pullets and 2 roos of that breed and also got the Barred Hollands with the same pullet and roo numbers.

Now for the why I'm getting back in the groove. One reason - guilt. Tim and I went to Michigan during the MFF (Michigan Fiber Festival) and met a bunch of Shetland people. We went to get different ram genetics and managed to pick up 4 new boys (3 purchased and one rental). While there, we spent time with some Shetland folks we hadn't seen in at least two years, if not longer and got to meet others that we only knew through the web. One of those people was Garrett Ramsay, a fellow Sagittarian, who's blog resides here. He made my first and only comment on the blog and told me to update this thing. So here goes, Garrett, this blog post is for you. :-)