High Water

I took this photo Monday evening just after we received 2.1 inches (5.3 cm) of rain. I'm standing on the culvert looking upstream to the east. This streambed had a few inches of water in it and was overgrown with wild mint before the storm. You can see the White Rocks on the high ground to the right.

My neighbor's hay field across the road had a river running through it and there was a stream running through our garden.

We've had water over the top of the culvert once in the year that we've lived here. That was a scary night. I was in the barn praying that the water wouldn't get high enough to come in. It ended up not coming close.

All of the mowing is done for now. I'll be taking the rotary mower back to my brother-in-law this week. We share half ownership in it. I think that we'll have to mow some more in August in preparation for fall & winter stockpiling of forage. My goal is to feed less hay than we fed last winter.

Pasture Biodiversity

Today I started rearranging some fencing to move the ewes and lambs up to the top of the hill on the west side of the pasture and get the rams off the pasture around their barn so I can mow it. As I walked around on the hilltop, I was amazed at the biodiversity in our pasture here.

The hilltop is almost a completely different ecosystem from the bottomland even though the two areas are separated by only a few hundred feet. The low ground is very thick grass and white clover. It's been grazed twice and mowed once and will be ready to graze again in less than two weeks. As you go up the hill, this mix of grasses and white clover continues but it thins out quite a bit and is much slower growing. The hilltop is a riot of grasses (some the same as and some different from the lower area), clovers, wildflowers, herbs and birdsoot trefoil. The number of different plants in a small area is incredible. While the grass in the lower area would be extremely ripe if it hadn't been grazed yet, this hilltop grass is just now coming on strong. The red clover is just starting to bloom.

I'm looking forward to moving the sheep up there this week. It's cool to have such a diverse pasture on a small farm. The early cool-season grasses in the lower part provide much early grazing provided that area is properly managed. Then when the weather warms up and the cool-season grasses slow down in growth, the high protein clovers and the herbs with their medicinal properties are perfect for summer grazing.

As an aside, the promised post on corn-based ethanol is going to have to wait. I don't have the patience to look up sources on my 26.4 kbps dial-up connection at home and I just don't have time to do it at work on our high speed connection.

And on a personal note, we're headed to the Childrens Hospital tomorrow with our youngest son Nick. Nick was born in 2002 with the most severe form of spina bifida, myelomeningecele, and hydrocephalus. He is truly blessed in that he runs and jumps and climbs just like a four year old should. (Actually, he's quite the daredevil so he probably jumps and climbs in ways that four year olds shouldn't.) However he does have a somewhat abnormally functioning bladder. The main purpose of our clinic appointment tomorrow is to try to discern whether his difficulties with toilet training have a physical cause or come down to his stubbornness. Your thoughts and prayers are appreciated.

Mowing and Gardening

We've been busy here lately gardening and mowing. As I mentioned in my last post, the rain delayed getting the garden planted in a timely fashion. Just when it was getting dry enough to plant the rain came back. Everything should be planted by tomorrow, though, except for some succession plantings of fall greens and root crops. I'm thinking of starting broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage for planting out in late July or early August for a fall crop.

The photo shows our pasture. Hopefully, you can see enough detail in it to see what I've been mowing. The right side was mowed about 10 days ago. The left foreground was mowed about 15 days ago and the left background just this past weekend. The center strip that the sheep are grazing was last grazed about 4 weeks ago.

This is a time for trial and error and learning about the grass on this farm and the growth curve at different times of the season. As we build the size of our sheep flock and add cattle, we will do less mowing. My goal is to have the right number and mix of grazing animals to never run out of grass while keeping mowing to a minimum. If our farm was larger, we would make hay but we can't justify the expense of the equipment. Because of this, we will probably always have to do some mowing this time of year.

Lately I've been reading less farming/homesteading blogs and more environmental/peak oil blogs. I'll probably write something soon about the insanity of corn-based ethanol and the environmental destruction that industrial grain farming causes. I've been thinking about starting a second blog to write about environmental issues from the perspective of a rural dweller and organic farmer. If you've stuck with me on this one though, you don't I don't have time enough to keep one blog up to date, let alone two. Maybe this winter when I have more free time...

We're Still Here

Wow, it's been two weeks since I've posted - the longest I've gone since beginning this blog. Of course, this is a busy time of the year for farming and on top of that we've recently went on 10 hours of production per day at our shop in the city. I leave home about 5 a.m. and get home about 5:15 p.m. After dinner, chores and working on whatever projects are going on, I'm ready for bed by the time it gets dark. This leaves little time for blogging. Anyway, here's an update.

We lost a lamb last week to sickness. We are loathe to use antibiotics but this was a case where we needed to intervene sooner and failed to do so. According to Pat Coleby, large doses of injected vitamin C is a natural substitute for antibiotics. Unfortunately, in the U.S., any idiot can walk into a farm store and buy LA-200 or Pen G with no questions asked, but injectable vitamin C requires a veterinarian's prescription. And in the area where I live, one cannot just open the yellow pages to "holistic veterinarian" and find a vet to prescribe vitamin C as an antibiotic substitute.

The chicks are growing and the hens are still laying well. The hardiness of these chicks is amazing to me. When we raised hybrids, we were lucky to get 22 out of 25 survivors. All 50 of our White Rocks are alive and healthy at 7-1/2 weeks old.

The garden is way behind due to lots and lots of rain. I haven't looked at the forecast yet for this week but hopefully things will dry out.

I'll try not to go so long between posts again.

Udder Health

This is a photo of our ewe, Coconut, shortly after lambing. You can see that the teat in the picture is quite large and engorged with milk. This is the story of how Coconut went from having only one functioning udder half to both sides functioning normally.

When we got her in 2003, Coconut was one year old and had twin lambs two days old when we brought them home. We were new shepherds and weren't paying attention to the right things. When we finally noticed something was amiss, one of the lambs was declining. It turned out she wasn't getting enough to eat because Coconut only had milk on one side. We got a crash course in tube feeding a lamb.

The following year, after making sure both of Coconut's lambs had plenty of colostrum in the first few days, we took one of them as a bottle lamb. The non-functioning side of her udder got huge and we could tell it was painful for her but, try as we might, we couldn't get milk out of that half. Our vet tech suggested that the udder was blocked by scar tissue and there was nothing we could do about it. This year I decided to do some research and find out for myself.

Immediately after Coconut lambed, I inserted a sterile 18g needle through the sphincter into the teat. Voila - milk! For the next few days, Jennifer and I had to open the teat with a needle and either milk the ewe or let the lambs nurse. Unfortunately, the opening we made was closing up within hours afterward. The lambs weren't nursing enough on that side to keep it open. The teat remained much larger than the other side and the lambs had a tough time latching on without our help.

Finally, after about three days of this, I made the drive over to PBS Animal Health and bought a box of teat dilators. Teat dilators are small plastic devices that insert into the teat opening and hold it open inside while still allowing the sphincter to close. The idea is to leave the dilator in for 2-3 days, removing it every 12 hours to milk out the udder while preventing the lambs from nursing on that side.

When I got home with the dilators, we noticed that the teat on the closed side had finally shrunken down to the same size as the other side. We tried the teat and got milk. Apparently, the lambs had finally started nursing on that side and the teat was staying open. We ended up not needing to use the teat dilators.

Based on what I've read, I think we will probably have to go through this routine again next year. The cause is usually scar tissue in the teat but since this udder half had never functioned before I suspect that the ewe may simply have had a deformity.

tags: sheep, ewe, lamb, udder, teat, dilator, milk

Feeding Time

This is our ewe, Lambie, pictured with her two ewe lambs. I took this photo on May 12 when these girls were 25 days old. They are monsters. I wish I had a scale to keep track of their growth rates.

For some reason these lambs have been nursing from behind the ewe like this since they were born. The ewes teats don't point back so I'm not sure why they do this. I guess it worked the first time so why mess with a good thing, right?

When Icelandic lambs nurse, their tails often wag vigorously. I'm glad we have lambs that don't require tail docking both for management reasons and marketing reasons. We can advertise our lambs as being unblemished by castration, tail docking or ear tagging/tattooing.

Update From the Front

...low pressure front, that is. We've had this low sitting over us here since last Friday and it's rained every day since. Rain is forecast for the remainder of this week. Yuck!

Anyway, there' s quite a bit going on here. Lambs are growing like weeds, chicks are eating faster than we can fill their feeder and the garden is doing well (to the extent that we've gotten things planted on time).

We've got ten lambs so our original flock of 5 ewes has tripled in size. I need to be taking more photos. That would be a good assignment for my daughter. She's 7 years old and quite a budding photographer. As soon as we get some nice weather I'll ask her to get a clear picture of each of the lambs. These two guys were born on April 19th and this photo was taken about a week ago. They are checking out the chicks through the open door.

We're raising 50 straight run white Plymouth Rock chicks. They will be five weeks old this week. The only birds we've ever raised from chicks have been Cornish cross broilers. These white Rocks are much slower growing. I used to put the hybrids on pasture at 10-14 days old but the birds we have now were almost four weeks before we let them venture outside. They are still sleeping in the barn because I haven't built them a portable pasture house yet.

Today when Jennifer came home from a dentist appointment, the rambunctious lambs had knocked down the netting that was confining the chicks. I didn't have it hooked to the electric fence (doh!). The chicks got out and were all over the barn and the pasture. It started raining pretty hard around 5:00 or so and the ones outside went right back into their pen. They're clearly much smarter than the hybrid birds we've had.

The pasture is already growing much faster than our small flock can graze it. I'm buying a half-share in a rotary mower from my brother-in-law. I need to get the overgrown parts mowed as soon as things dry out so it will regrow before the spring flush is over.

Our next big task is composting the bedding pack. I'll write about that and I hope to post about our garden soon, too.