Making Lambs!

Okay, mark your calendars folks---we've got sheep breeding happening here as of tonight. It was hard to tell who it was in the dark, with the sheep silhouetted against the headlights of the truck as we were getting hay, but I'm pretty sure Tut bred both Trouble and Paris (in the dark, Paris and Regina look an awful lot alike, but I think it was Paris). That means their lambs should arrive around April 9-11 (Icelandic sheep have a slightly shorter gestation period than other breeds).

This is pretty much prime breeding time right now, so the majority of the ewes should be getting pregnant in the next couple of weeks.

There may have been a few breedings prior to this that I didn't happen to witness. Sarah was looking rather friendly with Taj on Saturday, but I didn't actually see them do anything, so I can't be sure.

I'm greatly relieved now... I have concrete evidence that there WILL be lambs in the spring. I don't know if other shepherds are like this, but if I don't actually see the sheep breeding, I spend the entire winter worrying that they DIDN'T breed, all the way up until the lambs start arriving.

I love raising sheep! It makes the winter go by so much more quickly, knowing that you have lambs to look forward to in just a few short months. It's like having Christmas in April, getting to see all the new arrivals, trying to guess ahead of time how many each ewe will have, what colors and genders they'll be, and what day they'll arrive.

Then comes the fun of naming them all. I follow certain naming practices with my flock, which means that this coming spring all my lambs will be given names that start with the letter "U." That will be a little harder than the "P," "R," "S," and "T" years I've had so far.

So that's your homework: From now until April, start thinking up good "U" names to help me name my lambs!

Senter's New House (Part 2)

Yesterday, Ken and I spent the afternoon doing more work on Senter's new shelter. You can see from the photo how badly in need of a paint job our poor old barn is.

When we bought the farm, the spot where Senter's paddock is was just an impenetrable mass of thorns, vines, small shrubby trees, and tumbled chunks of rock and broken concrete. So even though we haven't gotten a chance to paint anything yet, the fact that now it's a nicely fenced series of paddocks with stone dust footing in Senter's paddock, is a vast improvement!

I'm proud of myself and Ken for tackling this building job ourselves. Neither of us have any real experience building things, but we did a bunch of research and came up with a design that I hope will work adequately, and will be much cheaper than any other option we've seen.

The materials only cost us about $250. The shelter is about 12' x 12' with a roof that slopes down from 12' to 9' to shed the rain. Or at least, that's how much the roof WILL slope, once we've got it on. Right now, we just have the framework up, with no roof yet.

We've made it so that if this design works out well for us, we can add to it and make a larger shelter that will shelter more horses later, if necessary. Eventually, instead of the window in the back of the barn wall, we want to put a door, which would provide easy access to the feed room on the other side.

Little by little, we try to keep making improvements.

Desperate Again

I was wrong. We don't have enough money to buy a new computer. In fact, we don't even have enough to buy hay. Our hay guy has been letting us get some on credit, but he's reached the limit of what he's willing to extend us. Not that I blame him---he's been very patient with us so far, paying as much as we can, even when it's not enough.

So yesterday, today, and tomorrow, we've been rationing hay. I let the broodmares back out into the pasture, such as it is, so that I could save what hay we had left for the young horses and the sheep, and Senter, who are in pens where they can't graze, even on the sparse November grass.

Fortunately, Ken had just bought a load of grain, so everyone can get a little extra grain to make up for the smaller hay ration.

Ken's paycheck just came in, and I'm expecting several checks in the mail: payments for the two horses I'm selling on "layaway" and payments for fleeces, sheep's horns, and skulls that I've sold. Ken is due for his annual raise and, perhaps, a Christmas bonus sometime in the next few weeks.

So we'll be able to buy hay again soon... good thing, because all that's left in the barn is the loose leftover scraps, which we'll rake up and fork into the truck tomorrow at feeding time.

The trouble is, even though we can scrape together enough to buy hay again right now, we also need to scrape together enough to pay $1,000 in property tax, plus the electric bill and heating bill and phone bill and mortgages...

When I look at the horses in the field, I know that I made good choices in selecting them. They are really nice quality, and I know they'll all produce gorgeous foals with Senter. But then I look at our bills and our budget and our empty hay barn, and I wish I'd never started this horse enterprise.

I'm so tired of knowing that it's all my fault that poor Ken is under such stress, trying to juggle all our bills. He works so hard, he deserves to be able to enjoy the benefits of his labor without having to flush all his money down my horses mouths. I want so much for the horses somehow to pay him back, but unless the horse market turns around drastically and I can get decent prices again, I don't know how that's ever going to happen.

It didn't seem like I was risking so much. All I needed was modest sales and steady hay prices for the horses to break even this year, and then my investment would start to pay off next year. But now we're just scrambling to sell as many as we can to cut that horrible hay bill down to a manageable level.

So anyway, we have no money for a new computer for me. We did scrape together enough to buy the one piece of software I absolutely require, and installed it on Ken's computer, so I can mostly keep working there when Ken's not using it. So I'll still be able to work on the websites people have hired me to do for them, as well as my own websites which need updating.

Mostly, this whole ordeal of worry and scraping leaves me feeling tired and sad all the time. Ken wavers between optimism and panic, but really the only thing holding me together is sheer stubbornness that these things HAVE to be done, so somehow we'll find a way to do them. But it drains me. I go to bed at 8:00 some nights because I'm just so tired, only to wake up again at 4:00 a.m. to start worrying all over again.

Some friends of ours have invited us over to their Thanksgiving dinner, which is really nice of them, since we can't afford to do one of our own this year. Thinking about going to their house made me realize how infrequently I get off the farm. Ken drives into town frequently, sometimes to do errands, sometimes to go to poker night with his friends. But I never go anywhere. I feel guilty spending the money for gas to drive to town, when we can't pay for hay, so I just stay here on the farm for weeks at a time.

We don't get TV here (although we do have videos we can watch on DVD), and I don't listen to the radio or subscribe to a newspaper or any magazines. So, other than the internet, I'm completely isolated. The animals are my life. And I'm not even able to do right by them.

I'm too tired even to write this post properly, so I'm sure it sounds very rambling and whiny. For that I apologize. Sometimes when I write here I try to make things sound happy and interesting, even when that's not how I feel. But this time I'm too sad to even do that.

Things will get better. Or they won't. Either way, there's no choice but to keep plugging along, doing our best.

Technical Difficulties

As if our finances weren't tight enough already... my computer just died this morning. It's been having problems for a while now, and Ken has been valiantly attempting to diagnose what's wrong and keep it alive.

But this morning the chronic problem became acute, and now the darn thing won't even boot up anymore. So, as much as we can't afford any extra expenses right now, I'm going to have to buy a new computer.

I haven't computer shopped in several years, so I was scared I was going to find that a computer of the type I need would be $1,000 or more, but Ken looked around and found some for less than half that. Since I just sold a sheep and I've been getting a lot of fleece and fiber customers lately, it looks like I can just barely manage to pay for that, if we go without some of the other things we were urgently needing to do with that money.

It has to be done. I can't run my business without a computer. And although it's a huge, poorly-timed hassle, it WILL be nice to have a fresh new computer. Ken is even pretty sure that we can rescue all my files out of the memory of the old computer, so with luck none of my recent, not-yet-backed-up files will be lost.

But in the meantime, it may take me a little longer than usual to answer emails and do other computer related tasks, since I have to wait and use Ken's computer when he's not busy with it. And there'll be no more pretty photos on the blog for a little while, because all my photos---as well as the software to upload photos from my camera---are on the dead computer.

Be patient with me... I'll be back up and running as soon as possible.

Tenor Gets a Job

Yesterday I sold Tenor, my very last "for sale" sheep (and could have sold another as well, if I'd had one I was willing to part with). The buyers called me out of the blue, needing a ram for their flock after their planned ram purchase fell through.

It was great to meet them, a very nice couple who have both horses and Icelandic sheep, just like us. And they only live over in Lexington, just 60 miles away.

As an added bonus, they know someone who is looking for a horse, and they thought that our 2-year-old filly Andromeda might be a good match for this person. It would be great to make another horse sale, in addition to selling the last sheep. And it would be great for Andromeda to go to a good home where she could belong to one special person and get all the attention she deserves.

So, Tenor is really coming up in the world now. He escaped going to the butcher because Ken and I thought he was too nice to eat. But we had plenty of rams for our flock, so we weren't going to use him for breeding. Essentially, he was just going to be Titan's companion all winter. But now he's gone to be herd sire for a 28 ewe flock. That's more than all the rams in our flock combined!

Congratulations, Tenor, on your big promotion!

Return of the Ladybugs

Imagine you're standing outside during the winter's first gentle snowstorm. Snowflakes, widely spaced but falling steadily, drift slowly down all around you. In passing, some cling to your hair and clothes.

Now, imagine the same image, except that the snowflakes are drifting sideways instead of down. And instead of being snowflakes, they are ladybugs. That's what happened in our yard today.

The ladybugs are back.

These aren't the ladybugs I grew up with back home in Maine, where to sight one of the shiny ruby colored bugs was considered lucky. These, I've been told, are some imported variety that has taken over in this environment. They are a dull rusty orange color, and they come in SWARMS.

They crawl into any crack or crevice they can find, to hibernate in the walls of older buildings for the winter. But they don't stay asleep. They find their way through the walls by the hundreds and swarm all over any sunny window in the house. You can vacuum them off the window, and five minutes later, just as many more have crawled out of the wall to replace them.

They fly erratic loops around the rooms and get stuck in your hair---and if you're very unlucky, your food. They crash into the bulb of the halogen floor lamp and burn. They crawl everywhere, including between the sheets of your bed. They crunch underfoot like popcorn. And they STINK!

As you can tell, I've come to really dislike these creatures. It seems that all old houses in this part of Virginia have them. We had them at the previous house we were renting too. But, unless I'm willing to spray my house full of pesticides, there doesn't seem to be any way to get rid of them.

I've endured the ladybug problem ever since we moved to Virginia eight years ago. But this is the first time I've actually seen them arrive. It was kind of creepy. I'd never really thought about it. I guess I'd always just sort of assumed that the bugs were around in the environment all summer long, and just came into the house for the winter.

But today, when we were outside in the yard, the ladybugs were clearly swarming here from elsewhere. You could see them from a distance, flying in that gentle erratic motion, like snowflakes, but the sky was full of them. Dozens of them kept getting caught in our hair, clinging to our clothes, trying to crawl in our ears and eyes and nose. YUCK!

Thousands of them were clinging to the walls of our barn, crawling up under the clapboards. Which is fine with me. Every one of them that decides to hibernate in the walls of the barn is one that isn't hibernating in the walls of the house.

So for all of you who order packages of ladybugs from gardening catalogs so they'll eat the aphids off your rose bushes: STOP! Don't pay good money for more ladybugs that are all going to leave your garden to fly to my house for the Great Ladybug Convention. Just come get the old already-trained ladybugs that you bought last year. They're all here... all you have to do is come pick them up!

Sheep Tents

For the past couple of days, Ken and I have been making new sheep tents in the breeding paddocks.

Because our winters are relatively mild, mostly all the sheep need is a place to stay out of the rain or sleet. In the past, we've usually just stretched a tarp between some T-posts to make a roof. We haven't tried to build permanent sheep sheds, because we don't always want them in the same places, so we try to keep these as cheap and portable as possible.

It's worked out okay, except that up on the hill here where we live, we get a lot of wind, so usually by the end of the winter, the tarps have flapped themselves to shreds and we have to buy new ones. Sometimes they've flapped themselves to shreds during a storm, and we've been out there freezing our fingers off in an ice storm, trying to refasten the tarps that are trying to blow away in the wind. Not fun! We'd like to avoid that if at all possible.

So this year, we decided to add a little extra structure to the sheep tents, by putting "beams" along the edges of the tarps to hold them steady and prevent them from flapping in every wind.
For the beams, I came up with the idea of using these 2x2s we had lying around, and Ken made this awesome little sheep tent yesterday. Notice on the right-hand corner, there's a piece of plywood fastened between two trees:


That piece of plywood is laced to the trees with baling twine, to give us a place to mount the sheep's mineral feeder where it (hopefully) won't get rained on. This whole setup is Ken's invention. The mineral feeder is fastened to a 2x4 which rests in two metal brackets. If I need to take the mineral feeder out to clean it, all I have to do is lift it up off its brackets. It works great, except last year we had a ram who kept butting the feeder out of its brackets. He's in the freezer now, so he won't be doing that anymore!

Here's Pandora, testing out the mineral feeder in its new, convenient location:


The second sheep tent, which we built today, gave us some problems because the place where we wanted to put it had a lot of rocky ledge underneath it that made it impossible for Ken to drive all the T-posts where he wanted them, although he did wear himself out trying.

In the end we had to compromise on the design of the second tent. We didn't have any more 2x2s, but I found some long metal support pieces from a collection of industrial-type shelves that was left in our shed when we moved here. Ken bolted some of them together to make them long enough, and fastened them between the posts. In the one place where he couldn't drive a post into the rock, we ended up tying that corner to a tree to stabilize it.


The comical-looking thing about sheep tents is that, unlike normal buildings, you don't WANT them to be level. You want one side to be lower than the other side, and one corner of the low side to be even lower. That ensures better drainage of rain off the tarp roof, and helps reduce water pooling on the roof as the tarp sags.

It doesn't completely eliminate water pools though. Sometimes after a big rainstorm, I'll have to go out and push on the underside of the tarp to drain the swimming pool off the roof!

We have one more sheep tent to build in the last breeding pen tomorrow. The tent in that pen sort of survived the winter because it's in a more sheltered location, so it will only need some reinforcing and readjusting.

After that, it'll be time to get back to work on our stallion Senter's shelter again.

Love is in the Air

Although I don't think any actual breeding has taken place yet, sheep breeding season seems to be progressing.

Nicholai has been making his "sex face."
(actually, he's just testing the ewe's scent to see if she's in heat)

Taj is starting to get the idea, too

In case you were wondering, Taj and Paisley demonstrate what sheep do on a date:

A little small talk

A little smooching

And then they go eat poison ivy vines together!

Got Sheep?

Please won't you feed me?

Yo! Bring me some food!


Who could resist a face like this?


Just a handsome boy


And another handsome boy

Fleece on the Hoof

We are late doing our shearing this year. No matter how good our intentions, we seem to be completely unable to send our clipper blades in for resharpening in time, even though we have months between spring and fall shearing.

We usually shear in mid to late October. But we just got around to sending our clipper blades out two days ago. Poor sheep---they're going to be naked in November, when it's already quite chilly at night.

When I sell my fleeces, I like to not only take a photo of the fleece itself, but also a photo of the sheep wearing the fleece, so the buyers can see where each one came from. Since I can't do my shearing yet until my blades come back, I figured I could at least take a bunch of photos of Fleece on the Hoof.

I'll probably use a lot of the photos eventually to update my sheep website , too.

Tansy

Paris

Salem

Tenor

Titan

Taj

Rhonwen

Regina

Teasle

Trouble

Nicholai

Suzette

Pandora

Persia

Poppy

Tut

Sedona

Sarah

Savannah

Paisley

Tundra

No, this isn't my whole flock. But it's everybody whose fleeces qualify as "premium" fleeces this fall. During the summer heat wave, the others suffered a wool break which ruined their fleeces until next time.