Amaryllis arrives

No, I don’t mean the flower, Amaryllis. This Amaryllis is a spotted donkey. She arrived on Saturday. She was foaled in a sheep pen in Iowa and has lived with Jacob sheep all her life. She will continue duty as a guard donkey here, but also as my equine buddy.

Amaryllis

 

Sheep investigating Amaryllis

 

Zena is a favorite yearling and this is how she came in from the pasture this morning.

Zena

What happened?

I don’t know what happened. I just wrote the post about the pasture. I finished up with a paragraph about the blankets I wove. That paragraph got attached to the previous one and the photo didn’t show up. Here is the photo.

Five blankets on one warp

Also, it seems that the normal formatting of all the previous posts is gone. I don’t know why. I sure get frustrated wtih this stuff. Any ideas?

Pasture Productivity

I still have the rams in with the ewes so I have the flock split into two main groups. Ranger and his ewes are in the main pasture and Houdini and his ewes are in what I call the horse pasture. That’s because that pasture is where we have had horses and a cow or two in the past. This year was the first time I had sheep in that pasture. If you want to grow healthy pasture there is more to it than just opening a gate and letting the animals in to graze. This pasture has been severely overgrazed in the past, but I was amazed at the amount of clover and trefoil that grew in parts of the pasture after several months of rest. The problem with this pasture is the amount of dallas grass, a summer-growing perennial in the west half. It grows fast in mid to late summer and then dries out in the winter. It was so thick in half the pasture that nothing could grow under it. There was just a thick dried matt of it–that is cutting the productivity of the pasture. The photo below shows this summer’s growth of dallas grass. The sheep will eat it when it’s young and palatable, but when it gets larger they can’t keep up with it and it is not as desirable. The grass in the photo below was  at my shoulder height before the last north winds. Some of it has been blown over. If you look closely on the right wide you see the top of a black plastic post sticking up. There is also a post on the left side but the grass is built up against it. The sheep don’t even venture into this thick thatch.

West view of sample plot in pasture

So what to do about it? I could try to get some cows in here. If they didn’t eat it at least they’d trample it. But I’m trying to make something work with the sheep. I have started feeding hay out here. I break the flakes of hay into smaller pieces and place it in strategic places in the tall grass. The photo below shows those same posts after 2 feedings in that area.  (Note the wooden post in the background of each picture.) The sheep  didn’t eat all that grass, but a good part of it is trampled down and hopefully broken up enough that something will grow through it after the winter rains.

West view 24 hours later

The next two photos show the same plot looking north.  You can barely see the black plastic posts in the first photo, but they’re obvious in the second.

Pasture plot, north view before grazing

North view after 24 hours

Look at how much grass there is behind this plot. I’m working my way north with the hay feeding. The goal is to get all that dallas grass eaten or trampled. Then when it rains i’ll get more palatable feed in there.

Power ram?

I took this photo of Houdini and told my husband that I thought he looked like an evil cartoon character.

Dan replied that he looked like one of the Power Rangers, which he just happened to see on Saturday morning. (I guess it came on after This Old House.) Now that it has rained and the sheep are walking around in tall wet grass a lot of the color from the marking harness has come off of Houdini, but in the first few days of breeding season I was ready to call him Alien Ram because he had a green tinge all over his wool.

When I’m not dealing with sheep, hay, classes, etc, I’m supposed to be weaving. I finally got a huge job finished. These are 4 queen size blankets and one double blanket that I just shipped on Friday. They are woven from wool grown by the customer’s family and she wanted blankets for her family members. They don’t look too impressive in the photo, but it was a lot of time.

Now the fun stuff (while my computer is still letting me download photos–don’t know what happened overnight). I like making these V-shawls and here are some friends helping to model them.

And this is my son making his escape after I made him take these photos.

Below is a striking shawl made by one of my students in the last v-shawl class I taught. This is her 2nd weaving!

A Gorgeous Day

It rained last night–not a lot, but enough to get rid of the dust and make everything smell fresh. This is the first rain since sometime in March! We were due. The best thing about the rain was that my hay was all in the barn BEFORE it started, thanks my husband and son. I had 440 bales waiting to go in the barn. This is just half of it.

haystack

I started did my share of stacking hay, but eventually Dan and Chris got involved and at that point I got to use gravity and throw the hay off the stack while Dan dragged it inside and Chris (age 17) stacked it. We filled 3 horse stalls and part of the aisle of the horse barn. These are HEAVY bales–a lot of them are over 125 pounds and up to 150 pounds.

So the hay was in, the sky was fresh and blue this morning, and the weather was perfect. I spent the day with a ewe and lambs at the local feed store where they were having a Grand Opening for their new store. Nice weather, good food (that’s always important), and I sold a few handwoven pieces.

It’s finally breeding season. I put the rams in with the ewes on Tuesday and 16 sheep are marked already. Here are some of Houdini’s girls. I sure hope that we get some rain before my November shearing date because these ewes are really green. Ranger’s ewes aren’t marked nearly as much–different brand of marker I think.

marked ewes

Well. I had a lot more photos to post but my computer is running way too slowly. It took me 10 minutes to get this one photo into the blog. I’ve been shelling walnuts while I’m waiting in between clicks. So I’ll sign off for now.