Pretty faces

I was taking photos to try and get a good one for an ad.

Gem

Janelle

Moon

Zelda

Dazzle

Prancer

Zip

Babe

Fanny

These Meridian ewes are all with Kenleigh’s Savor. He’s just a little guy but has been doing the job.

Last, but not least, Amaryllis.

What’s for Breakfast?

I moved the sheep to a new section of pasture this morning.

They immediately buried their heads. This is like a salad bar for the sheep–something for everyone. In the photo below you can see clover, trefoil (yellow flower), Dallis grass (broad-leaf grass), yellow foxtail (that grass with the foxtail-looking head), bermudagrass, dock, and other plants.

Some of these plants make summer grazing tough. The bermuda and yellow foxtail are late summer grasses and take over the pasture, crowding more desirable plants.  The sheep choose to eat the plants they like and leave the less desirable ones.That’s why, to graze properly, you put more livestock on a small area and move them frequently. When the sheep are in a small area they eat even  the less palatable plants while eating the ones they really like. Then you move them to the next area. This also helps with control of internal parasites.

Dallis grass has been a problem too. It is a perennial grass that originated in South America and can be a good pasture grass if grazed properly. If I can’t keep it grazed low it gets so tall and coarse that the sheep won’t touch it. Then it takes over and nothing else can grow. If you go back to older posts in the blog you’ll see where last year at this time I was doing everything I could think of to get the sheep to eat the thick stand of dallis grass. In the spring we finally burned it.

So what did I see in the salad bar pasture this morning?

Amaryllis went right for the yellow foxtail! Nobody else eats that.

Here is another undesirable plant. This grass is medusahead. It is an annual grass that grows in dry areas and has these nasty seed heads. Sheep don’t want to eat it even when it is still green. The medusahead started growing in this side of the pasture when I couldn’t get irrigation water to this area. The last few times I irrigated I have been more successful at getting water here so that’s why it’s green underneath. I hope that if I’m successful at irrigating this area next year the medusahead won’t be able to take over.

But look who is eating it!

So what are the sheep eating?

This is Della with her mouth full of dallis grass. (That’s the dallis grass seed head in the foreground.)

Ebony is eating trefoil and dock.

Linda is eating dallis grass.

The goat, Chloe, is eating trefoil and…

Jasmine is eating dallis grass.

One way to join me in a “pasture-walk” and photo shoot is to join the Farm Club and spend some time here. It’s on my website–see the link on the right.

Who’s in the barn?

The lambs in the last post are 10 days old now and yesterday I let them into the pasture with all the other sheep. Last night I found the little ram lamb limping and I diagnosed a broken leg, but wasn’t sure where.  I took him to see my vet today and she came up with this splint to immobilize the leg. The break is at the top of the tibia and this splint holds the joints on either side immobile.  We’ll leave it on about 3 weeks and see how he is.

While I had my camera in the barn I took other photos.

Amaryllis, the donkey.

Jasmine, one of my son’s does. He has gone to his summer job and I’m milking the goats that are left.

Ewes and ewe lambs on the pasture.

These ram lambs were so happy to get out onto the pasture after being in a dry lot getting hay for weeks. I have to keep them separate from the ewes now so my options are more limited. This pasture now has plenty of feed.

This is trefoil, one of my favorite flowers, and good sheep feed. There is a lot of it in that ram pasture.

My husband came back from the hardware store and told me he bought something for me. The other day when I was irrigating I broke the only shovel that I could find –one with the handle taped. So this is MY shovel.

Moving On

Lambing season is over (except for one sheep that I bought and is due much later). For people who like numbers the stats are on my website in the Farm Talk column–things like how many ewe lambs and number of twin births, etc. It’s actually interesting to me to see the tallies. Here is one of the last ewes to lamb. This is a yearling, Eliza, with a pretty ewe lamb.

The weather was gorgeous this weekend and I got serious about sorting wool. Here is a sample from a particularly nice fleece.  This is a yearling out of Meridian Diamond and bide a wee Yuri–the crimp in this fleece looks like Yuri’s did. Maybe you have to be a spinner to appreciate this.

I have a lot of wool to sort and I find myself getting distracted. I sat in the barn and took photos. This is Stephanie below.

And Amaryllis.

This banty hen sets on a nest of eggs all summer even though there has been no rooster since I’ve lived here.

Once she settles on a nesting place I transfer her to this rubber feeder so that I can move it if necessary to get to a bale of hay. I started marking the eggs so that I could take the freshest, but then I lost track. Now I just let her have all she wants.

I got distracted by poppies too, but that will be another post.

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