13 December 2023
Good Morning! Another totally gorgeous morning! Unfortunately the sun comes up too late for me to take sunrise photos these days and iPhone technology hasn’t figured out how to capture dawn light effectively. Just look at the photo and imagine what it felt / looked like. Incidentally, this post photo is such a great illustration of how single tracking dogs run. If the dog had been trotting the footprints would still likely be along one line like this, but whoever made these tracks was in a hurry!
Yesterday I noticed that the nails are still in place where we hung wreaths on the barn doors last year so I thought "Hey! I'll just grab the wreaths and pop them back on there and this is literally going to take two seconds.". As always: WRONG! Naturally as I was adjusting the bows for maximum seasonal impact, one of them came apart because the high quality Amazon bows are held together with a single staple. In order to attempt a fix with a twist tie, I had to take my gloves off and it got downright unpleasant! In the end I needed about 27 feet of bailing twine to solve the problem. Apparently my fingers were too cold to take a photo, I'll add one soon!
The breeding group have seemed to figure out that the haylage that I opened yesterday is food despite the fact that it’s frozen solid like some kind of fermented grass popsicle, so that is great news! This is their last week of Rumspringa and this weekend the ram goes back to his bachelor pad and the ewes get to go back to grazing - hopefully. The sheep books and various university extension services say that sheep can graze through up to 12 inches of snow, but these sheep didn’t read ANY of that literature despite its wide availability, so after breeding is over, everyone will probably start getting fed.
Onto the topic of the day! There are a couple of ways that a farmer can see whether a ram has bred a ewe. When we first started this nonsense I thought that I was going to put a harness on a 250 pound ram - that he would stand for me to do this, and that I could put a colored crayon on this harness which would mark a ewe when he mounted her. I even thought that I could change the crayon weekly to see roughly when we should be expecting lambs. The optimism!! I read all of the reviews of the various harnesses and bought the one that the most reviewers said would stay on. Well, we probably can chalk it up to user error, but our ram at that time had it half off within one day. I ended up having to cut it the rest of the way off, by the time we caught him he was all tangled up. Not ideal. Then we decided to go with the "hope for the best" method where we have lambs willy nilly.
I’ve seen farmers in the UK (on TV, not in person) paint the ram’s chest and belly with this oily paint that doesn’t dry and that solves the harness problem, but you still have to catch the ram every 2 or 3 days to reapply. Not feasible for me since I am slow and wimpy.
Then I saw another sheep farmer paint the ewe’s rumps with livestock paint and see whether the paint gets smeared from er.. friction, and I thought that this was something we could manage! That farmer (Sandi Brock - check her out for hours of sheepy enjoyment) has an amazing you tube channel which introduced me to the idea that normal people might be interested in the day-to-day of farming. She runs a much larger operation than our little grass fed flock and she puts a lot of rams in at the same time for breeding, so the ewes’ rump paint sees a lot of action. I wasn’t sure whether the same method would work for us, but it seemed it would be at least marginally better than the ‘hope for the best’ method.
With the bad weather earlier this week the sheep have been sleeping in the barn so I can spy on them in the cameras! I can also look at them in person, but they get up and face me when I show up which makes it hard to see their backsides.
As you can see, the rumps are looking pretty smeary!! When we sort the ram and wethers out this weekend, we’ll make note of who was definitely bred and who was questionable. Just another piece of information to have when it comes to lambing season!