Mid Summer Update

Here we are at the end of July and I haven’t posted anything to this web log since last December, mea culpa. Well quite a bit has happened since then, so here goes:

Over all it was a tough winter for us coming off the drought. We went through our square bales by the end of January because we had to feed earlier than expected. With the drought we weren’t able to stockpile grass for December. We cut the last time at the beginning of August our winter pasture, which under normal conditions would have produced some good growth and seeded with the no-till drill we rented from the county, with Kentucky blue grass and orchid grass, but because of the heat and lack of rain we had almost nothing to show for December on 12 acres. So by the middle of February we started to buy round bales. I built a round bale feeder (put link in) from a plan I found on the sheep discussion board I belong and that made all the difference. Mainly because there was little waste and the bales were pleasing to the sheep. I’m not sure what the nutritional content was but the sheep really liked it and it showed in body condition scores as we approached lambing, which for an average was close to 3.5. Overall we had to buy 18 round bales and this cost us about $400.

As I posted in December we decided to breed a little later this year shooting for the second and third week in May for lambing. The gamble paid off because we had great weather and grass in April and even better grass in May, so our ewes really performed well. Over all we had a good lambing with 37 lambs, but I post a separate article explaining more about our lambing and our data later.At this point in July 2013, with all the rain we have been getting is making up for last year.

Back to winter: it was a colder winter and not real wet. Wood cutting went pretty good and I was able to stay stocked. But we are still below what we need to be in inventory at this point.

At beginning of December we butchered our egg layers and thought about giving them up. The reason came down to cost. With farmers going after the quick buck raising corn for ethanol feed prices have continued to climb making raising chickens too expensive. But after some discussion we decided to press forward with egg layers and soon meat birds. But Murphy struck or I should say Kera our German Sheppard pup. We had moved the birds outside from the brooder in the basement and all was fine. But after moving the coop one evening in early June I didn’t latch the door properly and Kera found her way in there and did what dogs do. So a couple of weeks later I was back at the post office picking up another order of chicks. These are doing fine and are now ready for the pasture. But before we can do this I need to build a new egg mobile. The one we have now is on skids, but I was able to get an old camper trailer and will build a new one on the frame. More on this will follow.

Well I am going to close here and I am sure I have missed quite a bit, but we’ll try to fit some blogging time in once a week. It does help having what we do written down because we can go back and reflect on our labors, but it’s like everything else that’s not animal related…it falls to the bottom of the to-do list.