Farm Update

I realized that I haven't kept you up to date on the happenings on the farm.

After the excitement of lambing, this might be a bit of a let-down. Anyway - the adult sheep had their hooves trimmed and were wormed two weeks ago. Mark and the kids did most of it. Mark is becoming a professional hoof trimmer. When you have 20+ sheep, it does become an art form. The working process consists of each sheep getting one or two pills in a pill shooter. It's a long tube that basically puts the medication at the back of the sheep's throat, hopefully eliminating the option of spitting it out.

On 7/3 the lambs were all wormed. This was a liquid application. The medication was concentrated so each lamb received 1.5 ml. Again, the nurse/husband administered the medication (fortunately he is much more gentle with his human patients). He fabricated a device to shoot the liquid into the lamb's mouth so that, again, the option to spit out the medication was lessened.

The six kittens in the barn have all opened their eyes. The kids need to keep petting them to keep them tame as we have an aversion to feeding wild cats. Their mother is a wild thing and disappears whenever we come near.

Hank has adopted two cats - Lewis (an orange cat) and York (a black cat). Both Lewis and Clark hang around the house and have developed an agreement with the dog.

My Dad picked up Candy, the palimino horse. She hasn't been trained and is a huge horse. If there is something she doesn't like, she just kicks at it. Well, Alyssa decided to pet Candy and Candy whirled and kicked at Alyssa. Fortunately Alyssa only got a bruise on her upper arm (no other damage), but we can't have a horse like that on our farm so off she went.

The kids and I have been discussing how many sheep we will keep over the winter. We think we have agreed on 25 ewes that will be bred. We also have our oldest ewe that is no longer bred (she is 8 years old) and Peter, a former bottle lamb - he is wither (look it up) so he is just with the flock for decoration. Katelyn thinks she wants to keep #48 (a male), but we haven't reached a consensus. Over the next two months we need to look at the records of how many lambs each sheep had and check body shape on the young females. We are looking for a long body and solid stance. We will also see how many lambs their mother had. Next year I would like to sell the wool, but I also need to make coats for the sheep to keep the wool nice.

That's all down on the farm today!