Shearing Day 2015

Howdy folks!   Long time, no posting.  Sorry, things just seemed to get away from me for a while.  I'll try to do better.  LOL.  (we'll see).

Anyway, what's happening down on the farm?  Well, a lot actually.  The vineyard has come to life and we are mowing, spraying, weeding, pruning, shoot positioning, and scouting for pests.  We've had a fairly dry spring thus far and cooler than usual lately.  I have not put in the garden yet, and it's just as well because it's been in the 30s and 40s overnight this past week or so.  I did manage to buy all the transplants that will eventually become the garden, but I'm currently tending them on the deck, until I can clear out the beds and get them into the ground.  The cool temps have been a blessing for the sheep as I have not yet had a chance to get them sheared.  That's scheduled to happen today.  I'll post pics of their nakedness as soon as the deed is done. 

I did manage to finally rescue the yard from the sheep.  Several weeks ago, Greg had to go to Germany for a week and one of the last things he said to me before he left was "I want my yard back.  The sheep are eating everything."  He was right of course.  My landscape has suffered and my garden last year was a total fail because of having to move the sheep around and move hot wire, which they promptly trample, and try to rotation graze them.  I managed to let them way overgraze the front section and it's just now starting to recover so they are not allowed out there for the foreseeable future.  They can't stay in the vineyard once the new tasty shoots are long enough for them to notice so in the past, they've been around the house way too much.  I decided that before Greg got back from Germany, he would have his yard back.  I called my neighbor/friend who does fencing and got his opinion and we settled on a date and a price.  We ended up fencing off about an acre around the house, which will be "The Yard" and the sheep can have the rest.  It adds the complication of additional gates but it's manageable and it gives me multiple areas to rotate them so one area doesn't get scalped down to dirt.  Now Greg can plant his fruit tree orchard, and I can do a little permaculture with some wild black raspberries and the elderberries that pop up all over the place if you fail to control them.  My garden is safe and there are no more little sheep poop-berries on the driveway.   That's a win all the way around.

Well, Edward Scissorhands (not his real name) is here to shear the sheep.   Back soon, with pictures...

Two and a half hours to shear 13 squirming and kicking sheep.  It takes two people to wrangle them, even though they're in a small 16 x 16 foot stall.  I sell the white wool and keep the black.  I have 6 fleeces to wash and pick out the burrs, grass and weed seeds, then I plan to send it off to a fiber mill to process into yarn.  Every year I say this, and it just keeps piling up.  This year will be different because I have plans for this beautiful brown/gray/black wool.  I'm going to take a refresher knitting class and put it to use.

Here's what they looked like before all the drama began...

... and here's Lefty being sheared, with Pancho in the background, enjoying Lefty's misery.

They're all back in the pasture now, enjoying grass and weeds, and acting like nothing even happened, other than that fact that they do not appear to recognize each other at the moment.    

I'll deal with the black wool tomorrow and get it bagged up in mesh bags, ready for the picking, skirting and  washing steps.

Now Get To Work!

With about a row and a half of Traminette vines left to prune, and with things starting to rapidly green up on the vineyard floor, today seemed like a good day to get out and do some pruning and take my mowing crew with me. There's not much to eat in their winter pasture now, and they were more than happy to head up to the vineyard and start mowing the grass and eating weeds. We're expecting snow this afternoon but at the moment, they are on the clock.

Here are a couple of photos of them hanging out with me in the vineyard.

D.U.M.B.

I'm beginning to seriously question the intelligence of these sheep.

This afternoon, I was busily working away, trying to get done so I could run some errands in town. I have the windows open because it's 73 degrees today and absolutely beautiful outside. I took my headphones off for a few minutes and heard one of the lambs making a huge racket. I went to the window and saw Cocoa in the sheep pen. He was on the opposite side from the gate pacing back and forth along the fence. The rest of the sheep were on the other side of the fence eating grass, ignoring him. I watched for a few minutes and realized he was stuck in the pen. Well, sort of. The gate is 16 feet wide, and is wide open during the day so they can come in and out whenever they want and also so I don't have to run out there and let them in if it storms. I close them up in there before dark every evening but other than that, they're on their own.

Clearly, he'd gone in there for some reason and then got upset because the other sheep were outside the pen and he couldn't figure out why or how to get out. This went on for several minutes and he finally flopped down on the ground in frustration. I thought about going out there to help him but less than a minute later, he leaped to his feet, dashed through the gate and ran as fast as he could around to the other side of the pen where the rest of the sheep were eating. Frantically baaa'ing the entire time.

Oh, did I tell you? He did the exact same thing last week.

I do not know how these things ever evolved in the wild...

A post wherein I discuss worms and maggots (you have been warned)

Over the past two days, I've been paying particular attention to Cocoa. Partly because he is so interesting to watch and partly because he seems so independent and often is separated from his flock by quite a distance and I'm not sure why. Anyway, on Sunday I noticed that he was lying around and not eating when the other sheep were grazing. I made note of it but didn't think a whole lot about it. I attributed it to him being smaller, younger and not as hungry.

Yesterday morning when I went out to the sheep pen to let them out to their pasture, and to feed Sophie, everyone but Cocoa met me at the gate, happy to see me (or at least any treats I might have) but Coke was lying over in the grass by himself. His head was up and he was watching me but he didn't make a move to get up and come over to me. I went in the pen and walked toward him and he jumped up and ran to catch up with the rest of the sheep. I checked on him a few times during the morning and sometimes he was eating grass, and other times he was curled up in the grass, not sleeping, just hanging around. Not Normal; at least to my inexperienced eye.

I fired off an email to Kristin, the woman who sold me the sheep, and she reminded me that the first thing to check for is worms. You do this by catching the sheep, pulling down the lower eyelid and checking the color on the inside of the eyelid.
It should be dark pink. If it is pale pink to white, worms are likely the cause. The pallor is a sign of anemia. In sheep, intestinal worms attach to the stomach lining and the blood loss causes anemia in a hurry. The sheep were wormed the day before I brought them home, about two and a half weeks ago, so it didn't click that I had a worm problem until I went back out there, caught him and looked at his eyelids. Sure enough, pale pink, almost white. I called the vet and scheduled a visit for this morning at 10:00. I might have been able to handle this myself but I really wanted some professional guidance this first time. I'm glad I called the vet.

Kristin had suggested I give him a little extra feed and also check the site where he'd been neutered. I managed to catch him again but he was struggling so much, I only got a cursory glance "down there" and did not see anything alarming.

When the vet came this morning, she quickly assessed the situation and we decided to worm everyone. While she had Cocoa on the ground, she wormed him and then took a look between his back legs and sure enough, the snip site had opened up. I'll save the clinical data for another time, but to summarize, maggots were involved.

Obviously, I was horrified but she said it was common, not to worry, and got some stuff to spray to help keep it clean and the flies off. She injected an antibiotic to be on the safe side, then let him up off the ground and he tore off to rejoin his friends.

I got a quick lesson on worming, had a conversation about Coccidosis, Flies, and barn/pen sanitation, and she gave me the stuff to spray on Cocoa's open wound (He's gonna love me by the end of this week) some extra wormer for the lambs, and some stuff to put in their drinking water for Coccidosis, a parasite not treated by the oral wormer she used. Kristin had also indicated this might be a possibility if worms were ruled out as the problem. Hopefully I'm on top of the worm situation now and Cocoa will be back to his usual self in short order.

Based on Cocoa's reaction (he's about 25 lbs) the correct sheep behavior, when grabbed by the back legs is to turn into a kangaroo and attempt to spring away. Hard to imagine with a 100 lb Jilly Bean or Tebow. I'm going to need some practice before I can wrestle one of the adult sheep to the ground. Maybe I'll practice on Sophie. She'll probably think it's a game...

Day Labor

Well, sort of. Today was the beginning of the beta test phase for the vineyard sheep. We're starting them in a small patch of the vineyard (four rows of the new 2009 vines) to see how they do and how best to use them. Use Them? That sounds terrible! I know, but really it's a win-win. They love weeds. I hate weeds. Grapes hate weeds. The sheep could care less where they are as long as they have something to eat. They might as well be in my vineyard.

These sheep are so funny to watch. You really only have limited options in how to direct them or get them to cooperate with you. Mainly, that involves, again, the food and the bucket. They will pretty much go in the same general direction as you, as long as you have the bucket and are shaking the feed in it. They startle easily though, and will go scattering off in all directions. They hate to be apart from each other so as soon as the perceived danger passes, they clump back into a big woolly blob again.

Greg went out to the vineyard this morning and made some final adjustments to the hot wire and came back to the house. I figured he could follow us and sort of push us along if things didn't go exactly according to plan when I let them out of the gate.

We fed Sophie and took her out of her pen on her leash, opened the main sheep enclosure gate, and I started shaking the hell out of that bucket. We walked as a group toward the pasture gate. I opened it, walked out and off we went. From the gate to the vineyard is about 400 feet or so, straight down the north fence line. Greg and Sophie brought up the rear and when one or more sheep stopped to eat on the way, he encouraged them forward. We all walked out to the vineyard, through the gap in the hot wire and down one of the vine rows. Once they were all in, Greg closed the gap, completing the circuit of the hot wire. I dumped the feed on the ground and stepped back. They swarmed the little pile of food and I scooted around them and stepped over the hot wire, which is about 12 inches off the ground. He has it pulled taut and it's definitely live.

Once the sheep finished their snack, they got to work eating the weeds (an overwhelming task at this point because we did not spray these four rows to kill the weeds when we sprayed the other 8 rows). They ate, and ate, and ate, and ate and then took a nap. Then they ate, and ate, and ate, and ate, and then took another nap. So it goes. They work when they want, and when they need a break, they just take one. I think these are Union sheep. When one flops down for a nap, they all do. It's hot today and I realized that there really isn't anything out there that provides them with shade so I took an 8 x 6 blue tarp and some bungee cords, and rigged up a nice shady tent for them, using the four posts of two adjacent H-braces on the north end of the vineyard.

Greg and I watched for a while to see which one of them tested out the hot wire first. My bet was on Cocoa. He has been the most inquisitive of the three lambs, and can't seem to keep from poking his nose into anything new that enters his environment. Like the other day with my tool belt. I had set it down on the ground and he immediately came over and checked out each pocket.

Anyway, it didn't take long for him to get pushed into the hot wire by the yearling wether I named Tebow. From the moment these sheep got here, Tebow has been head butting the lambs all over the place. He does it if they're in his way, or if they're trying to eat out of the same food pan, or just for the heck of it. He has a thing about ramming them. They just seem to take it in stride, like it's a normal thing. He does it to Jill too but she just turns around and knocks him right back, and I think she has at least 40 lbs on him at this point. She is a much more docile sheep but she is definitely at the top of the pecking order in this little flock.

Tebow knocked Cocoa into the hot wire and he actually went under it, and it zapped him. After a few moments of panic, he managed to leap over it back into the row, none the worse for the experience. Sheep hate to be singled out so once he was outside the hot wire, all he could think about was getting back in. The adult sheep seem to understand the hot wire already. It looks just like the hot wire at the farm they came from. The lambs apparently will need a few shocks before they figure it out. Later in the day, Tebow knocked Pancho into it and Pancho was touching two or three other sheep at the time so I think they all got a dose of it.

We are keeping Sophie tethered up there so she doesn't blunder into the hot wire. As long as she's there, the sheep should be safe. I don't think I will leave them unattended up there until we see how this is going to go. From what we've seen today, they will need to be out there a lot in order to gain control of the weed situation. Next year, we will start putting them in there a lot sooner and they should be able to keep things from getting out of hand.

There is one weed species that gets a very early start, and in fact it goes dormant but does not die over the winter, and then comes to life, even before all the snow has melted. It is the only green thing in the vineyard in March. Even the grass is still dormant at that point. The sheep should be able to clean those weeds up pretty quick so they don't become the problem they became this year. They started off as cute little dark green plants, and by the end of March had put out lovely white flowers that made the vineyard look like a postcard from Burgundy. Then, almost overnight, out came the seed pods. We did not deal with these particular weeds early enough so of course they got away from us and released their seeds. We'll be seeing them again next year as a result, but next year the sheep will be ready for them.

The other thing I will need to do is run the mower through the rows the sheep are currently working on, cutting the grass between the vine rows pretty short. I'll probably only have to do it this year because the sheep should be able to keep up with the weeds and the grass if I put them out there in late March or early April. I noticed that the lambs were focusing on the grass instead of the weeds, and I think by cutting the grass very short, they will look for more interesting things to eat in the vine rows. This is one great big experiment and some things will work and other things won't. We'll just have to try different things until we figure out how best to work with these sheep. You cannot make them do anything they don't want to do. If there is a sheep user's manual, that statement is on page one.

They seem pretty content to stay in there for now, and as long as there's something they want to eat, I shouldn't have any problem containing them with just the one strand of hot wire.