Shackin’ Up
Satisfying day. Light snow, bright sun and kids home for the Thanksgiving holiday. Just perfect for getting some extra farm work done! Though a bit later than our ideal, we pushed, pulled and lured all of our breeding sheep and goat pairs into the various pens, pastures and gardens they’ll be shacked up in for a month or so. I couldn’t be more excited for the quiet tasks of winter that lie ahead, but getting the animals gettin’ on is a reminder that spring isn’t so far off. Just 5 months, in fact, and we’ll be in lambs and lettuces again.
Congo and Cream gettin’ busy making us milk and babies.
The whole endeavor, like most of farming, is one big complicated moving puzzle. Sort of like the crazy staircases in Hogwarts. The first piece is deciding which mommas go to which papas. The second piece is finding places for all of them to be separate but have access to food, shelter and water. The third is how to get them into those places, which are spread out all over the farm. For most of the year, our mommas graze together, while the rowdy males graze somewhere else. Herd animals by nature become very attached to each other in their groups and don’t like to be split up.
This fall, six of my ewes are on holiday at a neighbor’s sprawling sheep farm where they’ve been since we ran out of grass in droughty July. My rather diminutive girls have been running with a big meat ram over there for the past month, so when they return to us in a few weeks, they’ll hopefully be carrying the beginnings of multiple large lambs. I hope the babies’ fleeces are decent, but I’m really hoping to get some bigger animals we can eat. We butchered two year-old lambs last spring and got 17 pounds of meat off each! So size counts this time around.
Here at home, I’ve got just two ewes, both bottled babies that were so tame I kept them back when the others went off. For them, I’m concentrating my breeding efforts on quality of fleece. Tiny little Lily, a black Finn-Rambouillet cross, is in the back garden with Steeplechase, a funny looking brownish Finn-Dorset-Rambouillet-Romney ram with long, soft crimps that I adore. They are sharing a mini-quonset hut in there with Mercy, a white angora goat, and Oreo, a black-and-silver angora buck. Not too private, but it’s cozy and they’ve got all the cabbage they can eat. Lily follows me wherever I go, and oddly enough, so does Oreo, a majestic stocky buck with huge spiraling horns arched over his back. They were easy to lead into the garden just by calling. Mercy is shy but has conveniently curved horns that gave me just enough purchase to grab her while she was eating grain. I had to drag her in by those horns, while her feet were solidly planted the whole way. Steeplechase, so named because he jumps like a racehorse when he’s being pursued, eluded me for an afternoon, but he finally discovered Lily through the fence and was quite pleased to join her once I stopped running after him.
In the front garden, Lena, the other tame ewe who is also a black Finn-Rambouillet, is stuck with two rams. I intended her this year for Petey, a small white Icelandic cross ram, because they’ve both got very long soft wool. But Cash, a black Finn-Rambouillet, got away from me when I was moving everyone. I let him wander the yard until I saw him eating one of our newly-planted willow trees. Since the front garden was the closest pen I had, I quickly lured him in there and just hoped Petey got to Lena first. Ah – the science of genetics.
Also in the front garden is my youngest angora doe, Claire, a pretty silver, who is to spend this month with Trumpet, a tiny Nigerian Dwarf-Angora cross buck. I’m experimenting with them to see if we can make “Ni-goras,” mini angoras with nice mohair fleeces. I just snatched both of them up while they were eating and carried them where they belonged.
Not so Gabby and Pepe, my two Nigerian Dwarfs. These two are my most problematic animals, in any time of year. Both of them can jump, will tolerate electric fence jolts, have vicious little horn buds and are small enough to get through almost any hole in fence or gate or chicken house, where they squeeze through the pop-hole and eat up all the hen’s feed. Shannon, my husband, has asked me repeatedly to get rid of these two, but I confess I sort of like their tough attitudes. And their babies, tiny highly verbal mini-goats, always sell! So, they’ve got the most secure pen with the highest fences, the corral under the calving barn in our front yard. Though hard to keep in, they are easy to get back, because they’ll follow their stubby noses to any grain you hold in front of them. Even when they escape to go wandering out into the street, most passers-by who stop to rescue them are able to get them back into a pasture.
The final couple, my little dairy doe, Cream, and the great Alpine buck, Congo, have suffered a fair amount of disruption since their big move, but I think they are happily settled into the chicken pasture now. I first put them in with the horses, where they seemed to do fine nibbling hay in the shelter. But when the youngest filly, Zinnia, spotted them grazing out in the middle of the field, she had to assert her leadership and commenced chasing them back and forth. They would likely all have settled in with each other eventually, but I feared the goats might stumble in the chasing and be trampled. They seem relieved when I called them to the fence and led them across the drive to the opposing pasture.
So there they all will stay for about a month so we can be sure all the girls have been “covered.” After that, we’ll put all of them in one pasture together for the winter. In April, we’ll see what has become of all our planning and scheming for the little couples, and hopefully have lots of meat, milk and fleece to show for our efforts to pair them judiciously. In the meantime, we do a lot of water hauling to the multiple pens and pray the fences hold.
