Catching up to myself - Squirrel!

I woke up this morning at 4:30 ready to write this blog post. It's a fairly normal time for me to get up, I allow myself to get out of bed anytime after 4 a.m., and it's the best time for me to do my school work. This was going to be a post about goals, and objectives, and pushing boundaries to get to where you want to be... when I get to it. But it's already Squirrel! kind of day.

Squirrel - Needle felted from Demi's wool. Pictured in the Ozark Folk
Center State Park Craft Village, Feb. 13, 2014

Like I said, I woke up with this idea. I went to the kitchen to get my morning coffee. We've just started remodeling the kitchen. When we bought this house in 2009, the interior had just been updated with new wallpaper and paint and some new flooring (all except the bathroom, which was and still is pretty reprehensible, though I did paint it this summer!). The wall paper in the kitchen and living room is striped dark blue, gold and maroon. Not bad, but not my colors. And they put popcorn paint on the ceiling in the kitchen. Just try to clean that! So, as we just bought a new gas stove and a dishwasher (never been one in this house), and they will be delivered January 16, we need to make some changes to the kitchen. I started stripping wallpaper this week. On my way to get coffee (remember that?) I decided to start scraping the popcorn off the ceiling. I did go get a drop cloth, and scraped a decent 2-foot by 4-foot swatch clean before I got off the step-stool and made my way to the coffee pot. I cleaned up the mess while I waited for coffee to brew. Squirrel!

Coffee in hand, I sat down at the computer to write this post. I wanted to pull some pictures of my looms that I took yesterday, the experience on which I am basing this post. Apparently, neither my OneDrive or Google Drive are backing up my phone pictures right now. But, they are going into Google Photo. But I can't get Blogger to pull from Google Photo. Don't I remember that Google photo is going away at some point? Got to go look that up. Stop that Squirrel!

There were lots of picture of our sheep in my Google photos. I've been filing the recent ones into albums on my phone, but I don't seem to be able to access those albums from other devices. So, as one of my goals for this year is to get the registrations done on all our sheep (bad shepherd for letting those get behind!) I started creating a Google photo album with all my Jacob Sheep photos. I'm back to 2014, have 1,376 photos in the album and have enjoyed a trip down memory lane. Wow, we've done a lot of improvements on this farm! But how can I get Blogger to access Google photos? Squirrel!

So, now it's 7:22, the sheep are starting to get vocal about not being fed yet, and I still haven't started this blog post. So, working on goals, objective, and accountability, here is a rundown before I go do chores.

I like doing slogans, tag-lines, or whatever you want to call them for a year. 2019 was Focus & Finish, you can see that I need that one, and it has been amazingly powerful. I have nine blog posts drafted to cover my highlights for 2019 (hope I can find where I stored that draft). 

My tag-line for 2020 is #PushingBoundaries2020. Yeah, life is all hashtags now. Why pushing boundaries? Well, when I finish morning chores, and figure out how to get my loom pictures over here, I'll explain that one. Hope to see you tomorrow.

What to keep in your kidding or lambing kit

Havencroft Kachina had these adorable twin ewes by Havencroft Neptune. The new barn gives us a great set up for jug pens to give mom and babies a safe place to bond .

 It's the beginning of lambing and kidding time here in the Ozarks on Havencroft Farm. That means it's time to keep the "midwifery" kit hanging by the door so we're ready to help when needed.

I've been a shepherd since 1979. I learned from an old-time shepherd, Finley Nelson, and from my dad's stories of having goats when he was a kid. So, I do things the old fashioned way. I am happy to learn about new ways, but I still think simple is good.

Our lambing kit is simple. It starts with towels to help mama dry off babies. Most ewes or does have twins, so if we can help her by drying off one while she goes about the business of having the second, that's good. If it's cold, getting the babies dry quickly will help them stay warm.

Scissors, iodine, towels and clean straw are staples for planning on Havencroft Farm. 

The next thing that's in the kit is a sprayer bottle of iodine for spraying the lamb's umbilical cord. It's vitally important. We always iodine babies. Sometimes we dip navels, but for the last few years we've been drenching them well with the sprayer.

We also keep scissors in the bag, just in case we need to trim umbilicals that are dragging the ground, or trim wool away from udders on sheep that haven't been sheared yet. The next thing that is vital is making sure that babies nurse very soon after being born. They need the protection of the first milk, colostrum, to protect them from bacteria and to get their gut working. We check the mama's udder, making sure the colostrum is flowing freely even if we weren't there for the birth. We also check to make sure babies have full tummies and warm, moist mouths.

If the babies are too weak to nurse, or if there is any other reason they can't get colostrum within an hour of being born, we thaw out some frozen colostrum from last year, or earlier in the year and use a bottle or dose syringe to get it down them. We always freeze excess colostrum from our dairy goats in two ounce bags for just this purpose. Colostrum and soaking navels in iodine are considered absolutely necessary on our farm.

Something else I try to keep in the kit are recycled shopping bags. They are handy for disposing of after birth. We keep that cleaned up because we do have coyotes, raccoons and other predators that we don't want to invite with the smell of new birth.

We also make sure we have clean, dry bedding available. Some of our ewes choose not to use it, but we try.

Finally, we keep molasses in the kit. We mix about 2 tablespoons (or glugs)  in a bowl of warm water to offer to every new mom after giving birth. Most of them drink it down. It gives them water, sugar for energy and minerals like iron to help replace what they've lost.

It's not much, we keep it simple. We also do regular night time barn checks during kidding and lambing season. The whole flock gets used to the flashlight as the silly humans wander through their sleeping place two or three times a night. We are respectful of their sleep and try not to shine the light hard on any ewe or doe unless something looks unusual.

It's Fall

Finally we got enough rain to end the summer long burn ban.
Lena trimmed the cedars and cut down a few "eye-catchers"
and we burned a lot of downed sticks that can be
trip hazards in the dark or bad weather.

Autumn means many things. Temperatures get cooler. Days get shorter. Gardens reach their
fullness.

Here on the farm, it means getting ready for winter. The sheep and goats need a different type of shelter in the winter. When it's hot, they need shade and air flow. When winter comes, they need warm and dry.

Here in the Arkansas Ozarks, we do sometimes get snow, and we get wind, so the shelters need to be able to stand up to whatever weather tantrum nature wants to pitch.

Because the days are shorter in the winter, we will be doing one, or sometimes both chorings in the dark, so it's really nice to have the pens set up in a way that it is easy to feed. Also our ground gets slippery when wet, so having to climb the hill with an arm load of hay, or a bucket of feed needs to be kept to a minimum.

Shawn's still laid up from his sinus surgery, but our fall sheep and goat care still needed to be done, so Lena and I worked hard this weekend. It seemed a little like the Fox and Geese game, because everything had to happen in order to keep the rams away from each other and from the girls they weren't supposed to talk to.

First we built Boomer a nice new BIG pen, so that he can have several girls come live with him.
Dan was in with the whole flock for a bit yesterday. If we have any surprise lambs, they'll be here the end of February, about 147 days from today. But we got him into the Skinny pen with Bones and Mouse, after trimming their toes. We call it the Skinny pen because the back wall of the shelter in that pen is a plywood board that says "Skinny's Barber Shop". We tried to put Demi and Lizzy in with them, but the girls just pushed up the back fence and left. We fixed that, because I want them bred to Dan. I'd love a little ewe lamb that looks like Hagrid. We haven't put the girls back in yet.

The biggest task was moving the Dinosaur (a carport type tent that's been the sheep shelter for about 6 years, thanks to Robin and Summer) from the sheep pen to straddle the fence between the dairy goats and the horse pasture, aka the front yard. Lena cut so many tree limbs to get them out of the way, she's really sore tonight, but we got it moved. Fria, who at 30-years-old deserved comfort for her old horse bones, really likes her "new" shelter. Next weekend, or maybe the next one, we'll put sides on it.

Then we gathered all the tree trimmings of the last year or two and had a big bonfire. While it burned down, we built the new sheep shelter, a double-wide, triple-long hoop house. The sheep seem to love it, I'll take pics in the morning.

Now Lena and I are both tired and sore, but it's a good tired - the kind that comes from a productive weekend and a job well done.