Category Archives: Jacob sheep

A Typical Day…

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…or why I don’t get everything done that I have planned for a day.

First up is morning chores and spend some time admiring Hudson, my new ram from Mud Ranch Jacobs. Joan brought him yesterday and took home a couple of ewe lambs. Hudson warrants a blog post all by himself, but he’ll have to wait for that. Hudson is a lilac ram and by breeding him to my lilac and lilac-carrier ewes I’ll have lilac lambs next spring. (Lilac is a Jacob color different than the more common black and white.)

 

 

One of the risers in my pasture water line pulled out a couple of days ago and I had to wait for the water to subside to be able to fix it. I left the hole open awhile to make sure that there are no more leaks.

 

 

Here is the result of a repaired pipe line–drinking water in the pasture so the sheep don’t have to come into the barn for water.

I will have irrigation water tomorrow so I needed to set up tarps in the ditch. The water is provided by the Solano Irrigation District, not my well. The tarps allow the water to back up and fill the ditch and then flow out into the pasture. 

The green forage is the result of irrigating. Even with all the rain we had recently it wasn’t enough to keep the desirable pasture plants growing. Notice the brown part on the left. My 24-hour irrigation hasn’t been enough to get water to the all the pasture and that brown area is part that wasn’t irrigated when I had water on last month. I have asked for 36 hours for this irrigation and hopefully I can get water to the rest of the pasture. Otherwise I have lost about a fifth of my forage for the summer.

This small green area is a section in the eastern paddock that my son burned earlier in the spring. He didn’t think that the burn was successful because the medusahead was green and didn’t catch fire readily. However, the burning killed it allowing other plants to grow. I want to burn the rest of it but I’m a bit worried about burning now–even if the burning would be permitted now. Maybe next year.

 

Throw in a littel bird watching in the morning.

 

 

Spend some time petting Stephanie…

 

after trimming her feet which she considers to be an insult.

 

More bird-watching.

 

Scrounged and cut wood to fit inside the feeders so that hay won’t fall onto the backs of the sheep.

Jackie and Chris came out about 1 to help with halter breaking. (By the way, thanks to all the help, the lambs are showing remarkable improvement after only 3 days.) I thought a couple of them had rather droopy ears.

I pulled these out of one ear and found one other lamb with foxtails bothering her, although not lodged like these were. It makes me wonder how many I’m missing.

That’s about half the day, but a long enough post.

 

 

 

Farm Club Comes Through Again

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I sent an e-mail Friday  to the Farm Club  in which I said I was going to vaccinate lambs today and did anyone want to help? Dona and Tina were already planning on being here for a spinning class in the morning so they said that they would stay. Jacki, Shelby, and Allison came too.  Wow! What great response with only 24 hours’ notice.

I bought a new tool. For years I have been vaccinating with single dose syringes. That means that you have to reload the syringe each time you give an injection.

I just never thought about doing it differently, but I was at Higby’s Country Feed Store (my favorite store) and saw this syringe. There is a bit of a learning curve (remember to tighten needle, make sure you depress the handle part all the way, don’t drop because the barrel is glass–OOPS!), but what a huge difference it will make after I replace the glass part that broke about a third of the way into the job.

I appreciate all the Farm Club members (who are now friends) who show up for projects like this. Shelby manned the camera, as well as caught lambs and played with the loose chicken.

Alison, Jackie, Tina, and Dona all helped catch and mark lambs and…

fill syringes (after the unfortunate incident with the new one).

Shelby took the following portraits.

After vaccinating I let all the sheep out but then needed to catch one more lamb.

So Rusty had a chance to get involved also.

Thanks to all of you for helping. Wait until you hear about the next unscheduled Farm Day. I think it’s coming up soon.

Ram horn growth

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I have been talking to people who want to buy sheep. I explain that it’s hard to predict at this age (2 months) how ram lambs will turn out when they are six months or a year old. I finally got around to finding photos of some of my rams as younger ages. I have posted several of these in the photo gallery on my website to illustrate how the horns can change as the rams mature.  Here are a few of the photos, but look for the rest on the website.

Look at that nice spread.

These horns are still OK although as they have grown they have moved closer to his jaw.

Diego’s horns looked OK at 4 months.

At 6 months I had my doubts about his longevity.

Here I can barely get my finger between his right horn and his jaw. Diego became the entree for a crowd the other night and he will also provide a great pelt.

Pasture management revisited

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Regular blog readers may know that in the late summer and fall I start complaining about the unpalatable late summer grasses. I’m sorry, but I’m going to complain now even though it is only spring. I only graze about 7 acres so all of it seems precious. We dealt with some of the issues of the thick dallisgrass a couple of weeks ago by burning it. I hope something starts growing where all that heavy thatch was.

Today’s issue is the condition of the east paddock. Medusahead is a nasty, unpalatable grass that goes to seed in the summer, covering all the soil with thick dry thatch. The medusahead is starting to grow now and the only other thing growing with it is a perennial grass (Elymus–wild rye– I think) that the sheep don’t like either. The rest of the soil is covered with the dry residue from both of these. My goal in this paddock is to  graze it hard enough that they will at least trample and break up the dried up grasses from last year and hopefully eat some of the less palatable grass.

As I was uploading these photos I realized that they don’t show what I’ve been talking about.

This is the view looking south. You can’t tell, but it’s the east side (left) of the east paddock that has the problem vegetation.  It took them only a day to clear off almost everything in the south part of this paddock (as opposed to 2 days in equal sized paddocks with better vegetation).

They are hungry and ready to move.

I took this photo as I opened the fence and stepped back so I wouldn’t get trampled.

Arthritic Stephanie follows the running sheep.

Amaryllis brings up the rear. She will follow Stephanie anywhere.

This view is looking north, from the part of the paddock they just left. In this photo you can’t really tell the difference in vegetation between the west (now on the left) and east sides of the paddock. It’s much easier in person, but notice where the sheep are. There is no fence keeping them from the east side–it just doesn’t have what they want to eat.

Compare this photo to the one where they are running into the new pasture. There is a blue cast to these plants–this is very sparse (although it may not look so in a photo from this angle) and it is so tall because the sheep avoided eating it the last time they were here.

Tomorrow I will start irrigating. I hope for some warm weather to follow so that the clover and trefoil will come in faster.

A Rainy Farm Day

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Farm Club members braved stormy weather to make the March Farm Day a fun and productive day. As usual I had more tasks on the list than we could hope to accomplish in the morning but we made good progress.

First on the list was a lesson on using a halter and tying a rope, using a knot that can be easily released. I didn’t mean that the people had to wear halters, but Shelby is always ready for anything.

Everyone helped catch lambs and record the number of horns and whether or not there were any eyelid defects.  (Split eyelids are not uncommon in 4-horn sheep.)

Next task:  Empty this wagon that has been accumulating electric fence parts and who-knows-what-else for a could of years and sort it.

Good job, ladies! Now the trick is to throw out the true garbage and keep everything else sorted.

Tina, Shelby, and Lily cleaned lambing jugs.

Shelby volunteered to brave the lake and dump the loads.

Can you see the rain coming down in the background?

Shelby holding Shelby, the sheep’s, lamb.

Tina’s turn.

Dona holding her favorite.

Here is the crew ready to have lunch and spend the afternoon in visiting in the warm, dry shop.

Thanks to all of you for your help and cheerful attitude!

 

 

Lambs….again.

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Are you tired of new lambs photos?

This is the wet butterfly look. The ears remind me of recently-emerged butterfly wings.

This is the “Jacobs come in all colors” look.

Weigh-in of new lambs. I don’t usually weigh lambs, but to be able to answer the question, “How much do they weigh?”, I’m weighing them all this year.  My guess is an average of 7.5-8 pounds but I’ll report back when it’s all over.

 

Knitting better

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Today Meridian Jacobs hosted a knitting class taught by superb knitter, Nancy Jane Campbell. The purpose of this class was to evaluate our current knitting habits and work to “Knit Better’. There was pre-class homework.

These are two garter stitch swatches. The difference is that one is the result of knitting every row and the other is knit by purling every row. There is a difference. Nancy pointed out that my purl sample is much more even than the knit sample. The stockinette sample (no photo) also showed that I knit and purl with different tensions, resulting in subtle ridges and uneven stitches.

Lunchtime. We went to the barn so I could feed Nellie. Yes, I named the bottle baby.

We found more lambs.

Soliloquy had twins–smallest lambs so far this year at 5-6 pounds and Victoria had triplets.  I dealt with all of them and went back to the shop for the afternoon session of the class.

Before lunch we had measured and evaluated our samples. After lunch we started working on changing our habits and learning new techniques. The sample above may not be too impressive, but notice the very cool knitted cable cast-on edge.  It looks much neater than my long-tail cast-on. And notice the inch or so closest to the needles. There is a a big difference in the knitting for that inch than the couple of inches below. At the risk of knitting too tightly I have been knitting way too loose. It’s a lot easier to be consistent when there is a little more tension on the yarn and the added benefit is that the stitches aren’t always falling off the needle. This was a great class and Nancy is going to come back and teach a color knitting class later in the year.