Mr. Blue 841 meets Miss Green 171

Fall is coming, nights are chillin’ and the early breeding groups are done. Lambs for the freezer will be going to the shop on October 21st. I have a few extra so email if you are interested.

I have decided I need to offer more of my lovely sheep for sale. Since I breed for fleeces and our climate is too wet for annual growth to survive unfelted on a Churro, I shear twice a year. I usually shear late summer so they last in the barn. I have two white lovelies, an unusual NSP Blue (brown modified) and a Brown and Tan just added to my list. All my breeding stock for sale is registered. I also have 3 rams that need to find new homes. Mr. Blue 841 above is one, Green 141 is already on the sale page and my big 4H ram shown below.

CMW Guero, 4Horn

 We might have to recycle Blue841 on Oct 21st so if he strikes your fancy let me know soon.

This is the time to prepare our farm products for the Olympia Weaver’s Guild Sale or for sale to farm visitors. I will be preparing fleeces from our meat crosses for sale. Most of the meat lambs are out of Churro moms and Iggy, our BlueFaced LeicesterX Gotland. The fleeces are shiny, mostly silvery or white, and grey. I do have several BFLXGot lambs who I will shear and could be tempted to sell their fleeces as well. The wool is shiny, silky, and wavy like kid mohair. So you spinners and felters would really enjoy it.

Curious Cross fiber batt dyed blues and resulting felt

Fiber will be eventually be added to our website but for now, enjoy this piece of felt in blue and other mixed colors. The batt the felt is made from can be purchased for $30. Its a 15 ounce batt approx 36 X 45.

Three yearling rams, my three amigos, Carlos Santana, Rocket Man, and Stevie Ray

The chickens are almost all harvested. Just one group left to go! Sheep are growing and I have added some to the sale listings. We will have both cross and purebred animals for sale. Registrations have been sent in for the 2011 crop. We have a few crossbred BFL X Gotland ram lambs to offer as terminal sires. This cross provides a lovely silky fleece, like mohair for you spinners, dyers and felters. Two nice cross boys are grey and two are whiter. No worries about these guys as they will finish out nicely for the freezer if they don’t sell, with one sticking around as an emergency replacement for the Big Guy Iggy (their dad).

Shetland cross ewe lamb surrounded by Churros!

The fields are doing well, we are managing them better this year, less sheep means less overgrazing. Unfortunately, there is always a small amount of time between enough sheep to keep the grass down and too many in a space too long. We are always working on keeping the focus on the grass and its needs and being distracted in other farm tasks. Our next focus is a more appropriate size of a paddock for the flocks to allow good coverage, but not allowing the sheep to go to low in their favorite grazing spots. Reseeding our fields would be great but likely it won’t happen anytime soon.

Other activities around the farm this summer include replacing assorted flowers and other plants with edible landscape or habitat flowers. We replaced two rhododendron trees (really they were growing into trees!) with an arbor for honeysuckle for the hummingbirds that tend to visit. Next is to replace some overgrown azaleas with mountain huckleberries.

Our focus on the farm is to have a diverse genetic group of sheep, offering culls to the freezer. When folks are eating and not raising sheep, some really nice animals have gone into the locker. This year we have some really nice ones available, with the ewes being sent in for registration last week. I will list a couple of unregistered boys, simply due to lack of timing on the shearing. Take a look and shoot me an email if something strikes your fancy.

First Churro lamb of 2012 at Mountain Niche Farm

Purple One is the first purebred Navajo Churro lamb born for this season. It is an exciting time here on the farm with new lambs of various types.  Our Blue Faced Leicester X Gotland cross ewes Charla and Ronan lambed earlier with the two Shetlands. One Shetland is purebred, the other a BFL cross and their lambs were also in the early group.

The Black Shetland is a purebred, whose lambs are out of our cross ram Iggy, a BFL/Gotland cross. The lambs at the right are also Iggy’s babies. The black boy is out a purebred Churro ewe #158, and the white girl is out of a Shetland/BFL cross named Judy Montana. Charla, Ronan and Judy Montana all came from Judy Colvin’s place near where else? but somewhere between Charlo and Ronan, Montana. More pictures will be posted as I try to keep up with the lambs and moms. We still have 10 more Navajo-Churro girls to lamb. Some are bred purebred and the others are going to be meat lambs or pets. 

Laying Hens & Rooster

The weather was fantastic yesterday (warmest day since Sept 2010) and I went out and took some pictures of the chickens in the bright sunlight. See our Chickens page for more pictures.

Our visiting Canada geese

We have a pair of wild Canada geese living around our pond. They have been here for several weeks now. This happened several years ago, and at that time the pair made a nest and raised 4 babies. It was quite entertaining to watch them take the babies for a walk up and down our gravel driveway every morning. That was before the babies could fly. The whole family left about two days after I saw the babies fly for the first time. So we are hoping these two will also raise a family and we can watch them grow up too. If they do, I will be sure to post pictures of the babies.

Two of our 2011 lambs

We just took some new pictures of some of our 2011 lambs and added them to a gallery here.

A Shetland breeding group in a hog panel shelter

We build these shelters using what are actually called stock panels – they are 52 inches tall and 16 feet long, taller than hog panels (which are only about 36 inches tall.) Three panels are used for a shelter. The best arrangement we’ve found is to overlap the three panels about 6 inches (the spacing of the top two ‘wires’ of a panel standing up as it would normally be used.) If you look closely at the photo above you might be able to see how the two outer panels overlap the center panel.

To build a shelter like this, start by laying your 3 panels on the ground where you want the shelter with one end of the panels lined up where you want that side of the shelter. Next drive one T-post into the ground (about 2 feet deep) near the center of the end of each panel on the one side of the shelter. Put the T-post so that the bumps on the front of the post face the center of the shelter (so the panel will hook under a bump.) For example, for the shelter above, imagine that the three posts at the left side of the shelter were there and the panels were laying flat on the ground to the right of the posts. Next grab one panel at the end opposite the post and push it in toward the post while springing the center up. You might need help for this. Try to hold it on the ground at the end without the post to see where you will want that end to be. If you are building this without help, mark the spot where you want the post at the end you are holding, then move the panel aside. You should then be able to mark the other 2 post locations, move the rest of the panels aside and drive in the other three posts (the ones at the right above.) Now you can put the panels in place one at a time and fasten each end to the post as you go. Remember to overlap each panel about 6 inches. We have just used plastic hay twine to tie the panel to the post right at ground level. Wrap the twine around the T-post so it will catch on the T-post bumps and not pull up from the ground (in a windstorm.) When you have the three panels tied to the posts and in position, tie them to each other where they overlap. We tie them each in three places spaced out along the overlapping edges, again using hay twine. You might try some heavy-duty tie wraps for this instead.

Now that you have the structure put together, you might want to add a center support to keep it from bending too far left or right (looking in the opening.) We used a 4-foot wide tube gate in the one above. The picture at the right shows a better view of how the gate is attached to one side of the shelter. We just tie the top of the gate firmly to the center panel, then tie the bottom at ground level with a longer twine so that there is a space between the bottom of the gate an d the panel at the center T-post. Then we drove a stake into the ground at the other end of the gate to keep it from being pushed over. We used a 2-foot long piece of 1/2″ re-bar that I bent into a U-shape at one end, with the U hooking over the bottom tube of the gate holding it to the ground. You might need to dig little holes for the vertical gate tube ends to get the bottom tube to sit at ground level, depending on the type of gate you use. You can probably think up some other method of support instead of the gate, if you don’t have a gate handy. This support is important especially if you get snow. Last winter, the shelter above collapsed under about 8″ of snow – this was before we had added the gate support. Since then, we refurbished the shelter by taking it apart, straightening the panel and putting it back together (leaving the T-posts in place.)

The shelter shown at the right uses a 6-foot tube gate, which fits just about right between the two sides. This gate is only tied at each corner to the panels since it reaches both sides. This one didn’t have any problems with the snow last winter. You can see that this one needs to have its tarp replaced. I think that this shelter is over 2 years old, so it has weathered pretty well. Back to finishing the construction… After you have added your center bracing, you can just spread out the tarp over the panels and tie it to the panels at each grommet around the edges of the tarp. If you use 3 stock panels like I described, you can use a 12′ x 16′ tarp and it fits nicely. Start tying the tarp at one side where the panels sit on the ground. Be sure to pull the tarp tight and tie it so that the twines hold it tight. Then just work your way around tying at each grommet. We just used the cheap tarps, which cost less than $10. If you want it to last longer, you could use a heavy-duty tarp. Since the sheep tend to rub on the sides, they might still wear out the heavy tarp, so it might be cheaper in the long run just to replace the tarp every year or 2 with another cheap one.

Below are a few more pictures of these two of our hog panel shelters. The shelter in the bottom two pictures was built without overlapping the panels, so the tarp wasn’t as wide as the shelter. You can also see that it is due for a tarp replacement…

We hope that you find this information useful. Good luck building your own Hog Panel Shelter!