Good beginning

Fresh eggs and blackberry jam make a good beginning for a great breakfast.Alex and I, mostly Alex, picked blackberries most of the summer, never had so many wild blackberries. Must have been all the rain that made them so sweet and plentiful.I froze most of them as there are so many vegetables that are in when the berries come in June, usually sweet corn.Most everything takes a back seat when the sweet corn comes in, it's the number one favorite with everybody, especially the grandkids..As we ate the last of the strawberry jam this morning, I knew I had to defrost some blackberries and cook up a batch of jam.Couldn't start until late tonight because of house remodeling in the daytime.Finally finished and ready to hit the hay.

Brighter days

Cinnamon Red and her 2 doe kids enjoying a sunny morning after getting their hooves trimmed.The weather has been nice enough to tackle all the foot trimming. It's only been 2-3 months since the goats were shorn and hooves trimmed. I think all the rain makes them grow faster than normal.There are some nice doe kids in black,brown and red that will be ready to shear as soon as the weather warms.I am finding a few eggs everyday and Alex found a nice brown egg from her hens today.The hens stop laying in November and slowly get cranked back up after Christmas.By March there will be eggs everywhere.Most of my hens are Auracana and lay blue eggs, there are a few game hens Louise gave me that are pretty wild, but are great setters and mothers.I cooked some soybeans to feed them to give them more protein to help them lay, in the summer they chase bugs and grasshoppers in the pasture for protein.They are pretty happy hens.

Sheep lined up

Almost washed away yesterday, a full day of heavy,blowing rain. It was a beautiful morning afterward.And guess what, all the sheep and goats were lined up ready to eat.They spent most of Sunday in the barns and were waiting for me to come out. The sheep in this band are BFL,Cormo-BFL cross and 1  Cotswold ewe, Jewell. The sunlight dances on their wool.I love the BFL wool, but they do not take the humidity well and are not very parasite hardy.Cormo sheep are better about it, but I don't know if they can take all this rain without getting wool rot.Cormo wool is packed so tightly maybe the rain is not absorbed, live and learn.

Queen of the Meadow

Tanner is a registered Alpine doe, she feeds all the bums,orphans, or bonus lambs and kids.Tanner is the heaviest milking doe I have ever had.Nothing puts weight on like goat milk.And there is never an upset stomach.I have raised thousands of bottle-bucket calves, over 25 years of it, and milk replacer caused more upset stomachs and scours than I care to recall.A good milking doe is worth her price and feed.Alpine's have a Barbie doll attitude. With all the does here she thinks she is the only one, and the prettiest one, and she eats twice as much as an angora, and never gets fat.Every farm needs a Tanner.

Fresh Rovings

It all starts with choosing the right ram and ewe to make the type of wool that you want. These rovings are from my Cotswold ewes.Cotswold does well in this area, most of the time I crossbreed them, but these are from my registered ewes. After 8 months of fleece growing the sheep are shorn, the fleeces are skirted,washed,dyed or left natural,picked, then carded into roving.I will take these rovings to the Peachtree Handspinner's guild meeting tomorrow to sale.If I keep them for myself, they are ready to spin into yarn, then the yarns are woven or knitted.A long process and tons of work.Not to mention the mess left behind that the carding process makes.The carding drums will have to be cleaned with a dental like tool to remove all the fibers left behind, then vaccumed.Takes several hours to clean the carder. After cleaning I start carding with white or natural color, then onto the dyed fibers.

Charming

Charming all covered in hay, I don't use my buck fleeces anyway, so it doesn't matter that he makes a pig of himself in the hay.Charming is smaller than most of my yearling bucks but he makes up for it in charm, and he is a sweeheart.Yesterday's weather was a mix, started with heavy rain, then sunny and warm, then a black cloud and wind cooled things down in a hurry. Spent all afternoon carding roving for Heather.Heather emailed that she is teaching a spinning class in Colorado and needed Cotswold rovings in various colors. Luckily, I have been dyeing lots of Cotswold wool on the wood heater during all the cold weather.I have  one in a brownish with purple,peach and gold. Navy with pink and turqouise. Hot pink,yellow and turqouise.Peach,turqouise and a touch of yellow, that is my new favorite.Cotswold is a Big friendly sheep with curls from head to toe, they do well in the southeast with all our parasite and humidity problems.To soften the wool I crossbreed them with Corriedale,Cormo or BFL, for some of the most beautiful sheep you have ever seen.

Petunia

We are back to remodeling another room or two inside the house. We built this house in 76, it needs a lot of repair, but we can only take so much  of this mess, even the dogs are looking for a quiet place to nap. I'm not a clean freak but I don't have time to hunt for everything and the dirty clothes pile is getting pretty smelly.It will be nice to have my laundry room back.And a chair to sit in.So as the rain comes down I am thinking of Petunia, this picture was taken when she was just a few days old. Cinnamon Red was in labor on a cold and rainy day in April, she was in a pen but just wasn't progressing, I went in to check on the kids, but couldn't tell what I was feeling. Maybe a back? Called my vet, took her in, he felt the same thing, but was able to get her out, a tiny thing, then another, Daisey, then another, Barry.All three were fine, so Petunia became the bottle baby, Daisy wanted to be the bottle baby, but she was the strongest so I left her and Barry with mom. Cinnamon had a rough few days so I fed extra milk to all three kids.Everyone made it and they are all spoiled rotten.

Winter Day

Today is more our normal winter weather pattern. The sun never came out and a cold blowing rain moved in.Very dreary and gray.So after feeding this morning I got the dye pots going again on the wood stove. Two pots, a fire red and a hot pink, not sure how I will use them, but they sure brighten up the day.Put on a pot of chicken vegetable soup from last years garden to warm up the spirit.And, watched the first 2 parts of Lonesome Dove, all in all, a good day.I have fought against the weather for so many years, many times I have tried to hang a tarp on the barn in high winds, or tried to stop drafts from coming in lambing pens, or fed out in the pouring rain, or made nightly checks for newborn lambs and kids every 3-4 hours in freezing temperatures.It was good to get everyone fed before the rain came, thanks Alex for working on a Saturday.

Sunny day

A sunny day enjoyed by all on the farm.I needed to go to town and pick up supplies, but I wasn't going to waste a day like today running around.I finished cleaning up behind the old calf barn, that felt good, then moved the shearing stand and started trimming feet on the buck kids.It's amazing how much hooves can grow in 2-3 months.Looked at their fleeces to see who would be a buck prospect and who will be a wether, some of them fooled me, some are better than I thought earlier and some are not.I like for a buck to be 2-3 years old before I decide how good he is, unfortunately I can't keep them all that long. Last year I wethered one of the best bucks I have ever had, well, now he is the best wether I have ever had.I make mistakes all the time, and sometimes I can't see the forrest for the trees, but I try hard to be the best I can be.

Sugar Ray

Ain't he a knock out.Sugar Ray is so full of himself, he thinks he is grand, and it doesn't help that all the does think so too.Yesterday was so nice, the sun was out, the temp was in the 40's and we are climbing to to the 50's.Was able to get a couple of dye pots going and if it warms up a little more I can get the mill room heated to 65 or so I can run the picker and carder.I'm also way behind on worming and January is the official vaccinating month, not to mention the hoof trimming that needs to be done.Had some work done on a couple of old barns to repair tin and posts that rams and bucks have destroyed over the years.Most of my males stay in small pastures and pens so I can keep them where I want them..I felt sorry for Blue, the BFL ram, a few weeks ago, so I let him out in a pasture with a big pond between him and the ewes,guess what, he knows how to swim and was headed to the ewes when I caught a glimpse of something on the hill.He wasn't happy about it, but I led him back to his pen in the old barn.

Cutie

What a cutie. This is Sugar Pie's last kid, born last spring, A very nice twin buck kid, his second clip fleece is coming back in very nice, and fine, hope it has the yield.Sugar Pie is a very big and fine haired doe, has had many nice kids, but is in retirement now, even tho she doesn't want to be.Pumpkin, her mother went to goat heaven this past summer, I think she was around 14 years old. When the weather warms up Sugar Pie will go to the bottom pasture with the other retirees.My older does hate going to that pasture at first, it's as if they know their time is over, after a few months they settle down and enjoy the rest of their lives.They have a good dog that loves them, Kay, a Great Pyrenees. When I bring a doe back to the big barn for shearing, Kay will come under the fences to find that doe, it's as if she has them counted.She doesn't get paid by the head, but gets upset when I take away one of her does.

Squirt close-up

A close-up section of Squirt's fleece, it spin's like a cloud.Luckily the sheep at this pasture have plenty of grass for the winter and their fleeces will be this clean at shearing, if my luck holds.

Squirt

Squirt is a BFL-Cotswold cross wether, he only weighed in at 2# at birth, I could hold him in my hand.I waited and waited for Jewell to have her lambs that warm spring day, but gave it up and went to the grocery store.As soon as I pulled in I saw everyone in the pasture standing over something, guess they were amazed at this tiny thing running around looking for lunch.He was way to small to reach his mom's milk bar, so I got my baby bottle out to feed him, Jewell hated that, she stomped and snorted at me.After about a week he was able to reach her and I could see Jewel smiling at me, she had her lamb all to herself. But he never forgot his first mom and still comes for chin scratches.Now he is a whopping 250#, or more, always good to have a bottle baby in a herd, the rest of the flock will follow him in when I need them.

Easy keeper

Pennelope is an easy keeper and a happy camper.Can you see the icicles on her chin whiskers?I noticed in late September of last year that she was putting on a heavy fall coat, I knew she was getting ready for a cold winter. I also noticed a flury of squirrels racing back and forth to the corn fields, dragging back kernels of corn to their nests.It was the first time I saw whole rows of completely naked cobs hanging on the stalks.I too scurried all summer in the worst humidity I have ever known, to harvest and can or freeze every bean,tomato,cucumber,okra,squash,pepper and corn that grew in my garden.Now I realize it was time well spent.It's amazing how long it takes to grow and put up vegetables and how fast the jars are emptied.I thought I had an endless supply of dill pickles, but the last one is gone.There is no comparison to the taste of home grown and cooked.

Hunting

Don't know if there is anything out there chickies.Did you know chickens will eat snow?Even tho they had warm water, I noticed all the chickens pecking at the snow.Maybe becasue it was sparkly-sparkly. Somebody is laying, found 2 eggs a couple of days ago, not many for all the hens that are around the feeder, but very much appreciated.It's hard to eat a store bought egg after having the real thing, such a pale comparison, more like water than a yolk.In a couple of months I'll have so many eggs, I will cook some and feed them to the dogs, they appreciate them too,afterall, they do protect the hens.

Snowy sheep southern style

We did get snow,not a lot and mostly ice now,but it came down hard and fast. We had Christmas,now winter,okay I'm ready for spring.By Wednesday we should be back in the 50's.Fifties are good, no frozen water tanks and hoses, and maybe, get back to work on trimming feet and washing,dyeing,carding some wool or mohair.It's hard to work outside in this weather, in the south we can usually work outside all winter, except for the freezing spells or cold rain.The sheep don't mind it as much as the goats, angora goats love the sun, some of them lay out in it on the hottest days.Sometimes the humidity can be too much for them.As soon as the snow starting falling all the goats headed for the big barn to hide.Sheep just stayed out and got all snowy on their backs.Think I'll wait until the sun comes out for awhile before I wake them.

A real winter

We are having a real winter, not just 2-3 days of cold then back up to 50-60's.Not above freezing the last 2 days, that means hauling warm water and dragging out the hoses to hook to the hot water line,melting all the water tanks, then draining the hoses and storing in the garage by the wood heater over night.Keeping 3 wood heaters going all night in the house, garage and shop. We had so many trees fall in the last 2 years due to drought and then too much rain, but they are burning fast.The extreme cold will probably be the end of my lettuce,turnip greens, maybe even my garlic we planting not long ago.I love having something fresh and green to eat in the winter, helps get thru the gloomy days.Fortunatley, the sun is shining, looked liked diamonds sparkling when the sun hit the frozen dead bermuda grass.I can take the cold as long as the sun is strong and bright.All the sheep and goats are taking the cold pretty well, they are eating lots of grass hay,sheep feed and some grazing to keep them warm.There won't be any more shearing until the weather changes, I have a few does that missed their last shearing, the sheep will be ready again as soon as we have a warm spell.

Happy New Year

What a great idea, to have a new year every 12 months, just when you are tired of the same old year, it's time to bring in a new one.I was lucky to bring in the new year with both my grandkids and family not to mention a mother-in-law to cook turnip and collard greens,hog jowl,peas,and all the side dishes, plus her pecan pie, most of it home grown.I grew up with the best southern cooks, ladies that grew their gardens,canned and cooked everything from scratch.It's a lot of work, and I deeply respect and appreciate all these country women I have known.Most of them gone know, but I will never forget them.And I know how blessed I have been to live in this small farming community.