Riversdell

The day after Freckles had twins, Angel did too. We noticed one around 1 p.m. yesterday all by itself. Angel seemed to keep noticing it and hanging around it but was not cleaning or nursing it. Kirsten went and cleaned him up and placed him on the hay. A while later Angel had another; she cleaned her better but was still not nursing either one. So we made the decision to start them on bottles. Kirsten drove up to Plum Run Dairy and bought some goat colostrum and raw goat milk, the closest to sheep milk we could get, since, unfortunately, we could not catch Angel in order to try and milk her — one of the main drawbacks to our system of 100% on-pasture is that the sheep are not very human-oriented. Fortunately, the two survived the night in the barn and seem perfectly healthy and peppy. We’re at a loss to explain Angel’s behavior as she was a good mother to Annie last year. Today we are trying to get her to accept the wee ones but don’t have high hopes. Meanwhile, it’s six bottle feedings a day.

Our first lambs of the season arrived last night, in relatively mild weather, around 30°F. The twins are huddled around their mama this morning. We have not yet determined their gender.

It’s C O L D ! ! ! Last night’s low out on our veranda was 7°F, it was 9 the night before, and today’s high — the HIGH — was 16. It has also been icy and snowy lately so the wood I split a few weeks ago is still pretty wet so we’ve been stacking ‘round the woodstoves so it can dry before we burn it. Quite the ritual what with turning and rotating each piece from the less hot to the hottest spots near the stove. The stoves are voracious when it is this unrelentingly cold and windy — did I mention the 25 mph winds today? — and we have to feed them every 30 – 40 minutes all day and most of the night, too. Can’t wait for a thaw, even a small one.

Our Araucana rooster’s crow is the closest to the traditional cock-a-doodle-doo of any rooster we have ever had. Now that he is old enough to crow he does it all day, starting at around 5 a.m.

We are starting to get eggs again now — we get our hens to lay in the winter by using a light on a timer in their coop to make sure they get 16 hours of light a day, though the cold weather does slow them down a little.

We’re taking advantage of a little break in the cold icy weather to put up more firewood. Most years we buy our wood already cut and split, but this year a generous neighbor has offered us a bunch of seasoned logs ready to cut and split. Here you see we’ve cut some of the logs (mostly locust and sycamore) to length. Next we need to split it — our neighbor even included the loan of their 22-ton hydraulic splitter! By doing this ourselves this year we are saving enough money to more than pay for our new Husqvarna 346XP 20″ chainsaw.

We got fresh bales of hay rolled into the pasture for the sheep just as today’s snow was starting. It was too wet yesterday for our annual Twelfth Night bonfire — couldn’t get the fire to stay lit.