Konrad's revenge

 I always like to keep a handful of roosters around the farm. 

Their only job is to wander around the property, eating bugs and making happy rooster noises.

We have pretty roosters...err...I should say handsome roosters.

Stately, strong roosters.

Debonair roosters. 

....aaaaaand we have Konrad.

Konrad is young, so he isn't quite as...fancy, as some of the other boys. 

Not yet anyway.

His feet are downright creepy. 

He is a Salmon Faverolle, so he has a fifth toe, which is characteristic of the breed.. 

The bigger boys aren't very nice to Konrad. They don't physically pick on him, but they only allow him on the outskirts of the group. 

He's not allowed at the 'cool kids' lunch table.

The others sometimes chase him off when they find a tasty snack and they don't want to share it with him.

But Konrad is patient, he just keeps trying to befriend the bigger boys.

Konrad may not be as magnificent as some of the older boys, yet, but he has something going for him that the other boys don't. 

Like the scientist, Konrad Lorenz, after whom he is named, Konrad the rooster is a thinking man. 

He is a problem solver.

I was working in the garden one day, and the roosters trotted along with me, hoping that I would save them a little work by stirring up some tasty bugs. 

When I failed to produce anything to their liking, they eventually lost interest in what I was doing and wandered off to check the raspberry patch nearby. 

Our yellow raspberries are ripening, and they are a tempting treat for the marauding band. 

I had to chuckle at the persistence of my feathered friends as they stood on their tiptoes, and occasionally jumped to try to reach the sweet fruits.

The roosters are able to pluck all the fruit that grows closer to the ground, but they miss out on some of the elusive, golden fruit at the top of the raspberry canes, just outside of their reach.

So close, but so far away :(.

We tend to have a lot of birds of prey flying over during this time of year, checking the newly harvested fields for an easy snack, so I try to keep an eye on the roosters when they follow me out to garden in the back of our property. Although roosters are fairly large, that doesn't stop the hawks from trying to nab them. 

While I was busy working, I began to wonder where Konrad had gone, I hadn't seen him for some time, so I stopped what I was doing to take a look. 

I heard a rustling sound coming from the back of the berry patch, and when I peered around the back, I had to chuckle at the resourcefulness of my little buddy.

He found a piece of fencing that had been leaning along the side of the raspberries, and he climbed on it until his weigh toppled it over onto the top if the patch where he was able to reach all the best fruits.

" I'm king of the woooorld!"

"Nom, nom, nom"

"Hey, guys! Where'd the little dude go?"

"Seriously, dude, how'd you get up there?"

"Brains over brawn, my friends, brains over brawn."

Who's the cool rooster now?

So long summer, don't let the door hit you!

Saturday will be the official start of the Fall season, and although I am not normally in a hurry to bid farewell to the bright sun and warm summer breeze, but this year I say, good riddance summer! You were kind of a P.I.T.A. ( Pain. In. The....)!

The weather has recently taken a turn and we have gotten some rain over the past few weeks. Not a lot, but it has been enough rain to turn the pastures green again and to provide some much-appreciated relief from the heat. A few days ago it was 90 degrees and now the predicted temperature overnight on Saturday is expected to dip to 32 degrees which means, in all likelihood, we will see frost on the pumpkins....if I would have planted pumpkins...but I didn't...so in this instance it is only a figure of speech.

The signs of the changing seasons abound as the fields turn from drought induced yellow, to a more seasonal harvest gold- we'll take it! Remember in the 60's and 70's when all the appliances were Harvest Gold? I didn't like it on appliances, but I like it in the field....I digress.
 I don't know if we will have any Autumn color in the trees this year. Because of the unusually dry summer many of the leaves seem to be simply drying up, and falling off, without changing color. But even if the trees don't give us a show, I still love the colors, the lighting and the shadows that this time of year brings.

Of course I have been taking a few (hundred) pictures.

Thistles growing along the fence.

Soybean field ready for harvest..

Checkers, anyone?

These are some of my Amish Cockscomb. I love these guys. The flowers can grow to be almost a foot across, and they are so brainy...errr..they look like brains. 

These flowers contain probably eleventy billion seeds nestled all along their sides. The seeds fall out once the flowers dry, peppering the ground around them. Eleventy billion is a real number, if you saw these seeds you would understand.

I never have to plant these flowers....due to the aforementioned numerous seeds that hit the ground they tend to self-seed and I have many volunteers every year.

I just realized that I have a lot of red-based flowers. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

Other signs of fall are evident around the farm. The rams are getting....rambunctious, smelling the air for lady-sheep perfume.

Yeah, you probably noticed that Avyt isn't going to starve to death anytime soon. He has remained...ummm... a very healthy weight in spite of the lack of grass this year.

Speaking of rams, I still have a few boys available to good homes..not the spotted gulmoget in the middle, he's taken ;). There is more info about these boys on my Shetland Sheep for Sale link on this blog.

So, on to the next season! Good-bye summer.

Breeding groups will be decided soon and thoughts of spring lambs will soon be dancing in my head.

I know that I have made, and broken, this promise many times recently, but I vow to update my blog on a more regular basis!!!

A couple of weeks ago I was whining to some friends at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival about the rut that I have fallen into, and my general lack of enthusiasm and creativity lately,  my friend Garrett looked at me and said, "WELL, KNOCK IT OFF, LADY!!"

Well played, G. Well played..

That's what friends are for, right?

Lamb update, sort of..

Look at that! I'm back again already!

Well, my whining about the weather in my last post paid off; the day after I  posted, we finally got rain! Clearly I have just not been complaining enough and need to do so more often!

And not just a smidgen of rain, mind you, we got nearly 2 inches!

Of course 2 inches of  rain is not going to undo all of the damage that the drought has done, but it is a start, and it made me positively giddy! Things are even starting to turn green!

So, you are probably wondering what happened to all of the lambs from this year? Well, some have already left for new homes.....and, as you may have guessed, a few are staying here. I still have a few ram lambs that I am evaluating- it has been a slow process this year. Without green pastures to munch on all day they don't seem to be growing as quickly this year. Another challenge has been trying to keep the animals free from internal  parasites. The sheep are trying to graze on pastures that are already eaten down to the ground, and because they are eating so close to where they...well....poop...I have also had to be vigilant about checking to see if they need deworming to ensure that they are not continuously picking up worm eggs. All in all they are doing very well and have been pretty worm-resistant.

First some of my 'keepers'.

This little modified Gulmoget/katmoget is out of  Crosswinds Halley, and Whitepine Nessie's Monster Mash ( M&M).

Her name is Mandalay- Mandy for short.

I am sure you can tell right away why I wanted to keep this one..who wouldn't want to keep a lamb that freaks you out every time you walk in the barn because she looks like she's dead?

This is her baby picture.

She has matured very nicely.

Okay, so she's not totally mature and refined....just the way I like them!

Another keeper is Crosswinds Palisade (Sadie) Luna x Avyt

Lamb photo.

Here is Sadie all grown up.

Odessa ( Dessa) ....or as my husband calls her, "Fence Neck"...we have had to rescue her twice having her head firmly stuck in fences, one wood, one wire...she's not picky.  

Dessa is out of Crosswinds Menemsha x Avyt

And Crosswinds Rio

(Out of Crosswinds Natale Holly x Avyt). 

Baby Rio

 It's hard to get a good photo of her since she is usually in my lap.....she also likes to put her neck through the fence ( Note the missing fleece).

 Here are a few of the remaining lambs. I was going to post all of them, but I will do a few today, and the rest n my next post. I do have a waiting list for rams, but sometimes after evaluation,  lambs don't necessarily always match up with the traits that people on the waiting list were interested in, so some may still be available to good homes.

Firth of Fifth Avyt x Crosswinds Ashumet

Colfax, as a lamb.

...and now.

Love this guy! Colfax is a solid black ( possibly modified) ram with great conformation and fleece. Full horns that look really good so far. Carries moorit and spots.

If this guy wasn't related to every ewe I own I would be keeping him.

Remember these little spotted Gulmoget boys?

Crosswinds San Diego (Diego) and Crosswinds Dakota

I am thinking about keeping one of these boys, but I change my mind about which one every other day. I am watching their horn development and how their fleece is looking. Initially they had almost no crimp in their fleece, but now they both have very nice crimp coming in....very different from each other, but both nice.

Diego has more of a 'purled' type fleece. It is very soft.

 Dakota has more defined crimp coming in at the skin level....I'll be interested to see how both rams turn out. I will likely be sending fleece samples for micron testing next week. I know, it's just lamb fleece so the results won't tell me a whole lot, but it will give me a baseline for now.

More next time. Tomorrow is market day and I still have nut rolls to make!

Have a great weekend!

Whine Fest 2012

Well, hello there friends. It's been a long time. You probably have been wondering why I am giving you the 'silent treatment'. Where are the lamb photos? Where is the Chicken Math?

It's not you, it's me. I have not been carrying my weight in this relationship.

I have always tried to keep my blog somewhat light-hearted, and I have tried very hard not to post whiny drivel.  I know you all have problems of your own, and you're not reading this to hear about mine. Well, I didn't mean that like, "Boy, you reeeally have problems", I just meant....well, you know...we all have stuff.

I have found it difficult this summer to find much to blog about that didn't include a lot of complaining, so I have just not posted. My little cousin recently left me a comment about my lack of blog posts, and her father followed it up with a comment speculating that I would probably blog again when it rained....I am not sure if that comment was his empathetic understanding of how my ideas had dried up like the surrounding landscape, or if it was intended as a smart-arse remark synonymous with 'when hell freezes over', either way it was an accurate assessment. It hasn't rained, and I am pretty sure that Hell hasn't frozen over, but I feel like I need to purge this summer out of my system in order to move on to other, more positive things. So, my friends, this post will contain some whining and complaining...okay, A LOT of whining and complaining.

I know, you are all tired of hearing about the drought, and most of my US friends are in the same boat, so I shouldn't complain, but I'm gonna ( see above...I need to whine). Here in Northern Scott County Iowa we are in the Extreme drought category.

I can't even remember the last time we had any measurable precipitation...unless you count my neighbor Miss Effie's official total in her rain gauge after the last "rain"- One drop, a cobweb and a dead fly....not really what we were hoping for.

My pastures are toast.

For the first time ever, I have been feeding hay to the animals all summer long. 

I normally stop feeding hay in May, when the pastures have greened up, and start feeding hay again in October, when there is no longer fresh grass. The price of hay has sky-rocketed, adding to my frustration, and the extra months of hay debris is already showing up in the fleeces on the sheep. I don't jacket my sheep to protect the fleece, and can't even imagine doing that when we have consistently had temperatures in the upper 90's, and 100's all summer with heat indexes around 110 on many days.

The critters have been seeking relief from the heat wherever they can find it.....I am not sure how effective it is to just shade your head...but it is, after all, a chicken....I never claimed that they were the smartest creature in the barnyard.

I have no garden this year.......

Well, that is an exaggeration. I have a garden, I found this little guy yesterday and gave him a drink of water.

.... OH! And I have these.....

dried up blackberries.

And........dry, misshapen pears..

Oh, and I had AN apple! One, singular, apple on my tree earlier this month...it has since fallen off.

And who could forget my container garden? Okay, so it's a long-forgotten bag of seed potatoes that I just discovered in the garage....it counts, right?

The neighbor's corn looks green from a distance, but a closer inspection reveals pathetic, stunted corn stalks  

drying up and desperately pointing to the sky.

UGH!!!

So, in order to get over this funk that I am in, I am going to try to look on the bright side, and put a positive spin on this situation.....

Okay, so, on the plus side......

?

?

?

Oh, yes! There are no mosquitoes this year. No standing water = no place for mosquito larva.

?

 Hmmm

?

The price of propane is going down! There will be fewer crops that need drying, so the demand is down........

??

AND, we haven't had to mow the grass all summer, so, there is that.

Okay, I've got nothing else. The next posts will be back to lambs, and chickens and all things of a  farmy nature.

After all, the forecasters say that we DO have a "good chance" of rain tomorrow night. HAHAHAHAHA!

Yeah, right.

Holly's ram lamb update

Good news! Since my last post Holly started making enough milk for both of her lambs, so her boy no longer needs any supplementation. 

I really didn't want to have to wether ( castrate) this guy!

For those of you who asked why I would not want to leave him intact if he was going to be a bottle baby- ram lambs that are bottle babies, or any ram lamb that is handled too much, can become very aggressive toward humans once they hit maturity. I know, they are adorable and cute right now, but someday they will be 100+ pounds with horns and hormones. I don't handle ram lambs a lot unless I know for certain that they are going to be wethered and will go to a pet home. That is not to say that ignore the little guys all together, I will give the boys scratches under the chin if they are invited to come to me, but I do not allow them to demand attention from me. It's hard to resist snuggling those fuzzy little guys, but I know that handling them too much is setting them up for trouble down the road. If you want more information on handling rams in general, this is a good link to check out. http://www.stonehavenfarm.com/page7/toughlove.html