Our Summer & Fall in a NutshellWe left you last as Clancy turned 1 year old! From there we continued on with our schedule, Nathaniel working on a huge kitchen facelift. He did new cabinet doors for a large home kitchen. We also worked on getting him a proper website built. Please give it a gander here. Tinkerbell had twin lambs: a stillborn ram lamb and a very healthy ewe lamb we named Arwen. Early summer we gave up on trying to intensively graze the sheep in our electric netting as this year was exceptionally dry and even on our irrigated pastures the soil was far too dry and hard to pound in the posts of the pen; we were destroying it, and they aren’t cheap. The sheep did manage to mind themselves until late Fall, staying home and in the pastures despite our not having sheep proof fences. Our neighbor’s alfalfa field proved to be too much temptation however and they started going rogue so now they are wintering through the breeding season in our spacious pens off our barn. We retained Tinkerbell’s ewe lamb, Arwen, and Betty’s ram lamb, Samwise. Frodo, Merry, and Pippin all went to slaughter in October. We are delighted to have all three for our own freezer. They each weighed 44, 45, & 46 pounds. We were very pleased as they were all born just this Spring. Talk about a wonderful turnaround. All skinned hides are thrown away at the butcher but we requested our lamb hides and Raina is nearly done soft tanning the first one. The other two are salted which will keep them preserved until she is ready for them. We found a lovely home for both the goaties where they are going to be trained to be pack goats! They will love getting so much attention. The cows started out being intensively rotated across the pastures but it was a huge struggle to move them every day and then most days a portion of the herd had not respected the electric fencing and was grazing wherever they wanted anywho. That left us backing off the intensive part and doing a bit larger and longer rotations, averaging probably 5-10 days between rotations of larger portions of our pastures. Until we have more permanent fencing that is how we will continue implementing rotational grazing. Goodbyes were made to some of our cattle herd. Sadly necessary to stay within our pasture means and to keep our winter hay bill reasonable. Brie and her 2019 calf, Miss May, and 2020 calf, Washington, were taken to our local auction. Chickens! They are all but taking the winter off on egg production… just when they got started! We were swimming in eggs all late summer and fall and now we are buying eggs despite having 19 laying hens. Next year we will preserve eggs during times of surplus to use in the winter months. We did downsize our flock, we traded a portion of them for a tractor powered log-splitter! We are very happy to have such an implement for our woodstove needs. This summer we made the improvement and investment in a split-air heating and cooling unit just in time for the incredibly hot fall we experienced. We are entirely spoiled by it and love the modern convenience however to really keep our house warm in the winter we still need our woodstove but we don’t mind having a fire to keep us comfortable! This fall Raina ran a virtual six-week fertility boosting class. She enjoyed sharing nutritional wisdom and whole food preparation skills for improving health with a focus on fertility. Raina also dove into crocheting dishclothes… and now she has made over 60 in the last quarter of the year. By happy accident she has become the washie lady. She also made a couple aprons and is planning on doing more sewing, especially crossback or Japanese aprons in the coming year. To make purchasing easier she made herself a new website with a shop for easy ordering and payment. You can check it out here! She hopes to make batches of things to stock the store with a small inventory seasonally. Now we are still staying busy, Nathaniel has a small cabinet project and has been working on furniture pieces which will carry him right into the new year! Clancy is now nearly 19 months and starting to say words, he runs all over the ranch and loves doing lots of little boy things on the ranch. Clancy is our constant shadow and helps us with everything, especially bringing firewood into the house. He has a special bond with our cats, Rusty, and Tinkerbell and Samwise the sheep.
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