Fleeces and Cups...

It has been a long winter. Pink eye, a goat with a UTI, and constant cold and wet have made animal management in our little neck of the woods the usual challenge. The sheep seemed to time the birth of every lamb with the onslaught of a Spring snowstorm.

We welcomed our last lamb of the Spring, this little brown ewe, early this past week. She's a gorgeous chocolate brown With Two Grey Hills markings. Our first time mothers tend to be a little "wild" and wary of having us around their babies. They stomp their feet to keep us away and jump to get around, or OVER, us so getting them and their lambs safely stowed after birthing can be a junior rodeo.

One of our neighbor's dogs killed another neighbor's rabbit and is constantly coming under our fence, so getting the lambs out of the pasture is essential for protection from one urban version of predators.

The shearer came this morning and sheared our entire flock. We are up in the teens now, so shearing ourselves was not an option. Our shearer is wonderful and it took him an hour to do an entire flock that would have taken us a whole day. The fleeces turned out beautifully, and I spent the rest of theday skirting and storing and photographing the fleeces we will sell. It's nice to be done with our major sheep management for this time of year before May for a change!

Calving our mini and mid Jersey calves starts within the next week! Our rescued Jerseys are expecting babies this Spring.

And I'm back to carding wool and making yarn and rugs, and throwing cups for an upcoming show.

What creative plans do you have for this Spring?

More Lambs!

Two more lambs made an appearance since my last blog post - one on Easter day! 

This handsome Easter ram is doing very well...

And so is his little half-sister, born early yesterday morning as we were trying to leave for work. Our experienced mothers are done lambing, so we are getting in to the first time mothers now. They take a bit more work, ensuring that they are feeding their babies and looking after them. If they aren't, we step in and bottle feed.

The father of the lambs we've had so far is four-for-four beautiful, healthy babies! The proud papa celebrated with a "cold one" - LOL

The twins are growing like crazy! We are actively looking for names...

The geese are still laying eggs - and we are incubating as many as we can.

Everyone is here is enjoying the beautiful weather...

Are you?

New Life and Providing Our Own...

Our first lambs arrived early last week. We were lucky enough to get two twin ewes born to one of our experienced mothers! They were very tiny at birth, which made us nervous, but their mom is seasoned and a very diligent and nurturing ewe. Every time she stands up, she rallies them to eat, and they are now growing like little weeds!

We've spent the past couple of weeks filling our freezers. It's that time of year!

We slaughtered our beef steer just in time for two more to take it's place. We let the beef hang for 14 days, no small feat, since the steer weighed over 1200 pounds. Then we spent a few days cutting up and butchering the meat ourselves. We ended up with about 700 pounds of roasts, steaks, and stew meat; and about 100 pounds of hamburger.

We've exclusively raised our own meat for about 10 years, so we've been able to get the butchering down to a science. We have also been able to buy, as we could afford them, the commercial saws, grinders, and wrapping equipment that make the process go much faster.

Because of the timing, we took the three pigs we raised over the winter to a local butcher for slaughtering and processing. You can't age pig meat like you can beef, so it was too much for our little family to do both a large beef and three pigs all at the same time.

And you can't herd pigs anywhere they don't want to go...

So, now our freezer is full for another year.

And, if the weather keeps cooperating - soon our gardens will be full, too.

Do you have plans for a garden this year?

A Busy Few Weeks...

It was an amazingly busy month here, with the weather finally deciding that it could start to look a little like Spring. The Valley Quail we were incubating finally hatched - funny little cuties.

We took a long weekend trip to Southern Utah for a getaway to a warmer climate, near the Nevada-Utah border. Of course, it decided to snow the whole weekend we were there. Which didn't slow us down any. We hiked to a ghost town cemetery and poked around through all the galleries near Zion's National Park. 

We also visited all the rock shops - one of my favorite things to do. I couldn't pass up the hunks of recycled glass from the nearby glass factory. They will find their way in to some ceramic creations.

We butchered our second beef steer, just in time to get two more beef calves to raise for meat. Not-So-Little-Anymore-Q helped with the whole process. He was particularly helpful with skinning. Raising our own food gives him such a great appreciation for the value of life and complex emotions involved in raising your own meat. He has become an old hand at milking cows, delivering calves, bottle feeding lambs, shearing, hoof trimming, dressing poultry, and weeding gardens.

The pigs we had raised all winter were ready for butchering, too. We elected to have a local smokehouse take care of them for us, so we could have smoked hams and bacon on a larger scale than we can do in our smokers.

And the garlic we planted last Fall finally made an appearance as the ground has begun to thaw. We know there will still be at least one more surprise snow storm and a freeze, but it is still hard not to get excited to plant all of the heirloom vegetable starts waiting in the greenhouse and the house.

I've been busy in the studio, too...more to come on that.

What's been keeping you busy this Spring?