Well, its been a while since we have blogged. When you combine the escapades of 8 children and each of their developing lives, and add in the building of an infrastructure of a farm, it can’t help but be a really busy summer and fall! But we still try to enjoy ourselves and relax on occasion. The picture below was taken during such a rare moment; hopefully you can feel at least a modicum of the peace and tranquility of a summer afternoon in the country.
One of the things that has been consuming us this year is fencing and gates. There are creative solutions to both of these, and we have been discovering many alternatives.
Below you see a gate along our boundary fence where we expect challenges from predators; especially coyotes, but also possibly bears. The gap is about 20 feet, so standard gates are a fairly expensive option. This alternative is both cheap and effective, and very easy to make.
We took two 6 foot lengths of 2x4s and screwed in insulators along the length at an appropriate gap to insure contact with any decent sized predator. Spanning the gap with 1/2 inch electrical fencing tape completes the gate, and attachment to the adjacent electrified fence completes a pretty secure structure. The bottom of the 2x4s slide into a wire sleeve, and tension is gained by pulling the top part tight with a piece of baling twine (after duct tape, the most essential farm material for fixing things!) around the post. This gate is easily opened and closed after removing the electrical contact, and is a great and really affordable solution for any farm with electric fences.
Our sheep are going to be entirely grass fed and grass finished. So during spring, summer, and most of fall, it is fairly simple to rotationally graze the flock through a series of permanant and temporary fencing. But during winter, there are a number of challenges to overcome, such as how to provide shelter. Although our sheep will be nomads most of the year, providing them a more permanent shelter and a heated water source to prevent freezing, means that we will need to locate them closer to the house for much of the winter.
Below is a small shelter of around 80 square feet we constructed mostly of free wooden pallets (slid down over T-posts to provide a sturdy foundation) obtained from a local recycler. This simple construction only takes about half a day to put together and is completed with cheap corrugated plastic sheets for the roof and Tyvek sheathing around the outside! This is perhaps not the most aesthetically pleasing structure to grace a farm, but is is easy, cheap and fiunctional!
Finally our starter sheep flock arrived in August! We were really impressed with the folks from whom we bought these sheep. Gibraltar Farm in New York is managed by extremely professional, caring, and giving shepherds, who taught us a lot during the time we visited their farm, and personally delivered a group of 12 ewes to us as our foundation flock.
The girls (12 ewe lambs born this past spring) can be seen below enjoying the pasture on Morning Star Meadows in the late afternoon. Lying beneath those amber waves is a large amount of feed that we have stockpiled for them to consume during the winter.
Our pasture is definitely not an herbicide-sprayed monoculture of one type of pasture grass devoid of weeds, but instead consists of Orchard grass, Blue stem (a warm season grass) and Timothy, combined with clover and a variety of “weeds”, which are mostly devoured by the sheep. The brown stemmy grass seeming to dominate this field in the photograph is the previously mentioned Blue stem, and can provide a good protein source, although is not as palatable once it goes to seed and browns off in the fall.
During the winter months, we hope to be able to continue allowing the ewes to graze this stockpiled pasture and so we have constructed a “corridor” (below) bordered by electric twine from the shelter area (note the Tyvek sheathing) and the unfrozen water source, to the field of stockpiled grass shown above.
Now we just have to run them up and down between them for a few days to help them remember the route, which is only about 80 yards away.
And finally, on a different note, our other work this summer and fall has been in the garden. We obtained a wonderful yield of vegetables, as demonstrated by this truckload of butternut squash! About 25 plants yielded almost 250 lb of sweet orange deliciousness! We hope it stores well in our cool, dry basement and we will use it during the winter months for all sorts of soups and stews!
Hopefully it won’t be as long before our next blog, and we can update you about our continuing adventures as we prepare for our first winter with the sheep!
Morning Star Meadows Farm 