Morning Star Meadows Farm

November 24, 2019

Health Check before the Wedding Vows!

The girls are about to meet their “husbands” in a couple of days, and while they won’t be getting blood tests like we do, they do get a quick “once over” health check before tying the knot, so to speak.

This will be the first time we have tried the new weighing facilities and yards, so we were as anxious as the ladies for this to work out well!

We were pleased at how easily they complied with entering the yards, and now that they were contained, we needed to see them enter and pass through the race.

The first attempt yielded 6 of them easily pushing into the race. Maybe they already know that they will be divided into 2 groups for the 2 rams, who are eagerly awaiting the nuptuals!

OK! Piece of cake! These girls went through their paces with ease! I guess that although one is not supposed to discuss a ladies weight, in this case we will make an exception. We were very pleased to see that these yearling ewes had gained from 30-50 lb since June on a diet of pasture alone. Now they are ready to meet Cyrano and Romeo (yes, really!) in the next day or two.

We will try to video the meeting and post it, while making sure that we keep this blog for “general audiences”, if you get our drift!

November 12, 2019

Cyrano and Romeo

Meet the newest members of our flock! Cyrano and Romeo will be dads to our crop of lambs in the spring! They are registered purebred Katahdins bred and raised in New York at Gibraltar Farm by Etienne and Isabel Richards. They are 100% grass fed, and we will be relying on their fine genetics to complement that of our 12 ewes.

They arrived in September and have not yet been introduced to the ewes. We have kept them near the barn, far away from the ewes. Our intent is to introduce them later this month. Each ram will have a harem of 6 ewes until early next year. Lambs should start arriving mid April.

Roy has been working on extending their paddock area, as they have been munching through the pasture since they arrived in September. In the picture below you can see them watching Roy as he is just about to finish the last stretch of fencing. The weather was gorgeous yesterday, in the low 60’s, but we knew that snow and an Arctic temperature plunge would come today. Roy had built them a little shelter that he had in this new paddock, and he wanted to get them moved to it yesterday so they would have access to the shelter in this snowstorm.

Well, the best laid plans of sheep and men…below you can see their pile of hay, covered with snow. They’d rather eat that nice green grass under the snow! And as for the shelter? We found them BEHIND it, huddled together as the snow and wind were coming at them earlier today!

Believing that sheep, like any animal, are hard wired to survive, by sheltering from the elements, we were amazed to see them NOT entering their shed to get away from the wind and driving snow. So how do you entice a ram to enter a shed and be more comfortable? We can’t use food, since they seem to ignore the hay, and have no idea what to do with any other foods. For example, the ewes don’t even acknowledge the presence of delectable things like apple peels or leftover squash from the garden. And if we caught them and put them in there, they would likely see it as a bad thing and never go near the shed again!

I guess we just have to leave them to discover it themselves. We do know that they have superior genetics. Hopefully some of those are devoted to creating sufficient brain cells to discover the entrance to the shelter before the weather gets seriously bad in February. In a few weeks thay join their respective harems. Perhaps their wives will be able to show them how to use that threatening opening in the shed. At least the girls seem to be able to understand how to keep warm. Or maybe these boys are just like any adolescent males, even human ones, who, it sometimes appears, seem unable to accept advice to make their lives easier, and have to work it out for themselves!

July 11, 2019

IBC Rain barrel 2.0

For those who follow this blog, you may remember an ill-fated attempt to capture water from the roof of the house to water the garden. Below is the photograph of the IBC (Intermediate Bulk Container), which collapsed under the weight of the water we collected (an IBC can hold 275 gallons which at 8 lb a gallon for water is over a ton!). Apparently the metal frame surrounding an IBC (absent from this one which we found laying around on the property) is more than just decoration and is critical to maintain structural integrity!

Below is the finalized construction of our latest attempt to collect water from the metal roof of the barn for the sheep. It looks complicated, but the concept is quite simple and I will describe the reason for each component. Note the metal framed IBC which we bought to replace the collapsed one with no frame!

Firstly, we had to position the IBC around the corner from the downspout because that side of the barn has quite a steep slope on which it would be very difficult to position the container without digging a significant foundation. This apparently small concession to gravity necessitated using expandable, flexible pipe to pass around the corner. The next issue was that the downspout measured 2×3 inches, which is smaller than most house gutter downspouts which measure 3×4 inches. The importance of this will become clear with the next photo. But suffice it to say that we had to pass from a smaller to a larger opening. Also, we wanted to install an easily cleanable filter at a couple of points and this created an opportunity to place one between the white and brown components. The joint is supported by a metal brace, and there are wires holding it together that are loose enough to easily remove to access the filter. But why have that smaller 1 inch pipe from the side of the brown downspout?

The image below shows the reason for this interesting structure. At the opening of the 3×5 inch brown pipe is a close-fitting rubber trough with a hole through the middle. Water passing through the downspout fills the trough and exits into the small round flexible pipe that we plumbed into the center of the green lid on the IBC. The reason for the central hole is that if the IBC is filled or there is a blockage of the pipe, the water can pass through the hole and not back-up onto the roof causing leaks. The block of wood is the same thickness as the metal frame, ensuring that the trough remains horizontal and the hole stays open underneath. The slight lack of efficiency of water collection (with some water falling through the hole missing the trough) is outweighed by the peace of mind resulting from knowing that the aparatus will not cause problems upstream! This very useful aparatus (including the pipes and drill jigs to place the rubber insert into downspouts) is available from stores such as Home Depot, or can be obtained on-line. Note that this is made only for a 3×4 inch downspout, thus creating our need to expand our fitting from the original 2×3 inch downspout. Dontcha just love plumbing incompatibility issues!?

Another view from a different angle below. Note the frayed white edges of a second filter we inserted at the beginning of the flexible black pipe. The two filters are cleaned by simply removing them and shaking them out whenever we use the water to fill secondary containers to transport water to the sheep or chickens.

Finally, after a good rain, we have collected about 100 gallons of water! All we do now is attach a hose to the IBC outlet at the bottom and let gravity fill a 55 gallon drum, plumbed with a faucet and hose that we strapped into the back of the Kawasaki mule side-by-side that we can drive into the fields to fill water troughs and buckets! Note that this is from just one corner of the barn We can do the same thing to each corner downspout, potentially quadrupling our capture of life-giving water!

As we increase our flock this will become really important, since sheep will drink up to 2-3 gallons of water a day in the summer. For 150 sheep (including lambs) that adds up to almost 500 gallons a day, an amount that our house well may not be able to produce.

June 16, 2019

Spring sheep maintenance

Today was the day to try out equipment Roy has been busy making over the fall and winter. He has built a set of yards to work the sheep, including a capture chute that has a scale built into it. Many thanks to Gibraltar Farm for the great advice on building all of this! Purchasing this equipment would cost many thousands of dollars, and this homemade version, while a little “clunky,” is perfectly adequate.

It’s time to see how much weight these girls have gained since joining us at Morning Star Meadows. Also time to boost their vaccinations, check feet and overall health.

This is the basic set up with the chute and a number of simple panels made from 2x4s that connect either with rebar or good ‘ol baling twine!

Bringing the sheep up from their pasture was easy, as the girls are quite used to us and to being moved. In fact, they will call to us when they want to go to the next pasture!

Getting them to move into the chute was quite simple. In fact we had more trouble stopping their friends from trying to double up!

Once in the chute it was simple to record their weight, give them a quick health check and administer their yearly vaccination.

A home made sheep chute is both effective and relatively inexpensive to make

Everyone gets a turn to inject a vaccine. This is the multivalent vaccine covering Clostridium perfringens types C & D and tetanus.

And finally we noticed that with all the rain we’ve been having, some of their hooves had overgrown (walking on the soft ground, not wearing them down), and they needed a bit of a pedicure before letting them back on to the pasture. It was relatively simple to catch them as they exited the chute and tip them onto their rear for a few seconds of toenail sculpting.

June 4, 2019

Intensive Rotational Grazing

One of the most important aspects of feeding ruminants entirely on grass these days is variations on the theme of intensive rotational grazing. This means that the animals are moved regularly, according to some preconcieved pattern and specific timing.

But why bother? Why not just let the animals graze wherever they want, whenever they want? Because both research and experience have shown us that this will result in poor pasture utilization, overgrowth of unwanted plants that are not as palatable or nutritious (aka “weeds”), thriving parasite populations, less healthy animals, and ultimately, a low stocking rate due to all of these factors. Counterintuitively perhaps, by concentrating on “farming the grass” rather than farming the livestock, you will develop a more abundant, safe, natural, and nutritionally complete diet for your livestock and increase the health and well-being of your animals.

In the photographs below, you will observe two pastures; the “after” grazing pasture, and the new “before” grazing pasture into which the sheep have just been moved. We try to size the pastures so that the sheep move every 3-4 days, since the nematode parasites that plague many flocks take about that amount of time to develop from eggs into the infective larvae ready to be ingested. By moving them out just when the parasites are ready to infect, we can attempt to break this cycle and keep the animals healthier.

There’s always one in the flock that doesn’t quite get it!

New pasture to the left, recently visited to the right.

Close up of grazed, trodden pasture.

Another important aspect of the moving time is to “size” the pasture so that during that time, approximately half to two thirds of the grass is eaten or trodden down. This will firstly ensure that there is sufficient grazing pressure that most of the plant species are impacted and that the more palatable species are not selectively mowed down, resulting in an overgrowth of less palatable “weeds”. Secondly, the treading will mulch some of the longer stalks allowing them to break down and supplement the topsoil. In addition, the treading will help bury the seed heads helping with regrowth later in the year. Lastly, we cannot forget the natural fertilization that occurs when nutrient rich manure and urine saturate a small area while being trodden into the topsoil. A well known grass farmer and advocate of this form of grazing, Joel Salatin, equates manure with gold, going so far as to post a picture of a cow patty with a dollar bill placed in the center!

Finally, grazing so that there is still sufficient grass blade left to harness the sunlight for photosynthetic incorporation of atmospheric CO2 more quickly, allows for deeper roots and quicker regrowth, resulting in better topsoil development and much hardier, drought resistant regrowth of the sward. We will not bring the animals back onto these areas for at least 60-80 days. allowing for the death of some parasite larvae, and robust regrowth of grass with building of the topsoil in the process. For those ecology-minded folks, this process, done properly, creates a huge net carbon incorporation and builds the pasture while creating efficiencies that allows almost twice the number of animals to be grazed per acre.

The advantage of all this is that we can raise twice the animals, eliminate parasite problems without chemicals, build the pasture without fertilizers, and help save the planet (if you buy into the whole global warming due to excess carbon thing… about which we are more than a little skeptical). And as a final advantage, the sheep LOVE moving into the next verdant smorgasbord. It always gives us a kick to see them baa-ing at the gateway, as we prepare the next portion for them to move into.

May 8, 2019

Deep mulch gardening 2.0

Our second year of having a hay covered garden, and we couldn’t be happier!

Last year we worked the hay in around the plants, but this year we are working the plants into the hay. There is a bit of initial sweat labor invested in preparing the rows, but we have decided it’s well worth it, to avoid watering and weeding later this year.

We first push the hay away from the area we want to plant. This can be done in spots for each individual plant, but we have decided to clear entire rows. It’s so wet and wormy under each row, that it helped that we let the area dry out a little overnight before working the soil.

Roy then took the Mantis tiller down the row.

For our peas earlier this spring we simply pressed them into the wet soil after hoeing it up a little, and it actually worked out quite well! Here they are:

After Roy tilled the row, I was able to easily plant our cucumber seedlings. We then gently worked the hay back over the row and carefully mulched each plant with the more decomposed and wet hay from the bottom of the hay that’s been on all winter. Praying for no late frosts this year!!

Below are our potatoes. The first picture shows them covered. We planted these a few days ago. The second picture shows the uncovered potato. They will grow under this hay as if they were under a few inches of soil. As they grow, we will cover them with more hay, similar to “hilling” done with soil – and a lot easier!

Our little garden is doing great. Here you see the onions doing nicely, and the garlic well on its way. We’ll be looking for garlic scapes before you know it!

We’re hoping to be harvesting this spring mix lettuce after our daughter’s wedding later this month!

Here are our early plantings of beets, carrots, chard and kohlrabi. As the plants get larger, we’ll be able to mulch them better.

Another success story is our rhubarb! Fertilized with compost early this spring as they were just emerging, they have really taken off, and the deep hay around them has prevented the multitude of weeds we had last year!

Hope you get to try this method of gardening too!

May 2, 2019

Time again for gardening!

Ugh! I feel so guilty that we have not blogged for such a long time – like maybe all of winter? But life on the farm truly does slow down from a farming point of view in those winter months.

With all that lack of activity, Roy and I finally bit the bullet and joined a gym to keep us moving through the slow winter months. Between that and the day to day activities of raising our large family, we have been kept busy for sure – but nothing really farm-blogworthy!

We have started gardening – some indoor and some outdoor.

Our garlic from last fall has done quite well. Our parsnips survived the winter and are providing us with a sweet spring harvest! Onion sets are planted, and after the proverbial onion snow, have started to truly take off!

Early spring plantings of lettuce, carrots, chard, beets and kohlrabi are all in the small garden.

Last year’s compost has beautifully fertilized our rhubarb. Planted from transplants from a friend’s heirloom patch, they are truly thriving here this year and have already budded flowers which we quickly removed to allow more energy to the stems and leaves. Hopefully we’ll be harvesting when the strawberries are ready – they are already flowering!

We have already sampled the sprouting asparagus. It will be a while before we harvest enough that there is some to bring up to the house. For now it provides a wonderful snack while we’re planting!

Squash seeds have been started indoors and have exceeded our expectations — like, they are going so crazy in here that I’m afraid they’re going to have to go in the ground before I’m ready to put them there! Hopefully there will be no late frosts! Cucumbers, spaghetti squash, butternut, and zucchini are all thriving, as are the watermelon!

Sun flowers were to be started today, but met with a sad fate. Happy daughters ventured out in the fleeting sunshine today to fill cell pots with potting soil, and while turned to work on that, Mr. Finnley stole the seeds and quickly ingested the lot of them! Guess the girls will learn a lesson. The less couthe boys started to wonder if the seeds might sprout better in Finnley’s, ahem, “fertilizer”!

And now to why I sat down to write today before heading out to mow the lawn. Our Ruth Stout garden practices seem to be quite successful! Last year we mulched around all of the plants with a very thick layer of old hay from the old barn across the street. It was a wonderful summer with little to no weeding and no watering except for newly emerging seedlings!

At the end of the growing season, we blanketed the whole garden (except the strawberries) with a thick layer of hay. We even unrolled round bales and added old hay from the sheep’s leavings, complete with their manure. A couple of weeks ago we opened up a row to put peas in. I kid you not – every handful of soil beneath that composting hay was filled with 5 to 10 worms -red wigglers, nightcrawlers – TONS of worms! THAT is how I measure the success of the Ruth Stout method! The soil was cold and wet and rather clumpy when we tried to till it. It was a mucky job, but we ended up getting the peas in – either pushed into the soil or covered with 1 1/2 inches of clumpy muck. We waited to see what would happen, and happily they have sprouted! Yesterday we planted the remaining peas. This time we decided not to till – just to push them into the soil. When these get tall enough, we’ll push the hay back around them!

One of the things Ruth Stout did that both impressed and intrigued us was to plant her potatoes with no tilling or soil handling whatsover. Her book was written many years ago, so I thought by now there would be plenty of gardeners out there who have tried her technique. We watched this video (they have quite a few wonderful instructional videos, by the way) and were convinced it was worth trying. Ruth said that she simply put the potatoes on the ground and covered them with straw or compost of some sort – enough to cover them from sunlight. We had quite a few sprouted potatoes left over from last year, and they are now nestled under the hay. When they begin to rise through the hay, we will “hill” them with more hay! When we want to check how they’re doing, we just lift the hay and peek – and even sneek a new potato or two if we wish!

Enough for now. Time to mow. Pennsylvania is so beautiful during the springtime – partly because of the lush green pastures! The sheep will mow their part – and I’ll mow mine!

December 15, 2018

Big IS better!

This fall has been a series of experiments in how to feed the flock during the fall/winter/spring period when the grass is not growing. Our preference is to use “stockpiled” pasture, which is uncut/ugrazed pasture, and requires no machinery to harvest, therefore consumes no diesel or gasoline, and takes no space to store. Our main concern was – could the sheep eat through snow or ice to get at the stockpiled feed? We were pleasantly surprised that indeed, even with six inches of snow, the sheep happily searched out the plants below, and apparently also supplied themselves with water from the snow. But we have been also giving the sheep some baled hay, since in very cold weather, especially when it is snowing, the sheep seek shelter and don’t spend time grazing. We were carrying small square bales of hay from the barn to the sheep daily to ensure that nutrition is maintained for these young, still growing ewes.

In an earlier blog, you may remember that we harvested both small square bales as well as some large round bales off the front pastures. Small square bales only weigh about 30-40 lbs, are easy to store, but require a lot of handling and space to store under cover to prevent spoilage. They also need to be carried out to the sheep on a daily basis. The large round bales, on the other hand, weigh about 800-1000 lb and can be stored outside under a tarp. Moving them can be a challenge, of course, and we covered that in an earlier blog. But once moved out to the sheep, the question was: Would the sheep eat from them, and how would we prevent spoilage for the 3-4 weeks they would be exposed to moisture/snow?

One thing we did was to position the bale onto a small tarp to prevent wicking up of moisture into the hay. Once we moved the bale into position and unwrapped the mesh that was around it, we pulled off the outer 3 inches of hay that was rotted and mouldy. This was a bit concerning because we were uncertain about how deep that bad layer was, since these bales had been left out in the field for about 2 months before we moved and covered them. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the underlying hay was sweet and dry! No hay went to waste, either. The rotted hay was used to mulch the garlic bed! Then the next issue was that snow was likely to pile up on top of the bale, dribbling down through the entire bale when the sun melted it. We therefore devised a small “shower cap” of a tarp wrapped tightly around the top tied with baling twine (what would we do without that!).

And finally we introduced the sheep to it. It was a bit worrying for a while since the sheep initially regarded this new “monster” in their field with grave suspicion, and we saw no activity near the bale for two days. In fact, the first night they hunkered down in a small wary clot as far as they could from the blue headed beast. But soon, curiosity got the better of them, and after a few tentative nibbles, they were chowing down!

We hope this will be the feeding method for the future, because after we have bred up to a flock of 100 ewes, dealing with 60 large bales will be logistically challenging, but nowhere near as big of an issue as stacking and storing the equivalent of over 3,000 small square bales!

December 2, 2018

If you give a farmer a book…

If you give a farmer a book to read on a pleasant fall day, she’s probably going to want to go outside and sit in the sun to read it, in hopes of having an afternoon of quiet nothingness.

And if she goes outside in the sunshine to enjoy that book, glancing up from time to time to admire the farm, seemingy at rest as we approach winter, she’s probably going to remember those carrots that she wanted to dig up on a day such as this.

And when she goes to dig up those lovely carrots…

She’s going to see that the garlic has finally started to sprout and make a mental note that they will soon need mulched for the winter.

When she goes over to the well pump to wash the carrots, she will glance over at the big garden and remember the nice kale that has been growing over the past few weeks of nasty weather and think how nice it would be to pick some.

She will leave the carrots soaking, and go into the garden for the kale.

She will see some small kohlrabi that a critter has been chewing on and throw them to the dog, then commence picking lovely kale.

While she is picking the kale in her arms, because she doesn’t have a container (because she never planned to pick kale until she started reading that book), she will hear a strange noise coming from the distance, and realize it is one of the normally very quiet sheep and know that something is not right.

She will call out to her hubby inside for reinforcement and drop the kale and head off to find out what’s wrong with the sheep, quickly learning that Bessie has crossed over the fence, thinking the grass was greener on the other side, and now misses her flock and is calling for help.

As she goes to open a gate to bring Bessie back in with the flock, her husband will call out to say that she just squeezed through the fence on her own.

Knowing she did this with relative ease, we will both realize that the electricity must not be charging the wire.

Realizing this, hubby heads to the barn to check the problem, and also realizing that the grass IS actually greener on the other side, we both decide it is time to move the sheep to where Bessie wanted to go earlier, so the trip to the barn becomes a trip for supplies, and 30 minutes later, with fences and gate all in place, we move the sheep.

Now back to the top of the hill near the kale garden, the farmer previously involved in kale picking goes back to the garden to resume picking, albeit now 45 minutes later.

Kale in her arms, she returns to the soaking carrots (Ha! Thought I forgot them, didn’t you?) to finish cleaning them to bring them in.

AND on the way in she realizes that the garage door has been open this entire time and her crazy lab has been chewing up papers he found there and gathers them in her arms full of kale and carrots.

Bringing these all into the kitchen, she sees her book – the book that was to bring her a relaxing afternoon of nothingness – and realizes that on the farm, there is no such thing at all, but she is happy nonetheless!

November 18, 2018November 18, 2018

Kicking the Hay Habit

As we’ve mentioned previously in our blog, our farm will be strictly forage fed (no grain), and we have a goal of stockpiling forage for feeding throughout the winter when conditions permit.

After a recent ice and snow storm, we were able to turn the ewes out on our stockpiled pasture to test all we’ve read about ruminants seeking out forage beneath the snow. The ewes happily left their shelter pasture (where we had confined them during the storm) with available hay for feed, and sought out fresh grass and other forages beneath the snow.

A couple of days have passed, and there is still ample feed available for weeks to come.

Here they are, happily munching away at grasses, sedge grass, and weeds that are still available to them after ice and snow accumulation and subsequent melting.

They do have their favorites out there, but after observing them for a while, I was amazed at the variety of things they try as they move along – esp. the stemmy sedge grass!

	morningstarmeadows on Spring sheep maintenance
	Fabienne on Spring sheep maintenance
	Linda Hayes on Grandpa’s little helper!
	morningstarmeadows on Getting ready!
	Linda Hayes on Getting ready!