Thomas the Tank Engine

Yesterday while preparing for the evening arrival of the newcomers to the farm, I noticed that something wasn't right with Lucy. Normally she's full of energy and she likes to egg Abby and Ryan on to do this:

and this:

 Instead she was just lying down and she looked really out of it. When I realized that she couldn't stand up and was having muscle spasms, I rushed her to the vet. It seems that she has eaten some kind of toxic plant. We have no idea what, or if that's actually the cause, but the most important part is that she is better today than she was yesterday. Her pulse and temperature are back up to normal and she is interested in food. She's still at the clinic now (I brought her home last night to give her fluids here) and I'll go pick her up in a few hours. Poor little Lucy. 

Even with the Lucy illness we managed to get the fences, gate and shade shelter all ready for the farm's new arrival: Thomas the Ram!

He looks a bit different than photos of rams on Google images, but I guess this is just what Dorper x St. Croix rams look like.

Just kidding...we might use google for everything but we aren't *that* bad. That's Thomas' llama friend, Zeballos. He was sent along with Thomas since with his sheep friends gone (the woman who sold them to us sold her whole flock) he will be lonely. He could have lived with the woman's cattle but apparently they are too messy for him and he doesn't like to eat near them. Llamas choose one spot to defecate and then stick with that spot - they don't like to get dirty.  

This is Thomas the Tank Engine:

Like with any ram, he should never be trusted and you should never turn your back on him. His old owners told us that they only go in with him if they have to, and if they have their Border Collies with them, since he will respect the dogs.

As soon as they left - possibly before they'd even driven back through the gate, this happened:

That's Thomas, backing up to charge Nathan. The Border Collie is missing since he took one look at the ram, tucked his tail and ran off to go roll in some grass or something...maybe to eat some kale. Luckily Nathan is quick and he side stepped Thomas a few times before I sent in backup.

I think Abby will do a good job of keeping Thomas back if I go in to that paddock. When she went in there with Nathan and barked and circled Thomas he backed right off and stopped charging. 

Thomas demonstrating the "Flehmen response" when checking out his future ladies.

Thomas loves grain, too - but I'm only going to feed it to him through the fence. I don't want him to have any desire to approach me when I'm in the field with him. When he got impatient for more and started to ram the fence I walked away and came back when he had stopped. I *will* train this ram! You can see the new ewe in the background. She hasn't stopped calling for her lamb that was just weaned.

Handsome Thomas. Look at that mane! You can see that the lambs aren't exactly nervous anymore. I need to stop wearing flip flops in there since they get so eager they step all over my feet.

Sneaky Veggies

I went to take some photos of the tiny bush beans that are finally growing 

 and when I looked more carefully I found these! Mmm green (and purple) beans with dinner - I like them baked in the oven for just a few minutes with sesame oil, soy sauce and garlic. 

Then I was examining the cucumber plants to make sure that this wasn't happening again:

The cucumber on the right is a normal cucumber, off of one of our landlord's plants. The cucumber on the left is our first...and it was never a normal size. It started out growing that fat and when it didn't seem to be getting much longer or more normally shaped I picked it. It's on the stand right now but I'm guessing nobody will buy it so it will be sampled in our salad tonight. 

Anyway, I realized some of the vines needed to be tied up and when I did that, I found 8 beautiful cucumbers ready to be picked, completely hidden.

Just as I was writing this a lady drove up to the house to ask when we would have more eggs and to say she's been loving our veggies. We're only producing 4 eggs a day (...2 after we eat breakfast) until the chicks start laying in August.

I think we'll have some of our own chicken next week, though. These meat birds are getting huge. 

Don't worry, not you Dorothy.

These two boys will be the first to go. They're the biggest and they bite me when I top up their food.

Look at them next to Magpie!

I'm sure I'll feel sad after having raised them from chicks but at the same time, I know they couldn't have had a better life. Our friends Jess and Josh visited this weekend and they were laughing that the farm was like a chicken community center. The three separate groups come out of their coops in the morning and congregate in the same shady area every day, then they all split off to do their activities. Mother Clucker's morning activity still involves this guy:

He seemed to think my camera's shutter noise was a threat of some kind. Unfortunately, he isn't smart enough to realize that the neighbour's dog that got onto the farm and chased the hens was the real threat. He was off in the garage somewhere and did nothing to protect the girls (not that he could have done much). Luckily I grabbed the dog before any damage was done.

The sheep are getting so tame that taking photos of them is becoming difficult. I wanted some photos from far away of them in their paddock and I only managed to get this one.

The rest of the photos were "gimme some grain" close ups.

 Oprah lets me pet her now. Both lambs will coming running at full speed from anywhere when they're called and eat out of our hands. It's good that they're getting easier to handle since their ewe and ram buddies (and an extra surprise) arrive tomorrow!

Rogue Lambs Part II

After yesterday's episode I decided that it was time for the lambs to move back onto the 'real' farm, to a bigger paddock. So far they'd been on the house side of the farm gate, which is why they managed to get so far when they got loose. Be warned that this is a long story of multiple failures....err lessons.

Looking back, my biggest mistake was attempting the big move while alone (with a useless Border Collie). Nathan started a new job today at a nearby farm. He is helping to run it for an american multimillionaire who will move there in case the world ends, and would like a self sustaining farm...100 acres of beautiful, has everything you could imagine, farm. Anyway, back to the lambs. I knew that moving two not-very-tame lambs through a small gate (where they could then get to the road) and then through another gate, down the driveway and through yet another gate, with multiple non-gate options, was going to be difficult. I like to think I started the morning with a real positive go-getter attitude...full of hope and possibilities.

My plan: First, lamb-proof the paddock immediately adjacent to the lambs' current yard. It has a wooden horse fence with the lowest planks about 3' above the ground, and 2' gaps between planks. Nathan has always said that it would be almost impossible to lamb-proof that fence. I decided to prove him wrong. I spent a few hours dragging boards from all over the farm, lining them all up along the fence and then nailing them a foot off the ground to fill in that 3' gap.

Side story: While getting wood from one of the piles, I must have shifted the pile and trapped a tiny baby bunny. When I freed him he ran straight into Abby's legs. They were both so stunned that they stared at each other, then tiny baby bunny ran off through the fence.

When I was about a quarter of the way done with the fence I decided that it would be really nice and pastoral to have the lambs in the paddock with me, munching away quietly while I worked. This brought me to the second part of the plan: Lamb-catching. This part of the plan was going to involve a rope that I would fashion into a head halter, lots of grain and one untrained Border Collie. Here is how it went in my head: Ryan lies at the first gate and blocks it while I go in and call the lambs over with grain. I easily slip the head halter on Oprah, and with Ryan's encouragement from behind, we make our way up the driveway. Then I repeat with Ewean. What actually happens: I manage to get the head part of the halter on but not the nose part. Oprah panics. Ryan leaves his post at the gate and starts maniacally circling Ewean, who is circling bucking Oprah and me. I yell at Ryan to leave, then somehow manage to get the nose part of the halter on Oprah...Oprah doesn't want to move. I pick Oprah up and carry her into the new half-finished paddock. At this point, even though things weren't quite going according to plan, I still felt pretty proud of myself. I only had about 2 seconds to feel self-satisfied before Oprah was running toward the fence baa-ing for Ewean, and Ewean was running along her side of the fence baa-ing back for Oprah. A-ha. This is why you don't move one lamb at a time. I went to try and catch Ewean and as I siddled up to her with some grain, I see Oprah jump easily through the gap in the fence - the gap that's 3' off the ground, that I hadn't even thought to fill. Now Oprah is loose in the full 15 acres of farm (fenced, at least) and I knew there was no way I could catch her. I had to let Ewean out with her...except catching Ewean was not working. She had seen the tricks I played on Oprah and she was having none of it. I tried to corner her with a big panel...she pushed out the side. Finally I ended up cutting the corner of the fence so she could exit the yard right onto the farm. As she and Oprah trotted off down the driveway, I went inside to call Nathan and tell him the happy news that I'd let the lambs out, loose, onto the farm.

After grumbling "you were right" a couple of times (very quietly) I went back outside with renewed vigor, ready to set things right. I brought some grain and found the lambs happily grazing next to the greenhouse. I called them into the nearest paddock and ...shock...they followed me right in! I closed the gate behind them and stood there for a good 10 minutes feeling very pleased with myself. I brought a bucket of water over and their salt lick. Two sides of the paddock are 8' deer fencing but one side (with the horses, bull and cows in the next paddock) is 3 strands of electric wire, each about 2' apart. While I was standing there I saw Oprah go up to it and get zapped - since she's the leader of the two I thought they would stay away from that fence after that. I went inside to call Nathan again and tell him that the situation was under control. He mentioned that he thought the lambs would be able to get through the electric wires, but I assured him that I'd seen Oprah get shocked and I didn't think they'd go near that fence again. I was feeling so very proud of myself this time that I grabbed a popsicle and the dogs and went for a stroll to see the lambs again in their new paddock. I didn't see them at first but I was pretty sure they were lying somewhere at the back in the longer grass. I started walking along the fence in the horse pasture to go find them when suddenly I saw Woolly Bully running. Woolly Bully never runs. Woolly Bully was chasing two very scared lambs. It was chaos. The cows were running, the dogs were running, the lambs were running, I was running and the worst part was that my popsicle fell on the ground. I ran back to the house to lock the dogs in and get more grain, then called the lambs out of the paddock and into yet another paddock with 5' deer fencing all around it (why I didn't put them there in the first place, I do not know). They are (fingers crossed) still in there, with the shade shelter that I build after putting them in there.

Did I mention that we're getting another ewe and a ram in a few weeks?

Addiction

After giving the lambs almost a week to settle in, we decided it was time to get them to like us. They've stopped running away from us when we walk by  (it didn't help that we had to grab them on day 1 to check Ewean's gimpy leg - she had been limping but seems better now) but we want them to come running to us (and I want to pet them...and halter train them...). 

Day 2 of training and now when we go outside we see this: 

This was all thanks to the magic of Farmyard Crack. No, I'm not talking about my low sitting farm jeans: I mean sheep grain. We bought some to use for training and we started off yesterday by dropping a bit into a bowl for the lambs every time we walked by them.

Both Ewean and Oprah (her formal name is still Eweneequa but it's a bit of a mouthful) are still jumpy but are now eating out of our hands. Oprah is definitely the leader of the two - she is the first to stomp angrily when the dogs get too close to the fence, and the first to investigate anything new. Ewean doesn't investigate as much but she also seems less suspicious of everything.

The problem is, Farmyard Crack is equally loved by everyone. It's really hard to stay still and try to get nervous lambs to come over to you when you're trying to shoo chickens off of you. Especially when those chickens can get most of their bodies through the fence to try and eat the grain.

Sheep training helpers. 

That Farmyard Crack is something. When I stood up to walk down the driveway I saw this coming towards me:

This following me:

And I heard a pleading "baaaaaa!" next to me.

The cooler weather has slowed everything down in the greenhouse but it's still mostly looking good.

Baby cucumber

 Lots of Kale.

Cantaloupe. Apparently when you grow melons vertically they need to be supported in a net of some kind since they get too heavy for the plant. One YouTube video suggested using brassieres...I'm not sure if these tiny melons will need training bras first?

Itsy Bitsy Watermelon.

Not so itsy bitsy tomatoes. 

The tomatoes look fine but the folliage does not. I really hope this isn't Early Blight. I think the humid days in the greenhouse combined with cooler nights hasn't been great for tomato plants. Two of the plants in the grow bed have most of their leaves affected and the big Sweet Million plants have their bottom leaves affected.