What happened to fall?
Actually, what happened to 2019?
As usual we had a lot of farm projects planned for the year. We use a quarterly planning method where we sit down at the beginning of each quarter and list the things we want to accomplish. If there are any unfinished tasks from the previous quarter (duh! always!), we decide whether we want to carry them over or postpone them. We also take time to talk about the things we DID get done and give ourselves a proverbial 'pat on the back'. Overall we did pretty well - we got sidetracked a little with the cancer diagnosis of our farm mascot Angus - but we still managed to make some good progress. I think it's really important to review and reflect on the projects you got finished. Sometimes this life we have chosen can be overwhelming and you can lose sight of the positive. Especially since old man winter looks like he is coming early this year and that makes me very nervous. According to the old timers, the height of the mullein plants predicts the amount of snow coming. I was down checking tree survival along the boundary with the road today and found a mullein that was easily a foot over my head. I'm not sure I am looking forward to 6.5 feet of snow!
I thought I would share with all of you some of our successes.
We had a good lambing season. Although we were a bit light on lambs - only two of the ladies had twins - we did get some really nice ewe lambs to add to our flock. We had three breeding pens - so ewes were matched up with the ram that best met our conservation breeding goals. We ended up with 7 ewes and 5 rams. We were fortunate to send three of our lambs and two yearling ewes to a new farm in Oregon as a start to their dairy sheep operation - how cool is that?
Our baby Friesian was born on June 21 without serious complications. She is beautiful and special and we are so pleased that she is headed to her new home in a few weeks. Her new mama LOVES her and will cherish her I know. That's the best you can ask for as a breeder.
We got the roof on the barn! This was HUGE. We built the roof on the ground in 12' sections and then had a crane truck come lift them into place. It took us two tries to get the right crane but it's up there so that makes me extremely happy.
We did some serious fencing. The sheep now have about twice the pasture they had before. We still have a LOT of work to do to meet our rotational grazing system goals but we made good progress. We applied for a grant to help with additional fencing next year so stay tuned on that.
The garden did great! There is a lot of food stored away and still more that needs to be dealt with. My new saying 'if you grow it, you must preserve it.'
Many new projects were started - horse shelter/feeder, sheep feeder/hay storage, hay barn......yeah, we are really good at STARTING projects! Hoping to have the horse and sheep projects completed before winter really sets in. We'll see.
