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OK, I like winter, but I don't really like temps below 20 degrees F. I don't really see a need for anything colder than that, know what I mean Vern? Twenty degrees is plenty cold enough to get snow, which the skiers like, and it makes everything look pretty, but anything lower than that is really not necessary, IMHO. Today the temperature is around 9 degrees, but the windchill factor makes it feel like -5 or -10F.

The chickens don't come out in this weather. If they come out at all, they quickly change their little minds and go back in. The sheep? Do. Not. Care. After all, they are wearing 3-4 inches of wool, and they have a bedding pack which is composting and generating its own heat. It's sort of like radiant floor heating for your barn. I know because I went out with the ewes yesterday and sat down in their shelter for a bit, and my fanny was actually warm. Later, we pulled up a layer of bedding to move some out to the hoophouse for the rams, and you could see parts of it steaming in the cold air and if you put your hand down, it was pleasantly warm. But even when the sheep venture out of the shelter, you get the feeling that they hardly notice the cold. In fact, they're downright frisky. One of the ewes did a leap in the air yesterday like a gazelle, just because she could.

What was really weird yesterday was our sighting of FOUR BLUEBIRDS. Yes, the kind that people put up special birdhouses for and try to get pairs to breed in. The state bird of NY. We saw them yesterday, while it was snowing, sitting in our crabapple tree where we have the bird feeders. We did a quick search and found that occassionally bluebirds do overwinter in the north, and apparently these four figured they were tough enough to stick it out. I wonder what they're thinking of that decision now? We found recipes online for making your own bluebird food, and plans for mealworm feeders. We have suet cakes out, so that will have to do for now. But we haven't seen them again, so they may have moved on (they're probably thinking "Florida or bust!" though it's a bit late to migrate).

What's really annoying about cold weather? Hauling 5 gallon buckets of water out of the house every day. In my next barn, I want a frost-free spigot. Thankfully we do have a de-icer for the big tank, it's just that while the rams are inside, we have to carry water for them. In fact, when they go out to the hoophouse pasture, we'll have to carry water out there since they won't have access to the big tank. Something to look forward to! Maybe it will be a little warmer by then.

Sunday we brought home our new ram, Falkur. Falkur is 75% AI, and a Serkur son. He'll be two years old in March. We had built a nice indoor pen which connected to the sheep shelter via a new rolling door. We secured the door (or so we thought) with two heavy hooks and eyes, one on either side. We got home early Sunday evening, set up the pen and then backed the trailer up to the barn and opened the back. Falkur walked straight down the barn and into his pen like he'd done it before.

He sucked down about half a gallon of water and then started crunching hay. We thought "well, that was easier than we had any right to expect", closed up the barn, and went to bed.

The next morning I went out to do chores, opened the barn door, and didn't see Falkur. I thought "he must be lying down". So I walked over closer, but he clearly was not in the pen. My first thought was that he jumped over the side and was elsewhere in the barn, but it's a small barn with no place for a sheep to hide. Then I saw the door. The hook on the left side was hanging, still hooked through the screw eye, but still attached to the block of wood that had been previously screwed to the door to provide a place to attach the hook. Falkur had pushed the on the bottom of the door hard enough to pull the screws through the plywood from the other side of the door. Then he had just pushed the door outward enough to squeeze through (since it's on rollers, it will swing out at the bottom). I opened the door and there he was laying down in the shelter.

So much for quarantine. He had apparently felt that since there were other sheep on the other side of that door, he was going to join them and no door was going to get in the way.

Ken and I called in to our respective workplaces and said we'd be coming into work late. Then we got to work. First we took a section of hog panel and framed it out in scrap 2x4 and 2x6 lumber to create a heavy panel. Then we reinforced the door with a piece of 2x3 the same width as the door, bolted through the door's frame, followed by another piece of 2x3 on the inside, screwed through the plywood and into the outside 2x3. Then we reinstalled the hooks into this inner 2x3, and installed some heavy duty screw eyes into the sides of the doorway to tie the panel to.

The next job was to create an "obstacle course" in the pen so that Falkur and Flint would not be able to come straight at each other. Flint was already in the pen and had been all morning while we worked because when I first discovered Falkur outside, it was just getting light and Flint was taking notice and trying to challenge him. Given that Falkur is older, heavier, and has more massive horns, a head-butting contest was not a good idea. So I grabbed Flint and shoved him inside. In order to keep Falkur from trying to get to the other sheep again, he needed a companion and Flint was the only candidate. But they could really hurt each other, even in a small space, if they had open room to move. So we took a couple of old heavy dining room chairs, tied them together and laid them down in the middle. Then we brought in a couple of large log chunks from a tree we had cut down last year and added them, one on either side of the chairs. Voila! An obstacle course.

Then we lured Falkur in with some grain, tied the heavy panel to the doorway, hooked the door closed, and waited to see what would happen. While they couldn't really butt heads, Falkur quickly made it clear that he was the boss, and Flint quickly got the message. Now Flint moves out of Falkur's way whenever necessary. After a week or so, they should be OK to put out in the pasture, away from the ewes, but with their own hoop house. They'll keep each other company, and hopefully Falkur won't decide to try to bash down our fences to get to the ewes. It's past breeding season so that should help. Here are some pics of the "boys" and their new digs. Falkur is the black mouflon and Flint is the moorit (brown).

Winter finally arrived this month. December's average temperature was 40F but that all changed after the new year began. We've been working on a few projects including a new chickencoop and an indoor sheep pen. This pic shows the pen and behind it you can see the light is on in the new coop.

The pen is for quarantine, or sick sheep, or isolating rams, or whatever we might need it for. We also opened the old doorway that you can see on the back wall, which had been boarded up, and built a new rolling door and hung it on the outside in the sheep shelter. This lets us go directly from the barn into the shelter, where before we had to go around through the gate into the sheepyard. It's a bit more convenient for feeding the sheep in this weather.

As it's gotten cold we have been getting little bits of snow at a time until now there's about 6 inches accumulated. The sheep don't care. They have a few inches of wool to keep them warm! Besides, they get to sleep on a cushy bed of hay. The hay we got this year was not the best quality (see previous post), so the sheep only eat the best parts and leave the "drinking straws" (the really mature grass stems). This has been building up into a nice soft bedding pack.

We had mentioned our poor hay quality to some friends who have horses and cut their own hay. She said they had some good clover/trefoil hay that we could try if we wanted to. So today I went over and picked up a bale. This stuff is like green gold. It's still as green as the day it was baled, and it's yummy! I wish I was a ruminant so I could eat it. We took some out to the sheep and put it in the hay feeder and there was pretty much a free-for-all as they jockeyed for position to get at it. It sort of reminded me of "musical chairs" because they kept pushing each other around the feeder. Everyone was sucking in as much as they could get. Rose has a new nickname now - "Shop-Vac". We actually took it back out because we were afraid they were going to gorge and then get bloat. I emailed our friends and told them we be willing to buy whatever they could spare of this stuff. A little of it will go a loooong way.

We sent off a sample of our hay and got the results back yesterday:
(All values are on a dry matter basis)
%Crude Protein (CP): 6.4
%Available Protein: 5.6
%ADICP: 0.8 (Acid Detergent Insoluble Crude Protein)
%Adjusted Crude Protein: 6.4
Soluble Protein % CP: 31
Degradable Protein % CP: 66
%NDICP: 2.1 (Neutral Detergent Insoluble Crude Protein)
%Acid Detergent Fiber: 45.3
%Neutral Detergent Fiber: 71.9
%Lignin: 8.5
%NFC: 18.5 (Non Fiber Carbohydrates)
%NSC: 11.7 (Non Structural Carbohydrates)
%Starch: 1.8
%Sugar: 9.9
%Crude Fat: 1.9
%Ash: 3.43
%TDN: 53 (Total Digestible Nutrients)
NEL, Mcal/lb: 0.39 (Net Energy for Lactation)
NEM, Mcal/lb: 0.44 (Net Energy for Maintenance)
NEG, Mcal/lb: 0.19 (Net Energy for Gain)
Relative Feed Value: 69
%Calcium: 0.44
%Phosphorus: 0.08
%Magnesium: 0.14
%Potassium: 0.71
%Sodium: 0.037
PPM Iron: 68
PPM Zinc: 19
PPM Copper: 9
PPM Manganese: 75
PPM Molybdenum: 0.2
%Sulfur: 0.11
%Chloride Ion: 0.14
%Lysine: 0.22
%Methionine: 0.08

So the quality of this hay is not great. Six percent crude protein is barely above values for various straws, which may be around 3-4%. We knew that it wasn't going to be that great however because of the large amount of overly-mature timothy in the mix. Everyone around here will tell you that the weather played a big part in the quality of the hay they got. A few days of rain at the wrong time and that was that. Slightly more than half (53%) of the hay is considered digestible (Total Digestible Nutrients, TDN). So half is waste. Oh well, hopefully next year will be better. Meanwhile, we supplement with grain.

We bought a de-icer for the sheep water tank. The tank is plastic and holds 40 gallons, so we got a floating de-icer from Jeffers which is safe for plastic tanks. The installation instructions emphatically state that extension cords should not be used. This meant we needed an outdoor outlet near enough to the tank to plug the de-icer in, and the cord they provide is *maybe* 6 feet long, but probably more like 5 feet. So, Monday night we ran a new circuit from the barn out through the wall into the sheep shelter, and mounted an outdoor GFCI outlet in a protected area that was close enough to plug into.

This de-icer is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's a 1250W unit, which is plenty big enough for 40 gallons. The other night the temp went down to 17, and there was absolutely no ice in the tank in the morning. No more breaking slabs of ice out of the tank and freezing my fingers off. Yippee!

It took us all night to finish the installation though. It was snowing like crazy and the sheep were looking at us like we were nuts. We kept invading their shelter, so of course they would go out and stand in the snow, wander over to the hay feeder for a bite, and then come back and wonder when we were finally going to leave so they could come inside and lay down. We finally finished up at 11:30pm. There was 4 inches of snow by then, and the sheep were wearing some of it. It was a real visual lesson on the insulating value of wool. The snow just sat on their backs without melting. They would let it pile up for a bit and then shake it off. I wish I'd gotten some pictures.

The de-icer has a thermostat, so it doesn't run constantly, which is a good thing. It will be interesting to see what the next electric bill looks like!