After the Storm
After getting 7.5 inches of rain in the past 5 days, everything is saturated here at the ranch and it was really nice to get up this morning to feed the sheep and be welcomed by beautiful clear skies!
Life on the Ranch
Happy New Year!
Our first 11 chicks, hatched on election day, moved out to their new chicken house earlier this week. The chicken house will eventually be down below Lolo’s house, near our garden, where they will have a big, covered run, but for now we have it outside the barn, with a small run, so the chickens
Uh-oh, They Found My Secret Door
Orbit is turning out to be a great guard dog, but he is also an avid hunter, and we have found him outside the ewes’ pasture a lot lately, waiting in the driveway to be let back in. We discovered he had found a tiny exit hole in the pasture fence where it crosses a
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Got Corn?
My select group of retired ewes (the “pets”) live by my house and always gather at the fence when I walk by for chin-scratches or a treat of corn. Bebe (7 years old), Mother (5 years old), Shorty (6 years old) and Emy (7 years old).
End of Breeding
Not such a Happy Halloween for our boys–we took the rams out today, a couple of weeks earlier than we usually do. They have been in with the ewes just 21 days, which is just a bit longer than a ewes’ 17-day cycle. We find that most of our ewes get bred in the first
All Grown Up
It’s breeding month, and all the ewes are in breeding groups with the rams. Most of the ewe lambs are in with our ram lamb, Pistol, and acting all grown up! Nugget (photo-bombing the first photo, taken by Melinda) still has a bit of a head-tilt, but she is a happy gal and such a
Road Trip!
Who would have thought you could get two 200-pound ewes in the back of a Toyota 4Runner? I was skeptical when Sam Stack came to pick up Brown-Nose and Luna, the two 2-year olds he and his wife Lauren had bought from me to add to their flock at Willy Nilly Farm in Humboldt County.
Reunion in Vacaville
I took eight ewes who are retiring from production to Soul Food Farm in Vacaville today. We had our first rain of the season, just a light drizzle, but it made the day pleasantly cool, perfect for transporting sheep. In May I had sold four ewes who turned out not to be pregnant to Alexis
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Last Cheese
I made the last cheese of my professional career yesterday. It was a nearly perfect cheesemaking day; I began at 6 am sanitizing equipment and the milk line, began the transfer of the fresh milk from the bulk tank, and was joined by Melinda who prepared the buckets of frozen milk to add to the
Dang Me!
Dang me! It has been a rough week for our boy, Pistol. As a matter of fact, it’s been a bit of a bumpy life, but he is coming out a winner. Unlike his namesake in the ’60’s country song, “Dang Me,” Pistol was not the seventh son, but the single son of 2072, a