Monday, August 10, 2009

My Own Rodeo

This morning I finally had to get down to it and figure out who goes where for breeding season! It might sound simple, but it wasn't...to find a good pasture with a good sized pen for the right group of animals and to keep the goats and sheep separate and everything..bleh...

Well I ended up taking all the ewe lambs, Aravis, and Parsley and putting them in with our two does that are still milking, Penny and Ella, and our market wether, Joash. I'll have to put Penny and Ella in small pens at night. Ella's such a boss that she rarely will let anyone eat. I have two mangers for these guys, but there isn't room for all the ewes at one well Ella hogs the other.
Penny is waiting to be put with the buck until she puts some more fat on her and Ella is waiting so that my yearlings can eat all they want well they are in with Mr. Monkey. Aravis and Parsley are waiting until the first week of September to visit the ram so I at least have a chance of having some Jr. ewes for the fair next year. All the lambs will be waiting until 2010 sometime to be bred.
One of the annoying things about this pen is that it will be harder to catch ewe lambs in to try and get them halter ready for fair. Although both of my yearlings are pretty rescind, especially Parsley who walks very well by color, halter, or my hand around her head, I've only been able to work with one of the ewe lambs I'm taking and she is bucking bronco!

Louis, our seven year old Katahdin patriarch, and the ram lambs got banished from their lush pasture to a smaller paddock were I'm going to have to supplement them with hay and alfalfa. I won't be using Louis this year and I'm just waiting for the ram lambs to get big enough to butcher.

All the yearling does- Virginia, Gweny, Sophie, and Sally, are now with Rhudi (aka Mr. Monkey) in our biggest pen and pasture. Rhudi is seven months old now so hopefully he will get interested in the girls soon. So fare all they are interested in is quarreling over food! :-)

Johann, our new KRK, seven month old ram, is now with our other ewes- Amelia, Celia, Rosalind, and Rue. I also have our little Boer buckling in there that I'm trying to sell. They have the nicest pasture and two mangers...one in the creep feeder and one in the barn. Unfortunately Johann won't stand up to the ewes yet so he just sat in the paddock balling. He'll get over it. He's just a bit spoiled...
Thank you to the ewes ingenuity the creep feeder is not accessible to all parties. They've broken of three of the mettle bars! And then they took out the wood gate type thing and we found it in the pasture. They are so big and will do anything for more alfalfa!

All my homegrown ewes know the ropes, but Celia and Rosalind are quite the trouble makers. (This is were the rodeo part comes in.) It took quite a bit of shuffling and time to get the ewes and last lambs separated. I finally got all the little ones in an inside pen...now all I needed to do is put all the ewes back were they came from. First Celia took them all speeding up the gravel hill. After a lot of sneaking I was able to bring them back, but this time they headed the other direction on our road...towards the highway!!! For a moment I thought they really were going to go strait onto it, but they hesitated we finally got them back...only for them to get around the trailer and jump over the hitch between the trailer and the van!!! AND THEN go charging towards the highway again! We finally got them back and into their pen. They should be tired today. We really need to fence in our barn. :-P

I'll be posting some pictures on Wednesday...
Thanks for reading,
Bethany

3 comments:

An English Shepherd said...

sounds like a really busy time of the year for you.

Wizz :-)

Johanna said...

Wowsers.
Sounds fun and familiar. ;-)

Anonymous said...

Not quite cooperating, where they? :)