12 June 2008

Sheep and Chickens

The spare sheep has settled right in. He hardly even moves now when we go outside. He is eating the hay for the horses and donkey and we've had to move sheep away from where he is. I sure wish he'd head on out to somewhere else.
The new batch of chickens is growing well too. They are now off the main newspaper litter and on pine shavings. We still put the food and water on paper. Four have died but the rest are doing well.
Meanwhile it's time to put the adult rams and the ram lambs together into one big ram bunch. We sorted out one old ram who will go to slaughter at the end of this month and 2 who are sold and will travel together to their new place in a couple of weeks. The rest of the rams, all 27 of them, are now crammed in together in the mixing pen. We start out with a bunch of hay bales in the pen and the feeders full. It's small enough that if they all lay down at once they cover the floor with sheep. The idea is not to let them get a big enough space to be able to run and bash each other too much. By the time the hay bales are gone they are getting better. We slowly open up the pen giving them more and more space until in a couple of weeks they are now one big ram bunch. It takes a while to get them to sort out who's boss but this has worked for us for several years and seems to be the best way to integrate the youngsters with the old boys.
The ewes, lambs and replacement ewes are now all in one bunch grazing. Pastures are doing well and the lambs are growing well. We should be getting 30 days weights this week and we'll see how they are doing then but just looking at them most are looking very good.

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