Spare Sheep

We have a spare sheep today. A Rocky Mountain big horn ram. A young one by the look of the horns. He was in the grazing pen with our sheep out in the yard. We scooted ours back into the corrals and took down the fencing. That's the end of the grazing the front lawn for a while I guess.

The guard dogs do not like him and bark at him a lot. They ignore deer so I'm not sure why they think he is a threat.

Snow on Mt. Lamborn & Chicken Arrival Day

6 June and there was fresh snow on Mt. Lamborn this morning. At least this time I got a picture. Over the last day we've gotten almost half an inch of rain and the Grand Mesa got 4 inches of fresh snow. The rains will be really good for establishing our pastures.



Today was also chicken arrival day. We raise some chicks each year. Usually we get both meat broilers and some laying hens but this year we decided to just raise one batch of meat birds. Our hens from last years chicks are doing well and should last through another winter. We buy our chicks from Ideal Hatchery in Texas. The baby chicks are packaged and sent via the post office. We get a call from them early in the morning as soon as the truck arrives with the mail.

We went to town, knock at the post office back door and get our box of chicks. Then home to the already prepared brooder. I now dip each chicks beak in the water as I take them out and count them. We ordered 100 and Ideal shipped 104. That's to cover any early losses. The chicks are looking bright and alert and doing well. I think waiting until later in the year is a good idea.

I know that all hatcheries say not to use newspaper for baby chicks because it can cause problems with their legs. But their suggestion, burlap, is not available locally. We used to be able to get some feed in burlap sacks but now it's all in paper bags. So I use newspaper and try to get them off and on to shavings as soon as I am sure they are eating well and know what the food is.

The red broilers we get grow a bit more slowly than commercial white broilers but they are much more active foragers. Their color also makes them less of a target for the hawks and eagles. We expect these birds to be at slaughter size the end of August.

The Woolevator

The new shop second story is a long ways up there. When we stored wool in the old Red Barn loft you could toss the wool boxes up and the person in the loft could catch them. But the new shop is much too tall for that. While going up and down the stairs may be good exercise, when there are something like 100 fleeces to move that's a lot of trips even if you carry several at once. West welded up the crane, we added an engine hoist and Ken built a wooden platform to hold the boxes.

So we had a wool elevator made. Here it is being installed. The idea is that you put the boxes on the platform and use the hoist to haul them up. When it's not in use the crane assembly can swing back into the shop upper story and you can close the doors.
Today Ken and I moved all of the 2008 fleeces out of the hay barn an used the woolevator to get them up to the second floor of the new shop.





It worked really well and was easy to do. Once the fleeces are up there my plan is to set up the skirting table and do final skirting and preparation for sale upstairs. I do a preliminary skirting as we are shearing but this is the final more detailed skirting.


There's plenty of room to store the unskirted fleeces, the skirted and packaged for sale fleeces and still put in all the looms and have space to hold fiber guild meetings or do other craft work. I can't wait for the final bits to be done.