I felt grateful for a morning full of sunshine this morning. We’re well past our first frost and we know that snow is right around the corner, so it wasn’t surprising to step out to 35F temperatures and a crisp wind. I usually get started by filling the water tank in the bucket of theContinue reading “Running of the Rams”
Tag Archives: vermont sheep farm
A World Without Festivals
We just got news that DCSWF, commonly known as Rhinebeck, will be cancelled for 2020. Clearly, this decision makes sense: Dutchess County has a high caseload of Covid-19, and a festival where 60,000 attendees walk around in close quarters could be an invitation for disaster. From a vendor perspective, Rhinebeck is an expensive and time-consumingContinue reading “A World Without Festivals”
Gratitude
At 7pm Sunday night, I rolled in to our lumpy driveway after a two hour drive home from the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. The frustrated lambs in the passenger area of the truck murbled slightly as I directed the vehicle down the farm field road and out to pasture. I turned off the fence,Continue reading “Gratitude”
How Haying Works
By request, here’s a basic primer on how haying works! First, some definitions: Hay is grass and grass stems that animals eat. It’s cut from fields that could also serve as pasture. Correctly made, hay provides most or all of the nutrients an animal needs to survive the winter. The best hay is greenish inContinue reading “How Haying Works”
Logging On
Today, the loggers came to harvest some cedar, spruce, pine and poplar from our woods. We went down the hill with our forester to see the loggers working on our land today. Our property finally froze-in, despite being rather wet, so they were able to get started yesterday. We watched the feller-buncher for a littleContinue reading “Logging On”
Getting Through Lambing
Twenty of our thirty-three ewes have lambed so far at Cloverworks Farm. Thirty eight lambs have been born, with thirty six surviving. One loss was a little BFL ewe lamb who failed to nurse overnight with her mother. Another was 1627’s lamb, whom we had indoors and who just faded away, likely from pneumonia. ThoughContinue reading “Getting Through Lambing”
End of the Summer
The ram lambs left on the 12th of the month, so the flock is down to the girls all dining in the Donkey Pasture, and the boys, banished to mow the lawn and subsist on shrubs in the periphery of the fields. The guys were quite large when they left, and I’m lookingContinue reading “End of the Summer”