Missing Willow Farm

We’ve had Zeus up by the house for a few days to give him a little TLC after an injury.  He’s been staying in Jenna’s kennel.  We found him curled up inside her Canine Condo.  Did he back into there??  We thought we’d have to take the top off and lift all 100 lbs. of him out of there but he managed to wiggle himself out.   I wish I’d seen him go in!

We have a visitor to our farm, a texel ram named 802.  Well, theoretically he’s numbered 802.  That’s what you have to do when you have hundreds of sheep.  We have nine.  Ours have names.  We traded honey from our bees for his services for a few months.  He’s very tame and gentle which is great because he’s a very large boy.  Our ewes are very excited about his visit, and they compete for his attention.  It seems everyone in sheep-land is happy on our farm!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

After Jenna helps us with feeding our sheep in the evening, she plops into the Mule waiting for us to tidy up and drive her back to the house.   She’s not lazy, she just loves to go for a ride.   We have to park the Mule outside the pasture or the goats take the keys.  Seriously.

I like the show and I won a contest!  The makers of Tru Blood held a cocktail recipe contest and I got second place.   It’s basically my holiday Red Rooster recipe (a cranberry juice, frozen OJ and vodka slushy) with a bottle of Tru Blood added in.  I’ve never tried it, but since it’s blood orange soda it sounded like it would go pretty well in a Red Rooster.  I can try it now if I want because they sent me a four pack of O Negative, a cool bottle opener, the 2010 True Blood posters and a Barbie sized T-shirt… It was cute and all, had the Fangtasia logo and everything but was a teeny bopper’s small.  I emailed and asked if I could exchange it as there isn’t anyone in my family who could wear the one they sent.  A replacement is thankfully on it’s way!   I encourage you to try the recipe, minus the Tru Blood, cuz a Red Rooster totally rocks!

Tru Blood Cocktail Contest Winners Announced!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

  We harvested some more sweet potatoes.  They are planted in the spring as tiny plants called ‘slips’.  They grow into vines that have run out of their raised bed.   Some of these potatoes are bursting out of the soil.  They are pretty prolific, all of these were from a single plant.  Too bad I’m the only one in the family that will eat them!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

To plant garlic.  At least around here it is, we’re gardening zone 7.  I encourage you to try it, too!  Go into your kitchen (or run to WalMart) and grab a head of garlic.  Break it into individual cloves.  Don’t worry about peeling them.  Plant them pointy end up at a depth of twice the length of the clove.  If your clove is 1 inch long, plant it 2 inches deep.  Water them in, then next June/July you’ll be able to harvest your own heads of garlic.

Xena is the alpha dog of our pack.  She’s a great pyrenees and is a good 50 pounds lighter than our karakachans but bosses them and her brother Zeus around.  She was very jealous of our border collie Jenna at first and used to give her the stink eye any time Jenna came near her.  Xena even went after her a few times and got an ass whoopin for it!  They pretty much ignore each other now, although Xena delights in chasing Jenna when they’re on opposite sides of the pasture fence.  Although that is less than desireable behavior, we tolerate it (because we can’t get her to stop….).

Zeus and his sister Xena make up half of our livestock guardian force.  He’s a great pyrenees who came from the same Tennessee Fainting Goat farm that our Karakachans came from.  He’s got a thyroid problem that keeps him from being as fast as I’m sure he once was but that doesn’t keep him from doing his job.  He’s the sentry and his sister Xena is the muscle.  They make an awesome pair.  We’ve had them for 3 years now.  We drove 4.5 hours to pick them up in Tennessee.  When we got them home we put them up in our small barn, behind a metal barricade.  Less than an our later, our first three sheep were delivered by our friend C, who brought one of his champion herding dogs with him.  C let the sheep out of the trailer and then asked his herding dog to move them into our pasture.  Zeus and Xena heard the sheep and came bounding out of the barn and before we could blink, the champion herding dog was pinned under the sheep trailer.  My first thought was great… our dogs that we’ve owned for a few hours just killed an incredibly expensive border collie.  Thankfully, he wasn’t injured and C was extremely nice about it.  He told us we had some great guardian dogs, and he was right!

We have our texel sheep shorn in the Feb/March timeframe.  We trailer them over to a neighbor’s farm for sheering day.  Our friends have a few hundred sheep, and hire a shearing team from Blacksburg, VA to come for the day.  We put our sheep up in the barn overnight to keep them warm before the trip over.  It helps get their lanolin flowing and makes the job easier.  We got between four and almost ten pounds of fleece per sheep this year.  If you are curious about what texel fleece looks like as yarn (I was), here’s a local fiber artist who was at shearing day with us last year.  She blogged about spinning it.  It’s pretty!  http://feelinfibers.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-fleece-what-is-it.html

FiFi (Sophia) and her brother Milos spent their first four years guarding a few hundred Tennessee Fainting Goats before they came home to watch over our small flock and herd.  They didn’t get a lot of attention, being part of such a large operation.   Now that they’re our dogs, they get lots of love and attention.  I decided to try to teach them ‘sit’.  It took FiFi about a day to catch on.  Milos is still  working on it.  FiFi now runs up to me and sits when she sees me, hoping I have a biscuit in my pocket.  I usually do.  She’s 140 pounds of adorable.