Missing Willow Farm

You need to keep them healthy.   Since they graze where they poop, parasitic worms are always a concern.  We’ve found some of our animals are more susceptible to worms than others.   Since we don’t want to over-medicate them, we periodically check them for anemia, which is a symptom of parasites.  An easy way to do this is to check the conjunctiva around their eyes, which is bright pink to red in a healthy animal.  Our goats have gotten used to this, the sheep not so much.    We’ve tried a bunch of different dewormers, the most common types come in liquid form.  How do you get an animal to take a teaspoon of medicine you ask?  You squirt it down their throats with a special metal syringe that they can chomp on without breaking.   That’s an action shot of Savannah unhappily taking her medicine.  Our goats pretty much line up for their medicine.  The sheep require wrangling.

Tis the season for pumpkin raisin spice cake, milk & dark chocolate cake, cherry filled almond cake…. yum!   The tiny pumpkin decorations are made from gum paste.  They’re edible but cloyingly sweet.  Those chocolate leaves were a pain.  That project consisted of painting many layers of melted chocolate on maple leaves from our front yard.  These are my 2008 & 2009 cake entries for our county fair.   Every one of them earned a ribbon and were delicious.  Well, except for the pumpkin ones.  No one in my house will eat pumpkin so I only bake half a cake.  The judging is for presentation only so I double the amounts of spices the recipe calls for.  They smell heavenly but are I’m sure inedible.  That pumpkin cake always turns heads when we drop it off at the fair, the scent arrives before the cake does!  We always have a ‘fair turn in day’ dessert party with friends where the other cake halves and fudge and cookies get shared.  It’s an annual event that everyone looks forward to.

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!

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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!

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  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!

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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!