fairwether farm
I have continued this blog on a second website. Please click on the link below to see the new site. You may need to re-follow me on the new blog.
https://silvakurlscontinues.wordpress.com/
If you do not wish to continue following my blog; I hope you have enjoyed your visit here.
Good luck with your future reading.
Hi everyone… if you have found some photos missing recently it is because I am having to reconstruct this website. I have no more gigs to put up photos and since this blog is built on photos as well as stories I am contemplating my next step…
Bare with me while I undergo some thinking processes to see what the best solution is…
thank you for reading my blog and hopefully we will be back chatting again soon.
We are now officially in spring-summer mode as we go into our long weekend from work… “hahaha” I say, “a farmer’s work is never done!” but I decided since it was a beautiful day today, I would take Leigh out for a joy ride in the merc… since she has had her roof fixed and we can now put the top down.
It was a lovely drive down to a country diner to have lunch – pizza and drink – then on to the beach on the east coast in Amberley (about 1hour away). Home via the east coast and back (in a big circle) to our home at the foot of the mountains, (took us about 4 hours round trip).
On another note… Ema – our lamb is now 1 month and 1 week and few days old, she is now in the paddock 24/7 and sleeps with the other lambs/mamas and wethers. She still has her milk from a bottle 4 times a day, with the last feed at night 10pm/11pm given by Leigh.
She is still feisty and will get out of the paddock any chance she can, and so we have spent quite a bit of time putting up netting around the house fence to keep her in. It’s only a matter of time until she gets too big to fit through the fence wire, but in the mean time she is constantly trying to get out if she hears our voices.
Nico is a little sad today… his bested friend Louie is no longer around… Nico has been looking for him all day, and he has been meowing at us when he comes inside. Unfortunately our neighbour rang to say that Louie had been run over on the road outside their house in the late evening, so now we have a sad memory of Louie.
Bye from us all at Fairwether farm …
Why is it so hard to ‘do the right thing’? I am having no end of ‘mind trouble’ with getting Ema to stay out in the paddock by herself. Let me explain … (might help me too)
Ema doesn’t have any other sheep that she is bonded to (yet), and so I am surrogate mama, that I understand, and as a mama must let the Ema be a sheep, but, and this is my issue, I see that because she hasn’t bonded with any other sheep, she is alone in the paddock a lot of the time. Yes she feeds with them, plays with the other lambs (sometimes) but when it comes to just sitting around and chewing the cud (which is up to 50% of the time) she has no-one to sit with. The other lambs sit with their mamas, or with other lambs (ie their twin).
So this is my dilemma, do I let Ema ‘fend’ for herself and in time hopefully will bond with the others (if I am not in the paddock) or sit with her sometimes when the flock are at their rest? The problem with the second option is that she is staying by me, and not going off with the other sheep even if I walk around with them … she doesn’t seem to want to investigate by herself. At this point Ema is only just on 4 weeks old; the oldest lambs are now nearly 8 weeks old and are starting to be weaned (by mama sheep) and are also going off by themselves so I guess I have answered my question, that she is still young and needs time.
I know, “Ema is only a sheep” (you say) but at this point I have invested a lot of time and effort into keeping her well, now I would like her to find her place in the flock, but how to do that and not be a ‘helicopter parent’ is my problem. I do leave her by herself for up to 3-4 hours but there comes a point in the day when she continues to baa because she’s looking for company. So I go and sit with her, she climbs into my lap and has cuddles, and then when I walk away she continues to follow me. Leigh on the other hand, seems to not have the same problem, she comes and goes where and when she likes with him. I will probably have to ask Leigh to do more paddock time with Ema to ‘wean’ her off my dependence.
Well that makes sense to me, but doing it is not as easy, but this makes me feel a little better having written it down. I hope you understand the nature of this ‘story’ and I’m sure you will understand: 1) if you have ever had baby pets, 2) if you have hand reared any animals and 3) it’s a bit like having kids just before they leave home…
Good chatting to you all again… see you all soon.
I am not saying here that this is the correct or right way to bring up a lamb in a house but it is what we are doing in our situation.
The reason I have decided to write about our highs and lows is because there are lots of pitfalls and advice, but I found a lot of it to be ‘not quite enough’ or ‘that’s not our situation’. I guess what I’m saying is, common sense and the gut feeling is what is working for us along side advice from friends and vets who have been through this.
As you all know, it started with me finding a ewe lamb sitting beside our wether ‘Sugar’ who passed away during the storm of Tuesday last week. How the lamb got to be there is a guess on my part; either her mother rejected her at the outset (which I sort of disregard because the lamb was dry from afterbirth) or (more likely) that the mother ran off to the barn at the start of the storm – with one lamb but not realising she had two. The storm was very fast, wet, cold and sudden and was over in an hour.
When I found the lamb, I immediately tried to return it to its mum, but as I now realise, the lamb (Ema) would have had; 1) my scent – from picking her up and 2) probably Sugar’s scent from Ema lying next to him for about an hour. So it is not surprising that Ema was rejected. I did try to wrap Ema in the wool from mum (Nickel) but I think it was too late and after the fact.
Anyway from that time on I realised that Ema was going to be a house-raised lamb. From the first initial bottle of colostrum both Leigh and I realised that we were now in for the long haul. Bottles to be washed, sterilised and feeds to be done at regular intervals through out the next XXX days until she is weaned.
You will also have read about Ema’s pneumonia (here), but what I have since learnt is that this could have been caused in several ways. 1) from the storm, 2) from her lying next to “Sugar” who died of pneumonia, or 3) from drinking from the bottle too fast and milk getting into her lungs (a very common result for bottle fed lambs). Since the latter was something that I took on very seriously, we changed the way we feed Ema; we use a teat with a very small hole, give her lots of breaks in her drinking (to simulate mama) and to hold the bottle so that Ema has to kneel to drink (her back is arched). Ema has recovered from the pneumonia and the cough that she had so we hope we are on the right track with her feeding process.
I also wanted to replicate Ema’s natural environment as much as possible, so on the first day we set up our house garage with a surround of hay and peastraw and hay on the ground to soak up ‘stuff’ (I didn’t want to use ‘nappies’) and a bean chair for ‘human’ to sit in with Ema. That worked well as Ema didn’t move much from the human’s side (Leigh or me). After that it was necessary to think long term as to how we would keep her in the garage and confined so we brought in the hurdles (movable and stable fencing) and put them up in the garage to make a pen. This is still working, and we are now finding that Ema has associated the ‘pen’ to her home. She is quite happy to stay in the pen even if we are not there with her; she settles down without the baa-ing if she is fed and tired.
The other part that we/I am doing (because Ema has imprinted that I am Mama) is to take her out to the paddock when I feed the flock sheep nuts in the morning and in the evening. I have also just sat in the paddock with Ema and read my book or taken photos. Ema has started to venture over to the flock and interact with the lambs and the mothers. Of course the mamas push her aside but she is a courageous little girl and will go back time and again to ‘talk’ with the other sheep.
I am very impressed with her independence in that she goes off by herself to explore the paddock, mingle with the other lambs and generally play. I haven’t left her by herself yet because I am worried about the ‘head-butting’ of the mamas. Ema is prepared to stand her ground though and it wont be long before she is big enough to fend off the butting.
The feeds are now down to four per day and she is taking approximately 300 ml of milk at a time.
This is our routine for now; it won’t be long before this is all over and I/we will look back on this as a part of our farm life. Even if things still go wrong I know that I have given Ema the best chance and now it is up to ‘nature’.
Nice chatting with you even if it is one sided.
Hope you enjoy the blogs… see you all again soon. Maybe Nico will put his stamp on this ‘lambing’ business.
If I said that last week was a joy and pain, you will understand what I mean if you have been following my stories. Today I’d like to tell you a little of my personal journey thus far …
I care very deeply about my family, friends, animals in my family and, in fact, most living things. I also have this ability to ‘deal with a crisis’ at the time, but heaven help me if I don’t stop and take stock a few days later because sooner or later I’ll reach the point that I have a ‘crash’.
Well that crash happened last night. I’d been on an adrenalin high for about a week (brought on by the lamb Ema, Sugar dying, and then yesterday thinking one of the mums had an infection in her udder). Just as well I have a great husband in Leigh who talked me through it and I am now back to my normal self. This type of thing has only happened a few times in my life but one I have found does make me stronger (when I come out the other end).
I’m telling you my story simply because living on our farm and raising our flock isn’t all ‘wonderful and beautiful’. Having the responsibility to ensure that we take the ‘best’ possible care of our animals, young and old, sick and well, does also take a toll on our mental wellbeing sometimes.
I’d like to think I’m a pragmatist and I do understand about life and death on a farm, but sometimes I tend to make it too personal for me … but that’s my love of life in all things.
It is 6.20am on a beautiful Sunday morning, Ema has had her first big feed (250mls) of milk and is now going onto four feeds a day instead of the 4 hourly feeds, so she has feeds at 6am, 12pm, 6pm and 12am. She has had her injection of antibiotics and pain relief (I gave last night) and is bouncing around like a ‘jack in the box’.
I will now start sitting with her (during the fine days) in the paddock where she can mingle with the other lambs so that she is known and accepted by the flock. She will still stay in her pen in the garage at night for a long while yet, probably until she’s weaned.
Oh, by the way, the picture on the home page is of Nickel. If you are wondering why I’ve changed the picture on the home page, please go to the ‘memorial’ page here.
Nice to chat again … see you all soon.
Oh dear our poor wee Ema … she’s had a rough start to life. She’s hanging in there and is ok this morning, be it that she (and we) had a rough night.
At the 4pm feed yesterday she didn’t drink all her bottle, now that is nothing to worry about, but when the 8pm feed came around she wouldn’t drink at all. Mama Clare was going to have an early night (I know 8pm but remember I do the 4am feed), anyway I got up and had a really good look at her, tried her again but nothing … then I noticed that she was having trouble breathing and she was coughing these little coughs. Leigh and I decided to call the vet as we were worried … and she deserves a chance.
A emergency vet (a lovely lady from Christchurch) came out (took an hour) and gave Ema the once over and declared that Ema had pneumonia. Oh no, not another sheep… was my comment and relayed what had happened to ‘Sugar’ and how Ema came to be found after the storm (read a previous post).
Ema was given antibiotics, antihistamine, pain killer and hopefully she will recover ok. She’s on ‘bedrest’ for today and will have a booster shot on Saturday at our regular vets.
She had a reasonable feed at the 12am feed – well little over half and again the same at the 4am feed but by the 8am feed she was up and running around the pen and drank the whole 150ml of milk. Well done Ema … you are looking much better.
Oh and by the way, we had snow last night too, and all the flock are present, correct, and no more new births yesterday … huzzah!!!!
Day 2 of our hand feeding Ema – the twin girl that was born in the storm Tuesday. Was it only two days ago? Feels like a week!
We have been feeding Ema colostrum up till today, now we’ve started on the milk replacement. She has six feeds a day, and our day starts at 4pm, so 4pm, 8pm, 12am, 4am, 8am, 12pm. I have elected to do most of the day feeding (unless I have to go out in the car) and Leigh does the night feeding at 12am, I do the 4am.
Ema is adapting well to our life (as different from the flock). Ema lives in our house garage inside an area which has straw and hay and a bean bag (for Mama Clare to sit on).
We intend to keep taking Ema out to the flock twice a day (morning and afternoon) when we feed the flock sheep nuts, that way Ema gets to see the other lambs, interacts with the flock and she still bonds with the flock (well that’s the theory).
We have now birthed six of the seven ewes and have: six boys and three girls.
Aug. 16th # 2 Lumpy – twin boys
Aug. 28th #4 Suzie – twin boys
Sep. 13 #8 Wire – twin boys (ooo not very happy at this point, thinking all those boys)
Sep. 14 #10 Chocolate – twins – 1 (d at birth) 1 girl (at last a girl)
Sep. 15 #9 Nickel – twins girls (Ema – rejected by mum) but mum looking after girl 2.
Still waiting for $6 – Salt and #7 Pepper.
I hope you are all enjoying the blog … it is a sad and happy time farming. One that I know a lot of you will understand.
Cheers for now…
What a day this has been … a happy and a sad day. We had more lambs born today just before a storm hit our block. The mother “#9 Nickel had twins born outside in the shelter belt, she obviously cleaned them and gave them a feed, but when the storm hit she must have taken off for the barn with only one of her babies.
An hour later I went out to check on them all because I heard a lamb bleating; only to find the lamb lying next to a sheep, not Nickel it was Sugar the wether but he must have died in the storm. Oh… so sad… we tried all we could to save him. Anyway I picked up the lamb and took her to her mum, but because the lamb smelt probably of Sugar, Nickel rejected the lamb (head butting it when it tried to feed). So now we have to bottle feed the wee one, AND it’s a girl, and at this point I think the only girl out of the lot!
Oh such a shame but we will try to keep her going, she is in our house garage with straw, her mother’s wool shorn last month and a hot water bottle. She’s had a feed of milk from a bottle and is sleeping at present. It’s going to be a long……night as she will need feeding every 4 hours.
This is a reflective day for me today … I remember … this month is hard for my friends and acquaintances everywhere.
September is hard for Canterbury too as we remember our own.
I woke up this morning to more snow which is starting to fall on the ground. Snow always seems so peaceful when it falls and covers the ground like a protective blanket. I fed the sheep in the barn this morning, nuts as usual.
Sugar #1 wether is looking a little better today and I am very pleased to say that I managed to inject him with the antihistamine that will also improve his health.
Take care my friends … we will get through this and anything else that life has to throw our way … we are stronger with friends …
Some local shots from my camera
Remember I mentioned that one of our wethers was unwell last post?
We decided to ask the vet to come out and look at this boy as he was still not eating as normal and was going off by himself and not staying with the flock. Unfortunately because of the weather … haha no pun intended, (the wind was blowing from the north again which makes everyone, sheep and humans, feisty and bad tempered) we had the ‘devil’s own job’ to get the sheep to go into the stock yard. With no dog and the girls all ‘up in the air’ with their lambs I didn’t want to upset them too much either and so we didn’t manage to get them into the yards for the vet to look at the unwell boy.
The vet had a look at him in the paddock and believed that it was a similar illness to what he had before and after a good discussion we decided to watch him and try and get a dose of antihistamine into him … well that is an interesting exercise in patience and to date we are still trying to catch him to give that to him.
I don’t know how many of you are farmers, or have flock animals, but it is a known fact that animals that live in groups/flocks etc do not like to let on that they are ill; they do everything possible to appear well or normal “I’m ok, I’m ok, I’m ok I’m dead”. I understand the logic but it is frustrating for the farmer/shepherd who is concerned for the animals and wants to help them.
When Sugar #1 is on form he is a real ‘honey’ to work with but at the moment he is being a right pain in the b..tt. Animals… you gota love em… but they are frustrating too.
Hopefully we will get the injection into him tomorrow … watch this space and we’ll update you on his progress.
This month has seemed very long … and it’s only the 9th … that’s because we are still waiting for our ewes to produce their lambs.
We have also found that one of our wethers – Sugar #1 is not well again. It seems that when we get nor’west winds he gets a bout of pneumonia and why that is, we don’t know yet. We are having the vet look at him today, and we are concerned about a seeming unusual lopsidedness to his abdomen so it’s not looking good for our boy. I know… he’s only a sheep and a wether but I worry about all our sheep – I take my role as shepherd very seriously. Having said that… I also know (although this is hard) that we can not keep all the sheep we bred as we will be overrun and that is no good for our pasture or our breeding programme. In order to keep the best of the bred I will have to sell on the new ram lambs and wethers. The good news is that I have found someone wanting a ram lamb for their new flock, so one little boy will have a good life. I am hoping I get more interest in some others.
Spring is definitely making us feel better and the lambs we do have are now old enough to run around together – get into mischief and generally make a nuisance of themselves with the other ‘nearly mums’. Nico is also making himself known to the lambs, and of course he too is getting into mischief …
Well that’s all for now… see you all again soon.
What an interesting start to spring… we are having our first real snow dump for 2020.
Luckily the new lambs are now old enough to cope (2 are 2 weeks and other 2 are 4 days old) so they won’t have too much trouble with the ‘white stuff’. They have a barn anyway so that will keep them warm.
I gave them sheep nuts and hay this morning so they will be ok. Hopefully no gals will decide that today is the day to give birth (we have 5 more mamas to go).
Nico has asked me to post for him… he said he’s too cold n wet to do anything but sit by the heater now…
Well I’m off to get breakfast and a hot coffee… cheers to you all….
Hi everyone, well now that shearing is finished and I have tidied and cleaned up the wool it is now ready for sale.
If anyone would like to visit us in Springfield, Canterbury to talk fleece either in the raw or carded, please contact me and we will arrange a viewing or send samples to you.
The price of the fleece depends on the quantity and whether you want the fleece in the raw (as is) or whether you want it ready for spinning (washed, carded, gilled) in which case the price will vary. You will also be given information on the individual animal as part of my ‘Living flock’ process.
At this point I do not have enough spun wool to offer for sale unfortunately.
Well I know… all new ‘parents’ think their kids are the greatest… and shepherds’ are no exception, they think their ‘lambs’ are the best and cutest…but just look at this… I just think that the combination of the ‘shepherd’s cat, Nico and the lambs is just too cute not to take photos of… and that Mama Lumpy #2 is the best mum for allowing Nico to ‘talk to her babies.
We are really excited to see that we now have three generations of Gotland Pelt sheep on our farm. Lumpy birthed twins today at 12.15 pm. At this point I don’t know if they are girls or boys but they are both doing well and mamma let me get up close at 4.00 pm feeding time with nuts.So Lumpy #2 is the daughter of Pepper, one of the foundation ewes.
These lambs were breed from a fellow Gotland Pelt breeder here in Canterbury, and the ram was an excellent silver so we have hopes of some good fleece from the lambs.
We will let them bond with the flock and look at them again tomorrow. All looks positive at this point.
The other 6 girls are waiting for their babies now…
The shearing is finished and so I spent the next four days looking over the ten fleece to get rid of vegetable matter and short locks… and of course clean up any ‘dirty’ wool.
Luckily I recently purchased a sorting table which was very useful in laying out the fleece and then sorting for matter. I am not a professional sorter by any means, but it is cleaner and tidier than doing nothing.
The fleeces are dated and individually named from each sheep so we can identify each fleece.
The fleece below is the first that I wanted to trial for spinning in the raw (unwashed). The sheep this is from is Number 3, Bob. You may know him because I have talked about him a lot; he is the throw-back to the Gute. He is much taller than the other sheep, has always had a lighter fleece than any of the others, and did have a shadow of horns for a while.
His fleece is lighter this year than last year, see below for 2019 fleece in comparison to this year.
The difference in the colours from year to year are very interesting as I thought that the wool would get darker as the sheep aged, but this is not the case here.
I will be back with more information on the fleece later….
We are waiting for our first lambs…. which are due any day.
The flock are now shorn and I have my work cut out in cleaning and preparing the fleece for sale and for me to spin.
We have a very good (and have to say patient) shearer who looks after our shearing twice a year. The gotties fleece tends to felt very easily if left too long on the sheep so they are being shorn every 8 to 9 months.
Getting them into the yard can be very tricky but thank goodness we have 2 good yards so if we only get a few in first, then we transfer them to the other yard and open the yard gate, put a few nuts on the ground and usually the others will come into the yard on their own. We tend to entice the flock with nuts rather than ‘drive’ them into the yards. I have a very capable husband who is very handy at driving the flock into the yards… sometimes I get a little impatient with them…but he manages to entice them.
The flock are being shorn now because the ‘girls’ are due to lamb in about 2 weeks time. This means that they will be ‘clean’ and have nice free teats for the lambs.
The next part of this process is for me to sort and clean the fleece of vegetable matter and take out the short-end parts of the clip, then I will label the boxes with the name, number and year of shearing.
I have started the sorting process, and will keep 3 or 4 out of the 10 fleeces for my own use, whether I do the whole process myself or get some spun up by commercial spinning is yet to be decided.
Next time I will have photos of the sorted fleeces ready for spinning, washing or selling.
So it seems that we are going to have another little girl added to our family (not me haha). I have decided to spin and knit up some alpaca wool that I swapped for some of my Gotland Pelt sheep wool. The alpaca is great for baby garments as it is soft and calming on baby skin.
The fleece I have started is a cream, which I did think might take a dyeing quite well, but at this point I will just knit it up as a jersey and experiment with dyeing on the next spin I do with this fleece.
The fleece (wool) is very soft but it does not have much elasticity so I did think of blending another ‘sheep’ wool in with the Alpaca but in this instance I have decided to do a straight 100% Alpaca and see how the garment turns out. The next spin I do with the fleece may include some other wool, and I would like to see how the Gotland and Alpaca work together as well.
If you do not know these animals, I have included a photo below (not one of my photos).
Over the next week or so I will post the finished garment…. in the mean time we have our own flock to shear today…so I will also be posting photos on the shear…fleeces…and other interesting events.
Bye for now…
It has been a while since I have written … Nico seems to be taking over this farm website.
We have had a quiet time recently with winter there has only been the odd day where we have done any farm work although the flock always get breakfast of nuts, and hay when the frost is on the ground, that is standard practice here now.
Last weekend was the end of school holidays so we had the grandkids out to stay for the night. Tia is 12 years old and loves to visit the farm, Piera is 5 years old and it is the first time she’s stayed overnight. We had a nice fire in the firebox at night.
Pizza for dinner and in the morning the girls were very helpful feeding out the nuts and hay to the sheep.
On the Sunday we stopped at the Springfield park which has the ‘famous Donut’ and the girls played before they went home to Christchurch.
We are preparing for shearing, hopefully next week, as the flock are now well due and I am worried that they will drop their lambs early in August. We have purchased a sorting table to aid our fleece cleaning process. This year my aim is to sort all the fleeces either on the same day or the day after. It is a process which should help me sell the fleeces in a better condition than previous years. Although I don’t know a lot about this process the internet has been very helpful, so with the aid of the shearer (who is super knowledgeable) I know we will manage to get some beautiful fleeces for sale soon.
The other thing that we have purchased for the lambing season is a set of hurdles. These are gate-like structures that can go up inside the barn if any of the mothers or lambs are in trouble. They hook together to form a square, or you can put them up inside the barn using the barn walls to make two square holding pens. The other purchases will be a ‘nursery basket’ with things that I might need when lambing, my list is simple: gloves, scissors, iodine, feeding equipment, towels and such for difficult lambing. I am hopeful though, that being Gotlands’ they will not require any special handling.
Bye for now… next time will be shearing photos and lessons learnt…
I thought it was time to tell Nico to go outside. He’s spending far too much time in front of the computer and it is my turn to tell you all about a typical day for us.
I don’t know if you know the saying, “going to the dairy to get milk”. It is a common saying in New Zealand and possibly some other countries, and it means that you go down to the local shop (in the village or town) to buy your extra daily supplies like milk, eggs etc prior to a main grocery shopping expedition.
In our case “going to the dairy” has a slightly different meaning. It literally means going to a farm and buying our milk straight from the farmer and their cows. There are certain farms in New Zealand that are allowed to sell milk directly to customers but of course, there are strict health and hygiene regulations that the farmer must comply with in order to sell his milk, there must be strict adherence to hygiene for the cows, the milk must be kept at a specific temperature and the bottles must be sterilised and kept in a chiller, as is the milk.
I have been drinking this milk for over five years now and have not had the stomach problems I use to have when drinking the pasteurised, A1 milk that you buy in the supermarkets.
Click here to read about this topic.
So of course every few days we have to take a trip to get our milk. Yesterday we decided to take the sports car for a run. It is always a treat to go out in ‘Silk’ as she’s not suitable for most of the ‘farm’ shopping we do. The diary (farm) that we go to is about 1/2 hour drive to a small village called Oxford, the farm is called Caven Farm.
The milk keeps in the fridge for about 1 week and we sterilise the bottles before we visit the farm. It tastes like the old fashioned milk with the cream on the top (lovely on porridge for breakfast).
So that’s our trip to the dairy….take care… Nico will probably be back soon with more antics..
It has been a long autumn and now that we have snow on the mountains, lovely balmy days of sun and frosty mornings we can be forgiven if we think winter is here.
Since we celebrate Christmas in the summer months there is a small tradition (by some people) to have a mid-winter celebration (or sometimes called Yule) here in the southern hemisphere… so Saturday, being the 20th of June we had a mid-winter feast with friends from the West Coast, New Zealand.
We sat outside by the firebox (Nico as well), had cheese, nibbles mulled wine and good conversation then inside for a stew of venison, cranberries and vegetables with fresh bread and salad. Next a mid-winter cake (smaller version of my Christmas cake) and other beverages to add to the celebration. In the morning I cooked up waffles, bacon and fruit for breakfast with coffee and tea.
An all-round great mid-winter festival and one that I will remember.
I is Nico…..this is my story. The human mamma – “Shepherd Clare” told you how I come to live with her and other human.
https://wordpress.com/block-editor/post/thebirchesspringfield.com/1483
Now I will tell you wot I do in my life on the farm as Shepherd’s Cat. My new life started when I got to the farm….oooo lots of new things to see and smells…waz a very happy kitten……I haz lots of toys…
I went outside in the ‘big world’ ….tiz huge…. has forest n (Shepherd says paddocks) grasses n mices n rabbits.
When it rains… or is cold I’z stay indoors and play…humans gives me toys…n boxes..
I start my day by helping Shepherd Clare feed da sheeps…I like to visit with them… they are my woolly friends…I’z good with da sheep…I’z help…
Iz big now and allow outside at night time…though Mamma worries when I don’t come home till late….(7pm)…
Next time I’z tell you about my best friend…Louie he lives next door…
We would like to think the world will go back to ‘normal’ once the virus is eliminated (or contained) but I think we need to be prepared to accept that things will not go back to the way they were. New Zealand has taken a cautious step out of level 3 to level 2; that means we can visit family and friends and perhaps do some of the things that we use to do. For us things will be the same; we socialise with friends and family and have small gatherings in our homes and clubs.
We hear now that in the last week of June we will probably go to level 1. I will look forward to seeing my friends at the Spinning and Weaving club and seeing more of my family in the weeks to come.
The isolation period – March 26 till now (26 May) has been been an interesting time on the farm. The first week we had problems with the septic tank, the second week issues with the electricity, then in the ensuing weeks, the tank had issues again, the oven decided to breakdown – we have had more problems during this time than at any other time.
June and winter…
With the colder weather coming we are gearing up for lambing in the coldest winter month – August. I will pack a birthing kit with the necessary equipment in case we have trouble with any of the mums or lambs; unlike the last lambing season (2018) when I did not have anything and luckily we did not have any particular trouble. I have grown in confidence around the sheep and they accept me in ‘most situations’ but of course birthing brings its own challenges. I intend to create a ‘birthing-holding’ area inside the sheep barn so that the mothers can come and go, and I can contain a mother with their lambs if I need to. Luckily Gotland Pelt sheep are very good at birthing on their own and raising their lambs, but I need to be ready in case things go bad.
I am hoping that we will have a quiet winter period with time to clean up from autumn and prepare for the colder winter months.
I hope you all continue to be safe and well…
The next time we chat it will be winter and all the glory that the season brings…… maybe snow…… definitely frosts……new ideas for spinning…..new plans for the farm…..news on what Nico the ‘shepherd’s cat’ has been doing…
Take care ….
The projects I started during the lock-down have been many and varied; the finger-less gloves, the jersey, and the grey cushion for the house.
I have now completed a dark grey cushion cover in a basket weave. This fleece is from one of the foundation ewes, Chocolate. She was the only dark grey sheep at the time and I liked the soft fleece, so had it spun up commercially back in 2018 and recently decided to knit it up into another cushion cover because of its colour and texture. I am very pleased with the results; it compliments the house very well.
My projects continue to grow – no pun intended – as I have many more 2019 fleece to either sell or knit up into items. Soon it will be time (July 2020) to shear the flock again, pre-lambing, so I need to keep going with the fleece I have in storage.
I intend to try my hand at felting and also dyeing soon, but that will have to wait until I can return to the Spinning and Weaving club in Christchurch.
The other fleece I have started to spin is Bob #3, he has the lightest coloured fleece of all the flock, he is also the largest of the sheep, but a real sweetheart to be around.
As the spinning gets underway I will post a photo of the wool, and the results of the knitting project (as yet not sure what I will do with this wool).
Cheers for now and look forward to chatting with you all again soon….
We had some good news today….. New Zealand is going to our level 2 at the end of this week. For us, this will not mean a great change in our life, as we are isolated by the fact that we live in a remote area away from the city. It takes us 45 minutes to drive into the city of Christchurch, 45 minutes to our local supermarket and 30 minutes to buy our milk from the farmer. We have approximately 300 people living in the settlement of Springfield, Canterbury, and although we have neighbours around us, we do not see them on a daily basis; but they are there if we need them.
Level 2 for most of New Zealand though, means that they will be able to go to the malls, church, shops, movies and cafes etc. For me, I will enjoy getting a hair cut and maybe a coffee or takeaways, other than that nothing much will change for us, as we do the farm stuff anyway on a regular basis and only go out occasionally. I will though, look forward to seeing family and friends again.
This has been an interesting time, and I know a lot of you will have experienced similar things. Last weekend, with the lifting of some restrictions, we went for a drive to the beach (still 45 minutes for us) and took a picnic coffee with us. The people out walking passed by and we talked about the beautiful day, the weather, or other mundane topics, but we all felt a kinship with our common issue. I hope that in the days to come we do not lose that sense of camaraderie. It would be nice to think that we had more sense of community than perhaps we did before.
Of course farm work continues….. the ram, Tuppence, went back to the owners as he (hopefully) has done a good job and we will have lambs in the spring. The flock are settling down again after his stay. It is good to be able to hand feed them all again without worrying about him being the aggressive little ‘boy’ that he had become.
Nico continues to help with the farm, keeping an eye on the sheep and lazing in his bed afterwards as he’s ‘tired’ from all the farm work he has to do, (well checking out the stockyards to make sure there are no mice is hard work, talking to all the sheep to make sure there are none missing is tiring…. no wonder he wants a nap, all that counting makes me tired too).
Take care everyone, and in the days to come, I will show you what else I have been doing on the farm.
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Nico, our Manx kitten, so I thought I’d give you an update on what he’s been doing lately. Nico is now six months old and has adapted well to farm life. He loves to visit the flock every morning – or night – depending on who is feeding them any particular day (I feed them in the morning and Leigh feeds them late afternoon) and since there is plenty of nice grass at present we have gone to feeding them once a day.
So Nico will follow us out to the workshed to help us get the bucket and the nuts; he has to check out the workshed as well, to make sure no mice have appeared since he was last in there. The routine is then go out to the main gate and open it, call the flock by rattling the bucket (which they know is ‘nut time’) and they all come running over to the ‘breakfast bar’ (a piece of grass cut so that the nuts don’t get lost in the long grass).
Nico, as a good shepherd’s cat, either climbs on the fence or squeezes under the fence into the paddock to ‘visit’ with the sheep too. He will go right up to them and hunker down while they have a look at him and sniff him. He is very brave, as they are sooooooo big, but they are also gentle and just nose him.
He loves to walk around the paddock as I check the water troughs, fences, pick up any rubbish blown in from the main road, and generally look at the sheep and give them a scratch and talk with them. This is the time when I look at how the flock are moving, see if any of them are limping, got sores or anything; this has been a routine now for 2 years and it means I can keep on top of any unusual health issues (hopefully) before it gets too bad.
Anyway back to Nico, sometimes he will stay in the paddock for an hour or so, looking for the mice in the long grass (he caught 3 the other day) and then will come back and look for me in the garden or house.
Nico has also ventured out at night……… As a worried parent, I was not happy about this but as a cat, he thought it was his right to go out exploring, so now we let him stay out for a while after dinner. He usually comes inside about an hour after dark and then we shut the cat door for the night. He can’t get out until I get up in the morning and open the flap. I know I am a little paranoid, but we lost Pippin in the night because he crossed over the main road and got hit by a fast car/truck.
Well that’s the adventures of Nico for today………….. come back and visit soon, and I will have more stories to tell…………………………
I was having ‘withdrawal’ symptoms with not having anything to knit since I completed Leigh’s jersey and did a quick pair of fingerless gloves, so, as you do, I jumped onto the internet to see what else I could knit that would be a challenge.
Challenge accepted…. I decided to give this cushion cover a go. I don’t take credit for the idea, this came from Pininterest, but I liked the pattern and so thought I’d try making it myself but without any instructions it was going to be ‘hit and miss’ as to whether it would turn out the same.
On looking at the picture I though that the ribbing started off the sequence, but after knitting it up I have realised that for me the rib could be done last as the edge is very neat and looks like a cast off knit-wise stitch.
Anyway although my finished effort is not quite as big as this one, (wool quantity was an issue) I am happy enough that I will try the pattern again, with more wool this time.
The other issue was that the wool was meant to be triple knit but I only had double knit so I knitted two strands together; next time I would ply both strands before I knitted the item. See how the cable stitches are not close together, I think that the needle size for the wool was wrong.
Bye for now, and any comments on how I could improve this knitted cushion would be welcome.
Continuing on from our time on the coast, https://thebirchesspringfield.com/2020/04/07/who-we-are-who-am-i/
Our discussion turned to ‘What do we want to do for the rest of our lives?’ I decided that I needed a new direction now that full-time employment was no longer necessary and Leigh was happy to go along with my plan to raise sheep, and especially the Gotland Pelt breed.
It took us all year (2017) to find the block we wanted; it had to have good pasture (as the Gotties need free-draining ground), good structure for the farm (high fences for sheep that are escape artists), a good size house that was nicely appointed and well maintained,(Leigh wanted a house, I wanted a farm) and not too far from Christchurch, where extended family live.
Of course there was the discussion ‘why are we buying a farm to retire to instead of buying a nice house in the suburbs’ but as we both grew up on farms, had enjoyed our west coast farming time with the two sheep and because I was interested in learning some new skills (wool spinning, dyeing and crafting) we decided that we were NOT to old to start a new venture.
When we have the opportunity to stop and admire the view from the window, we realise that we made a good decision to move here. I find quiet pleasure in walking around the farm to see the little changes we have made since we shifted here. It might be a new planting structure in the garden, or it might be visiting the sheep on a cold fresh frosty morning to give them some nuts from our hands, whatever it is, I am thankful that we took the risk.
Thank you for reading. I look forward to talking with you again soon.
I started knitting a Guernsey jersey for Leigh back in February and this week managed to finish it off (not quite in time for the birthday celebrations).
I’m very pleased with the result, it quite a heavy jersey but will be good for our cold winters. The wool was professionally carded and spun, but the wool was from one of our foundation ewes, Chocolate.
My other project – which was a very quick one – was to knit myself some fingerless gloves from the wool I spun up myself and dyed.
These only took a couple of hours and here is the pattern if anyone wants to use it.
Fingerless gloves :Double knit wool, I used number 4 needles, and the yellow is my own dying and the grey is Suzie’s wool.
Cast on 40 stitches and rib in 2 x 2 (knit 2 and purl 2 – repeat) for 4cms.
Change to knit row/purl row (stocking stitch) and if you wish, change colour at this point. Knit for approximately 8.5 cms
Change back to original colour (if wish) and rib (2×2) again for 4cm.
Cast off in rib.
Turn over into half lengthways and stitch together the top rib and the bottom rib, then stitch half way up the stocking stitch to close the part of the thumb. See picture for completed gloves.
At the time of writing we are all waiting to go up to level 3, next week. The time has been spent as I usually spend my time, knitting, looking after the sheep and Nico, the kitten; oh and I forgot, husband Leigh had a birthday in that time so we celebrated at “I so late” cafe.
Today is a grey day and not conducive to going outside so Nico is using my work room as a playground, boxes, balls, toys and anything else he thinks he wants to play with.
Nico is now 6 months old and thinks he is old enough to play outside at night time. He will ‘hunt’ mice in the paddock by the house in the twilight and early evening and now we have let him go out for a while, but the first time he stayed out I was really worried (you know the first time the kids go out at night!! ) but he came inside on his own, so not worried now.
Level 3 for us will look pretty much the same as level 4 – we will stay home most of the time and do work around the farm, autumn is here now and so leaves pile up if not attended to, looking after the ‘girls’ as I hope the are pregnant and turning over the vegetable plots so they can rest over winter. Oh and clean out the barn for the new lambs when they arrive, organise the shearing in July /August, keep the weed spraying up and keeping the house work going as well; have I forgotten anything? Keep us in meals, food shopping and a bit of knitting and spinning on the side, I think that’s all.
Keep well everyone, this is working, and so I wish everyone reading the blog a safe and enjoyable month. See you again soon,
na prosécheis Cuídate
The reason we decided to buy sheep was for me to be able to see and do the whole process from sheep to garment.
I have finally managed to do that process and am very pleased with the results; well satisfied that I know and understand the process, pleased… well that is an ongoing feeling but I am getting there. (Is anybody every truely pleased with finishing something? I know I want to improve my finished product, but still am proud to have achieved the process from beginning to end.
Let me explain:
I started knitting many years ago… as a kid actually… and, of course, bought my yarn. When we lived in Diamond Harbour – (Christchurch, NZ – in the harbour basin) we had sheep living next door and I took up spinning with a drop spindle.
I have been reminded that I did a project on spinning and knitting up an alpaca fleece and I said that I would post the results of this exercise as it was the first time I’d spun this type of fleece.
The fleece was a joy to spin; flowed freely through my fingers and it was soft and easy to get a nice even size.
Unfortunately I was too eager to knit up the fleece before I found out how much I had in that colour and so I didn’t have enough to complete a jacket (started here).
So I unpicked the entire back, two fronts and one and half sleeves.
After smoothing out the yarn I reknitted it into a hat and booties. These turned out well although the hat took some changes to the pattern as the hat was too wide across the brim and was not going to sit on the head of the baby but fall off, so I knitted a further six rows at the base of the hat instead to increase the size of the hat.
I think if I was to knit this again I’d use a rib on the brim to keep in tighter. Not really sure this pattern is the best for baby heads, but since this was my first project in alpaca I will be interested to see how it wears (when the baby arrives – November soon).
Good knitting folks and I will chat about my beautiful Gotland fleece shortly. Bye for now.
Mama Clare says ‘happy birthday Nico’, cause today I’z one year old. I’z got a present from Mama and Leigh… I’z BIG now.. grown up… but I’z still like toys.
I’m off to find Louie and tell him I’z one…
Bye..
Mama Clare says “Nico tiz time you told the people about you and the new lamb, Ema”. I’z say “Ema is sheep I is cat … yum yum lamb cutlets”… Mama says “no we don’t eat our friends” I’z say “yes I do”.
Well it started when I’z help Mama Clare look after Ema; she waz sick so I stay with her. I sleep in her hay and keep her company … she was little. She drink from a bottle not from a mama sheep. Ema have no mama …cept Clare.
Tiz been more days and Ema feed from bottle and I’z see her when she go into the field with the other sheep … at feeding time.
Now she is 2 weeks old and I can play with her; she runs around and I’z chase her … then she chase me … tiz a good game we play … but she eats grass – yuck – I’z only eat grass for medicine…
Ema is fun now … not little and staying with Mama Clare all the time. Soon she will stay in the field with the sheep but not yet, says Mama.
I’z going now…
silva kurls 