The Collie Farm Blog

We went out to breakfast today, took in an antique car show in town, then worked on Kirk’s house some more. I cleaned out most of the kitchen cabinets, the microwave and the stove top. Kirk reseeded the grass, and packed up some things.

Later at home, I put metal roofing on top of the sheep shelter in the field (pic coming soon) and then we tackled trying to fix the pocket doors in the living room. We’d really like to get these working, so we can shut the dogs out of the room with the future-nice-furniture! The pocket doors are beautiful, but unfortunately, one has lost one of its sets of rollers so does not travel well on the track. We took a lot of molding off, and got it half re-attached once, but it later got stuck and came off again. We are  having trouble understanding exactly how it goes together and works, it’s too hard to see in there. I think we may need to remove  yet more molding and find a way to take the entire door out, so we can see what we’re doing in re-attaching the roller. I would have thought I’d find some great blog or website somewhere with detailed advice on this subject, but the Web hasn’t helped me today!

So far, I have one book on sheep husbandry, “Raising Sheep the Modern Way” by Paula Simmons. The women who sold me sheep to me agreed it was a good book. It advises “flushing” ewes before breeding, which is a method of giving them ever-increasing amounts of grain the 17 days prior to when you expose them to the ram. Research has shown this makes them more likely to drop two eggs and give multiple births.

But, when I’ve asked around, I’ve learned a lot of people don’t bother with this and still get multiple births. And one lady I met who does do flushing often gets singleton lambs. So, I’ve waffled on whether or not to do it.

The nice lady at the feed store co-op had me talked out of it, as she’s one of the ones who has luck without it. But, then I started thinking it would be nice to grain-train the ewes, for moments when I don’t want to use a dog to get the sheep to follow me. And, poor Hershey the ram is stuck in his pen, eating hay, for another week and a half. So, I bought some grain.

It turns out Hershey is already grain-trained and will follow me anywhere for it and eat out of my hand. The ewes know what a shaking bucket sound means, but they won’t come. They wait until I’ve left the bucket and am long gone. So, though I think I’d like to flush them, I have no way to control how much each one of them gets.

So, I’ve settled for leaving a little bit of grain out in six small buckets by the ram pen. And, feeding Hershey out of my hand so that he stays acting like a good boy.

We have a bit of dilemma in what to do with Kirk’s house, now that we’re married and have settled upon living life on the farm. Kirk has a really nice house, I almost wish we could trade them on their lots! It is an historic home in a charming old neighborhood, with beautifully refinished fir floors and mountain views.

Though it’s maybe a good “problem” to have, we don’t know what we should do with the second house– sell it or rent it out. The pro’s of renting seem to be the potential for profit over time. We do know people who have done really well as landlords. But, this profit assumption relies on the real estate market going up, and with the current economic uncertainty, there are no guarantees there. The con’s of renting are the headaches of being a landlord, and we’re not sure we want to take on that extra stress. And we’d have a lot to learn.

Kirk only bought the house two years ago, so to sell it now, given the short time he’s held it and the flattening of the real estate market means probably taking a slight loss on it. But, viewing it as not just an investment, but a place to live, then having a slight net loss doesn’t seem so bad–it’s about the same overall expense as if he would have rented all this time.

We’re not fond of the real estate agent thing, so we’ll likely sell it FSBO, and that will allow us to keep more of the profit. We’ve both done that before and have had excellent success with it.

We went there today to work on the yard, it’s important to keep it looking lived-in. Kirk mowed, and I weeded the flower beds. It mostly just needs some good cleaning and some fresh paint in a few places. We’re leaning towards selling it, to have more money to invest into the farm. That means we’d best get it on the market soon, before the holiday slowdown comes. So, we’d better get crackin’!

And, for fun, here is a picture of Maggie, lunging out of one of the drainage ditches, attempting to snatch a piece of grass that Kirk is holding above her head. She loves this little game they play. She rushes ahead of us when we walk in the field, and waits impatiently in the water for Kirk to appear with something to throw or dangle. The bottoms of the ditches are muddy, and sometimes when she emerges, she is so head-to-toe brown with muck that you can’t even see her white blaze. But that’s more good news because then she gets to be hosed down afterwards, another favorite game of hers!

Monday night, I caught the lame ewe to work on her feet. I took Gene, my 5-year-old Border Collie, down to  help catch her. It took about 20 mintes to catch the ewe, both because the sheep aren’t dogged, and because Gene can act like a idiot sometimes. Her lack of confidence always manifests in squirrely behavior and the sheep figuring out they don’t need to take her seriously.

But, I do find that after she gets tired and yelled at quite a bit, she starts to settle down and work nicely. The tiredness makes her choose to work more efficiently, and me taking her self esteem down a few notches softens her demeanor so the sheep respond better to her. We got the job done; and to give her credit, I don’t think there are many farm dogs that can help single an undogged sheep in an open field! We cheated a bit by putting them into the corner, but still, it’s a trick that can’t be done by yourself without a good stock dog for sure.

So, the feet… I used to work my dogs at a place where the sheep had really bad feet, and I spent a bit of time every day I was there trimming hooves to try  to ease their discomfort and make them more workable for the dogs. A friend of mine who has an animal sciences degree showed me the basics. I find that not only do you have to create a good flat foot surface so they walk right, you have to be ruthless about hacking away diseased tissue. Making them bleed is actually good, as the blood washes out the wound and encourages fresh tissue to grow. And, you have to open up the bacteria-laden pockets to the air so they can dry out. I also find that the more you  trim, the harder the hoof works to recover, and it’ll grow very rapidly. The body wants to heal, after all.

On this girl, only her front feet were bad. Here is one hoof beforehand: you can see the side edges of the hoof curling over. This creates a pocket in which material tends to pack and retain moisture, and then works its way upwards, splitting the hoof. I thought this might be all there was, but as I trimmed, I could see that much of the hoof wall was detached, which is relatively useless. And, where there are tiny holes, if you work the points of your trimmers into those and start opening them up, usually you find lots of “stuff” in there, and a bad smell to boot.

Here is the “after” photo–I’ll take off more material in a week or so, but this was all I wanted to do in one sitting. Despite having a lot of raw, exposed tissue, she was walking better already. Before I let her go, I sprayed her feet with Shreiner’s Herbal Solution. I really like this stuff, it’s a very old-fashioned, natural wound dressing spray that I use on absolutely everything, including myself (though it’s not labeled for humans, so don’t tell them I said that! ). I learned about it from a pig farmer, and get it at my local feed store.