In 2006, our Flood Control District dredged our drainage ditches. They shoot for doing it about every five years. Normally, they immediately spread the “spoils” that come out of the ditch. But they didn’t then, because a neighbor promised to pick them up to use for fill. Well, that didn’t happen, probably partly because our fields became non-navigable that summer and the summer after that too, with grass overgrowth and wet soils.
So, here we are 3.5 years later, and we still have a row of lumpy soils in two of our pastures. The lamb above is enjoying a nice chair shape in one section of the spoils mounds. Flood Control promised to get it taken care of this year, which makes us glad, as it’ll be easier to mow, and will look nicer.
They were supposed to come Saturday morning to start. So, I moved the sheep into a temporary location, picked up their water troughs, hauled temporary 5-gallon buckets of water over to them, moved their mineral feeders with the ATV, moved my garbage cans full of feed, drug hundreds of feet of hose out of the way, and tied up the dog in preparation.
The bulldozer arrived at 10am, as anticipated. But the driver said he wasn’t feeling well, and planned to start on Monday instead. Doh! I didn’t want to complain since I felt badly that he was sick. But, I so wish they would have called the night before to tell me! I guess I should have also better communicated beforehand how much work it is to move the sheep and Electronet for no reason… So, I put everything back, and will do it all over again Monday morning. But not before I call first to confirm they are coming!
The bulldozer they are using is huge. It has a 13’ blade, which will barely fit through our interior 14’ gates (14’ is what Flood Control told me was the minimum they’d like to see for their access points- so I guess they were right!). This dozer has extra wide tracks, which the driver said he prefers for the dodgy kinds of wet fields he encounters when doing jobs like this. Our fields are now pretty well-managed and drained, so we don’t anticipate him having trouble here. But the neighboring property to us, which is currently unmaintained, has some pretty wet spots. So, it’ll be interesting to see if the wide tracks are enough to keep him outta trouble over there! We can’t likely rescue that baby with our little 30-horse tractor…
On the baby animal front, nuthin’ Saturday or today, so far! No more lambs yet. I hate the suspense part the most. We went to a friend’s birthday party dinner last night and made the call to stay out late and not worry about doing a lamb check ‘til almost midnight when we got home. Just as well, as there was nothing for me to do! We do have chickens hatching in the incubator today though. The house is filled with cheeping noises.
March 22, 2010 at 2:39 am
Those lambs are SO cute!! 😀 Did any of your sheep have trouble lambing?
Naomi
March 22, 2010 at 3:23 am
Naomi, I’ve had to help one so far. But only four out of our sixteen ewes have lambed yet, so there may be more work to do yet!
Michelle
March 22, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Oh, I see. 🙂 How many sheep do you have altogether?
March 22, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Naomi, we have sixteen ewes and two rams. We shoot for keeping ewes that have at least twins, though we have a lot of yearling ewes, so some of them may single this time because they are young and small. But we’re hoping for about thirty lambs out of the sixteen girls. I suspect there are at least two ewes that have triplets still, so we may get close to our goal of a 200% lamb crop. That will put us up to about fifty head for the summer grazing, and we’ll butcher in the fall!
Michelle