Brittany

    Brittany was born here at Dor Galen Farm in 2007. She is the head ewe of the Dor Galen flock.
She has the most wondrous fleece  with a temperamental  attitude just to make things interesting, I suppose.
She is the mother of Little Mac and her mothering skills is how she acquired her name. Little Mac is the surviving twin, the other twin did not survive birth. Brittany turned away from Little Mac every time he tried to nurse. We did manage to get about 20cc's of colostrum from her to help Little Mac survive .  Little Mac became a bottle lamb and lived in the house with us for the first couple months of his life, but that's another story to be told . So, my husband in an exasperated tone, named the ewe "Brittany"......"after the mother of the year", he said.
   Here she is at her resting place ( and it is HER resting place, by the way..) at the side of the hen house.....

Leading The Dor Galen Flock To The Front Pasture.....

Yes, here I am leading our Dor Galen flock to greener pastures! I say "greener pastures" in jest as dry as it has been lately.  Every morning one of the ewes tries to grab a sneaky bite from one of the maple trees we planted. There are times that Rambo tries this, also. All in all, it's not too chaotic a trip from the barn, trotting through the yard and up to the gate. They wait patiently for  about a half a scoop of grain from the blue bucket, a.k.a. our number one sheep enticer.......

So Dry You Can't Spit.......

or so it seems...... a view of the freshly cut cornfield immediately west of us...........
We really need some rain! This past month was the driest August in Indiana since, oh, about 1800
something. The pasture is really dry and the sheep seem extra hungry. I hope this does not mean we are in for a long, extra-snowy winter!

Labor Day Holiday?

    Do farmers get a respite from their labors on a Labor Day Holiday? I think not, at least that has been the case on this farm and the farm just west of us. While my husband and I observe vacationing Americans zooming down the highway with boats and campers in tow, we are taking wheelbarrows of sheep shit to the compost pile. The farmer next door got his cornfield completed harvested and yesterday he was mowing the weeds along the fence row. He chatted to my husband for a few minutes and said he would send one of his boys over to mow our pasture as soon as they were done harvesting which would be a couple of more weeks.
    Meanwhile, my husband worked all day to make the compost pile higher. He has worked all summer to clean the side stall where the flock was last winter. Our barn is ancient and the stalls are narrow. The only way we have been able to clean them is with the good old pitchfork! Believe me ,
this is hard physical labor if you have never tried it!
    One of the neatest thing about harvest time here, is being able to listen to the elevators humming at night as they dry the crops. It's also neat to watch the tractor headlights at night in the fields working in the darkness to harvest the fields.

Sheep Have Enemies........

Who are the primary predators of sheep? Well, coyotes rank right up there. Surprisingly enough  domesticated dogs are  up there, too.  Everyone usually thinks of wolves, and wolves definitely take sheep down. Here is a drawing of a wolf I did in 2006 while I was in Minnesota...
    Our farm is approximately thirty minutes from Lafayette, Indiana.  Wolf Park, a nature preserve is located there.  Wolves are beautiful creatures and part of nature's food chain: however, it gives this shepherdess cause for concern......

What's a Farm Without Barn Cats?

    And here are our ferocious feline defenders of the grain............

Remember September.....

    We finally got rain today, the first rain for at least a couple of weeks. The sheep didn't try to get in from the rain, either. They just stood there and continued to graze, Bill, the llama, was completely soaked and acted like he was loving every minute of it.
   I did not have to water the garden tonight which was a break I needed. Even though it is the first of September here, it looks like October without the fall foliage. Our next door neighbor had his combine out earlier and cut half the corn field before it rained. The cornfields around here are that dry!

Scottish Shepherd with His Blackie Flock.....

   
   This photo reminds me of our Scottish Blackface: Wild Thing, Mild Thing , Malcolm and Whitey.
Blackies can be very skittish and standoffish, but I do have Wild Thing and Mild Thing eating raw carrots and apples from my hand. I'm still working on Malcolm and Whitey, hoping they will come around eventually.

An Adorable Sheep Face.....

    I found this sheep photo on a UK volunteering blog and I couldn't resist........

This contrary farmeress reads "The Contrary Farmer"

    I am very intently reading "The Contrary Farmer"  by Gene Logsdon.   This book provides much food for thought (no  pun intended)  and a view of agriculture that mirrors my own.  Anyone unfamiliar with his work can check out his books and his blog at the links above.