Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 16 February 2024…
Hey Y’all!
Good afternoon and happy Fast-Jet Friday from Air2Ground Farms!! The fast jets today are the Mighty-Mighty F-15E flying low through the Lake District of the United Kingdom. The top pic is the sun rising over the garden with the chickens after the snowfall, taken standing in our front doorway. As expected, the snow melted quickly and MUD remained. Today’s rainy afternoon is adding to the muddiness. We spent the morning with the flerd. The sheep started getting out, under the barbed wire fence. There are tiny sprigs of green showing through the mud and the sheep cannot resist the draw of the grass that’s greener on the other side of the fence. We chased them back in (well, really we just brought them their food and they rushed back in…but that doesn’t sound as adventurous) before they got too far. By the time I took Happy and Stella a new bale of hay, the sheep were back out and making their way up the driveway toward the county road. This called for reinforcements. After chasing them back in again, Shelley and I posted Rebekah at the gate/fence to keep the sheep from getting out again while we got a bale of hay ready and carried it over to unroll. Being animals of very little brain, the ruckus of the hay unrolling quickly distracted them from the fence line. Today isn’t the first day we’ve dealt with this so we decided it was time to do something else.
We have the flerd in a large 2-paddock pasture separated in half by a 2-wire high-tensile electric fence (when charged). We’ve been letting the flerd wander back and forth while we unrolled hay on both paddocks, distributing their impact, the residual hay, and the poop between the two. Frustrated with the sheep continuing to get out, we decided to keep them in just one of the paddocks. Everything is always “not quite that easy” though. The sheep just walk under the two-wire like it isn’t even there. So we needed to run a third wire below the existing wires. We had the insulators for the T-posts and we had the poly-wire rolls, so that was a good start! That said, the weeds/briars/saplings were so thick under the existing wires that the entire fence line had to be cleared before running the new wire. I spent the morning running the weed-eater with skill-saw blade on it clearing the fence while Shelley followed behind installing the poly-wire. After a few hours, we had the sheep inside electrified wire, at least on the two sides they have been getting out. We hooked our solar fence charger to the wires and they are charged at about 11,000 volts…enough to turn the sheep around as long as they touch it with their nose. If they just run at it and pop under it, even at that voltage, it won’t do much. Most of the time, if they are inside a HOT wire at their nose height, they stay put. The cows you may ask? They largely ignore the sheep and are content to wait on us to deliver their next meal of hay. I hope you have a great Friday and wonderful weekend!!
Check out Thursday’s Dust’er Mud podcast where my mom, Linda, discussed her recent breast cancer diagnosis and the steps she is taking, to include a ketogenic diet and intermittent fasting, to help battle her enemy.
In today’s Video, we chat about the milking machine that taught us how to milk and the ups and downs of the last year milking.
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
Any wonder why we are likened to sheep in the Scriptures?
😄