There are not really a lot of “small” things on a farm. But here we have some pretty teeny ones: Eggs!
When young hens start to lay eggs, they are small, and as the hen matures her eggs will get larger, like the ones you see at the grocery store. All of our young chickens are breeds that lay large to extra large eggs, so you can see they have a ways to go yet. We are averaging about 15 eggs a day, and only one or two of those are the large eggs of our older hens. This means their production is slowing down and they will be used in other ways for our family.
Another “small” thing we have this year is… corn! The very dry season led to our sweet corn not growing very well. It still has good ears on it! It is just much shorter than usual. The later rows we were able to get irrigation line to at a younger age, so it was able to grow taller.
Unfortunately, we seem to have an issue with one or multiple bugs on our ears. As soon as they are ripe enough to pick, the cobs are all eaten down by something, and we are not sure what it is. We are trying an organic pesticide on the remaining rows to see if we can at least get a little corn to eat this year.
Our “small” lambs are growing quickly. They have eaten their paddock grass down, and have moved to the secondary pasture. I refuse to use barbed wire, so we picked up a lot of free waste pallets from local businesses to build a fence they can’t crawl through.
We are using 20 of them to build a moveable sheep tractor as well. We want to be able to have them eat down the north 10 acres without building a whole fence system over there. Plus we will be able to move the tractor around the yard, or by the garage to minimize the need to mow.
The tractor is 5 pallets by 5 pallets. They are screwed together and have a 16 foot board screwed to the back of each tractor side for additional support. We have 10 inch casters on the bottom for better mobility. We also are using a tarp over one corner for some weather protection. Sheep are little escape artists, so we’ve strategically placed their feed and water bins to block the wheel gaps.
It is not a very large fence, we have to move it every 3-4 hours, but it works well for our 8 little sheep. This fall we will reduce our herd to only 2 or 3 ewes, and it will be sufficient for that as well. We will also be purchasing a ram in the not so distant future so we can have more baby sheep. Our goal is to have a little bit of milk production, some decent quality wool, and most importantly, meat for our family
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