Ethel spends most of the day sitting around looking all casual like this.

Then a little head will pop out from underneath her.

And then another little head.

Sometimes a little fluff ball will run around the back of mama,

and sneak back underneath her tail feathers.

Then Ethel goes back to looking all nonchalant.

“What are you looking at? I don’t know anything about any baby chickens.”

So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that we’ve had a difficult time getting a decent head count.

Turns out we have 9 baby chicks, not 8.

[Can't wait to see how much extra traffic that headline will bring to my site.]

All of eggs have hatched, and with a couple of losses, we ended up with 8 healthy new chicks. Three of the little fluff balls are brownish-red and I have high hopes that they are Araucanas, also known as Easter Egg chickens.

Today, Ethel taught her babies how to eat, which was stupidly adorable. Also, when Ethel sits, all the chicks snuggle underneath her and you wouldn’t even know they were there if you didn’t know they were there.

PHOTO CREDIT: Maggie

My friend Amy came over today to take so pics of the freshly hatched chicks.

We’ve hatched 9 so far, and lost one, leaving on 4 eggs to go.Since we’ve no idea if they are males or females, we’ll leaving off naming them for a bit.

This is the face of 350 pounds of emotion. 350 pounds of anger and frustration.

The face of a castrated giant who has decided that his raison d’etre is impregnating the ewes in the pasture next door.

I have had Ernie, or Big E as we call him, since he was just a lamb. He was born at Stone Barns while I working there and I fell in love with him the first time I laid eyes on him. He was a tiny thing back then, and needed bottle feeding- a task I quickly claimed as my own. Although all the animals at Stone Barns are bred for the table, livestock manager Craig Haney gifted me with Ernie when I got my own farm.

I had no idea that Little Ernie would grow into the behemoth he has become, or that his Cotswold fiber would be suited only for rugs, but I wouldn’t have cared anyway. He was my lamb from the moment we met; it was as meant to be as anything ever is.

Over the years, Ernie’s fan club grew right along with him. My mother thinks he hung the moon and he’s always a favorite with visitors due to his sweet disposition and trust of people. And other than eating us out of house and home- or field and barn- he has never given me one minute’s trouble till now.

Up till now, Big E has never shown the slightest interest in the ladies. At first we thought it was kind of funny to watch him standing by the gate all day, making kissy faces at the ewes in the next pasture, but now that Aldo is here, E has become a bit of a problem. If the ewes are within eyesight he rams the stock gate over and over again, trying to get to them. We put him in one of the horse stalls in the barn and he tried to jump over the four foot high half door! When we put him in with the lambs he even started making eyes at Feenat, who doesn’t even come up to his kneecap.

We’ve solved the problem with some creative pasturing but I tell you this- I will be glad when breeding season is over and all this lust in the air blows on out of here.

I am so sleepy but didn’t want to let the evening go by without telling you what a great, productive weekend we had around the farm. Great weather, good friends and we crossed a lot of important things off the farm to-do list.

On Friday, Dr. Hammond, our vet, made a farm call to take Salina’s cast off. (read about her accident here and see the picture of her in her cast here. When Dr. H. put the cast on her he told me very firmly to make sure we kept it dry, so we have kept Salina in one of the run-in sheds ever since.

In fact, we were so religious about keeping it dry that the vet had a really hard time getting it off! He joked with us that no one ever really keeps it dry.

Dr. Hammond was very happy with the way the leg had healed. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news is that, after palpating Salina’s belly, Dr. H is pretty sure that she isn’t pregnant. To be honest, this isn’t a huge surprise. Salina didn’t breed the first year we had her (which on most farms equals a one-way ticket to the slaughterhouse.) She did breed last year and gave us Truman, the ram lamb that 100,000 people got to watch being born. (at around 3:24 if you haven’t seen it.)

Then she was attacked by a dog in the fall and nearly died. Erin and I nursed her back to health over the winter. So it doesn’t really surprise me that she wasn’t in the mood for love when we put Lincoln in with her in November. But you know what? I really don’t care if she’s bred this year or if she ever breeds again. I really like Salina. She is a sweet ewe and she will have a home on my farm for as long as she lives.

On Saturday we had three friends come to the farm to help us get the nanny goats ready for kidding. Jean and Dan and Linda were such troopers! Erin taught Jean how to pull shots and I showed everyone how to check to see if the nannies milk was coming in (the first sign that labor isn’t far off.) Dan helped Patrick ferry the expectant mamas from the fields at the top of the hill to the small paddock right outside our backdoor. It was a lot of work, but the weather was just so warm and bright and lovely, and the company made even the most tedious tasks seem sort of fun. It was also the first time I enjoyed being outside in ages.

Today was another beautiful day- it got up to 70 degrees in the Hudson Valley! After we finished all our farm chores, Patrick and I staked out our Victory Garden. The layout has changed a bit so I’ll have to start my plan all over again over at growveg.com but I left the potatoes out of the old plan anyway.

One of Patrick’s garden-related tasks this weekend was putting together our new compost tumbler. This is the second one of these we bought and they make compost from poopy hay super quick. Logan gave it a test run before we started filling it.

Patrick and I took in a movie in the afternoon while Erin got the lambcam working! I haven’t been able to embed it on the website yet- I need the tech to walk me through it on the phone tomorrow- but we are very nearly there. Here’s a picture of what the camera itself looks like.

In other news, I signed up for a beekeeping workshop on April 4th! I am so excited about it. I have been wanting bees for a while and there is so much to learn. Maybe next year, every share in our Yarn CSA will come with a jar of honey!

Hope you had a lovely weekend too.

I planned to post an “Ask the Shepherd” tonight but some actual shepherding will have to come first. Salina, my sweetest ewe, has broken a leg. We thought she might be being beaten up a bit because she has been covered in mud for the last couple of days, as if she’d been pushed over. Since we put FDR into the ewe pen for breeding on Sunday he is the most likely culprit.

We isolated Salina and called Dr. Hammond, the Hudson Valley’s own James Harriott. He said she’d be fine till morning when he can put a cast on. He also said the prognosis is pretty good since it’s a hind leg, it’s broken below the hock and the bone isn’t poking through the skin. I am still worried though. 

Salina is the same ewe who was attacked by a dog last fall. After the attack, she had a series of seizures and I was certain we were going to lose her. She hung in there, though, and became quite affectionate with us during while we were nursing her back to health. Erin and I both adore her and would be bereft to lose her.

FDR will be coming our of the ewe pen tomorrow. Of course, we don’t know for sure that he is responsible for Salina’s broken leg, but it would be irresponsible to leave him in with all the bred nanny goats and ewes. I’ve never known him to be aggressive though, so I’m withholding judgement on what to do about him.

I’ll update you tomorrow when we get home from the vet’s office.

We took Lincoln, our Cormo ram, out of the breeding pen about two weeks ago. He had been in with the ewes for more than two months, which should have given him ample time to get all of them bred, but Lincoln does his work a lot more discreetly than Buck Fifty, our angora goat buck. We saw Buck Fifty romancing the does from the first minute we put him in the pen. But with Lincoln, well, were just  not so sure.

So, even though we’ve never had a problem with Lincoln getting everybody bred, we’re putting FDR, Lincoln’s son, in with the ewes this weekend, as a “clean-up ram.”  This is a really common practice with livestock, the idea being that any “uncovered” females the first ram misses will be impregnated by the second. We waited two weeks to put FDR in so that we’ll be able to tell without any doubts who actually fathered the lambs.

It’s just so hard for me to believe that FDR is ready to work as a stud. He was the first lamb born on our farm and his photo was the basis of our logo.We will have to take Sicily, FDR’s mama out of the ewe pen when we put FDR in to prevent any inbreeding from taking place. She will be going into the adjacent pen with the Weight Watchers, so called because they are all on the heavy side.

The Weight Watchers are Daisy, Buster, Cosmo and Ernie. They are on a strict, hay only diet, but even without a grain ration they don’t seem to be reducing much. Snow is pastured with the Weight Watchers as well, because it’s adjacent to the breeding pen where all her girlfriends are. We also put Truman in with them, because he was getting beat up in the boys pen, and Kit Kat is a temporary resident until his wound heals up.

We won’t be putting a clean-up buck in with the does this year because, frankly, we have enough goats. If Buck Fifty managed to miss anybody we will just leave them open for the year. This year we are putting all our time and attention into ramping up our Cormo breeding and goat kids will be a bonus.

Last year at this time we were starting kidding season. When I look outside at all the snow on the ground I feel like a genius for deciding to breed later this year. We should start seeing lambs and kids in late April. Of course, there could be some unforeseen consequence to breeding this late- unforeseen consequences being my middle name- but right now I’m basking in not having to trudge through snow to make the every-four-hour barn checks that come with lambing and kidding.