Teresa & Mike CHS - Our journal

[RollingAcres]

Mike, do you keep your steer separated from your sheep? Just wondering if you have looked into co-mingling them.

 

[Mike CHS]

I had them together for a short while. The sheep weren't bothered by them but one of the steers started bullying them so that was over. He tried the same thing with the ram but learned why a ram is called a ram.

 

[RollingAcres]

I don't want to get ahead of myself, just starting to read up about raising sheep. Now that we have tasted our own beef, we definitely will do it again and if we can financially do it, we may even raise some sheep or pig in the future. We would have to get fencing fixed and get our "ducks" in a row first.

 

[Senile_Texas_Aggie]

Miss @RollingAcres,

That's wonderful! I hope you will be able to do that. There are a lot of folks on this forum to help you with sheep. Sorry, I can't help -- like Prissy on Gone with the Wind, I don't know nothing about birthin' no sheep!

Senile Texas Aggie

 

[CntryBoy777]

I had a plan to get some and use them for meat and eating grass....and would get ewes and wethers to start with....grow the wethers up and then put them in the freezer and look to breed the ewes for the next season....I will honestly say, that @Mike CHS has convinced me that older bigger meat is very tasty.....I could enjoy supplying my own....and if ya can't find a butcher place, it is better handled.....

 

[Baymule]

I don't want to get ahead of myself, just starting to read up about raising sheep. Now that we have tasted our own beef, we definitely will do it again and if we can financially do it, we may even raise some sheep or pig in the future. We would have to get fencing fixed and get our "ducks" in a row first.

If you raise feeder pigs, build a set up like mine. I built a Pig Palace with a window (hole in the wall) that I can pour the feed through. I set up a water barrel with a hog nipple and I don't have to go in the pen to find the water tub that they turned over and knocked across the pen. I have had pigs that I didn't trust and went in with a piece of pipe to whack them with. The Pig Palace is hands off care for pigs.

https://www.backyardherds.com/threads/baymule’s-pigs-2018-herefords.37448/

 

[Mike CHS]

The last of the watermelons and these have been running between 18-22 inches long. We have been cutting up roughly one watermelon every 4-5 days since early July and I'm sure going to miss going out to the garden bed and getting dessert. We only planted one hill of these Rattlesnake melons and the rest of the bed was Crimson Sweet. I'm not going to miss the weed patch that the melon bed had become. It's all cleaned up now but there was a couple of buckets full of vegetation in the front end loader last week.

 

[Mike CHS]

Teresa just finished running the fecals we pulled the other day. This is the third fecal we have tested on these 4 sheep. The previous two tests showed they were in the low 100's range with the most recent being quite a few lower on the count but when they are that low, it's hard to really know how much difference there is. The slides ran today showed they had zero eggs. They have not been wormed other than getting a garlic barrier drench. This still isn't long enough to show a hard trend but it is encouraging.

 

[Baymule]

Those 4 are keepers!

That watermelon sure looks good. I had volunteer watermelons, have one left out by the burn pile.

I put Ringo and the girls in the garden this morning for 2 hours. They were full and ready to go home. So I put the lambs in the garden. The ragweed and lambs quarters are over my head. This was not a good garden year.

Ringo LOL

 

[Mike CHS]

Percy is going to be the herd sire for a small flock in the next few days. I'm going to miss the boy but he's going to a nice home. They haven't been raising sheep very long and this is their first experience with a ram.