Baymule
Herd Master
They sure look a lot better! You have some good grass, my bet is that it is rich in minerals. They are getting the best of care, they may not know it, but they just hit easy street. They got the best Sheep Momma ever!
The Education of Ben
Baymule
Herd Master
Oops.
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- #463
Beekissed
Herd Master
Aw, thank you, Bay!! You exaggerate greatly, my friend!
I don't know all that much about sheep or much of anything else, but I try real hard...guess that's going to have to make up for the lack of knowledge, huh? 
The grass here was pretty bad when I moved back home to be with Mom, but over the years I've planted quite a bit of clover and tried to keep her from scalping the meadow so much and so often so that the good grasses could reseed. This was an old pine grove, so the soil is pretty acidic in places still, and the only thing growing on those places is moss. We are slowly but surely culling the pines and leaving the deciduous trees, opening up some areas to more sun and more growth of the better trees. We'll leave some smaller, low growing pines in the sheep's paddock, as conifers are good for self deworming.
I've been liming those mossy places pretty hard this season to kill the moss and I fetched 14 rotten FREE round bales to roll out in the places with poor grass. I noticed that when I spread out hay up by the dog house area last fall that the place sprouted really lush and tall ladino clover this spring...and that was in the shade in an over impacted area of soil.
So, figured I'd get some good quality hay that was for free for mulch this season and God provided 14 bales!!! Why buy seed when there's tons of seed in these bales and the bale itself provides the fertilization and mulching of the seeds? As long as it's good clean hay~and it is!~then what grows should be decent graze. I roll it out in those poorly places and the chickens are spreading it for me...can't beat that.
I'm hoping that the sheep themselves will also lend a hand in improving their pasture when I can rotate paddocks. Each paddock will also include some wooded area that have plenty of browse available...honeysuckle, multiflora rose, and even autumn olive(the bane of all the farmers around here...and the sheep LOVE them), as well as small saplings that are tender and young. One paddock encompasses the orchard~those trees will get a chicken wire wrap to avoid any stripping. Could be the small amount of arsenic in the seeds of green apples that fall will also aid in eliminating worms naturally.
I'm tapering off the feed I gave them to get them trained to the pen and to the shepherd, as their poop indicates their diet is much too rich now that they are out on the grass. I'm getting logs instead of raisins.
Time to see which one will fatten and do well on just grass and browse only diet...my vote is on the younger sheep. Both came here a solid 3 on the FAMACHA scale and she had better condition than the old girl...that could just be an age thing, though. The elder fed one more lamb this season than did the younger, that could factor in also.
Baymule
Herd Master
We’ll you know us old gals sag here and there and don’t have quite the snap back we used to. LOL LOL Go a little easy on your old Sheep! 
Sheepshape
Herd Master
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Sheep fatten pretty easily, and your sheep look in pretty good condition to me. If those girls are going into an area with saplings whey will destroy them....they're partial to small trees. Good thinking about the trunks of fruit trees, some sheep are terrible bark strippers and will kill trees quickly. As for the apples....they may or may not eat them.....some love 'em, others leave 'em. With regards to worming, I'd use a proprietary wormer once and then they probably won't need another worming if they are grass that is 'new' to sheep.Chicory is a natural wormer for sheep, but not all sheep like the taste.
With regards to pasture sward height, sheep prefer grass 3-4 inches tall, the new stuff which has grown after topping. there's less nourishment in tall grass with seed heads, so topping the heads will allow the grass to re-grow to a height ideal for your girls.
Oh and 'log poo' is the norm for sheep on grass.....when sheep are turned out onto fresh pasture after a winter on dried stuff, they may produce greenish 'cow pats' for a while!
The old girl may well the first to fatten, though they tend to get thinner again when really old (by which I'm talking 8-10 plus).
My sheep are utterly unafraid of dogs as my elderly Border Collie was never trained to 'work' them. Some of them think nothing of chasing the poor old fellow. Hopefully you'll be able to establish some kind of order!
With regards to pasture sward height, sheep prefer grass 3-4 inches tall, the new stuff which has grown after topping. there's less nourishment in tall grass with seed heads, so topping the heads will allow the grass to re-grow to a height ideal for your girls.
Oh and 'log poo' is the norm for sheep on grass.....when sheep are turned out onto fresh pasture after a winter on dried stuff, they may produce greenish 'cow pats' for a while!
The old girl may well the first to fatten, though they tend to get thinner again when really old (by which I'm talking 8-10 plus).
My sheep are utterly unafraid of dogs as my elderly Border Collie was never trained to 'work' them. Some of them think nothing of chasing the poor old fellow. Hopefully you'll be able to establish some kind of order!
Bruce
Herd Master
Great place for blueberries!
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- #467
Beekissed
Herd Master
You would think so, wouldn't you? But...alas...no. I tried and they never grew at all...got some kind of fungal thing and all the leaves dropped off.
Bruce
Herd Master
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- #469
Beekissed
Herd Master
We are hoping they DO destroy these saplings, as they are none we would want to grow into trees...just a bunch of trash wood or those growing too close to one another to ever gain size.
My last sheep didn't have that log poop on grass except in early spring, so with these gals never having the sprinkles since they first came, I'm thinking they are consuming more clover right now than other types of grass. That's all good but it also indicates their graze is rich enough that I don't need to give any kind of supplementary feed right now other than their regular hay in the self feeder.
They love the apples, so that's all good...all my sheep have loved apples and will fight the dogs for them, as my dogs love apples too.
I don't use chemical dewormers on my livestock but do give natural dewormers of my own design...seem to work great. I also have various things in their range that help with natural worm expulsion. Along with that I feed fermented pumpkins in the winter and a loose mineral mix that seems to help their immune system resist parasites. Once I get it all going it seems to make for healthy sheep and soil structures here. This place is definitely new to sheep...or any other livestock besides chickens and ducks. It hasn't been farmland for almost 100 yrs now. It's kind of funny because you can see barbed wire and the scars they left on the trees way up high on these trees...tells you how much they've grown since they were used as fencing.
I hope too to establish a pecking order...right now the sheep think they are at the top of the heap.
Little do they know they are food...and lower on the food chain than the dog. 
Bruce
Herd Master
Um, trees grow from the top. If that were not the case I wouldn't be finding barbed wire 18" off the ground and 3" deep in a tree. Have to be real careful walking through what was an old fence and "lets pile the rocks from the field here" line. That stuff is ancient, brittle, rusty and still very sharp. Try to bend it and it snaps off instead.
