It definitely feels like fall on the homestead. Things seem to be winding down. Chores do not take as long these days and we are getting all the animals settled for winter.
The house is decorated with some of the tiny pumpkins/gourds we grew this year.
We've had quite a year with sheep!
We stopped moving the sheep through the pastures about three weeks ago. They will have access to the barn throughout the winter and we have our hay ready for them to eat.
The sheep we were hosting left last Friday. We still have an extra dog until December, but then she will go to her new home.
In May, three lambs were born.
Unfortunately, by October, two of our lambs died (from worms).
It was hard and sad, but it's a part of this lifestyle.
Our payment for hosting the extra sheep for the last few months was this new girl.
Her name is Sylvia.
She is pure bred Cotswold, has super dark wool,
and is a lot younger than our other ewes.
Sylvia and our other 3 ewes are currently being bred right now at our friends' farm.
That means that our one little surviving lamb (Opal) and the two dogs have the barn to themselves.
We also let Opal roam around the house to let her eat the clover which she loves.
We thought we would have to process our ducks ourselves,
but we found a processor who processes ducks,
so at the end of August we had 8 ducks processed.
Our turkeys were processed with our second round of 29 meat chickens.
I miss them, but we have 5 turkeys in the freezer along with hopefully enough chickens to last us until next year.
All (15) of our laying hens are laying eggs now.
So we have an abundance of eggs!
(We are selling our extras for $3 a dozen if you are a local and want some.)
Speaking of eggs, the ducklings born in the Spring that we didn't process have just started laying eggs.
We are not collecting those, so we'll see what happens.
Shortly after we received a buck and a doe from a friend, our buck died. So our two does (who were not bred like I thought they were) spend their time eating lots of tasty scraps. We've got a new buck coming in the next few weeks.
Our mushroom logs have started fruiting!
The fall garden is tiny (so tiny we signed up for the Rough Draft Farmstead fall CSA)
compared to our spring and summer garden.
I did plant 100 garlic cloves the other day for next year.
All of the cloves came from the garlic I harvested from the garden this year
and we still have lots of garlic to spare.
Maybe with the shorter days we can focus our time on some indoor projects in the coming weeks.
There's a to-do list that is a mile long, but then again, we might just rest.
