The grass grows pretty fast this time of year and the sheep love to be out on it, grazing from pasture to pasture, onto new grass every few days. They all look great, the lambs are healthy and what few cars we have on our road stop from time to time to watch the lambs play. It is a great time of year.

On the horse front, one of our young students, Molly, has been competing with her High school equestrian team in the High School equestrian competition. Her first showing experience but she has worked and trained hard with Spike, the horse she has been riding, and has done a fantastic job with him, really jelled as a rider/horse combination and has qualified for the State Championship High School show in three different classes – Go Molly. Parents are pretty proud about her as well, as they should be.

Lambing isn’t due to start for us for another couple of weeks – we are lambing later this year to try to get lambing into the warmer spring weather – but we are getting ready for that fun time and we expect to have everyone sheared before lambing so that is always fun to see and be part of, when they are sheared they look like different sheep!

Horses are all ready for spring, starting to drop their winter coats and they are ready to spend the days outside instead of just short afternoon visits, one it dries up guys, once it dries up….. We might even be able to get on the outdoor area soon and not have to ride indoors.

Molly, one of our riders here at the barn, will be starting her high school equestrian season this weekend riding for her school team, a bunch of the barn folks will be there to cheer her on – Go Molly!

The trees are now full into the color display typical of this time of year. Yellow, red, golden colors are all spread across the landscape. Fall is a busy time here at Spinner Farm, getting everything ready for winter. The horse blankets have all been unpacked from summer storage, checked for any damage and have already seen some use. The sheep are all looking good, this is my favorite time of year for fleece length – I think they look great this time of year. We have also started selection of which ewes will be breed to which ram and will start breeding in November. All the rams and the ewes have been on an increased diet lately and look good – with the cooler weather here now the ewes are starting to cycle so we should be good to go when we put the rams in. We are also busy putting in some new fencing – sheep fencing as we make some additional hard wired pastures – these will need to be ready before the winter sets in so we have additional winter pastures to split the flock up into the separate groups, either with the correct ram or into the group of the ‘too old or too young to breed’.

Summer was busy this year, and a sad one as we lost Mattie. We have many pictures and memories of her and I am convinced she comes to visit us here every now and again just to check up on us. I think the other dogs miss her as well.

Horses have done well this year at the shows and we will continue to work on their training over the winter, it will slow down during the holiday season but then pick up the pace again as everyone has to be ready for the early spring show circuits.

Soon the weather will turn colder and we will soon be into November and we will start planning the holiday season which, as we all know, will be upon us very quickly – it seems even more quickly if we don’t get our planning done!

From all of us here at Spinner Farm, the livestock, the dogs, cats and all the boarders and frequent visitors, to all of you – May your holiday season go well, may Thanksgiving and Christmas be a time for friends and family and may you all have a great end of the year.

Steve

June 17^th. Our oldest dog, Mattie, had to be put down today. Mattie broke her leg right at where the bone connects to the hip joint.

Mattie was 13 years old but still was active around the farm. Not the fasted dog of our family pack but she loved to follow us around, especially out to the back field where she would lay down and watch us work either putting up temporary sheep or horse fence.

Mattie was the senior dog and all of the others respected her and loved to play with her. She will be missed very much. Mattie is being cremated and her ashes will be placed under a huge elm tree on a knoll near the barn. She will be able to watch over all the activity on the farm from there.

Our last ewe to lamb had twins last night. Lambing season has come to an end. We did lose one ewe during lambing, a sad event and she is gone but she will not be forgotten. So, we ended up with 14 lambs, 7 of them are a Cheviot/Border Leicester cross. These are already spoken for and have a great home to go to. We have 7 Romney lambs and will probably keep the ewe lambs and sell the ram lambs – they will almost certainly go to homes for people to work their show trial dogs on. Now we wait for the mud to dry, the grass to get longer and get all the sheep out into the back pasture with Charlie the Llama as their guard and protector.

Well, it seems spring has arrived. Lambing has started, only a couple of ewes so far with a single ram lamb and one pair of twins – both ram lambs. The pregnant ewes are getting bigger and looking ready to pop!.

Well, here we are entering the 2^nd half of March and we have a big storm this weekend. It did start out as a light snow but now is just a heavy rain. I am glad we are not getting a big dumping of snow but we are expecting a couple of inches of rain and that will cause flooding for some folks in the area. I also think the rain might help wash away a lot of the snow we still have on the ground, which might be a good thing because it might help us get some early new grass. This would not only help us directly but would also help out the hay produces in the area which helps us all in the long run.

We had an interesting nighttime visitor this past week – one of our trail cameras got a cool picture of a bobcat at 4:30 AM right in the same spot we have seen coyotes, foxes and even some turkeys. Cool picture, I may post it up here on the blog in the post or two.

Stay tuned…..

Well, February decided to go out with a bang. A big snow storm dumped about a foot of heavy wet snow, this was followed by a few inches of heavy, cold rain. The ground is frozen and the run-off areas for the foundation drain were covered with ice. Thursday night was spent outside chipping away the ice to get the water to run off to the storm drain. With help from our barn friends, Bill and his twin boys Cole and Logan and with Matt, our friend Dan’s son, we did get the ice cleared away and the water draining.

Got back inside, dried off, then we lost power. Seems like well over 250,000+ NH residents lost power Thursday night with hurricane force winds knocking down trees and power lines. I must admit it reminded me of the ice storm of December 2008 where we lost power for almost 10 days! This time we got the generator running to power the well and other appliances and we turned up the gas heat to stay warm. Power came back late Saturday night so we were only out for a couple of days – others are not so lucky with many homes still without power 4 days after the storm hit.

Bill the instructor came back again today – school holidays so a lot of his students have extra time to ride – and had a good size group, 5 of 6 riders in his group lesson.

Cole and Brandon helped me with feeding the sheep this afternoon, they boys live driving the RTV utility vehicle around the farm.

We did not check the trail camera today but we have been getting some good coyote pictures lately – it they start to bother the sheep we will have do something about that.

Expecting some more snow over the next few days – not doing much tonight but supposed to get heavy later tonight and into Wednesday. Should be not such a good weather week, roll on spring.