White Christmas

It almost didn’t happen but we got snow at the last minute and enjoyed a white Christmas this year. The day before Xmas it snowed just enough so I needed to plow. This was a very travel intensive Christmas for us this year. We all were going to different families on Saturday Sunday or Monday but Today (Tuesday) we will all finally be home and be able to celebrate together. Here is a picture of as close to a one horse open sleigh as we can get at this time.

Paulette and Mack taking tank out for a ride in the snow.

The Team

It was a great weekend. We picked Tank up at Wayne's house on Friday night and both he (Tank) and Arnie were busy all weekend. Paulette, Ben and Emma all rode Tank on Saturday and Paulette had a great trail ride with Arnie on Sunday. Arnie is still not sure about all the scary things in the world and he and I are working on getting him used to them. He took me on a little high speed ride Saturday morning when he got scared trying to pass another horse, a dog and a couple trucks when we were driving in the fore cart down our road. he calmed down and we went right back and drove the road again so he could see that it was no big deal. Arnie is not yet 4 years old and very green, he needs time to learn to trust us and realize the world is not so scary. Tank is another story. tank is 9 years old and has been used to pull a wagon for years. Sunday, after adjusting the harness out to as big as it gets, I worked Tank gradually from ground driving to dragging his trace chains to pulling a tire then to the fore cart finally hooking the snow machine trailer to the cart, putting a couple kids on the trailer and bouncing down the back skidder road. He was Great!! i was so pleased that he took all this in stride. I really wanted to have a horse that I would be able to get right to work with and it looks like Tank is going to be perfect for that.

Next step to Sustainability

One of our biggest farm goals is to run it sustainably. The other big goal is to actually turn a profit. This summer Paulette and I started wondering if using horses, instead of a tractor, could decrease our overhead and get us closer to our goal. Yes I know horses are not cheap and you have to feed them even when you are not using them but they run on something we grow here (grass) and they produce something we need very much (fertilizer) also they will not be "parked" to often so it is not like we will be feeding them for nothing.
Fuel for engines is not getting any cheaper neither are the parts needed to keep them going. We have one tractor and if it continues to get used the way it has been we will be needing to buy a replacement in a couple years. After some research we decided to make this next step

Besides using the horses for work we wanted to be able to ride them as well. Paulette really missed trail riding. While her horse Libby was a really nice dressage horse she was not the kind of horse that could be just ridden around for pleasure. Paulette decided to sell Libby, and buy a working hose that she could just jump on and go for a ride without the worries of riding a high energy warm-blood. After looking at different horses and talking to people about what we want to do we decided on getting a couple Haflingers. Haflingers are a very hardy draft pony. They are a versatile breed that the Amish use regularly and are know to be very easy keepers. during our research we got to know a teamster named Wayne that uses Haflingers and he agreed to sell us a 3 year old named Arnie. Our goal was to have a team but we were having a real hard time finding what we were looking for in our area, Paulette found a few nice looking teams but they were 5 or 6 hundred miles a way.

Arnie came home last weekend and Paulette and I have been working with him almost every day since. It is almost comical as one of use is getting done working with Arnie the other one is standing there with their "stuff" too get the pony and do their thing.




Yesterday Wayne called to tell us a friend of his had a nice pony for sale and he could hook it next to one of his horses if we wanted to come over and try him. We agreed and this morning we went to Wayne's to check it out. Short story is we now have the second pony for our team. Tank is the horse on the right.




Paulette has been enjoying working with Arnie and will be seeing how tank rides very soon. This winter I will be using them to pull logs up from the woods for firewood and in the spring we plan on using them for everything from spreading manure, planting a very large market garden, road grading and a lot of trail riding

Some more pictures

Here are some pictures I have taken over the last few months.


We got about 1 1/2 feet of snow from that storm last month.

Ben and Emma made a pumpkin snow man, I guess it was there way of protesting the snow :-)

Here is Morgan holding the flock on a big patch of clover. Sheep can bloat from eating to much clover at a time so I would have Morgan hold the flock in the clover for an hour or so every day until it was well grazed down. Morgan is a great dog. I tell Paulette I would not have sheep if I had to do it without the help of dogs like Morgan, Midge and Dante.

Here is the Lucy's drive road crew. I fenced the flock along the road I maintain to clear back the brush. When they were done I could get in there and cut out the big trunks. This area is completely
open now.

The ewes would get pretty high on the bushes and the little lambs would wiggle inside and get the leaves the ewes could not. Sorry I don't have an after shot, I will try and post one.

This is a very old orchard that never really used pesticides. I have gotten permission to graze the sheep there. It is a really pretty spot with the apple trees and the sheep laying under them eating drops.

I am making the first passes with the brush mower to clear a fence line.

The flock chewed a lot of the old growth down and then I mowed the entire pasture (about 10 acres). The grass came back really nice and I have the ewes back onto it right now (nov 8th).

BT hiding from the sun on a hot July day

Another shot of the sheep in the orchard.

Midge sure likes to have her belly scratched!

I hope everyone is doing well and are all set for winter. I still have plenty of work to do before the snow flies...well flies again. We are really enjoying life up here, this years garden was pretty much a success, the flock is healthy and we will be breeding around 20 ewes this winter so if all goes well we should have around 30 lambs racing around this spring.

This Summer

This has been a busy summer for us. We have been working on lots of projects from working on the house to putting up hay to moving sheep (a lot of moving sheep). So we finally got the permanent certificate of occupancy for the house. There are still things to be done but it is really looking like a home. Paulette has done a great job painting the trim, doors and windows. We still love the solar and I am in the process of wiring a propane stand by generator into the system that will start automatically if the batteries get below a certain voltage. I almost forgot: Paulette’s father, he is a carpenter, built us a deck off the back of the house. It is about 10 x 14 and it has become one of our favorite places to sit at the end of the day. Paulette has also done great job keeping us well fed. Her garden has been doing really well. The feezer is getting full and we are eating a LOT of fresh veggies.

We put up all the hay for the winter, we had an opportunity to get it all done in one week and just went for it. We bought around 300 bales of first cut reed canary grass and 300 bales of second cut reed canary grass. The second cut is really nice and green and should do a nice job keeping the ewes fed though the winter. We finally got “real” rain for the first time in a long time. We were VERY dry up on the hill and the grass stopped growing. I tried adjusting the size of the paddocks and moving the seep faster though them but the forage just was not there. I ended moving the flock to an abandoned field down the road to get them by until we got some rain. It was kind of un-nerving having them out of site. We could hear Dante and Midge at night barking every once in a while. I strip grazed them though fairly quickly so they could eat what they wanted but didn’t force them, I am thinking about getting weight on the market lambs as well as starting to think about getting the ewes back in shape before winter. It may seem like winter is a long way off but for us it will come very fast. Getting weight on the sheep before the winter is a big deal; skinny sheep have fewer lambs and will never gain the weight back over the winter. I heard a saying from a shepherd “a fat sheep going into the winter is like money in the bank”.

I have the sheep trampling in a cover crop of rye, oats and turnips. I am only planting an acre to try it out but this should extend the grazing season for the ewes which will save me money. The big expense for raising sheep is the hay costs over the winter. If I can do things to decrees the time I have to feed hay I can increase the profit I make on lamb sales.

It is really working!

last year I wrote about how I was going to confining the sheep to small paddocks and move them every day or two. Before I moved them I would though out some grass and clover seed so they would trample it in seed they browsed off the leaves, weeds and what little there was for native grasses. The reasoning I had for doing this was to put the nutrients on the ground were the trampled in seed could use it. The sheep would also do a better job cleaning up the brush since they were under pressure from the other sheep to get what they could before someone else did, so they were less picky. Here are a couple pictures of how it is going.
This picture was taken 11-10-2009, it was just after the loggers left. here is the post I wrote about it in http://uponthehillfarm.blogspot.com/2010/02/foster-farm-finds-home.html

















This picture was taken last June. you can see the Timothy coming up, it looks promising! At this point the sheep had been over it 2 times and I had thrown out seed once in the spring. This is a spot that stays moist longer than most of the clear-cut so the grass is doing the best here compared to the entire clear-cut. below is the link to the post. http://uponthehillfarm.blogspot.com/2010_07_01_archive.html
















This was yesterday May 26th 2011. The Timothy and red clover are so thick I am concerned about letting the sheep have free choice of it since I worry they could bloat. As I said this is a wetter area so the grass is coming in best here but the rest of the clearing is definitely growing grass.




















I am moving the sheep almost every day now. Lambing is almost done and now we will be busy keeping good grass in front of the ewes and lambs. This year we weighed all the lambs when they were born so we will be able to track the pounds gained per day for each lamb which will help us choose which animals to keep for breeding and which go to market. I am not going to say anything that will jinx the situation but so far so good :-)

Some pictures

I am having some trouble with my camera. Emma has been taking some pictures around the farm, here is what Emma finds interesting.

I finally was able to get going on planting the pastures. It has been SO wet and dark I have not been able to get grass seed down.




















A couple pictures of the inside of the house. Paulette has been doing such a nice job painting. It really is looking nice inside. Always more to do but she keeps working on it and little by little it is getting done and the result is really beautiful.

A picture of "Flop" and her single. We don't really give the sheep names but this one is missing her ear tag and she has one ear that hangs low so when the lamb was put in the records I put "Flop" and it it stuck. Her lamb seems to have larger than average ears, maybe that is why Flop has an ear that flops.

Some twins playing on a pile of rock, these two must be less than a day old since they gain fat cover within a day or two after being born.


















This is the remains of an old hunters cabin that is out in the woods behind the farm.

Busy with Spring

I am just chiming in quickly to say I am still here :-). We have all been really busy trying to get the finishing touches on the house, getting the pastures planted and lambing has started. Everyone is doing great. I will get some picture of the house and lambs up soon.

WE ARE IN!!

I just received a call from the code enforcement officer and we were given a temporary certificate of Occupancy (CO). A Temporary CO simply allows one to live in the house while they finish the odds and ends. Can't wait to spend the first night in our new house!! Very exciting.

Mack's Latest Accomplishment

Many of you know my son Mackenzie. He has always been a very responsible young man. I value his help to me here on the farm, I can give him a task and he just does it. If I ask for him to haul brush or clean a fence line he doesn't whine about it he just gets to work. He wanted some money when he was visiting his grandparents down in Groton long point CT so he started a bike repair business and earned enough to by himself a $300 Ipod touch (this was when he was 12yo). Now at 14 he is planning on what it will take to get his learners permit so he can get his drivers license. Here on the farm he has his own P/U and he uses it to help with his chores. I got an email yesterday from his school announcing he was awarded Citizen of the month. below is the message got.... GOOD JOB BUDDY!!... MMS Citizens of the Month8th Grade: Mack Foster is new to MMS this year. He has been such a positive addition and brought great talent to the 8th grade. He has volunteered to help with our many projects and activities like the Fall Breakfast and the International Cafe. While doing this, he exhibited a sense of responsibility and self-direction. In many instances, Mack has exhibited caring and kindness toward his fellow students. Though quiet, he has a sense of humor. We nominate Mack with great pleasure!Mack Foster is a great selection and a member of the 8th grade band - He plays trombone and has volunteered to play percussion on one selection for the Spring Band concert and also plays bass guitar in the morning Jazz Lab Band. Kind, considerate and respectful come to mind as labels for Mack.

I think this is actually true.

It is April 2nd and the snow is still here. I am beginning to think that the 10" of snow we got yesterday was actually not an April fools joke! Just when the road was starting to dry up and the ground was getting exposed. I actually thought winter was over . Bad news is the code enforcement officer couldn't come up to inspect because of the weather so we are not in the house yet. She is going to stop by Monday and take care of it then. Meanwhile Paulette and I had the day off because of the weather so we were able to get a jump on the weak ends projects. Today the Sun is very bright and the it sounds like it is raining from all the melt off from the roof. It is not all bad, I don't have to worry about checking the dogs for ticks :-).

Kitchen Cabinets

This weekend we focused on getting the kitchen in. I was able to install most of the cabinets and make the counter top. I still need to do some more sanding as well as put several coats of tung oil on the top but the hard part of making it is done.

Paulette milk painted and polyurethaned the upstairs bathroom floor. It looks really nice. We kind of think we would have liked to have painted more of the floors, oh well to late now.

The first cabinets to go in.

Gluing the pine boards for the counter top.

The plywood back board for the pine counter top drilled and ready to go. I glue and screw the plywood back board to the pine boards to give it strength

After a lot of measuring and re-measuring I made the final cuts to the sink opening. I ended up using a skill saw to make the final cuts so it was a fairly tense few minutes until I had it done -- the potential to mess a days work up was pretty great i.e. "measure twice cut once, not "I cut it three times and it's still to short" :-).

I used cut nails and glue to hold the edging on.

A couple late night pictures of the finished counter top. I am going to make a back splash and glue it to the wall. I will finish installing the rest of the cabinets during the week and Paulette will put the doors back on.

Making progress

Here are some pictures of the work we have been doing. If all goes well we should be moving in by April 1st, no joke :-).


Here is the wide pine boards ready to be distressed.


Emma working on making the floor look 200 years old, kids are good at this. She is using a mace like tool that has pieces of metal tied to the stick so marks can be put in the floor before finishing it. The final product looks like a floor with many years of use on it.

Here is part way though the staining process. Paulette came up with a layered staining method that really looks nice when it is done. Here she is putting the second coat of stain on the floor. She will wipe this off and let it dry for a couple days before coating it with 2 coats of satin polyurethane.



Here is a bad picture of one of the finished floors. I will take some more pictures that do them justice.





Some of the kitchen cabinets Paulette is in the process of milk painting.



The window in the entryway. This is the first window we have finished and it came out great!! We are very happy with how all the pieces have come together and the look is just what we were going for.




Mud season is here really bad. The road is a mess and the weather has not been making it much better. It may be spring in some places of the country but we are still enjoying winter up here. Yes that was sarcasm.


The ewes are getting big and are due to start lambing in the beginning of May. I will need to give shots and shear them in about 3 weeks.