The town of Sullivan is known for its wild blueberries, and this summer is turning out to be a very good year for them. I’m slightly disappointed that the border collies don’t show any interest in mining this trove, but the sheep are making up for it.
Tagged: blueberry bush, browsing, Casey, lamb, rock, sheep, wild blueberries
This is what the woodsy section of pasture looked like this morning after two days of sheep grazing. For reference, this is what it looked like when they started.
Grass, ferns, and weeds are largely eaten to the ground, and the leaves on trees and bushes are gone up to sheep-reaching height. I would normally move the flock out before they had eaten the flora so thoroughly, but I’m deliberately trying to reclaim this area as pasture, so I wanted the sheep to do a bit of damage to the woody plants. I let them get a little hungrier than I normally would, to encourage them to eat things they might otherwise disdain. If I pulled stunts like this too often, the nutritional status of the flock would start to suffer — lambs grow best when they have very consistent access to all the food they want to eat — but an occasional day where I prioritize land management will hopefully be ok.
Tagged: browsing, grazing, landscape management, overgrazing, pasture reclamation, sheep
Foggy morning at the Miles’s place…
And the sheep in the woods seem to have had a fine night.
I was a little worried that the electronet might not be an effective predator deterrent with trees and bushes right up against it, but Bravo and Cleo have had more than a week to establish these fields as their territory, and there were no signs of a challenge to them. By tomorrow morning, the sheep will have eaten the shrubs and trees down pretty thoroughly, so Cass and I will find out if we can move them out of their grottos.
Jungle is starting the retake the back portion of the pasture where the sheep have been grazing; my hosts, the Miles family, would prefer to keep it as grassland, so I moved the sheep back there today to do what they can.
A few of the lambs got upset when they couldn’t find their mothers, but the sheep mostly seemed delighted with all the nooks and crannies in this part of the pasture.
I’m a bit unclear how we’ll get them out of there, but I’m assuming that Cass will figure out something clever and persuasive.
Today my sheep were actively converting first-succesional forest back into grassland. The edge of one of the fields was starting to grow in with a thick stand of (I think) quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), and I’ve been meaning to let the sheep have their way with it all season; I finally got the grazing sequence to align with that patch today.
The sheep were as enthusiastic about the aspen leaves as I’d hoped.
By this afternoon, they had mostly denuded the saplings. I’m hoping another couple of passes like this and the encroaching forest will rethink its advance on the pasture.
Tagged: browsing, forest, grazing, pasture, Populus tremuloides, quaking aspen, saplings, sheep, succession
I hadn’t gotten to cleaning up all the smaller branches from the fallen ash, and yesterday when I was walking the farm with friend, neighbor, and logger Mark Smith, he asked if I had left them out for the sheep to eat. I’m not totally convinced he wasn’t just being charitable about my messy pasture, but he explained that deer absolutely love eating ash bark and small twigs. Much as I wanted to confirm that I was indeed providing a clever alternate food source for my flock, I had to confess that I simply hadn’t finished cleaning up. It turns out that Mark knew my sheep better than I did, and I might have gotten away with the fib.
Tagged: ash bark, ash twigs, browsing, Fraxinus americana, Hollow Oak Farm, Mark Smith, pasture, sheep
