Todays activities

Just a quick rainfall update before I go any further... Yesterday 2mm and today 3.5mm

Here's our rain gauge out near the kids playground. And when I say we had 3.5mm today, what that actually means is I emptied 3.5mm out of the rain gauge this morning, so the 3.5mm actually fell yesterday. This is the case every day, I measure the rainfall from the previous day.

First job again today.. sheep feeding, just did the 4 ewe mobs this morning, and there are more and more lambs arriving every day. There are also more problems popping up with the lambing. I hadn't mentioned it previously, but it's not unusual to lose a few ewes (ie. they die) due to problems with giving birth. And we have lost a few. 4 I think at last count, from different mobs. Today I had to help out 2 ewes that were down lambing. I don't hold high hopes for the first one, she'd just been there too long and probably wont survive, but the second will be fine. She was up and away with a little help after I pulled her lamb for her. She may even have another lamb still to come, but she seemed to have plenty of strength left for that, so she should be fine. Here is some footage of the first ewe I came across.

Next job was new lights for the trailer. If anyone has ever used a trailer behind there car or ute or whatever they will be fully aware of the issues that can arise just to make sure the lights work... and they usually don't. Especially on a farm trailer. The other day we couldn't get the lights to work... yet again, and so the decision was made to upgrade to LED tail lights. Well after a little bit of drilling, soldering, and heat shrinking (about 2 hours worth - well not quite, but it seemed like it - have you ever tried using heat shrink when it's windy, I couldn't get my gas lighter to stay alight). Then the hurdles went back on, so we could transport sheep in the trailer it we needed to.

The reason for that is that the afternoons job was shifting sheep. The mob of wethers that I had been feeding on the block we call Gumbowie. They've been fed enough now and built up plenty of strength to make the approx. 5km walk up to Fountains (another block of ours). In fact the trailer wasn't even required as we only had to pick up 1 sheep that went down with exhaustion. My dad and myself work together on moving the sheep, well we did today at least, with one of us driving in front of the mob (in this case Dad) and the other driving them from behind (you guessed it... me!). We put a vehicle in front of the mob so the strong ones don't run ahead like wild animals - and wethers can do that - while the slower, weaker, even slightly lame ones struggle to even walk right at the back. That can be disastrous, especially when taking the mob over intersections and crossing over main roads.

Going steady along a country road

Andy's there helping me out. He's just waiting for the next command... actually he's not really, he's posing for the photo. He was really hard at work and I called him and he turned around for the shot.

Got them to the paddock with no problems, just had a couple of quick fencing jobs to do once we got there. One of the gates through to another paddock was a bit worse for wear. It woulda done the same job whether it was open or closed, so we tidied that up a bit.

Before

After

Yeah yeah, I know it doesn't look like much of an improvement, it's still a rickety old gate, we coulda put a new one there. But oh well - she'll be right, till the first time the sheep lean on it. That gives us at least a coupla days. Also had to check the water trough there. They went in on a fresh wheat stubble so we haven't had any stock in there for quite some time and, hence, the water trough was turned off, and as it turns out did have a leak in the pipe. So dad put in a new T-piece in the line where it goes into the trough. The old one must have had a leak. I never actually went and looked he sorted out all that.