Our Temporary Home

The week leading up to demolition is now a blur. We were blessed with very nice weather for moving out of our house. We made countless trips ... with the golf cart (that has a bed on the back) and the John Deere 990 tractor with a pallet on the front ... of boxes and furniture out to the new and old barns for storage.

We built a pole barn structure in 2006 (pictured above) and the lower-roofed section of it is my office, the kitchenette, and 1/2 bath. We set up our new living quarters in this area, supplemented by our 27' - 5th wheel camper. The finished barn space is roughly 900 sf (the section with the shorter roof) and is finished like a house ... carpet, drywall, windows, pellet stove for heat. We have an alcove for our bedroom, a space still for my office, another space for a couch and TV and another for the dining room table. It's rather cozy! And Colton gets his own private sleeping quarters in the camper.

I am cooking in the camper, but we do have the full size frig in the kitchenette along with lots of shelves for kitchen appliances, cookbooks and stuff. There is a small shower in the camper, but a very small hot water heater, so Preston and his cousins tore out the 30" fiberglass shower from the house, along with ample 2x4's, the beadboard / pegs from the laundry room and built a shower house on a large pallet. They plumbed it to the water from the milk house and now we have a great outdoor shower. I was the first to try it and it was wonderful. I'm hoping for warmer days, as right now it's like taking the Polar Bear Plunge!

The guys also set up my washer and dryer in the milk house. The property was a dairy barn years ago and the milk house is a 10'x14' block building where they stored the milk after milking the cows. I used it as my sheep operation, but the sheep are gone now, so we cleaned it up and it has a new use for the time being.


...yes, this it clean ... everything in my life it relative now. The shower above was the 'yucky, tiny' shower in the house, now it is the lap of luxury. The washer and dryer were planned for a very small 3-sided hay shed until 'T' (cousin Terry, Jr.) came up with a better idea, now I have 'indoor plumbing.' My house is demolished and we are 'homeless,' but I have a very warm, dry, comfortable living space, so I am forever grateful. The puppies are thrilled they get to sleep with their people now instead of downstairs in the house all alone. And all of the sacrifices are a means to a very exciting end.

Building a New Home

Our life it about to take on a whole new adventure. In a few weeks, we are going to plow over the 160+ year old farm house you see here and build a new one in the same location. I spent 4 months drawing the floor plan. Just before Christmas, I took it to a designer to have him make the construction drawings. We spent January interviewing builders and decided on 3 of them to bid the project. It is currently out for bid and we are waiting to hear back.

We have begun packing up our household goods. We will move everything out into one of the two barns (the old dairy barn or the new shop/office - pictured above). We will sleep in my office and cook & shower in the 5th wheel trailer while construction goes on. It's estimated to take about 6 months. So our hope is to be moved back in sometime in October.

So stay in touch with us while we build our new home!

More Babies

You might remember this picture of my bird feeders outside my office window. I shared it in one of my first blog postings. Well, Colton and I had gone to Florida during spring break to visit my Mom and Dad. When I came home I saw a bird's nest in the green feeder. I watched for a few days and discovered it was a mama Robin and she had layed 4 blue eggs.

When I got home yesterday from an overnight trip to Chicago, I discovered what I think are 3 babies. I know... they look like plastic ET's ... a face only a mother Robin could love. She's sitting on them now as I type, keeping them warm. After a couple week's of bugs and worms, they will grow into something more resembling a bird.

Our First Lamb

Here is our first lamb born to Delia and Rambo. She is 3 days old in this picture. She is a black mouflon and I feel horn buds, but we'll have to see. There is polled (no horns) ancestry on the sire's side.

I found her early Monday morning. Delia had been nesting all day Sunday ... staying close to the barn, not eating much. So Sunday I busied to get the post delivery stall ready for her and all lambing supplies ready. She only had one lamb this year after a tough breech delivery last year of one of her twins. I was happy for her easy and unassisted delivery!

Here are pictures of Rambo, her sire (solid black) ... this picture is last fall, so he's grown quite a bit since then... And Delia, her dam (moorit mouflon). The ewe is available for sale and will be ready to leave the farm early July.

We aren't expecting our next lambs until the end of May ... kind of an unorganized, unplanned breeding season.

Off To Market

Each year we have a few ram lambs that didn't sell and so their destiny is food on our table. We have a local butcher friend who handles the processing in a USDA inspected facility and prepares the cuts for us. We took 6 lambs last night to his farm and he will take them today.

I also have two intact adult rams who bear genetics not worth repeating. They both have very tight horns and they have had to be trimmed (at $65 a vet visit). One of them has very long legs and that caused difficult births last spring delivering long-legged lambs. These are both hereditary traits and the goal of a good breeder is to cull out the undesirable traits. That doesn't mean it's easy, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. Welcome to life.

Anyway, we were concerned about taking older intact rams to the butcher for fear of a tougher texture and stronger taste due to their raging hormones. A breeder friend of mine said they would still be good ... have it all ground and make some into sausage to disguise the taste. So we'll likely take them as well. We just couldn't take them all in the same trip or the adult rams would have killed the wethered (fixed) rams because they had been living with the ewes.

In Iceland, the sheep are raised primarily for meat, although they are known as a triple purpose breed: meat, wool, and milk. The meat is much milder and more tender than domestic or Australian lamb. It is considered a gourmet meat. We have an upscale grocery store here in Dayton, Dorothy Lane Market. They have been importing Icelandic lamb for a couple of years. I spoke with them last week and they are selling it for ... $24.99 / pound. We plan to approach the meat buyer there as well.

Our lambs are all raised without hormones, antibiotics, pesticides or herbicides. They are also grass-fed and finished. I do not grain feed them.

If you are interested in purchasing any of our lamb, you can contact me at debhoeve@gmail.com

Here is the pricing:

** half lamb into cuts ($5.50/lb)
** whole lamb into cuts ($5.00/lb)
(average yield about 35 - 40 lbs.)

After these orders are fulfilled, we will fill orders for individual cuts, if available. These will be $6.50/lb.

Deliver should be in early February. 50% deposit required on all half/whole orders. We have a small flock and this meat will go very quickly, so do not hesitate!

Happy Birthday, Betty!

Today would have been my mother-in-law’s 80^th birthday. Preston was in Colorado Springs on business on October 6^th having lunch with people he had just met when he got the call from Los Angeles that his mother had died suddenly. He called me immediately and I was in a state of total disbelief. Betty was someone you were certain would live well into her 90’s. But God had a different plan.

I only knew her for a few short years, but the lessons I took from watching her live her life will stay with me for a long time. At age 60, when the rest of us are thinking about retirement, she started a new career at an estate planning law firm as a personal secretary for one of the partners. She worked full time, a 40-hour work week Monday – Thursday… not because she had to, but because she wanted to. She ran circles around the younger girls and the attorney who spoke at her funeral said they’d have to hire 3 people to replace all that she did at the firm. Her work ethic was amazing.

But she still made time for lots of fun. She loved to come visit us on the farm and was eager to try anything new. She was here for 2 weeks in June. She saw lambs being born, saw her son milk a ewe, was here when our new llama arrived and helped us bale hay and even drove the tractor pulling the wagon full of hay when we were trying to get it in before the rain came. She had so much fun. She was my drinking buddy. She’d always say “Its 5 o’clock somewhere” and mix up a Manhattan while we made dinner.

She was a very active Red Hatter and went on several trips each year with her good friend Alice. In September of this year, she and Alice planned to go to Washington DC. Although they went with the group, the two of them always extended the trip to get in a little more site-seeing. A few weeks before the trip, Alice became too sick to travel, but Betty made the decision to go anyway. She navigated the nation’s capital, the Metro and did the tourist thing all on her own. What a brave woman!

Every weekend she would write us a letter. It usually talked about the weeding she would do in her rose gardens, the beautiful tomatoes she’d have year-round, the goldfish in her pond and errands around town. She’d include articles of interest from the newspaper to include maybe a letter to the editor she had written under the pseudonym Mary Johnson. And she always sent me a stack of coupons.

She wrote a letter to us that first weekend in October, put it in the mailbox Monday morning and went to work, feeling fine all day according to her co-workers. At the end of the day, she gave them a cheery good-bye – see you tomorrow. She stopped at the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few things and apparently on the way home started to feel badly. She pulled in the garage and ran in the house, sat down on a chair and that’s where the fire department found her the next morning. A neighbor saw that her garage was open and called the police.

In her reviews at work each year, she’d always ask what she needed to do to keep her job. She said she wanted to go with her boots on. That she did.

She loved reading my blog. She said on several occasions that she felt like I was writing a letter just to her and not to burst her bubble by telling her any differently. I even found copies of some of my stories she had saved on her computer. So since her death, I hadn’t felt very inspired to write. But today, in honor of her birthday, the inspiration returned. Cheers, Betty! Here’s to you and your amazing life. I will miss my drinking buddy.

Store Opens on Etsy

Just a very short, quick blog today to announce the Grand Opening of my store on Etsy.com. Etsy.com is a storefront for homemade items only. I picked up my yarn at the fiber show last weekend and have put some of it in the store. Please stop by The Icelandic Shepherdess Store and let me know what you think! I'll be putting some roving out there as well, so check back!