Saturday afternoon we took reservations on all our lambs. Yep, the whole crop is spoken for.

Customers will be coming on Oct 3rd and Oct 4th to pick up or process their animals. We also sold all our eggs and a handful of chickens. Remember all those free chicks we ended up with in the spring? We’ve been able to raise them and sell birds to several other folks to turn them into a profit. So what’s next, right?

Fall is also breeding season, so in addition to keeping our lambs healthy and growing for the next few weeks to finish, the mild summer seems to have brought at least a few of our ewes into early heat. It’s a little early for our flock, and our ewes are awfully fat right now {smile} so we’ll have to see if they actually breed early or not. Tiberius seems more curious than actually interested right now.

The cows are just hanging out eating as usual. Our bull calves will both be harvesting this Fall as well. One to our freezer and one for customers.

Do you remember this little guy from last winter? Molly’s little calf?

Yeah, he’s all grown up now…

The flies have been particularly bad this year. Here’s something interesting about our cattle…our Zebu are not as susceptible to flies. I don’t know why. I didn’t even notice it at first because the only other cows around are Molly, as a Zebu/Jersey cross. But we noticed at the Fair that our cattle attract waaaay less flies than the Angus cows on the Fairgrounds. And in our pastures, you can see that Molly is pestered more than the others.

You can see that her calf up there has almost no flies.

Then you can see here that Annabelle has almost no flies other than the occasional horse fly on her legs or belly.

Then you can see poor Molly here has a lot more. Not as many as a standard beef breed, but more than the Zebu. All those black marks are flies pestering her.

And this is the worst we’ve seen them around here. On the whole I think we’ve been fortunate. However, I found a recipe for Homemade Fly Spray on Pinterest that we might try to give her a little relief.

We don’t usually treat our cows with anything. We haven’t had any issues with internal parasites (unlike the sheep) and the flies are rarely bad enough to need treatment, so our cows live a pretty au natural lifestyle. Green grass and sunshine and they’re pretty carefree.

If you have any tried and true natural fly treatments, I’d love to hear them! Particularly how you give the treatment to the cows when they’re not halter trained. Molly’s friendly and curious, but she doesn’t just come when I call. Do you have fly problems at your farm? I remember the dairy farm we rented at when we were first married…whew! The flies were so bad you couldn’t leave your car windows down or your car would be covered!

Speaking of Fall work, we’re gearing up for winter around here and there’s new coats on the Christmas lists for the kiddos. We’ll have two getting passed down, but we’ll need to buy a new one for the Ladybug and new coveralls for the boys this year.

Will you be needing new winter gear this year?

See where I’m sharing this week…