Bug war is on

The Bug War is on!!  I came home yesterday and there were bugs everywhere.  We have box elder bugs (wax bugs, black and red winged annoyances) on the ceiling on the floor on the windows all over the ENTIRE house. I went back to town and got some more insecticide for use inside the house.  I sprayed around the doors and windows.  I then fired up the vacuum cleaner and vacuumed every visible bug I could find, a few hundred.  They are trying to take over.  I would have sprayed outside around the footing and eaves but the wind was howling.  I will do that when the weather cooperates.  Annmarie brought home some sonic chasers.  They emit some nasty sound that supposedly only the bugs can hear.  Yep, I can hear it.  A very high pitched whine.  She tells me I will get used to it.  I am willing to give it a couple of weeks, especially if it will help with the bugs.  We think they are living under our breeze porch.  I may have to crawl up there and fire off a bug bomb if this last round of effort doesn't pay off.  The chickens have been eating the bugs outside but it doesn't seem to be helping any inside.

I am going to castrate that other male baby sheep this weekend.  I was looking at the sheep today when I let them out of the barn and they look kind of skinny in the back haunches.  I think I may have to worm them soon. I might even start feeding them some hay.  Annmarie read in a farmers magazine we get that for sustainable grazing you should not have more than 1 unit (1000 pounds of live animal(s)) per 2 acres of pasture.  This would be 8 sheep for us on our current fenced pasture.  I need to get the rest of the fence done.  I want to create three other independent pastures so that we can rotate the sheep.  Each pasture is supposed to get at least 2 weeks of rest before putting the animals back on it.  We keep finding little tidbits the more we learn about self sustaining farming.  The funny thing about this is 100 years ago everyone did it this way.  It was very labor intensive to put up tons of hay so you rotated animals, pastured them in the forest and let your pasture grow so it could sustain the animals as far into Winter as possible.  Now we are trying to go back to that.  Most food was grown on small farms.  Not true now.  Well, our meat is going to grown right here and it does make a huge difference in taste.