Sheep are sorted

I had visions of another solid day of fencing. I knew that I needed to make the asthetic changes dictated by the wife first. I had a friend come out to help today. We will henceforth know him as "TJ Hooker". The first thing we did was add the two boards dictated by fashion. Once those were in I decided to continue the slanted board down to the water crossing. This ties the whole fence together and prevents the fence from skewing sideways. We were able to find a bowed board that fit nicely as the uprights are not aligned.  This did manage to pass muster in the afternoon. We may have to fill in the triangle section with paneling if Zeke starts to leap out this hole. We are going to hold off and wait for this event to occur before we fill in the opening. 

My arms were killing me after this little bit of overhead work. Luckily, fencing was not on the agenda for the day. 

Last night our sheep buyer called and said he is ready to pick up lambs. Unfortunately, we don't know how many are ready to sale. So TJ and I finished cleaning out the barn. Then we moved all the alpaca hair to the tack room. I need to make a skirting table so we can get the dirt and loose particles removed from the fleece. This needs to happen this year so we can get the hair to a small processing mill. 

We then lined up the feeders on the opposite side of the sorting chute to make an alley way to push the sheep to the back of the barn. We sorted off 41 lambs. After this the buyer will need to wait until December before he can come back.  This will help us dramatically with our hay consumption. We currently have 40 ewes that can have babies and five babies that were too small to sale. We had to look up how many ewes a single ram can service. The answer is no more than 50 for him to impregnate them in the same 34 day estrus cycle. He can do more it's just that the babies will come over two months instead of one. He was very well behaved today in the barn. Also the ewes are getting used to the frequent sorting. They ran down the chute with very little prompting. 

I am going to have to fix the gate latch on the corral. When we installed the new fence we moved that railroad tie a little bit and now the latch is off 1/4 of an inch and won't engage. I need to drill a new set of holes in a 2x6 board and attach it to the railroad tie. This will fix all the latching problems. We also tightened up a couple of hanging gates. 

Well the sheep for sale have been hanging out in the barn lot all day and a momma managed to get into the ram pasture. So the babies have started to test the fence, unfortunately it's not very good!  So after quitting early so I didn't feel horrible after working all day in the hot sun I ended up back out in the heat fixing the fence. I tightened it and then added a whole layer of woven wire on the upper half of the fence. I rolled it out and was 1.5 feet short. So I just filled it with smooth wire patches. The other little section will have to wait till tomorrow I am beat and tired.