Wednesday Dose of Wooly Cute (and The Whole Picture)

More photos and farm news below. . .

The sun has been shining, the daytime temperatures have finally climbed above freezing, and we're not snowed in anymore, but there's still plenty of snow out there on the ground. I snapped these pictures of our 15 (hopefully!) pregnant ewes in the front field last Thursday as we were heading up our steep, half-mile long driveway after being snowed in for a week, and it's still pretty white out there.

We rarely get a foot of snow at a time here in Missouri, and the snow we do get almost never stays around this long, so the last two weeks have actually been kind of fun. The landscape is beautiful, the moonshadows are glistening, and the white ground lets us to see all the hilly contours of our mostly steeply sloped, wooded land.

And, as Joe pointed out the other day, when our snow sticks around it stays pretty and white as it naturally melts into the ground. No unsightly piles of dirty grey out here in the middle of nowhere, just peace and quiet. Well, except for all the starving (ha), complaining critters. I don't think they appreciate the scenery quite as much as we do. Of course our all-you-can-eat buffet hasn't been buried under a blanket of white.

It was a good year for hay, and we put up 23 large round bales and just under 300 square bales, which we figured would be more than enough to keep the sheep and donkeys fed through the winter and into spring, even if we had to start feeding hay early. And that's exactly what happened.

There's still some edible grass out in the fields, and the sheep and donkeys (and deer) have been pawing and nosing through the snow to get to it. But after already being frozen numerous times this fall and then covered for this long with snow, it doesn't provide much in the way of nutrition, just roughage.

It may not officially be winter yet, but we're all already very much appreciating our barn full of sweet smelling, homegrown hay.

More sheep? Here.

More of The Whole Picture series? Here.

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