Rusty Truck Ranch

Planted our first field of corn poppies this week! So not only will we be offering Sunflower photography, we will have a poppy field for photography as well!
🌻♥️📸
Fingers crossed that they grow well! This is entirely experimental, so we will find out soon how it will go! Stay tuned!

We delivered all of our lambs for the season in just a 5 day window.

6 mama ewes
10 lambs
5 ewe lambs
4 ram lambs
1 loss (despite our best efforts)
1 bottle lamb- mom had mastitis last year that appears to have effected her udder this year.

Lambing is my favorite event on the Ranch each year, and it is over so quickly!

We’ve noticed that all of the babies seem to have a very calm temperament, with many seeming to enjoy pets and attention from us (which is not typically the norm!) I have contributed this to our new Ram, Stanley, as he is the only new variable. He also threw very consistent coloring with 6/10 lambs being brown with a white head!

Next up, vaccines and banding.

Norma and her ram lamb born early this morning! ❤️

We keep Katahdin hair sheep that shed their wool each spring, which is what you see hanging over this baby. Norma is nearly shed out except for across her back.

The best feeling is waking up to 3 more babies on the ground this morning😍 All alive, all nursing, all the mamas doing great.

Have you met Molly? She is my main squeeze- she is my OG sheep/farm animal, and my best milker! 🍼 She came from a small dairy in Yakima, and we bottle fed her and a few other lambs jointly with our neighbors to decrease the workload that bottle feeding always brings! I bonded with her pretty immediately- who couldn’t love a red lamb!

Molly is getting to be an older gal these days, and has more tan wool that red, but she is still healthy and doing great. She’s an incredible mom and I have learned a lot delivering her lambs over the years. It has given me a deep appreciation for birth and innate birthing/mothering instincts while sitting in the calm outside patiently observing her in labor.

The last 3 years Molly has thrown a single enormous ram lamb, so big that she tends to have trouble with her hips for a few days following delivery. It’s been turned into a running joke- “Molly’s hugely pregnant with a giant ram lamb again.” She is also always the most pregnant appearing and her babies grow fast with all of the extra milk she produces. She often be the last sheep to deliver and have the biggest baby in the pen.

Today when she delivered an average sized ram lamb, and I was only surprised that it was a normal size… another boy… another single lamb! But when I went inside and returned to find a spotted white ewe lamb by her side too, I was absolutely shocked and thrilled!

Here is our sweet proud Molly with her two fresh babies born this morning ❤️ All are doing well, and are up nursing.

I just love her and everything she has brought to our farm.

Judy the goat also has a Co-worker from the Ranch who worked with the Wishing Star Foundation last week! This little guy doesn’t have a name yet as he is going to another farm to live- but we wanted to give credit where credit was due! ✨

We all know how hard it can be to get up early, drink milk, hop into a stranger’s car, and snuggle smiling people all day! Actually that might only be a safe ambition for a goat working with an incredible foundation, so please don’t model your work schedule schedule off of our coworker here!

We have the totals from Spokane/ CDA day 5! Congrats to our winning Goat Wranglers from Friday ........ Rocky, Emily and Lisa bringing in an amazing $1865!! WOW!! Thank you so much!

This is the time of year that it all starts!
Pumpkin 🎃 planting! We will start all of our seeds in sterile soil in seedling flats.

Wait… why don’t we plant direct into the ground?
🌱When you plant a seed into microbe rich soil like a field, you will surely loose seeds to normal bacterial activity in the dirt.
💧when seeds don’t sprout, water gets wasted on watering non-productive ground.
💪It also makes it difficult/laborsome to go back and replant those areas where there are gaps, and creates inconsistent timing for harvest.

So how do we get all of the plants into the ground?
Do we dig holes? Use a shovel? Dig a trench?
We actually use a transplanter/water wheel towed behind a tractor- there’s truly no other way to plant this many pumpkins and stay married at the end of the season🤪

I’ll will show videos of the transplanter as we start getting starts in the ground!

♥️Why are the seeds red in this photo? These are Crunchkin seeds, small seeds from a small decorative variety that it a marbled orange/yellow. These seeds are film coated which is why they are red