Spoiled Sheep

So little Rikki now has a new, doting mother.  That would me none other than my mother.  It is the grandchild she will never have.  Rikki now wears diapers and is tromping around her house.  Mom's cats think she has lost her mind.  Rikki is doing well with the bottle and traveling in the car in a cat bed.  Yes a very spoiled little sheep.  My only stipulation is that she is brought back to the farm on a daily basis and given supervised playtime with the other lambs in the barn (sin diapers).  I do not want her to forget she is a sheep!

Meet Rikki

So Miss Rory had her 4 lambs but decided this one cried too much so guess who gets to take care of her.  She was 3#6oz at birth (her brother and sisters were around twice that much).  She has taken well to the bottle and now weighs more like 4 #.  She follows me around very closely, and yes she is now coming in the house! Wait until Tom gets home.

This is our very first bummer lamb in the 10 or so years we have been doing this.  Since we still have a few ewes to lamb I am hopeful one might adopt her.  We shall see.  In the meantime she is getting lots of love and sleeps in my lap as I write this.

Rory has a Party

At day 145 Rory decides to go into labor conveniently in the late afternoon, shortly before I am heading home from work.  Tom was in charge that Friday.  By the time I got home she had just delivered her 2nd lamb and was busy cleaning it up.  But then another came. Three on the ground, we are scrambling to get them nursing then another water bag appeared.  OMG a 4th on it's way.  The first three were girls, the last a boy.  It was a challenge making sure they all had there first drink of milk and knew where to find it.  There were lambs everywhere, hard to keep them all straight.  But they are a nice variety of colors, don't you think?  Now to figure out how to take care of all them. 
This is the first time we have ever had a "litter" of this size.   Singles and twins are the norm, at least once a year we have a set of triplets.  But this is insane.  There is definately a little supplementing of food that will have to happen.

This is a picture of Rory taken two days before.

Wide Load

As you can see by the pictures we are getting closer to lambing.  The nine ewes we bred are all looking bigger, some look like they are going to twin, some just a single, and then the other, namely Rory, looks like she will have a triplets or maybe more!  Of course Rory (see above) is our 50% Gotland, 25% Shetland and 25% Finn so is a bit bigger already than the rest of those in the flock.  Apparently Finn sheep are quite prolific so I wouldn't be surprized if she didn't pop out 4 of them.  I wonder if at this point they sense what is coming?

Shearing our own.....

About 5 years ago my hubby Tom and I decided to learn to shear.   Our motivation to take this on was the losing our dear shearer to retirement, how could she do this to us?  We tried out a few others after her but they just weren't the same, leaving our sheep with multiple band aids and fleeces full of 2nd cuts.  We thought we could do better.  So that spring we picked out our victim, poor little Alliette sheep.   She was a smaller sheep, friendly and mellow.  Perfect for practice.  Our intentions were to learn how to do it like the professionals, that is roll the sheep around on the floor, bend over them with the shears and get the fleece off in one piece.  I had copied about 10 pages of pictures of the various positions for clipping from a Kevin Fords Hand Shearing book and set Tom up with sheep in hand.  I thought it would be natural for the "man" of the house to do the shearing and on that first attempt I would look at the pictures and instruct him. 
It was two hours later that we finally finished up poor, patient Alliette.  I think the whole fiasco just about broke up our marriage.  I would watch, try to instruct, show him the pictures but then end up grabbing the sheep and doing it myself.  What became apparent was that I was a bit more adept at the process than Tom.  Perhaps I had been observing the shearers more than he and could remember the positions better.  Anyway that is how it evolved.
So for that past two years we have done all the shearing of our sheep, usually around 25.   We are still not to the professional level yet, and I say "we" because we have developed a "two person" technique where by I hold the electric shears, get the sheep between my legs and roll them around like the pro's but then Tom is my helper, grabbing head or legs as needed or he responds to my "grab the sheep" before the sheep pops up and runs off.  We have become quite a team and at best can get a fleece off with minimum of sheep cuts and 2nd cuts in about 10 min.  Lots of improvement since the original two hours.  (Just for a fun fact a real pro can shear a sheep in about 3 minutes.)  Our record for sheep shorn in one day now sits at 9, last year we could only do 4 before my back felt like it was breaking.  Not bad for an ol' gal! 
Presently we have finished our ewes and will move onto the rams this next weekend.  Fortunately there are only 4 to do.  Piece of cake!
   

Everyone needs a haircut.........

....it seems this time of year.  First off it is the trees.  They need pruning;  the fruit bearing ones that is.  We have some very old, well established apple and pear trees.  This past couple years we have had quite a haul of fruit from these trees.  Just this last week we ate our last fresh pear.  They preserved quite well just sitting in the dark in the back of our carport, slowly ripening.  I dried quite a few as well, and we continue to enjoy them.  So back to the pruning, I feel obligated to continue this yearly tradition, in spite of all the work.  There are the rewards. 

      Then there are the sheep, who are quite the hairballs at the moment.  At feeding time I find myself "oogling" the lovely fleeces of the ones who allow me.  I ponder the relative softness, luster and color of each, and wonder what they might look and feel like in a final project.  Of course I cannot, repeat CANNOT keep them all!  My first priority is their sales.  I have plenty in my fiber closet at present, plenty of potential projects.  So please, if you want to help me limit my fiber accumulation let me know which type, color of fleece you might want and I can put your name on it.  Come shearing, which is just around the corner, you will have a lovely, soft pile of someone's winter coat ready for your own project.  Haircut time is near!

This is Runa.

She wants to be first on the shearing list.

The Sheep are Growing Feathers!

This fall we acquired some new additions to the farm, some young Japanese Bantam chickens. So far they have settled right in and are doing the job I intended for them. I thought having a few chickens pecking around the pasture might be a good thing to help decrease the parasites which affect the other beasts here. The problem was keeping them away from the predators. My friends who have chickens lock them up at night in fortresses to keep them safe from the wild creatures, namely raccoons and skunks. Being a bit lazy, I was not ready to invest the time and energy into that plus adding another chore to the day's list. Then I learned about these little bantams. Several of our friends have them and have had a hard time keeping them from madly multiplying despite treating them as feral. I was then fortunate to get some, maybe my good fortune as well as my friend's.

When I got the little critters I wanted to imprint them to the barn. My first attempt, leaving their cage on the floor of the ewe barn for a couple days, resulted in failure. They did not return to the barn to roost, preferring the trees near the pasture. One by one they disappeared (chickens can't see at night and I suspect the raccoons were picking them off). From my chicken friend I was gladly given a few more . This time I placed the cage up a bit higher off the ground in the barn for their imprinting. Wasn't sure what would happened when I let them out but they seemed to get the idea. In affect they are basically free roaming chickens, all the time. They roam and scratch around the pastures during the day (who told them to stay out of the vegetable garden?) and return to the barn to roost at night. Perfect! Now all I do is throw some scratch out for them and they are on their own. The pictures here show them in the rafters above the sleeping sheep. On cold nights the sheep help keep them warm. So for now the only problem seems to be that the sheep are now wearing feathers! And of course, the question will be, what to do in the spring when they start laying eggs. Oh well, we will deal with that problem later.