Today it begins...

 

From wild and woolly...

...to domestic and well-coiffed.

It's been a busy couple of weeks with Littles staying with us for a week, a new grandbaby being born, and then came shearing on January 29th.  The herd produced a gross of 3125 pounds of raw wool when weighed at the Wool Warehouse.  A couple days after shearing we bagged the ewes (checking to see that they are making a milk bag) and sorted off the late, May-lambing ewes.  We branded the ewes that will lamb now with red paint and branded the bucks, late ewes, and yearling ewes with green.  Hubs applied the insecticide as we counted each group out of the gate.  
Tally:  
199 ewes to lamb in the Lambing Barn
93 head to Buck Pasture:  12 Bucks, 55 Yearling Ewes, and 26 Ewes.

No sooner did the men have the Sheep Barn cleaned up and bedded with a thick layer of straw and set up the lambing jugs -- BAM!!  --  the first lamb was born -- TODAY!

Although it is not spring here AT ALL, our spring season has begun.  Today on the bleak prairie we made it up to a chilly 19 degrees with a stiff breeze and a skiff of snow that blew around. We still have a good, deep, crust of snow on the level that refuses to melt with ice underneath.  We're not exactly "pushing up daffodils" here.   We start our spring season on the ranch with early lambing and just a week or two after we complete that job, we start calving heifers and then cows and on and on it goes until pretty soon we are in the field sweating and making hay bales for all our critters.  The "spring" seems to go by so fast once it begins.  And today it begins.  I'm pretty excited!

In honor of the first lamb born, here are pictures!