Sunday, February 04, 2018

Woolly & Naked...

 More snow

Woolly 

 Naked

 Hello person.  Got anything to eat?

It snowed and turned cold right after we sheared the sheep.  It is winter, after all.  The wool was thick and beautiful and the wool warehouse manager was so excited to receive our wool that he immediately cored a bale of wool and took a sample of it with him to the American Sheep Industry annual meeting in San Antonio this weekend.  He said he wanted to show off the good wool we grow up here in the north country.  That was cool.

On Friday we worked through all the sheep and sorted off the pregnant ewes from the yearling ewes (who will lamb in May) and the late lambing ewes.  The bucks also went with the late lambing ewes.  Then we paint branded all of them -- red paint for the early ewes and green for the yearlings and late ewes.  Then we squirted some insecticide on their backs and turned them out.

TALLY:
206 ewes will start lambing on Feb. 7th or so
77 yearling ewes will lamb in May
22 late ewes will lamb in May
10 bucks
TOTAL:  315

We calculate that the ewes should begin to have lambs any day.  February 7th is our first due date, but the 206 ewes could drop lambs from here on out for the next two weeks or so.  It's going to get busy around here as we kick off the "spring season" with lambing.  I'm excited.  The men completely worked over our lambing barn this past fall.  They tore off the old holey tin, took out the rotted posts and roofing, and made everything like new again.  They even lined the interior walls with an inexpensive pressed board and painted it.  It's going to be a much warmer place for baby lambs.  We have the lambing barn all set up with jugs and some newly made twin pens.  The pens are bedded with straw and we are ready to roll.  It sounds like we are going to contend with winter as we go into lambing.  It was -14* F last night and stayed cold most of the morning.  We warmed up to 16* but are down to 3* for tonight.  I do hope we can get a nice little stretch of reasonable weather, but it will be what it will be and we will just deal with what we get.

I'll report back soon when we start having our first lambies. 

6 comments:

  1. Do you have problems with the ewes getting sick if it gets cold after shearing? I wish I knew how to knit. I love the thought of a real wool sweater. Anymore everything seems to be synthetic. Something gets lost in translation. Good luck lambing! Those little buggers are cute, but a lot of work.

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  2. ooohh... that does sound exciting. It's good to have everything ready.

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  3. SHEEPIES!!! It's my favorite time of year LOL! I always feel so badly for your sheep though -- it just seems like they get sheared at the wrong time of year haha. Can't wait to see the new babies arriving!!!

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  4. Kickin' into high gear, yee ha! :D
    May your lambs be healthy and plentiful!
    Fire up the coffee pot!
    :)

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  5. I love going through the seasons of your ranch with you each year. Oh, those ewes always look SO cold to me! My brother in WVa has a handful of ewes. One very unexpectedly gave birth to twins recently. Max doesn't know where the ram came from! It's quite cold there, and one of the babies froze death. Nature can be harsh.

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  6. Love the photo of all the sheep coming down the road.

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