Our March Madness has finished before the end of March! Our lambing wound up early this morning at 1:20 am, when Mist gave birth to a beautiful black 3/4 Cormo girl. Prince is her father, and with Mist as her mother, we wanted to keep with the weather theme, so Lisa named her Princess Virga. …
It is almost the end of lambing and unlike other years when I CAN’T WAIT for it to be over, this year I’m feeling a bit bittersweet about the end of lambing. We have been very fortunate this season, with really excellent ewe health, high fertility, but not too high, all the ewes pregnant, but …
We have been lambing for a full month now (our first lambs were born February 16th) and most of that time we have been deluged with one atmospheric river after another, and really cold temperatures also. Finally we have a few days of warm sunshine, although another storm is due this weekend. And, with only …
Last July, we lost our much-loved and trusted senior livestock-protection dog, Orbit, in the prime of his life. It was so traumatic and sad that I haven’t written his obituary yet, but I will write him an obit, because he is so deserving of it. The loss of Orbit put pressure on our remaining two dogs, …
Back when we were running a sheep dairy, shearing day was something to be endured, for the health of the sheep. But now that we have a fiber-based business, shearing day is the most important day of the year. Last Thursday was one of two of our annual shearing days; we sheared our 46 bred …
We lost our beloved ram, Mitt the Romney, today and everyone on the ranch took it pretty hard…
Looks like we are headed for a lamb bonanza this year! We bred 46 ewes and expected about 35 to be pregnant, as our pregnancy rate has been about 75% every year since we started with the fiber sheep, whose fertility is not as high as the East Friesian dairy sheep. But the fertility gods …
We’ve had a very unusual May. Usually May is our little bit of summer–the spring winds have died down, the pastures are still green and full of wildflowers, and we have sunny days and lovely long evenings that make me nostalgic for the summers of my childhood, in New York and visiting my cousins in …
Lambing is almost over, and I’ve hardly had a minute to write a blog post this year! We began on February 13, and have had no lambs born for the past two weeks, but we have 5 ewes holding out. We expect them to lamb in the next week or two. My friend Annie is …
Yesterday was one of our miserably windy March days, with gusts so strong anything not nailed down was flying away. It was also a sad day because it was time for my cousin Linda to return to Idaho. After we said goodbye to Linda our minds were taken off it all by a little lamb-storm. …