First 2013 Jacob Lamb at Mud Ranch

Lots going on between my last post and now.  Time ticks on, doesn’t it!?  I hope everyone who follows my silly little blog had a great Christmas and Happy New Year!

We had the ewes shorn on January 4th this year.  I’ve been wanting to make the leap from shearing after lambing and in the spring to shearing before lambing and in the coldness of winter… not that ‘coldness’ is what I was shooting for but rather better fleeces and easier lambing.  I’m very impressed with the fleece quality I’ve received by shearing before lambing.  Nice strong fiber and really clean too!  It’s especially nice to see all the baby bumps developing.

Violet & Princess

Violet has a nice round belly developing, though not much of a bag yet.  Despite my “clear thinking” I bred Violet to Fennel at the request of my daughter.  We always manage to bottle feed one of Violet’s babies every year so I had sworn off breeding her and had hoped to have a ewe lamb to keep out of her.  Last year’s “keeper” was killed by a coyote so there went that idea… I’ll just leave you with the fact that my 5 year old is a heck of a negotiator. 😉  Princess is to the right of Violet here and has a very large belly and a nice little udder developing.  Once again, excited to see what she has to offer.  She was bred to my two horned ram, Tristan.

Here’s Aspen, Meg and Ponderosa all sharing a little pile of breakfast.  Both Aspen and Ponderosa came from the Newberry flock up in the high desert of Oregon.  They haven’t exactly thrived here so I was curious to see how well they looked after being shorn.  Not too shabby, atleast better than what I was expecting.  Both have a slight baby bump.  They were bred to Raider but he got bored after about a week of having his measley six ewes and we ended up moving all his girls in with Lancelot… so we’ll see who the proud daddy is of those lambs.  Meg, who has quite the belly developing was bred to Lancelot and looks like she’ll be one of the first in February.

First lamb of 2013!

Of course, the biggest announcement of this post is our first lamb for the year.  He’s a little two horned lilac ram lamb out of Lily.  She was not supposed to get bred but, thanks to shearing early, we found out we were expecting soon!  The whole ordeal jogged my memory on a time this past summer when Lily had some how escaped out of her pen and in with some rams.  This little guy is the result.  Amazing what rams and ewes will do.

Time marches on… and soon the arrival more new lambs.  Looking very forward to this next month.