Well, I’ve been promising a chalkboard painting post, and I swear, it’s coming. But I’ve got bigger news that I just had to share–it’s lambing time!
Now isn’t that more fun than how to make a chalkboard?
Well, we think it is anyway.
It started with twins on Valentine’s Day morning, and now we’re up to five. It was a few weeks earlier than we were really expecting, but March is just around the corner, so we were already prepped and ready.
The three this morning were all ram lambs. (We like rams because our customers like rams.)
We’re keeping our eyes open for a really good ram and a good ewe or two for our own breeding program, but we’re not pressed about it right now. Our flock of Cluns are all young and right now it’s easier for us to keep one, single breeding flock than to try and track two separate genetic pools.
I’ve posted before about how important careful breeding programs are to maintaining heritage breeds. We have a lot of other bustle in our lives too and keeping it simple right now is the best way for us to keep doing a good job. I’m already behind on my paperwork. (Actually, I have the paperwork, it’s the entering it in the database and turning it in to the breed association where I fall off the wagon.)
We’ll be moving these guys (and their momma’s, of course) over to the nursery field this evening. We give the ewes some higher quality, partial alfalfa hay and a protein lick in the early weeks of nursing to make sure everyone’s getting what they need. These Cluns’ are excellent mothers and they give everything they’ve got to their lambs. Twins can drain a ewe pretty quickly if you’re not careful and we don’t have any good, green grass right now.
Remember #7 last year that got so sick? We’re trying really hard to avoid that again and hope the protein lick this year might help. And we’re keeping an especially keen eye on her too. She recovered fine and her lambs grew up just fine, but we were never able to determine the final root cause so we don’t know if it might happen again.
Anyway–everyone is doing just fine so far. We’ve got two healthy little calves out back and 5 woolies bawling in the side fields. We’ve got 10 ewes left to deliver.
And we’ve got a chalkboard project up tomorrow.
I promise!
