Category: Voices from the Farm

It was breeding season once again. With the addition of the 18 ewe lambs retained the previous year, we now had 79 mature ewes. The coming year was looking to be a busy one, for sure! But I was already looking forward to it!

Mid March, the real lambing season began in earnest! It was one very busy time with 60 mature ewes giving birth to 102 lambs, and not one was lost! Our lambing average had reached 170%, our highest so far, which meant the introduction of the 1/4 Finn blood into the ewe flock was starting to pay off.

Garbed in white pants and shirt, helmet and veil, wearing long gauntlet gloves and wielding a “smoker” to calm the bees, I began opening hives and discovering the wonders within. It was fascinating to me, and I was hooked in no time at all. Not much time passed before I could walk into a trefoil pasture in bloom and find it abuzz with honey bees gathering pollen and nectar, and thereby pollinating the blossoms so they would produce seed. A most wonderful process, I became a confirmed bee keeper for the next dozen or so years.

March 20, the lambing season began… not an auspicious beginning! In the middle of the night, I went to the barn to check on the ewe, she was up and eating hay… all seemed well. Early next morning, she was dead and had a dead lamb, which she could not deliver. After the rough start, lambing continued to go quite well, with few problems. Of 82 lambs born, only 2 were born dead, and of the 80 survivors, 39 were ewe lambs, so our ewe flock expanded again!

At the end of February, the lambing season was about to get underway. It was going to be a lengthy one, as the 48 mature ewes would lamb first, and about the time they were finishing, the ewe lambs would start lambing.

The barn renovation was coming to an end, and life was settling down. The ram pen had been reassembled in the lower barn level, and the “boys” were safely penned, but it would soon be breeding time again. I had been giving some thought to Dr. Jordan’s suggestion of adding some “Finn” breeding to my flock’s bloodlines.

At last, once the sheep went to pasture, the barn renovation got underway. It was quite an undertaking, as my plans called for keeping the overall size of the barn the same, but redoing the interior so I could feed twice as many sheep in the same amount of space.