Good Food is Everybody's Business
On the corner of Seventh Avenue and Virginia Street in Seattle is a restaurant. It’s a restaurant much like many other downtown restaurants: tall glass windows, comfortable seating, a view into a bustling kitchen and a creative – sometimes edgy – menu. But there is something that makes this restaurant different.
The sheep flock kept growing and demanded a lot of my time. The lambing went well, and we had an absolute deluge of ewe lambs. This proved to be fortunate, as it turned out the demand for breeding stock was very high that year. “Big Mumbo” again had quintuplets, and all survived, but three were added to the bottle lamb pen.
Not a perfect year, but it could have been much worse. And I learned, the hard way, to “never trust what a feed salesman may tell you!”
Lambing was going very well, and by March 20, Bluebird produced twins, and as usual they were both ewe lambs! A few days later, her daughter, #146, who had quints the previous year, delivered a set of quadruplets: 3 ewes, and 1 ram. Another thrill! Two days later her twin, #145, delivered twin ewe lambs. No wonder our ewe flock was growing by leaps and bounds!
We had begun calling these two ewes “Big Mumbo,” (#146), and “Big Jumbo,” (#145), they were both good sized ewes, capable of carrying a lot of lambs! I made sure I gave “Big Mumbo” extra rations, and she raised all four lambs herself and did a good job of it!
We came through the lambing with no lambs lost, the second time for that joyful event,
I started off the year by answering the many congratulatory cards and letters I received after my “Silver Bell” speech at South East Minnesota Sheep Producer’s Association (SEMSPA) Annual Meeting in December, 1982. Most said my talk was “highly entertaining” and/or “informative,” and there were also lots of questions to answer.
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!
Dear Readers, I apologize for my prolonged lapse in writing these stories. I took a long sabbatical during the fall to harvest and preserve the …
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.
