Category: Food Sources

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.

March 22, and lambing of the second group began. Everything was going smoothly until March 25. when a huge blizzard hit us. The sheep were very nice about not lambing during the height of the blizzard! There weren’t many problems except for a close call on April 9. We did not lose any lambs in this second group, and only one in the first group, so I was getting very close to my dream of “No lambs lost!”

That fall I was nominated for the MN State Sheep Award, “The Silver Bell,” by our County Ag Agent. I protested that I was not ready for that honor, and asked him to wait a couple years, but he went ahead with it anyway. I did not win the Silver Bell Award that year, but surprisingly, I finished in the top quarter of contestants!