Wow December was a hectic month. There were the usual suspects; Yule, Christmas and New Year, which we tend to start the prep for and feel the pressure of at the start of the month.
Our first big smallholding related job of December was finally going to collect our tup. We had decided to hire a ram lamb, but as the time came the owner was a bit worried that the ram lamb was on the small side and may not be up to the job. We changed the plans then to hire the ram lamb’s dad when he had finished covering his ewes. It pushed lambing back but, with everything that was happening with sorting out my stepdad’s funeral, pushing it back seemed right. We had been hoping to collect him mid November but it just didn’t work out until Dec 3rd.
We decided that taking Chi up to Sheffield and coming straight back would be too much, so Sam braved our first animal transport on his own. When he got here he unloaded no problem and was promptly wormed. He was a little nervous, especially of cats for some reason. The intention (this post seems to be full of intentions!) was to have him in for 3 days, like we did with the ewes, so that the zolvix could work it’s magic. His wool was full of burrs, so I planned to cut them out and do his raddle paint on day 3 before we let him out. Akbar, the tup, had other ideas though!
I was driving home on the afternoon of the second day and saw a tup wandering about our smallholding! Thankfully he hadn’t got in with the ewes yet. Sam managed to get him out of our veg patch area (not yet made thankfully) and into a sheep area. From there we managed to pen him up with only one half hearted attempt at butting us and painted him up orange. In fact Akbar has proved to have a lovely temperment and, apart from that first running round trying to catch him, he hasn’t even attempted to butt us. Sam has found penning him up a piece of cake. As far as we could see he used the hay rack to get over the hurdles as the hay rack was only hanging on by one hook. I’m still nervous as to what effect it will have on our worm burden, but 2 days may have done the job.
The girls were initially very wary of him, running like hell whenever he approached. I started to worry that we weren’t going to have any lambs, but sure enough one morning we had an orange bum. In fact any coloured bums we got were spotted first thing in the morning. December was a very foggy month and I think he used the combination of fog and dark to catch them overnight! For those that don’t know, I should probably explain the paint. Sheep have a 13-19 day cycle, with an average of 17 days. Commercial flocks will use a harness with a raddle crayon on it so that when the tup covers the ewe he leaves a paint mark on her bum. Then you know when she was covered and can estimate lambing. After a cycle you change the colour, if the ewe is coloured again then you know that the pregnancy didn’t take the first time. There’s some possible reasons. Ram didn’t get a go? Stressed ewe? Infertile ewe? Infertile ram? A lot of the native breeds are too small for the propper harnesses (raddle), so we mix up some raddle paint and smear it onto his breast instead. For Akbar he needed a top up half way through the cycle as they started getting a bit pale.
He covered 4 of the girls in the first cycle, then we painted him up green and he covered a different 4. So everyone has been covered at least once. He’s due a repaint again tomorrow, so fingers crossed he doesn’t cover anyone this time. Our lambing will be late, May currently, but possibly June if he covers in the third cycle. I’m a bit nervous about that but it is what it is. We are thinking about seperating him from the girls but we have no-one to keep him company if we put him far from them and I’m a bit worried about him escaping back in with them anyway. Now to try and arrange a scanner to come and check our girls are actually in lamb and start prepping for it, but more on that later!
I started this as being one post covering all of December but it got very long, so later this week keep an eye out for part 2: Bird flu
Dans
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