Lambing is over for another year, all the ewes bar, or should that be baa, one lambed in a 3 week window. Tracey clearly had other ideas and skipped a couple of cycles and lambed on Sunday. All good though nice strong single lamb. We’ve kept her close to home until the lamb’s a bit older and then we’ll bring the flock back home and she can rejoin the flock.
This morning Tracey decided that the poly tunnel was the place to go for a good feed and pushed the door open. For some bizarre reason she likes the dried out cabbage leaves.
Lambing is coming to a close, only 7 ewes left to lamb. Although it’s felt like a hard slog lambing has gone well and the weather has been benign, we must just be getting old lol.
Chaos in the CrecheOut in the Sun on fresh grassI’ve just woken up and I’m only 24 hours old
Sunday 7 March back at Bromyard for the first market of 2023. Not as busy as December, hardly surprising really as it was quite chilly, on the upside it was dry and everyone traders and punters are friendly and interested in what we do. We only had lamb this time as unfortunately the upgrade works at the abattoir overran and hence the pigs couldn’t go in time. Overall though we sold most of the lamb. We didn’t sell many joints, seems like people are using their ovens less in favour of air fryers.
Amanda could only stay for a couple of hours and needed to get back to check the ewes. Really enjoyable morning the time flew by and looking foirward to the next market on 2 April and we’ll have fresh pork and lamb.
The tups have been in for 17 days and it’s time to change the raddle colour, why? The ewe’s cycle is approximately 17 days so by changing the colour we can see who hasn’t taken the first time they were tupped.
Yellow was the first colour we used and Orange covers the yellow as you can see. Hopefully we won’t have too many second timers, otherwise lambing will go on for longer.
Well, this year we decided to try our hand at showing sheep. Firstly thank you to all those Ryeland members who have helped out with advice (go to Bromyard before you show at Burwarton), trimming (quite an art) and feet (don’t leave them!). We took our Coloured shearling ram to Bromyard (4th) and Burwarton (4th) and a trio of ram, ram lamb and ewe to Kington another 4th.
Ubie and the jet wash: He looked much better afterwards.
It’s been fun getting involved in the shows, but there is quite a lot of preparation, not least making sure you shear at the right time and we nearly missed it this year. Next year we will be more prepared. I’m not sure the sheep enjoy all the preparation, especially the jet wash bit. But they did seem to enjoy going to the shows.
We’ve put the tups in a week earlier this year on 26 September, not because we particularly wanted to lamb earlier as I prefer to turn the ewes and lambs out onto fresh grass. But everyone was getting restless and it just seemed like the right time. With two distinct flocks it can get a little complicated and this year it means there’s 5 groups. Sam is with one group of Ryelands and Uhoo with a second. With Sherlock gone Ubi has all the coloured Ryelands, lucky boy. That just leaves this years ewe lambs and ram lambs, hence five groups in total. Surprising it only took a couple of hours to split and group everyone.
We don’t raddle the rams, instead we just mix the coloured marker with oil and smother it on the ram’s chest. The first year we breed Amanda used olive oil as it was ‘all we had’ apparently!
It’s all going well, after a few days a good percentage of the girls have been tupped already, hopefully the rest will follow and we’ll have a tight lambing like this year.
Unfortunately we lost Sherlock one of our coloured rams last week. He got a taste for chicken food and broke into one of the hen houses and munched his way through 6kg of layers pellets overnight.
Really upsetting, however hopefully his genes will live on in his ewes and rams. In particular Paddington who is a Sherlock ram lamb from this year. Paddington isn’t his official name but apparently he’s sooo cuddly that he’s like a teddy bear.
We have had a great year in terms of increasing our flock size, with 26 lambs; 13 coloured and 13 white Ryeland sheep. We’ll keep some of the ram lambs for our own meat and will be keeping some of the ewe lambs as future replacements for some of our older ewes. But we do have both ram and ewe lambs for sale, so if you would like a docile, friendly breed of sheep, either to start up your own flock, for great flavoured meat, for wool, or just as lawn mowers, we have some lovely weaned lambs available.
Sam and Sherlock have been our stock rams for the last 2 years, so they need to move on as their lambs from 2013 will come into the breeding flock this year. We’ll be sad to see them go as not only have they given us some good lambs, they’re bidable and laid back. You can see what I mean in the photos, when they aren’t with the girls they graze in the orchard with the hens. The photos were taken in late May before they were sheared a couple of weeks later.
Sherlock officially called Abeydore Sherlock MC0153 is the coloured tup.
Sam (Strathore Samuel M12286) is the white Ryeland.
Both are Heptavac-P vaccinated, wormed and clicked. If you’re in the market for a Ryeland or Coloured Ryeland Tup get in touch by emailing Dumblehole
Dumblehole 