Another lamb arrived today

Meanwhile, the wife has been tilling her garden and now starting to get some veggies planted. She loves her old-school tiller.

 

Yep. Great machines.

 

Just a picture of the 4 day olds lambs.

 

Nice lambs.

 

I've got that same tiller.

Bought it many years ago from a co-worker.

Didn't put in anything last year, weeds overtook everything the year prior.

 

that looks like super rich garden soil. Not your usual patch of dirt in the woods that's for sure.

 

Yep, Deann has been working very hard on it for almost 10 yrs. now. It's her "thing."

 

Nice looking batch of lambs Mike. will you be selling them or building the flock?

 

Selling what we can, most of the rest will go to market. Unfortunately, we don't have enough room for all of them. Thanks for asking.

 

Do you keep any of the meat for yourself?

 

We have not slaughtered any yet. We have only been doing this for 3 years and we've been growing the flock slowly. We probably will. I like lamb and Icelandic is supposed to be excellent. We shall see.

 

A friend of Chaz his wife has a few sheep. I know she milks them and actually freeze the milk.

 

Yes. One of the main reasons we started with sheep was to milk them. Our first two years of breeding we were still too busy learning the whole process of how to keep them alive, breed, deliver, raise babies, etc. This year we will try to milk some of them.

 

DONE WITH LAMBING for this year! Our last ewe gave us twin ewe (girl) lambs yesterday. Unfortunately, she flat out rejected the first one and bonded a little with the second one, but refused to nurse either of them. So, we are milking out the colostrum and feeding it to the lambs along with milk replacer (a.k.a. formula). It's the second time shes done that, so she never gets to breed again. The final tally for this breeding season is: All five ewes had twins and 9 survived. 8 ewe (girl) lambs and 1 ram (boy) lamb. Unfortunately, we did lose one momma ewe last week, two days after giving birth. Thenecropsy/autopsy results from the state Ag Dept are still pending but favoring enterotoxemia so far. So, between the one dead mom and the one crappy mom we have 4 "bottle babies." That makes for some extra work over the next couple weeks until we can get them onto a milking bucket and/or solid food.

Here's the pictures of the final set of twins from yesterday and a video of the four bottle babies getting ready for feeding.

 

Oh my, four bottle babies sounds like a ton of work. How frequently do they need to be fed?

 

So sorry you lost a mama. They sure look like they know it's feeding time.

 

Definitely more work. You can get away with 3-4 / day for the first couple of weeks, then start blending in dry foods. I just got done building a bucket feeder. In a perfect world we can train them to feed themselves from it ad libiditum, fingers crossed we can get them trained quickly.

 

Nice invention. Wish we had something like that when we had calves.

 

For the big producers they have full on milker dispensing machines that can keep the milk cold and feed dozens of lambs, but those are thousands of dollars. The bucket and teats are about $10 total.