Tag: breeding

The Month of Thanksgiving – Day Twenty

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Giving thanks for the tools and truck lights that enabled us to finish placing our breeding groups together on Wednesday. A quick summary of the day –
::: winds averaging 22 mph all. day. long.
::: taking down old fence, putting up new paddock fencing, making lanes for moving sheep
::: finished trimming hooves and crutching
::: drenched all the adults with a mixture of garlic powder and molasses (will devote an entire post to this sometime soon); attempting to sort breeding groups as we go
::: it is now almost 5 p.m. getting dark and beginning to rain, still windy 🙁
::: going over to the other side of the pasture, we find the rams and put the breeding harnesses on using the truck lights to see – warning, this is not for the faint of heart
::: take Saul, on halter, back across the pasture, retrieve his girls and head down the hill to his assigned paddock… get everybody down the hill using a flashlight, through the gate.. unfortunately when we try to shut the gate the girls take off back up the hill at a trot
::: finally catch one of the girls and manage to get her through the gate to keep Saul company overnight
::: head back up the hill, adjust lanes to move Liam’s group up to his paddock
::: go to Liam’s paddock and there are two sheep not one standing at the gate, this is not good
::: get halters on both and discover that Hercules has broken through a tubular, wire-filled gate
::: fix the gate with a rubber mallet and tools shown above; put up another temporary electric fence to protect the gate from another jail-break
::: back to the barn then back up the hill bringing up Liam’s group
::: bring out Aragorn’s group into the barn pasture
::: move Poseidon’s group to the nursery area awaiting his recovery from last Sunday’s injury
::: take down most of the lane fencing after finally locating Saul’s runaways, get them into a pen in the barn
::: it is still raining, still windy… give up until morning light… thankful that we are finished… almost

The Month of Thanksgiving – Day Nine

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We are full of thanks for our new fence.

It has provided us with much needed additional pasture. One of the greatest advantages, is that this year we have the ability to have a large, sturdy, electrified fence between the breeding ewes and rams. We are pretty confident that this is going to eliminate the problem of spring ‘accidents’.

Still, in spite of everything, there is a whole lot of fenceline courting going on.

Ram Cram Winter 09

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Time for the semi-annual ‘Ram Cram’ – a great management tool we learned from The Lavender Fleece web-site. Hercules, Saul, Goliath and Poseidon are pictured above in the small pen getting ready to move to their post-breeding pasture. We keep them together in this small pen for 24 hours. Much of the post-breeding ‘wrestling’ is done in this time window. When they are moved to the pasture, they are more concerned about food and water than the other rams. This system has worked out very well for us (knock on wood).

Our lead ram, Liam, is not with the others as we will move him into a pen with some older ewes until shearing. He tends to run himself ragged during breeding, and needs a little ‘down-time’ to get back up to prime condition.

Bringing in the rams

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For the past couple days we have been getting all the girls ready: trimming, manicuring, etc. We have worked in the barn and out in the corral; in the pouring rain and through the snow flurries. Now that we finally have every one ‘gussied up’ and in the proper pen, we are faced with this.

It should be quite a lot of fun walking the four big rams over from the far paddock through this. It certainly should provide a lot of laughs. (pretty dark for 1:15 p.m.)

Making like Houdini

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We were moving the ewes and wethers nearer the barn today so that the ‘breeding beautification’ process can begin, when to our surprise a familar face appeared among them with some unexpected ‘equipment’.

Here he came up over the hill with Queen Elizabeth and Hebe – Hercules, same culprit as last year. We turned the fence off to move everyone around, and we think that is when he ‘made like Houdini’ and escaped from the ram pasture.
Hopefully he wasn’t too busy before we got the ewes moved!