Sunday 5 July 2009

The Silence of the Lambs............

or not in our case, as on Saturday we gave the lambs their second Heptovac injection and at the same time separated them off from their mum's!!!! All was calm until we took the lambs out of the barn and into their own paddock on the common land. We kept Finn back and put him in the Alpaca's summer paddock along with missy's lad, Fluffy (as per Harry Potter) and Amy's lad, we've called him Fleecy as he has a really nice and soft grey fleece.
We also weighed and gave the ewes a mineral drench to help them recover from the rigours of raising lambs. There is a 5, 3, 4 month rule with ewes, 5 month pregnant, 3 months riasing lambs and 4 months to recover, which we try to follow. So as the lambs are now 12 weeks old, it's time to separate them from their mum's. Last night was a very noisy night, as well as very warm as all the windows in the house were closed to block out the bleating from the ewes and the lambs. Today it's a little quieter.
Weighing the ewes and lambs at weaning, means that we can monitor weight gain/loss to ensure we never have the worm problem we had last year. I have to say the lambs are looking really well, no "pooey bums" despite the long grass they are grazing.
In a months time we will have all the lambs in and decide which ewe lambs we are keeping, so they will go in with the rest of the ewes and the rest that are going to the mart into another field, so we can keep an eye on their weight and anything near the 30kg mark will be sent to the mart as light lambs.
Just spoken to Pete, he's going to borrow the our lamb scales, and cull ewes are a good price at the moment, so we will be up early to sort out the 3 ewes we've ear marked as culls. Such is life, you have to respond to the markets where possible.

1 comment:

Poppy said...

Do you have any of the meat back from your cull ewes or sell it all on?