What a couple of weeks - wow! As I write our beautiful daughter is fast asleep so I am grabbing this opportunity to capture what has been going on at the farm these last couple of weeks.
We did miscalculate our lambing dates...so the day I went into labour the 30 ewes all started producing as well. We have had some wonderful lambs but some sadness too with losing a ewe who produced a wonderful set of quadruplets but had suffered a prolapse so we were unable to save her. Our vet Adelle was wonderful and after safely delivering her lambs helped put her to sleep. We managed to adopt one of them onto another ewe and we are bottle feeding the other three. We have put a lot of them outside already, we have been lucky with the weather that it has been a bit milder and not wet. They are doing really well and we are giving the ewes sheep nuts and some hay to supplement what grass there is at this time of year.
The main flock of 253 are all inside now as of 2 days ago and we have had them scanned and our percentage is up on last year! We are at 198% which we are really pleased with. So the grand total is - 5 empty, 36 singles, 171 twins and 41 triplets! I think that is going to keep us busy! We have two veterinary students Nick and Rebecca coming to help us as well as the wonderful Melanie who has already been helping us with this batch of lambs and in fact is coming this afternoon to help us sort the ewes into the relevant pens according to how many lambs they are having so we can feed them accordingly.
We have been busy with our bookings for our 'shepherd for the day' experience and had Pauline and Matt (pictured above bottle feeding 2 of the quads) joined us a couple of weeks ago. We really enjoyed having them and we are looking forward to welcoming our other visitors in a few weeks time when the main flock start lambing. The lambing weekends are fast approaching too which we are hosting jointly with our landlords the Northmoor Trust, so we look forward to seeing many of you then. The dates are the 26th/27th March and the 2nd/3rd April.
The snowdrops and aconites are just making an appearance and it is now light still at 5 o'clock which is great and helps us look forward to spring even more.
I think I can hear someone stirring...more soon and thank you to all of you for your messages and support.
Camilla, Roly, Molly, Boris and Belle
We did miscalculate our lambing dates...so the day I went into labour the 30 ewes all started producing as well. We have had some wonderful lambs but some sadness too with losing a ewe who produced a wonderful set of quadruplets but had suffered a prolapse so we were unable to save her. Our vet Adelle was wonderful and after safely delivering her lambs helped put her to sleep. We managed to adopt one of them onto another ewe and we are bottle feeding the other three. We have put a lot of them outside already, we have been lucky with the weather that it has been a bit milder and not wet. They are doing really well and we are giving the ewes sheep nuts and some hay to supplement what grass there is at this time of year.
The main flock of 253 are all inside now as of 2 days ago and we have had them scanned and our percentage is up on last year! We are at 198% which we are really pleased with. So the grand total is - 5 empty, 36 singles, 171 twins and 41 triplets! I think that is going to keep us busy! We have two veterinary students Nick and Rebecca coming to help us as well as the wonderful Melanie who has already been helping us with this batch of lambs and in fact is coming this afternoon to help us sort the ewes into the relevant pens according to how many lambs they are having so we can feed them accordingly.
We have been busy with our bookings for our 'shepherd for the day' experience and had Pauline and Matt (pictured above bottle feeding 2 of the quads) joined us a couple of weeks ago. We really enjoyed having them and we are looking forward to welcoming our other visitors in a few weeks time when the main flock start lambing. The lambing weekends are fast approaching too which we are hosting jointly with our landlords the Northmoor Trust, so we look forward to seeing many of you then. The dates are the 26th/27th March and the 2nd/3rd April.
The snowdrops and aconites are just making an appearance and it is now light still at 5 o'clock which is great and helps us look forward to spring even more.
I think I can hear someone stirring...more soon and thank you to all of you for your messages and support.
Camilla, Roly, Molly, Boris and Belle
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