So, in the past couple months, while I was working like crazy and had no time for Steemit, you can imagine that a lot has been going on!
For my first update, I'll talk about the sheep. (Some of the pictures might be a little "graphic", showing the birth of lambs)
We finished lambing out our sheep the first week of March. Here's a bunch of the fuzzy little butts hanging out in the lamb lounge:
We built this space for them with a heat lamp and a gate made from a pallet that had holes too small for the moms to pass through, to give them a cozy place to sleep on cold nights.
Several of my sheep had twins, a few had triplets. One of them had quads! She went on to raise two of them, and I took on the others. (Here comes the gooey picture!!)
I raised several lambs on the bottle this year, they would spend a few days in the house, like these ones pictured below, getting accustomed to bottle feedings, then moved back to the barn where they had access to free-choice milk from a nipple bucket.
Lambs grow crazy fast. Their mother's milk is very high in fat, about triple the content of cow's milk. Fast forward to just a few days ago, when I separated the lambs from their mothers to complete the weaning process, and lambs that were only eight pounds at birth are now approaching sixty or more pounds, at the tender age of two to three months!
My next group of ewes is soon to be lambing as well. They will start in June, and are enjoying the green grass next to the barnyard.
Most of the weaned lambs, who are currently occupying the barnyard, will be sold for finishing elsewhere before that time, so the moms will have a safe, dry place to deliver their offspring.
And that's basically it for what has been happening in the sheep department at Tanglebranch Meadows! I'll be back again soon with more news about other things. Thanks so much for reading, and have a lovely day.
