Surprise! Surprise!

Okay, so I shouldn't be too surprised because it's all my fault! Back in the spring, our first lamb that was born was a ram lamb to Tweed. He was a single lamb, and then got the added benefit of eating from his older sister's milk because she lost her lamb after a couple of days. By the time I got to the field to band (bloodless castration) the ram lambs, "Juan Fatram" was just too endowed for it to work. Juan went into the freezer in November, but apparently not before he'd developed good relationships with some of my ewes.
This afternoon, when Ashley was out feeding she noticed a funny little bunch of fur out in the grass. She came and got Charles who called me just as I was getting in my car to come home from work. The lamb is doing all right, but her mother, Cathy Gale, has rejected her. Cathy had a second lamb but it looked to have been stillborn. Cathy doesn't have a very good mothering record - one stillborn, twin rams, one ram and one bottle ewe lamb, and now one stillborn and one bottle ewe lamb.
The new ewe lamb looks like a skunk with a white stripe on her face with black on the sides, so her name started out "Skunk" then went to "Flower" and finally settled on "Flora".

Another ram lamb

Mabel is a yearling ewe (Cathy Gale's daughter from last year), and she had a ram lamb on Saturday, April 3. I generally only check on my sheep once a day, when I feed them in the morning. I can see them from the driveway, but from there, they are about 300 yards away. So on Easter morning I was surprised to see an extra lamb in the field. I wasn't expecting Mabel to have a baby so soon, because she didn't look very big. Just goes to show what I know!

We had a very nice Easter lunch with my stepmother, Brenda's family yesterday. Then we sat out on the back patio rolling hanks of yarn into balls for her mother, Marty. The weather was so pretty, warm with a pleasant breeze. We had to leave pretty early because I had to go home to feed my bottle babies, but it was nice catching up with everyone.

After feeding, Charles and I spent an hour or so in our vegetable garden, sowing seeds for spinach, lettuce, chard, and leafy herbs - dill, cilantro, parsley, par-cel, fennel and chives. Last year I missed lettuce season because it was too wet to till the garden. This year, we've already tilled twice, so I have high hopes. Seedlings are also coming along well, with okra, tomatoes and peppers already making leaves. Broccoli is slower than I expected, but I hope to get enough to put some in the freezer for the summer.

Just when it's all going smoothly

With animals, it's always hard to tell what they're thinking. One of our ewes, Cathy Gale, gave birth to twins on Tuesday (March 30), one ram lamb and one ewe lamb. At first she didn't want anything to do with either one of them, but eventually she allowed the ram lamb to eat. Cathy has completely, violently rejected her ewe lamb, so now I have two babies to bottle feed. Cathy and her ram lamb are living in the barn so I can milk her twice a day to feed the ewe lamb. Now that the lambs are four days old, I can start cutting the sheep milk with lamb milk replacement formula, but I will probably keep milking Cathy for another week to get a good supply. Then I will put Cathy and her ram lamb back out in the field with the rest of the sheep; the ewe lamb will be bottle fed for about 6 weeks, until I am sure she's eating grass and sweet feed.
Cathy had a dead lamb the first year we owned her - it weighed in at 14 lbs, and was too big to survive being born. Then last year she had a set of twins with no problems at all. So I don't know happened that this sweet little ewe lamb was abandoned by her mother. But we've had good success with our first bottle lamb, Emma Piel, who is still doing a terrific job raising triplets all on her own!