Pastures New

sheep

We inherited the sheep with the property and it seemed like a good idea to have some lawn-mowers. However, keeping them fed and healthy does seem to take up a lot of our lives - so the Sheep have their own page.

Well, we started with 17 sheep. We lost two young ram lambs earlier in the year, we think due to worms even though we had them drenched. Rambo did his job well and Dave the shepherd pronounced that we had six pregnant ewes expecting seven lambs. The ewes produced 11 lambs including one set of twins and one set of triplets. One of the triplets didn't make it but the remaining two are doing fine. The ewes all seemed to know what they were doing and we did not had to intervene except to retrieve lambs that got separated by fences from their mothers.

Some of the expectant mums - mum left had lambchop1, mum middle had lambchop 9, and mum right had lambchops 6, 7 & 8 but we lost one of the triplets. At the back, meet Dopey who is organic by choice - won't eat sheep nuts.

Dave, our shepherd giving our little flock the once over before winter set in.

As you can see, photographing sheep does seem to be difficult
and the Mallards think they are sheep and turn up at feeding time

Pippa supervising the sheep during shearing

Pippa supervising the shearing during December 2003