Sheep Portraits

I needed to find some photos for a special request. You’d think that with over 4300 sheep photos (according to Lightroom) I wouldn’t have to take more. But I did. I’ll share some. Most are in the Sheep Portrait category.

Meridian Hazel, one of our very friendly sheep. She will be three when she lambs in the spring.

Meridian Raquel is our second oldest ewe. She will be 10 in the spring. Her upper right horn was damaged and grew down over her face. For years it was right in front of her eye but it broke a few years ago and now she has full vision.

Meridian Janna, almost five years old.

Hillside Hannah’s Grace came from Michigan in 2021. She will lamb for the first time in the spring.

This ewe, bide a wee Hallie, came home with me from Black Sheep Gathering in Oregon 7 years ago.

Meridian Terri, a 5-year-old ewe.

Meridian Lenore, one of the 2022 lambs.

This is Lenore with her dam, 5-horn Sweetgrass Tranquility, a ewe who came from Michigan in 2021.

Another mother-daughter pair. The daughter is Meridian April, the last lamb born in 2022, and her 4-horn dam, Meridian Columbine.

The sheep are still spending a lot of time in the pasture, but they come in as a group to relax. After an hour or so they will get up and go back out.

End of October

It was still mild weather. The Sacramento Valley got rain, but not much here—not enough to show in the rain gauge.

The sheep moving to the gate where I will let them into the next paddock.

A sheep farmer’s version of fall color. Peyton, the BFL ram, was the one with the red marker. I moved his ewes out a few days ago and now they are with Townes. Silverado and Barrett still have some ewes, but I’m getting ready to be finished with breeding season.

This is one of my favorite views of the property.

Patchwork Townes is the ram with the most ewes now at the end of the season. His marker has been switched to green, but I think there is only one ewe marked green.

We held Hug a Sheep Day on Saturday, but it was mostly for Farm Club members with a few other friends who came. We had the most huggable sheep available. That’s Jade and her daughter, Hazel.

At the end of the day I walked across the road and took my customary photo looking south to Mt. Diablo. One of these days I’ll share the series of photos I took from this spot throughout the growing season.

The Flock - 2022

I always like to get photos of all the sheep before shearing. I can go back and compare before and after shearing photos (which I find interesting) and I can find photos of some of the favorites as they have grown up. Yesterday I spent a ridiculous amount of time editing the sheep pages on the website to reflect which sheep are in the flock now. That included making sure I had photos of all the sheep—and I do have updated photos of almost all of them. You can view Our Ewes here and The Rams (and wethers) here.

When I post photos on those pages they are usually of the whole sheep, but I’ll include some close-up head shots here.

Meridian Cashew (Meridian Jasper x Meridian Dilly), born in 2020 and bred to Meridian Silverado. I love this ewe’s horns.

This is Dilly, the dam of Cashew, above. She will be 5 this spring.

I plan to start paying better attention to my ewes’ horn growth. A friend has focused on horns for quite awhile and she has a flock full of ewes with stunning horns. See PatchworkFarm.

Dilly is out of Honey, a ewe who also has nice horns. She will be 7 when she lambs this year.

I was thrilled to be able to bring in a couple of Patchwork ewe lambs last summer. This is Patchwork BettyLou.

This is BettyLou’s friend, Patchwork Amara. She is a beautiful lilac ewe. I did not breed them in the fall because I thought they were too small. It will be exciting to see what lambs they will produce next year. In the meantime I’ll enjoy their lovely fleeces.

At the same time I brought in BettyLou and Amara, Hillside Hannah’s Grace came from Michigan, another ewe with nice horns. I have a T-shirt that reads “You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a sheep and it’s almost the same thing.” I agree with that sentiment.

A friend of mine is the one who arranged shipping for sheep from three different flocks and I was lucky enough to be able to include sheep in the trailer. If those three lambs made me happy, adding another sheep would make me happier still, right? This is Sweetgrass Tranquility, a three year old ewe due to lamb in March. She is from the Sweetgrass flock in Michigan.

Sweetgrass Eilwen is Tranquility’s buddy.

Since I have gone off the original track to the sheep I bought this summer I thought I should be thorough. This is Hillside Gabby’s Barrett, a ram lamb who bred 7 or 8 ewes in October. I can’t wait for lambing!

Back to the home-grown sheep. This is Meridian Trina (Meridian Axle x Meridian Terri). You can see that her horns, although acceptable, are not as desirable. She is a 4-horn ewe with horns that are fused and therefore somewhat funky looking.

Trina’s dam is Meridian Terri, a ewe who also has fused horns on one side.

Look at Terri’s fleece. Isn’t that beautiful? It’s not all about the horns. There is a lot to try and get right with this breed.

Meridian Sonata is the oldest ewe here. She’ll be 10 when she lambs in March.

Meridian Sylvia is Sonata’s daughter. She has nice upper horns, but the lateral horns aren’t very stout. She was a ewe worth keeping though.

Soprano is another Sonata daughter. I don’t like putting coats on the sheep because I’d rather see the sheep than the coat (and it’s a lot of work to keep up with coats). But this fleece will be stunning because it will be so clean.

Maybe I’ll share more sheep photos tomorrow.

A Ram Retrospective

On Christmas Day I took advantage of my son being here to try and track down photos that seem to be “lost” in the depths of my computer. I’m still not sure we found the family photos I think are somewhere, but it prompted me to later go through other photos. I probably don’t really need all 33,000 that Lightroom says I have. There may be other posts like this one later, but I’ll start with rams. I think it’s always fun to see the variety in Jacob rams.

This is Jacquee’s Rugby. I think he might have been the first ram I bought, probably in 2001, because he sired lambs born in 2002 and 2003. I know I used a couple of other rams (from Hillside and Oak Farm) but I don’t find any photos of them. The photos here are of those I bought or that were born here.

Bide a wee Duke sired lambs in 2003 and 2004.

Meridian Apollo, born in 2004, sired lambs born in 2005 and 2006.

Hillside Joy’s Lynn, a lilac (the gray/brown coloration) ram who sired lambs born in 2005. By this time I was using at least two rams each breeding season and maybe more, but I don’t have photos of all of them.

Meridian Rocky (Meridian Apollo x Meridian Diamond) was born in 2006 but I don’t have a photo taken here. This was sent to me later by the person who eventually bought him. He sired Ranger, who is a few photos down.

Hillside Springtime’s Newberg sired lambs in 2007.

Bide a wee Yuri sired lambs born in 2008.

Chicory Lane Houdini was here for about half a year. He came to me because he had become aggressive and the owner needed him off the property. I used him for a breeding season and then didn’t want to risk the potential danger of keeping him around. This is an example of why I have very strong opinions about how rams should be handled while they are growing up.

As the flock grew Meridian Ranger (Meridian Rocky x Meridian Dot) sired a lot of lambs in 2008 and 2009.

Meridian Tioga was Ranger’s son, born in 2009. He sired a lot of the 2010 and 2011 lambs.

Puddleduck Ringo, born in 2014, is the sire of some ewes still in the flock, including everyone’s favorite pet, Jade.

Meridian Catalyst (Meridian Crosby x Meridian Clover) was a 2015 grandson of Yuri, in one of the photos above. Catalyst was a lilac ram who was eventually sold to another California breeder.

Bide a wee Buster, born in 2016, also sired many still in the flock.

Meridian Cayenne was the 2017 son of Catalyst and Mud Ranch’s Foxglove. He was that lilac color pattern with beautiful horns like his sire.

Meridian Jasper (Meridian Clark x Meridian Jade), is a grandson of both Buster and Ringo. He was born in 2019 and the sire of 6 or 7 sheep still in the flock. Jasper is now the flock sire of another California farm.

Meridan Axle (Meridian Catalyst x Meridian Ava) at almost 3 years. Axle was a favorite ram as far as his attitude and his fleece, and some of his offspring remain in the flock. I’ll share photos in another post of how fabulous his horns looked in his first year. This is an example of why you can’t always predict the final outcome of the horn growth. He is now at a farm in Montana but 5 of his offspring are here, including our second best pet sheep, Hazel.

Ruby Peak Tamarisk sired many of the 2021 lambs and we are awaiting more of his in 2022.

Lambing Finale

I am a few days late on this post because the last lambs were born on Friday and it is now Monday.

This is Meridian Roca, a yearling (born 3/4/2020) with the last lamb of the season. She delivered easily the evening of 3/26 and was a great mother from the start.

Meridian Foxy is a 6 year old lilac (coloring of gray/brown instead of black) ewe with a small (5.4 pounds) ewe lamb born early that morning. I had given up on Foxy and decided that she wasn’t pregnant even though an ultrasound showed that she was. I thought that maybe she had aborted. I had been keeping the last three pregnant ewes in a separate area but had just turned Foxy out with the rest of the ewes the night before. She surprised me with this lamb the next morning.

This is Cashew, another yearling, with her ewe lamb born on 3/23.

I may want to keep this little ewe lamb. However there are plenty of others I’d like to keep too. Decisions…

I like to keep track of lambing stats. If you look at my lambing board you will see that lambing began 2/20 with twins, six days before the first “official” due date. There was a breather of a few days and then they started coming on 2/24. There were 84 lambs born in 19 days with a high of 12 lambs born on March 1. Lamb # 86 was born 3-14 and then a gap of nine days before the last three. The lambs are color coded for ram/ewe (not very creative here, but I need something easy to remember). The birth weights are as accurate as I can be, but if I find the lamb already up and nursing who’s to say how many ounces of milk it has already had?

I “process” lambs usually the next day or maybe two after birth. They get a BOSE injection (selenium and vitamin E), a tail band, ear tags, and maybe a band for wethering. With the Jacob ram lambs it’s impossible to know at birth if they will grow up with symmetrical balanced horns (if 4 horns) or wide spread (if 2 horns). So I don’t want to castrate most of them because I’m always waiting for that perfect ram to be born but I won’t know until it’s grown for several months. However, I can tell if they are too light or dark in color to be an acceptable registered ram. The Breed Standard allows for 15%-85% color. If a ram lamb is outside that limit then I will band him to castrate. Those wethers may be sold as fiber pets or as ram companions, or for butcher. There will be another blog post coming up about the color analysis part.

We use two ear tags for each lamb. The first ear tag is preprinted with the ID # which includes the birth year. This years lamb #’s begin with 21. Ewes have that ear tag in the left ear and rams in the right ear. The second tag is color coded by sire and I have written in the ID number. This year I used up a variety of leftover tags but next year I need to start by buying new ones. The gray tags I used are too close in value to the white to easily differentiate. In the lower right corner of the Lamb Board I have my reminder of the colors.

Tamarisk lambs have orange ear tags.

Jasper’s are gray.

There are only a handful of Axle and Rambler lambs and those are red and yellow.

Anywhere you see a X P on the lamb board that means that Peyton, a Bluefaced Leicester, is the sire. The BFL-cross lambs are black so they don’t need a special ear tag to tell me who they are. The colored tags are useful not only for identifying sires, but as a back-up if the original ID tag is lost. It is also helpful to know which color to look for when I am trying to find a particular lamb—the colors narrow the search down a bit.

Ears is a BFL cross herself . She was bred to Peyton so her triplets are 3/4 BFL. The other adult crossbred ewe in the flock is Addy but Peyton is her sire and she was bred to a Jacob ram.

This sometimes seems like an overwhelming number of lambs but so far they are all doing well.

The ewes are hard at work raising all these lambs.

To finish out the stats:
89 Live lambs born, 1 long-dead twin delivered along with a live lamb. One tiny (3.4 lb) lamb died before 24 hrs..
44 rams and 45 ewes
2 triplet births = 6 lambs
36 twin births = 71 lambs (plus the dead fetus)
12 single births (including 3 yearlings)
Average weight of 73 purebred Jacob lambs: 8 lbs (Low = 3.4 and high = 10.6)
Average weight of 16 BFL X Jacob lambs: 9.5 lbs (Low = 7.4 and high = 12.8)

LAMBS!

Lambing seems off to a slow start. Usually the barn is full a few days after the first lamb is born, but not this year. The first due date I had marked on my calendar was today, February 26.

The first lambs were born February 20 - a set of twins to Zinnia and sired by the ram we picked up in Oregon, Ruby Peak Tamarisk.

Here is how that little yellow lamb looked today, 6 days later.

Four days later I checked the barn in between Zoom meetings and found this scene. Two ewes and two lambs. Upon closer inspection I knew that only one of these ewes had lambed. Ginger is the one on the left and these twins were hers. But Dilly was in early labor and sometimes the ewe’s hormones take over and they are anxious to mother a baby. Can you see how confusing it could be for the shepherd to sort out lambs? This is why I think it is important to keep checking the barn and when I think a ewe is in labor I separate her. These are two experienced moms but if there is a young ewe involved she might completely lose track of her lamb if an older pushier ewe intervenes. Even with these two if I’d been there an hour later I might not have known which lambs belonged to which ewes.

This is Ginger with her twins, sired by Axle. There are photos of the sires on the Ram Page.

Dilly had her own lambs but then Ginger thought maybe they were hers. You have to realize that this desire to claim lambs from another ewe doesn’t last long. In fact not long after this Ginger was hitting the fence when those other lambs got too close. It’s only possible to get an orphan lamb grafted onto another ewe with a lot of work and skill (and luck) involved.

One of Dilly’s twins.

Later that night (actually the next morning at 12:30 a.m.) Anise lambed with twins. The black lambs are crossbreds sired by Peyton, the BFL ram. See his photo on the Ram Page

This morning Betty lambed. There is another reason I like to get these ewes into the lambing pen before they lamb.

The lamb on the right is that one in the photo above after Betty got her cleaned up. The one on the left is how they look if they are delivered in a clean pen.

So my goal every time I go to the barn is to figure out which of these ewes is the next to lamb.

Shearing Day 2021 - Part 2

I wrote a post about Shearing Day a couple of days ago but there was more!

There were photos of Ginny and Oakley (the shearer’s dog) in the last post. Rusty even wanted to play. Not bad for an almost 15 year old dog.

The last post ended up with a lunch break. (Too bad we couldn’t have the fabulous potluck that has happened in other years.) I had brought a friend’s sheep here to dry out and stay dry so they could also be shorn. They were the after-lunch group.

We were amused by this sheep’s fluffy hairdo.

I watched this sheep butt others with her horns and she must have been doing that earlier to come in with this look.

Farm Club members helped clean the barn after we finished shearing, and they valiantly braved the lake to dump the wheelbarrow loads.. This is what happens after only 2” of rain.

They also spent time looking through fleeces.

After finishing with all the sheep I like to take some photos of how they look without fleece.

This is Sheila.

Meridian Axle.

Ruby Peak Tamarisk, on the left, is the sheep I picked up this summer in Oregon (blog post here). Meridian Jasper is on the right.

Rocky is a wether whose only job is to be a buddy sheep when I need to move someone else (usually a ram) into separate quarters.

Peyton is the BFL ram who weighed in that morning at 281 pounds!

Farm Club members took some of the fleeces but there are still a lot left.

Shearing Day 2021 - Part 1

Shearing Day was 5 days ago on 1/29. I can’t believe that I haven’t shared photos yet. I often think in terms of photos and blog posts, but they don’t always make it to the computer. The first post I meant to write was about getting ready for Shearing Day.

Tuesday night the area was hit with a wild storm and huge winds. On Wednesday we drove to a friend’s farm about 5 miles away to bring her sheep to our place so they would be dry for shearing. We now know how many sheep we can put in our trailer—that would be 20 in full fleece. The sheep were soaked but by bringing them here they had a chance to dry out and our shearer added them on after shearing our sheep..

Tuesday night our power went out and stayed out for almost 24 hours and we were luckier than many to be out of only that long, especially since I didn’t think John would want to hand shear 88 sheep.

Wednesday morning I got the barn organized for shearing. I found the plywood we save for shearing next to the stack of straw. It looks as though last year someone labeled it so that it wouldn’t be cut up and used for something else before this year. Good idea.

We started with the rams. This is 2 year old Jasper.

Shearing Day is usually an Open House and we have a lot of visitors and fleece buyers. This pandemic year was an exception, but I was glad that some Farm Club members could come and help. In fact they did most of the work of moving sheep and handing them off to John.

Sheep-eye-view of the holding pen.

The whole day went so smoothly. Everyone had a job and knew what to do. The few brand new Farm Club members jumped right in as well and the “old-timers” showed them what to do and talked about handling sheep.

John sheared 8 rams and wethers and then moved onto the ewes.

Mary scooped the fleeces off the shearing board and her husband, Russ, held the bag open for the fleece.

Kathleen was happy to do her regular job of weighing fleeces.

As usual Ginny entertained herself with the ball. This time she put the ball through the fence where John was shearing, hoping that someone would throw it for her. This time John’s dog, Oakley, picked it up and they both ran off.

Later Oakley found a piece of horn which I think he liked better than the ball.

John sheared all 68 of our sheep and then took a break before shearing the my friend’s 20 sheep.

While John ate lunch we held a raffle that was open to those members who had renewed their membership. We raffled off the shawls that our Meridian Jacobs teams had woven at 2019 Black Sheep Gathering and 2020 Lambtown Sheep-to-Shawl contests. It was fitting that Marina won the shawl woven by the team she was on in 2019. Two other members who couldn’t be at shearing will pick up the Lambtown shawl and another that I wove as a sample before the Lambtown competition.

The ram lamb (almost a year), Rambler and his wether buddy in the background. Remember this look—you’ll never see him this white again.

Stay tuned for more shearing photos tomorrow!