Summer is over!

After a busy Summer, I've realised I haven't done a blog post in quite a while so let's do another update! In my last post I spoke about shearing and this was done on the 2nd June. It took us a while as I am far from a professional (that would do about 500 in the time it took us to do 5). and it seemed to be really difficult trying to get through the beautiful thick fleece of the Ryelands. But, it has to be done and with the help of some kids who were down at the farm glamping, we eventually got through them all. After we sheared them, we wormed and sprayed everyone with a flystrike prevention spray. As you can tell this stops all the sheep from getting flystrike, a horrible infection for sheep that both Gigi and Dolly have experienced, and also any parasitic worms.

I also talked about the possibility of halter training. Now this hasn't quite gone to plan! Halter training sheep takes a lot of time and patience and I had plenty of patience just not quite the time. This Summer may have been the busiest Summer for me that I have ever had after having picked up some extra jobs to earn some money for the possibility of traveling next year. But enough about that and back to the sheep as this is what the blog is about! At the beginning of the Summer I did have a go at training Big Yin, the biggest lamb (Gladys' little boy), and it did look promising so I will definitely try and pursue this again but just maybe when things start to wind down again.

In addition, over the Summer we weened the lambs off of their mothers. This often happens naturally as the mothers get fed up of feeding the lambs and start to push them away but we felt that this wasn't happening soon enough and the lambs were getting too big to keep feeding from them. The ewes were doing too good a job! So we separated them, which was a harder task than anticipated as we were trying to herd the lambs into one field without the mothers following. This may not have been my best idea to say the least! In the end what we did was got them all into a shelter and picked up the lambs one by one to take them into the pig field. The first day was crazy as they wouldn't stop calling after each other for about 24 hours straight but they soon settled down and after a few weeks away from their mothers we reunited everyone. Over these few weeks, we were expecting the lambs to maybe drop in condition as it can be a bit of a shock to the system to stop having their milk all of a sudden but they seemed to do really well with only one lamb getting a little bit ill but there's not much a course of pen and strep can't help!

Now, as we are now in September, it's time to think about moving on the lambs from this year and getting the girls ready for potentially being tupped again.

I have now advertised my 5 lambs on a couple of sheep farming groups online and have had some interest already! The two girls are definitely more popular which was to be expected due to the boys being wethers. As wethers they only really have a couple of purposes, lawn mowers or pets that can keep rams company. These purposes are clearly not as valuable as the ability to produce lambs like rams and ewes so you would expect a lower demand for them. With this in mind, I have decided that if the boys do not sell privately I will take them to market where they will be sold on and most likely be used for meat.

However ,for me to sell or move the lambs they first need to have ear tags so that they can be identified and also registered on the Coloured Ryeland Flock Book as they are pedigrees. This is simply a case of plumbing in your details online like flock and

holding numbers and waiting for the tags to arrive.

Now onto tupping. I am currently deciding whether I want to tup my three girls again this year. I will be using the same "rent-a-ram" scheme I used last year and there is one waiting for me if I want it. I just need to decide what I'm going to be doing next year when the time comes for lambing. I will be thinking about this over the coming weeks and will update when the time comes.