Harvard Mass, NYC Sheep and The Lamb Races Begin Again!

First off, I'll be teaching a Two Color Knitting and Steeking Class at the Fiber Loft in Harvard, MA on March 19th. Here is the link for more information. Hope to see some of you there. If you are coming and would to purchase some lamb for your freezer, I'll be happy to bring some down with me! E-mail me to set it up..... or to ask about pricing.

Second - don't forget all you NYC knitters - go check out the sheep at Times Square and send me a photo of you in front of them. I'll post it on this blog next week. I'm wondering if I will get any???? I'd be checking it out if I were closer! See the post below...

Lamb races are a peculiar occurrence that evidently happens in sheep flocks all over the world. They are something I wait for every year! Once the lambs get strong enough to become really playful, the races begin. Just before sunset, they get all riled up and start chasing up and down the barnyard...... never fail. A couple years ago I made a silly little video of them which you can find on my sidebar. Here are a few stills of the racing lambs running through the barnyard before dark.

If we have time on Sunday, and the weather cooperates, maybe I can convince Julia to help me with another video. By the way - we will be at the Amherst Winter Market at the Amherst Middle School tomorrow (3/5) from 10 to 2 p.m.

The snow that falls cleans up the barnyard but it quickly gets turned into slush by the feet of the animals. Mud season is going to be brutal here! Look how dirty some of the lambs are!

And then some of them stay quite clean. These photos were taken on the same day. Who can figure? I suppose it is like people - some spill all over the clothes and some stay pristinely clean! Funny to think about, isn't it?

And I have found another soul sister in agriculture and her name is Ella MacSweeney. Check out Ella's blog - Cowluck. Ella is a "presentor" on Irish radio. She co-hosts a show called "Ear to the Ground". If you check out her YouTube channel, you will learn a little about artificial insemination of cows. The ETTG YouTube Channel has many other fascinating videos and great Irish accents.

(And by the way, I bet you don't know this about me.... when I was in grad school, I took a "Sheep Production" course and I had to artificially inseminate a sheep. I don't think my Mom even knows that! I bet not too many knitwear designers have ever done that.... Wool - from conception to finished product! Maybe I should add that to my resume.)

Barn Chores

Last night, I kept waking up. It was the wind that was interrupting my sleep. It was howling away bringing in some very cold air after a day yesterday when it hit 45 degrees. I kept thinking about the sheep and the lambs knowing that cold, windy air and birth are not the best combination. After Julia left for school on the bus, I headed down to the barn to help out with the lambing chores. This lambing season, we are expecting at least 300 lambs. We are living and breathing lambing season at this old farmhouse. So far, there must be 125 lambs so things have been busy. And to be honest, we have pretty much lost count. 

Upon arrival, I checked in with The Boss (that would be The Farmer) to see what kind of help was needed. He said there were 3 sets of twins already. He was expecting a shipment of grain so I started tending to the twins who he had just found outside in the snow. 

 

The mama was attentive but these guys were definitely in need of some help. They were both trembling but when I put my finger in each of their mouths, there was a bit of warmth. All was not lost. We keep a supply of old towels rotating through the barn so I sat down with the lamb that looked the worst and used the towel to massage her legs and dry her off. She seemed to respond which made me feel encouraged. A little more massage and her head lifted off the barn floor. We decided to move the mama and these twins to a pen with a heat lamp and just watch.

So much of lambing season is watching. Watching and waiting. Trying to guess who will be next. When a ewe is close to lambing she will "bag up" which means her udder swells and looks like this.

After I finished with the one weak set, I took a walk outside to see what was going on. Lots of the little lambs like to hang out in the hay feeders sunning themselves when they aren't nursing from their Mamas. They are safe in the feeders away from the large sheep and can just snooze away uninterrupted.  Little lambs need lots of sleep - just like infants.

Further on down the hill, I found a brand new lamb. I must have missed its birth by seconds. The lamb had a bit of blood on her head which sometimes happens. The mama was attentive so I left it out in the sun and went back in the barn to do today's chores. 

When a lamb is just born and its umbilical cord is still moist, we dip it in iodine to prevent disease. We try to pen each set of twins and their mama so they can bond nicely. With the number of lambs we have had so far, we are running out of pens. Before the day old lambs can be released, their tails need to be docked and they need to be numbered with paint and an eartag. I'll show you this process tomorrow. After I finished yesterday's lambs' tails and marking, I started to release them to make room for today's crop. But before that, I had to check on the Mama outside who had just given birth. Yup, she had twinned. I picked both of them up by the front legs and slowly walked backwards into the barn. The mama followed nicely - I was lucky. She needed to be brought inside because it was really windy and cold - what we refer to as "lamb killing weather." The barn is a modified greenhouse designed for sheep and we put it up over 20 years ago. It functions well and helps the lambs live and thrive. This is one place that I let my love for aesthetics and beautiful things go - the barn is for lamb survival, that's it. It sure is nothing fancy but sheep don't care.

The first set of chilled lambs was looking better - in fact they were both up and trying to nurse. They are smallish but seemed to be doing well.

 

In the middle of all of this, the grain truck arrived to deliver the grain for the mamas. Our sheep eat primarily farm-raised hay but when the mothers are milking, they need a little more protein and energy which the grain supplies. Some people think sheep are stupid but I'm here to tell you differently. The adults all knew that the truck was there with the grain. They could hear it being blown into the bins and the combined baaaahhing was deafening. The trucker stopped in to see the lambs and have a quick chat with The Farmer. He was curious about the greenhouse and how warm it was inside. He then headed out and promptly got stuck in the snow. The Farmer helped dig him out and finally he was on his way.

In the meantime way down the field, two more ewes had just twinned. The Farmer put me in charge. I was in over my head. I couldn't tell which lamb belonged to which sheep and neither could the ewes. I had to get the lambs inside so I played lamb leapfrog - I picked up two lambs and moved them down the field about 10 feet. In the meantime, the mothers were tending to the other two. I picked them up and the mothers followed stopping at the first pair. I set the second set down 10 feet closer to the barn and kept repeating the process until the 4 lambs and 2 ewes were safely inside the warm barn. I watched and watched but couldn't tell who belonged to who. Can you tell?

We decided to pen them all together and hopefully by this evening the Mamas will sort out who belongs to whom. 

After I got all the babies taken care of, I fed and watered each pen full of new life. I filled up the water tank outside for the second time in the day (nursing mamas drink a lot of water!) and came home to write this blog post. I'm waiting for the bus again and then Julia and I will head on down the barn to see what else is going on and if The Farmer needs our help. 

That's the way it goes around here during lambing season. A lot of the same thing, over and over again with little bits of lamb life and death drama thrown in. It's not for everyone, for sure. Julia keeps threatening to move to "the city." We tell her, "that's fine" but this is where she is living now. I'm thankful that we can share lambing season with her and all of you. Good day everyone.

Lambing Continues and The Storm Subsides

All of these forceful winter storms have given me some great opportunities for taking photos of our sheep. Man, sheep in the snow - what could be prettier I ask? But I don't want to let you all think that this farm life is all just cute sheep photos all the time. That would be me telling you all a virtual lie. One thing I don't want to do is sugar-coat this farming thing, further adding to the wool-obsessed knitter's myth of getting a few sheep and living happily ever after. Don't get me wrong - I love sharing the photos of the sheep with all of you, knowing that many of you are knitters or crocheters who really have the sheep and wool love going on. I am so thankful to all of you for reading and spurring me on to keep learning about photography.

Our lambing barn is five miles from our house on the farm that The Farmer grew up on. The greenhouse barn lays about 1/4 mile down a dirt road. There we keep all The Farmer's large equipment in some equipment sheds that also do double duty as sheep barns when needed. The equipment includes two tractors, two trailers to move hay and sheep, mowing and baling machines, large hay making accessories, and lots of round bales of hay weighing about 800 pounds each. I am really not interested in the machines nor do I have the talent to operate them. The time I become interested is when something breaks, work can't get done, and it costs a fortune and takes forever to fix one of these big machines. We both have to drive four wheel drive vehicles that are high off the ground. If we didn't, we would never get anywhere. The Farmers starts his day early, heading off to the barns before Julia heads to school.


All this snow has just totally complicated our busiest time of year. It is hard to get into the barn because we don't have a plow. We just push our trucks through the snow, hoping not to get stuck. If we do, one of the tractors is used to get us out. It's actually all rather comical. I usually head down to the barn after Julia goes to school to check in and see if my help is needed. I don't have the natural talent of working with the animals that The Farmer does but I do my best. When I arrive, I get the low-down on how many lambs are born and what's going on. Often we are faced with lambs that are very weak, a mother that may be down or unable to produce milk to feed her lambs. Sometimes the lambs are almost gone - chilled and near death. Over the years, The Farmer has learned how to deal with these common problems and is quite good at assessing the situation. There are different things you can do to get a lamb going again and if I get a chance, I'll tell you about them another day.

One thing The Farmer frequently does is use a tool called a stomach tube. He passes a rubber tube down the throat of the weak lamb into the stomach. He can then give the weak lamb who has no sucking reflex milk. This thing has got to be one of the greatest inventions for sheep farmers. We have saved so many lambs with it, I can't even count them all. During lambing season, there is always one on the counter, one in the truck, and one at the barn.

One of the most important things with a weak lamb is to get the lamb warm again. The Farmer keeps his truck running and tucks the chilled lambs on an old jacket near the heating vents. If he has to go somewhere, they ride with him. It is easy to tell if a lamb is cold - you stick your finger in their mouth and if it feels like an ice cube, we know we have trouble. Sometimes we are lucky and the heater in the truck does the trick and the Mama Sheep accepts her lambs that we had to warm up.

Sometimes that is not the case. Either the mother has died or she is not capable of producing enough milk to sustain her babies. Sometimes the lambs are just too cold and by the time we get them warm, the Mama won't accept the babies. That is when we have to step in. And those are the lambs that end up in our house. We keep the woodstove going and set the lambs beside it. Sometimes they are injected with glucose to bring them back to life. Sometimes we give them a warm bath in the sink. It's all a learning process, even thirty years in. There are many sheep farmer tricks -- just as many as knitting patterns I would say. Lots of them are available on great websites operated by many land grant state universities.


I'm letting you in on these things because I have been getting comments from readers about how cute the lambs are in the house and "isn't it sweet that we keep the lambs in the house?" I really wanted to dispel these myths and tell you that the lambs that end up in the house are there because they have to be.


There is no longer a Mama available to take care of them and so they become "bottle lambs." We step in and become their mamas. We feed them "lamb milk replacer" in recycled water bottles using a special tip called a lamb and goat nipple. I swear the milk replacer smells exactly the same as the formula I used to feed Julia. When the lambs are old enough, we can wean them off the milk and they will then eat hay and a little sweet grain. As soon as we feel they are capable of surviving in the barn, we take them back and put them in a separate pen to acclimate them. In a couple days, we let them out of the pen and they blend in with the rest of the sheep. I say that lightly because bottle lambs usually don't blend in totally. They are always a little more friendly and when they are little they are very noisy - running up to us begging for a hit of milk - just like an infant.


Yesterday, Coco and Chanel moved down to the barn. I can't say they are very happy there but in a few days, they will be used to it. We still have a set of twins here sharing the study with us who are a bit too small to move back to the barn.

If you are local and have a chance tomorrow, stop on over at Greenfield High School between 10 and 2. We'll be setting up shop at Winter Fare - Greenfield's once a winter farmers market. Good weekend everyone!