Jim Webster's Blog, page 29

Lambing almost live

Well we’ve about made it. There are definitely two left to lamb but they could take a fortnight to make their minds up. Then there are three hoggs who might possibly be in lamb but again they could be even further off. So the curtain may not have come down on the show, but in …

Spring has sprung?

  It’s been longer than normal since I last posted. To be honest I’ve been busy. Yes, Jim has been working for a living. It’s something I’m supposed to do from time to time. But anyway, at the start of the week I had to go down to London for agricultural meetings. They were interesting. …

A bad day?

Sal is less than happy. Normally when I go out on the quad she runs behind me (because the lanes are narrow) or even tries to outrun me when we’re in a field. But at the moment we’ve got a lot of ewes outside with youngish lambs. The lambs have got to the adventurous stage. …

Stick to what you know best?

In my case this appears to be mud! We’ve had a wet winter, but the ‘Beast from the east’ and the constant, biting easterly winds did one good thing. They dried the ground up. It became possible to travel and sheep could wander about pretty well everywhere without leaving a mess. Then we had the …

Mum

One thing you realise during lambing is that not all mothers are created equal. With sheep you get all sorts. For an animal that was supposedly bred to enhance the maternal instinct, it might be time to up the stakes and see if a spot of genetic modification might not speed the job. Breed seems …

Wonderful stuff, genetics.

  So it was about 8pm last night and I decided it was time to walk through the lambing ewes and see if anybody was up to anything. I arrived to find a black faced Suffolk ewe with four new born lambs. Two were black and two were white. There was a problem with this, …

Little one at large

When you go into a lambing shed first thing in the morning you never really know what you’re going to find. On some mornings I’ve made my way from one end of the shed to the other and back, to discover absolutely nothing has happened. On other occasions you’ll find that the adoring mum and …

Going home

Well the wintering Swaledales have gone home. I’ve borrowed an appropriate photo of sheep belonging to somebody else. It’s suitably scenic. The hoggs that were with us had to leave because in the next week the field they’ve been in over winter will hopefully be ploughed for potatoes. It’s very much a tale of two …

Taking life as you find it.

There was once a shepherd who dropped his Bible while he was mending a gap in a hedge. A couple of days later, a sheep walked up to him carrying the Bible in its mouth. The cowboy couldn’t believe his eyes. He took the precious book out of the sheep’s mouth, raised his eyes heavenward …

A big breakfast

The ewes seem to have admitted to themselves that it’s lambing and they ought to get on with it. We had three lamb last night. They’re together inside the one building and sheep seem to be happy with that. Cattle are different, they wander off on their own to give birth, but sheep seem perfectly …