Stories from the Farm

Ok, so it is a little earlier than I had originally planned…but life happens like that 🙂  Yes, we have started breeding season here at Kenleigh Acres.  That means lambs will be arriving the first week of January – yikes!  It all started when Joan from Mud Ranch told me that they were done with Douglas aka “Dudley”.  Their flock consists of a lot of his daughters, so we made the decision to bring him back because of his bloodlines.

He has a very unusual head and he likes to use his horns for destruction, so the plan was to bring him home, breed him in a few weeks, and then butcher him.  I know it sounds a little cold, but I don’t have much tolerance for rams that don’t mind their manners.

We attended the JSBA’s AGM in California (hopefully I can write about that tomorrow) and met up with Joan and Simon there.  Douglas was a gentleman all weekend and I thought that boded well for when we got him home.

We arrived home late Sunday night after driving for 9 hours.  We hauled a few lambs for some other people along with a Shetland ewe.  We had to set up some pens in the front of the barn to keep everyone separate.  Unfortunately, due to the late hour and exhaustion, we forgot to attach Douglas’ pen to the barn.  Due to this over site, I found Douglas in front of the barn Monday morning – oops!  The really strange thing was that the barn gate was still shut!  On my way out there I was going through the scenarios of what may have happened and I was really afraid that he punched a hole in the side of the barn.  I was relieved to see that this hadn’t happened.  I found the pen pushed away from the wall and fixed it before putting him back in.  Unfortunately I also realized that he had climbed up on the hay and jumped through the window!!!  So, I put him back in the pen and thought all was well.  I came back to the house and turned around and lo and behold there he was in front of the barn again – what the…???  So, back to the barn to figure out what he did this time.  He jumped everything this time!  Now a little panic is setting in, what in the world am I going to do with a jumping ram???  So, he got tied in the pen because I had to go pick up my son.  When we got back I went out to check on him – guess what – he jumped the panel – tied.  Luckily I left enough slack that he wasn’t hanging.  But he can’t stay tied until breeding season.  My poor husband was at work and was getting very frustrated calls from me, of course he couldn’t do anything about it.  And he pointed out that this was my idea.  So, why did I do it – for the bloodlines…his sire is bide a wee Kell

who is out of Spahr Farm Silas

and his dam is Zettle’s Blackberry

who is out of Zettle’s Diego.  My husband agreed that we should try to breed him to a few ewes before we butcher him.  Thus the reason why we will be expecting lambs the first week of January, we gave into him and gave him a handful of ewes.

We are experiencing some really HOT weather right now and we didn’t expect him to breed any of the ewes for awhile, boy were we wrong!  He has bred 3 of the 5!

I told him that he better pace himself because as soon as the girls all have green on their butts, he is out of here 🙂