Breeding Season is an exciting time of the year – anticipation of what’s to come and hope for the future. Once all of the groups are decided upon and sorted, the excitement quickly fades… Chore time is doubled/tripled as I wheel the wheelbarrow from pasture to pasture doling out the food to my screaming adoring fans.
The groups have been together for 5 weeks now and most everyone has been bred, so I decided to pull the rams and put all of the ewes back together. This was also in anticipation of being gone this weekend, I wanted to make chore time easier for my husband. I also noticed that a couple of the boys were getting bored and restless because all of their ewes were bred.
Not naming names, but one in particular was very naughty yesterday morning…
I put Junior and his girls in the barn because I knew I could walk through there with hay and not have to worry about him. Unfortunately, he took his frustrations our on the poor gates and lambing jugs. I was not happy and I told him as much!
We sorted the rams off and put their halters on and into the small pen they went. This is my absolute least favorite thing about owning sheep and using multiple rams. If we were to simply turn them all out together in a pasture, then we would run the risk of one of them getting seriously hurt. So, we put them in a very small pen, one tied in each corner to prevent them from ramming and hooking each other with their horns.
They stay this way for about 24 hours. We then turn them out with several piles of really yummy alfalfa, in hopes that the food will be more enticing than causing each other bodily harm. We then stand back and hold our breath and hope all is well. We are at the ready with Kate to herd them back into the pen if it doesn’t work and we try again in another 24 hours. Hopefully they behave themselves tonight.
Julian is the lucky one at the moment because we are using him as a clean-up ram, which means he will hopefully breed any of the ewes that did not get bred the first time around.
He has proven to be quite the ladies man and it looks like a couple of the girls were saving themselves for him. He has been funny to watch – he is a wine ’em and dine ’em kind of guy.
The girls were happy to be reunited and could be heard most of the night catching each other up on what has happened in their part of the world for the last month.
Chore time was drastically reduced this morning, but we now have gates and fence to fix and 3 very unhappy boys. Hopefully all will be back to normal in a few days. I hope everyone behaves themselves while I am away!
Stories from the Farm 
Have a good weekend! Glad you got everything back under control… so far. 😉 Your boys are so nice… I cannot imagine them getting in to trouble while you’re away. 😀
You don’t leave any time between designated rams and clean-up rams? Couldn’t there be some questions of paternity?
On a completely different topic, I spun up a one-ounce sample of Jacob today that I just LOVED. So much so that I started wondering if you have any roving that you’d want to trade for some of Braveheart’s roving. Not that I NEED any fiber, but at least I wouldn’t be ADDING to my S.A.B.L.E.
I’m not sure I would include Wrangler in that blanket statement. The little rat was picking fights with Reno and Junior and they kept walking away from him until finally Junior had had enough. They seem to have it worked out now 🙂
I use marking paint on the rams and I know who has been bred and how dark the color is and can tell if they are rebred. I usually put a different color on the clean up ram, but I only have the one color this year – poor planning on my part 🙂
Isn’t ‘nice’ Jacob wonderful! I left a comment on your blog.
Very interesting and informative. Does this usually work to keep the rams getting along? I have not had any good luck keeping rams together, and it is not fun having them kill each other.
I have noticed Goth is bored with the ewes in his pen and now will need to work at keeping him away from my new, and young ram after I move his ewes out….as his boredom seems to be causing him to be rough with the girls.He is pretty good at taking fences and barriers down…..can’t keep a decent fence around the sheep because of ramming. I do enjoy watching my rams though and getting new lambs in the spring.