Jacob Sheep
All posts tagged Jacob Sheep
ok, a lot of catch up!
How has it been two weeks since doing a blog post?
Where is the time going?
How is Christmas only a few weeks away???
Time to take a deep breath……….ah, that’s better.
I am very thankful for the daily routine that stays the same, no matter how crazy the holidays get.
Lulu and Infiniti are waiting for their evening chin scratches…
the sheep are all fed…
the pigs are enjoying a feast of pumpkin…
the cats always enjoy a snuggle…
and I love watching the ducks swimming and bobbing on the pond.
In addition to the daily routine, I have been teaching a few classes. These have been SO much fun!
We traveled over the mountain and through the snow to deliver a sheep to his new home. I am so thankful my husband was willing to drive through this…
it was so pretty, but there is no way I would have driven through it!
While there, we saw this adorable little guy…
He is a Scottish Highland calf and oh so cute 🙂
I have also been doing a lot of crafting…
I was so excited when I recently found the pattern to make this horse.
My grandma made horses for us when we were growing up and used this same pattern! A friend ordered this purple pony for a christmas gift for a special little girl – I think she is going to love it! I am working on a few more, one for a certain little boy 😉
Hope you are all doing well during this fun time!
I love snow days, especially when it isn’t sloppy and wet. This is a very rare occurence where we live. In fact, we didn’t get any snow last year. They have been forecasting snow for days and it finally arrived. We woke up to a winter wonderland.
Ok…it isn’t a lot of snow, but it is a lot for us this early in the year and it is going to stay cold for a couple days which means it is going to stay! I gave all of the animals extra food last night and extra bedding.
All except for the ducks. They didn’t want to leave the pond last night and I didn’t want Kate to get soaking wet. They seemed quite happy to be in the water this morning…bbbbbrrrrrrr.
All of the sheep were happy to see us and eager for breakfast.
The dogs had fun running, jumping, and playing in it.
Snowballs were thrown…
and a little sledding was done!
While all of us were home I wanted to take some pictures for our Christmas cards.
I had my picture taken with the girls. I like this one of me and Infiniti…
and this one of me and Delight, such a funny girl…
but I think I like this one the best.
My son of course wanted to have his picture taken with Rose 🙂 This took several attempts…Rose kept jumping off the bridge and running a BIG circle before she came back.
This picture turned out great of my husband and his lab, Deuce.
Yay for the snow day and Christmas card pictures!!!
I was recently asked how many sheep we have named. I didn’t have a clue what the answer was! Of course, this question piqued my curiosity, so I counted and the total is 234!
Cypress was the first lamb we named.
This also got me thinking about the naming theme for the 2011 lambs.
Naming the lambs is something I really enjoy and I love putting together a list of names before the lambs start arriving. Well it is time to get my act together because the first lambs are due to arrive on January 4th. With how the time is flying, that day is going to be here very soon!
We used city names in Oregon for 2010 and I wanted to use a variation of this for 2011, so I am going to use river/stream/lake/creek names. The Oregon Atlas is full of fun names!
This boy also has a new name. I had a hard time calling him Albus, so he is now Ringo. His registered name is going to be Blue Ewe’s Ringoes Albus. Ringoes was the city in New Jersey where the AGM was held and where we picked him up. Ringo has a nice ring to it 🙂
You can see the whole breeding line-up, including pictures – here
This has been my philosophy on setting up a good working system for the sheep. Each year I buy a few more panels or a new gate to add to what we have in the barn. Every year we redo the system to take advantage of the new piece of equipment and make it a little better. This year I added another piece of equipment and it didn’t make it a little better…it made it a LOT better!
Here, Amber is modeling the new 3-way sort chute that I picked up at Oregon Flock and Fiber. I had the opportunity to use it while doing the herding dog demonstration at Black Sheep Gathering and was hooked. We rearranged the barn and worked it into our system.
Delight is demonstrating how the sheep should walk single file through the alley into the small pen. Unfortunately this doesn’t always happen. At first they don’t want to go and then it is like you opened a flood gate and they are all running at once.
The barn is set-up with several areas that go from big to small. We can have the barn completely open for them or we can shut gates and move them from one area to the next until they are in a pen that is appropriate for the number of sheep we are working. I vividly remember the good old days of running around trying to catch sheep…running around and around out in the pasture. Ah, such fun it was 😉
This way is so much better – for us and them!
We have the 3-way chute set-up so we can sort the sheep into 3 separate pens. It can also be used as a squeeze – very useful for routine sheep care. This wouldn’t be possible for big breeds, but it works well with our jacob sheep.
It will take a few more times of working the sheep through the system to get a really good feel for it, but I am envisioning so many possibilities.
We are officially done showing sheep and attending fiber shows for 2010. This year’s Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival was a great way to finish the season. The sun was shining on Saturday and attendance was high.
All of these bags left early in the morning…
and most of these little buggers left on Saturday…
I love them, but making this many was a little overwhelming. I felt bad coming home with one lonely little sheep, so she is keeping me company in my office 🙂
I loved the comments I heard about the sheep and the bags – ‘I REALLY don’t need this, but I MUST have it’, ‘This looks just like the sheep I used to have’, ‘My friend just bought a new car and this little sheep is going to be so cute hanging from the mirror’, and many more that I forgot but enjoyed in the moment! In addition to all of these sheep finding new homes, quite a few people bought the kit so they could learn how to make themselves a little flock.
This year I found myself needing to show sheep and man my vendor booth all at the same time – WHAT??? I can multitask well, but not that well 🙂 Thanks to several good friends, I had plenty of help – this is one of my favorite things about fiber shows! While I was thinking about who I could ask to help me show sheep, I remembered that Kristine had offered her showing skills to me earlier this year. Although she had plans on Saturday afternoon, she gladly agreed to help. She hasn’t shown livestock in quite a few years, but it didn’t show. Since we were both showing, there aren’t very many pictures to show of the jacob show. So, I will just say that there were 4 breeders and some very nice sheep 🙂
Kenleigh’s Ironside came home as the Champion ram and Kenleigh’s Mollala was Reserve Champion ewe.
It has been 14 years since it rained at this event and that is amazing for the end of September in the Northwest. The sunny stretch ended on Sunday. We woke up to a drizzle and by mid-morning – it was POURING!!! About half of the vendors are outside on the lawn, including my booth! Thanks to some help from my husband, we were able to put walls on my canopy and everything got damp instead of wet 😉
Thanks to some more help from friends and my husband, we had the 7 sheep we brought to the show shorn and then I got to walk around and visit the other vendors! These two pieces weren’t for sale, but they were some of my favorite things that I saw…
and another one of my favorites…the blueface…
their ridiculously huge ears and eyes…
and their super shiny curls.
I only bought two fibery items…
this beautiful and super soft blueface roving…
and some colorful goodies.
You’ll have to wait to see the other item I came home with – I am so excited because it is going to make sheep work a lot easier and dare I say… maybe even fun!
Our new sheep are here! A couple of them have been on the road for two weeks. I wish I could tell them that their travels are over because I’m sure they are just waiting to be put on another trailer.
Bringing new sheep home is fun, but it should be done with care. As much as I would like to turn these new sheep out into the pasture, this would be haphazard because they have been exposed to a lot of different sheep and farms over the last couple of weeks.
I would hate to expose my sheep to an unknown threat, so the new sheep will have to wait a little longer to enjoy the Oregon grass.
I have them in a quarantine area in the barn. This will help acclimate them to our property and I can watch them closer for any signs of distress. I am also taking this time to worm them. In addition to buying new sheep, you could also be buying worms that you don’t currently have in your flock. It is recommended to worm with 2 different classes of wormer. It is best to flush the worms out in your quarantine area and not in your pastures.
In addition to Albus, whom you have already met – we have…
a handsome 4-horn ram lamb from Peg Bostwick. His name is Sweetgrass Clint and he will be traveling to California with Robin Lynde in the middle of October.
Albus’ traveling partner – Blue Ewe Meg. Very pretty girl with a lovely fleece.
An unplanned (but one I am excited about) purchase from Dan Carpenter. Such a cute face on this girl. Her name is Dandy’s Hope.
This girl may look a little out-of-place 🙂 She is a Navajo-Churro from my friend Karen at bide a wee farm. Her name is Ursa and she is the ewe that I mentioned briefly in a previous post about breeding to one of my ‘brown’ looking jacob rams. I can’t wait to see the resulting offspring and am hoping for something other than black. I wish I understood color genetics better (I am TRYING) so that I could discuss it with some intelligence. So, please don’t ask any technical questions – but feel free to help me in understanding the extension brown and dominant black aspects! On another note about Ursa – her name means ‘bear’. So far I haven’t seen that she takes after her name, except for maybe looking like a big brown bear. The churros aren’t much bigger than the jacobs, but just that little amount seems like a LOT!!!
After Albus realized that Clint is NOT a girl, they have settled down…
now he has his eyes (nose) on Ursa.
Stories from the Farm 
