Life on the Ranch

31 for 21 - S is for Sheep         Hard to believe that the 31 for 21 challenge for 2011 is over already. Doesn't it seem like it just started? I had great intentions of getting through all of the Ranch Animal Alphabet posts (especially considering there are only 26 of them and 31 days in the month!) but, that was not to be. With internet failures, a busy life at times and my own human failure to remember everyday, here I am at the 19th letter of the alphabet. Oh well, I will try to keep on posting over the next week here to finish it up.          The letter S is somewhat of any easy one because of the many sheep we have been running through this ranch over the past year or so. Sheep are one of the dumber animals in existence yet, some of them also have sweet personalities. We started with 2 Katahdin sheep  added in Painted Deserts and some Finnsheep plus, a handful of others. For a more complete look at our sheep adventures, you ca...

This is Bub, the new Dorper ram that my son bought. We shall see how he grows out and what kind of lambs he produces!

This is a trial run of a slide show I made over at photobucket.

We have had quite a few lambs born over the past 6 weeks. Here are some pics of them:       Although we usually feed square bales of Alfalfa/Orchard grass hay, we did resort to a big round during the last few snowstorms. It made it way easier to keep all the sheep and goats in good health.

We have had a few lambings the past week. One was by a Desert Sand ewe we have. She had a single eweling in the sheep shed one evening. We were able to keep her shut up in the shed for a few days to bond with her baby (and to protect the lamb from the cold!). Just last night, we moved our big, fat Katahdin ewe (Ewe Neek) into a stall at the back of our house. Sure enough, at about 5 am, I was awoken to the sounds of little lambs. I went down and she had 3 lambs out. It looked like the last one had just come out because it was still wet. There are 2 ramlings and 1 eweling. These are lambs that are half Katahdin and half dairy, since they were bred to our dairy ram. Here is the picture of what I first saw:

Well, it finely snowed several inches. The animals all appeared to be warm and had fresh water to drink. We have added more sheep to our ranch just recently. Here are a few pics of the sheep we have at the moment.

Yesterday was a fun day for some of us in the family. We went to a big ranch and helped with a ram round-up. Here are a few pics from the day: If anyone reading this is in the market for trophy horn rams, just shoot me an email at    kim@goodgoats.net

The sheep are slowly growing in numbers! What started out as a simple desire to have a few sheep to help with maintaining our 40 acres, has blossomed into several new adventures. Some weeks ago, we brought in a mixture of Painted Desert sheep to add to the few Katahdins and Barbados that we had.           Well, thanks to Nancy Osborn, we now have 2 dairy ewes and 1 dairy ram. Below are pictures of Malibu (the white ewe), LL (the black ewe) and Ames (the 5 month old ram). Ames, the "slightly-freaked-out" ram!! Here is Malibu (on the left) standing by Ames. She is 4 years old and he is 5 months - he will most likely grow out to be a pretty big boy!

Yep, the picture above says it all . . . sheep . . . have entered the ranch now! It was a great trade that I couldn't pass up, thanks to Mary over at Mary's Lil' Acre. We now have 2 Katahdin ewes. One of my daughters has been researching sheep for sometime now and so it was worth the trade, just to see her smile.         So much has gone on the past month. I will try to catch up over this upcoming week.