The Apprentice has been incredibly game for whatever comes her way. So on Friday we were ready to sort lambs and I wanted to weigh them. We have never weighed our sheep before. We bought the slings and scale several years ago with the intention of doing it occasionally but in all reality it was not necessary. I had posted an ad for the lambs on Craigslist and someone was interested but they wanted to know how many of the lambs were slaughter weight. Well we are keeping seven of the big lambs for our local customers. We have six sold but due to the current coyote problems we are having I through it prudent to keep an extra on hand.
Due to us keeping seven and me stating they weighed anywhere from 35-85# I figured we better have some weights. We grabbed a short section of chain from the fence (I keep all of the short sections I find all over the farm next to the outhouse trash enclosure). The new scale and slings were in the tack room. The one sling is for newborn lambs and the other for everyone else up to 200#. We hung the scale up in the momma/baby area. This way if the lamb got loose we could easily catch it again. The only bad part of this plan is you have to get the sheep into the harness on the ground then lift them up onto the hooks of the scale. So this means lifting every single lamb after you have already caught them and drug them over to the scale.
We got all 59 lambs into the barn and pushed down to the far end so they can feed into the chute and then we can count and sort them. I manned the sorting gate and chute. The Apprentice was at the end of the chute and had to catch them as I pushed them out and drag them over to the momma/baby area. Keep in mind she weighs 115# and is 5’4” and has never wrangled sheep before. It went pretty well actually.
She determined that horns on sheep are unnecessary. I like to use them as handles but the ones with little nubbins kept managing to head but her or dig their horns into her biceps. She got tossed around a few times and losses control of the lamb. We just pushed them into the momma/baby area and then caught them again. We had one crazy female, who weighed 112# that just head butted right into my left side and tried to knock me down. We finally snagged her and got her into the scale. If she was not already going away that behavior would have earned a ticket to cull city! One time she held on but got tossed all over the barn while managing barely to stay on her feet and keep ahold of the very large lamb. On one occasion while getting the lamb into the harness she got jerked toward the side and I had to catch her to keep her from hitting her head. After that I held the sheep and she put the harness on. We finished with all 59, with 52 weighed. We did not weigh the seven we were keeping. It was getting pretty long as that took us about four hours to do fifty sheep. So about 5 minutes per sheep.
We then let the 52 go out into the upper end fields and moved the keeper seven over to the lower pastures to go into our main herd of ewes and two rams. We only kept whethers so this is possible.
Once that was done we needed to take the pile of discarded and not valuable alpaca fiber that was still in the milking area of the barn over into the lavender patch. We are using the fiber as a weed suppressant, ground cloth. It works pretty good for that but it takes a lot of fiber to do that. Luckily, we have a lot. We drug it through the corral and front yard and then went to toss it over the fence. This is when the Apprentice announced she “cannot move my arms” when we went to lift the fiber over the fence. It was a 12 x10’ tarp full of fiber.
We worked on clearing the front hillside of puncture vine. It’s so hard to get rid of so we are taking it out and bagging it all to go to the dump. We don’t want any of it on the property. Once we had the bag full the apprentice could not lift it so she brought the trash can into the yard and managed to get the bag into it on her own. We called it a day after that.
I am getting too old to go all day, I hurt by the end of the day. Annmarie tells me I should be conditioning my body in the off summer season but I am not sure that will help my joints, my achy knees, elbows and shoulders! So instead I just keep moving and keep doing stuff despite the pain.
Stewart Creek Somethings 