As tupping runs over into December we’re still keeping a close eye on how our boys are doing, and keeping our fingers crossed that all is well and they are fathering lots of lambs.

Due to having 3 tups we had to split the ewes into 3 groups and keep them separate over the 5 week tupping period. When the time came to take the tups out, we gathered them all up together and marked and took ear tag numbers of all the early lambers, so that we can split them out again more easily when lambing time draws near. The tups were put back with some younger tup lambs to have a rest and recuperate, while the ewes were left to run together in one big flock again.

We do a batch of meat lambs every month so that keeps us ticking over, we pick a couple and take them to the abattoir in the first week of the month and then collect the meat and deliver it to our customers around the third week in the month. We are also constantly thinking and planning ahead so we’re preparing mentally for lambing, making lists of equipment we need to get together, discussing which fields to use and how to rotate, then changing our minds, then changing them back again. We might look like we know what we’re doing, but our brains are more scrambled than a pan of scrambled eggs!

The month we have been waiting for has finally arrived. Tupping season can commence! We tup (mate the sheep) fairly late as we want to lamb late, due to outside lambing and needing to wait for warmer weather and decent grass growth.

As you can see from the picture, there is paperwork to sort for nearly everything we do with the sheep. Here we are deciding which ewes are going with which tup, and so have printed off lists and assigned each tup a colour…

Choosing which ewe goes with which tup is mainly down to breed, but we also have to take into account the age and experience of both the ewe and the tup. Our 2 new tups haven’t worked before so we made sure they only got about 30 ewes each, and half of those were experienced ewes. Max, our older boy, had nearly all young ewes, and he had about 50.

We will leave the tups in for 5 weeks, which is 2 17 day cycles for the ewes. The first 17 days the tups will wear a red crayon on their chest, the 2nd cycle they’ll have a blue crayon. This way we can make sure that the tups do the job properly the first time around, and also we get an idea of when they ewes will lamb. We’ll split them into 2 groups for lambing, although some will probably overlap a bit.

One of our new boys, Sammy the Suffolk, got off to a flying start, barely getting through the gate before starting work! Our other new tup, Bobby the Bluefaced Leicester, took about a week to get started, but they both marked all their girls before the 5 weeks were up.

Now we wait. We have a few jobs to do before lambing, as all the ewes need vaccinating and worming before they lamb, and moving to the lambing fields, but really now we just watch and wait until April.