February, the coldest month of the year, and the ‘Beast from the East’ hit us. We actually had snow at the beginning and the end of the month, which is very unusual as we rarely get even a sprinkling of snow around here. Luckily for us it didn’t last long, and the ewes were still able to graze. Many others didn’t have it so lucky. Add in the frosts and icy winds and we felt really glad we weren’t lambing yet! The sheep all survived, although with those woolly coats I don’t think it affected them too badly.

As we head into March and see the back of the storms, we start preparing in earnest for lambing. By the end of March we should have our first lambs, so we need to finish of the fencing, round up and sort the ewes, dose them all and then send them off to their respective fields (or maternity wards!) to settle in before they lamb!

January has been a fairly quiet month for us. The ewes are looking well, we had some dung tested for worms and fluke and we were advised to treat them all for fluke. We brought them all in to the pens and dosed them all, looking them over at the same time and checking condition. We’re happy with them, and doing our bit to keep them healthy, so we just wait…

In the meantime we’ve been doing some fencing, trying to get it finished before we start lambing. We’re getting there, slowly but surely!

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.

As we start tupping in early November, now’s the time to make sure all our sheep are healthy and ready for the winter. We MOT’d the boys, making sure their feet were in good condition, and giving them all a dose of wormer, flukicide and a vitamin drench. It’s important that the tups are in good body condition and have good feet, as they have to serve about 50 ewes each in the space of 6 weeks. If they go lame they may lose interest, and if they aren’t well fed at the beginning they may not have enough energy to do a good job. Our boys all looked good and were raring to go.

Next we brought all our ewes in, and gave them the same treatment. Again, making sure they are in good body condition at this point. Too thin and they may not carry a lamb through the winter, too fat and their fertility could be compromised. We put a mark on the back of each ewe’s head indicating which tup she would be going with. It should save us time later when we need to split the flock into separate fields for tupping.

At this point in the year we start to get a bit impatient, and are getting excited about next year. On more than one occasion one of us would say to the other ‘Maybe we should put the tups in early, just a week or so…’ We will wait though, as we lamb outside we need the weather to be on our side, and there’s more chance of that in April than in March!

Now is the time when we start thinking about the next breeding season, and preparing the ewes for meeting the boys. We vaccinated all our new breeding ewes against abortion this month. Unfortunately enzootic abortion is becoming more common, so we took the decision to spend quite a lot on the vaccines in the hope that it saves us money in the long run by reducing our losses. A lot of the time you are gambling in farming, gambling with the weather, with market prices, or with vaccines and medication. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you really don’t know if it made any difference whatsoever!

We also put lick tubs in the fields for the ewes, containing minerals necessary for fertility. We need them to be in peak condition in the run up to tupping season, to ensure they produce strong, healthy lambs.

We also got our first batch of meat back from the butcher at the beginning of the month, and delivered it locally. We sold all 4 almost immediately, and sent another 4 in at the end of the month, all pre-ordered again. Hopefully we can keep up this level of custom in the future!