Lambing slowed down drastically this month, with a lamb appearing every few days. However, as the older lambs grow, we have to think about vaccinating and worming them to prevent any outbreaks of disease. We vaccinated all our ewes before lambing so that some immunity would pass to the lambs. This only lasts for a short period of time and the lambs need to receive additional vaccine in order to keep up the cover. We have to jab them all between the ages of 3 and 6 weeks, then repeat the jab 4-6 weeks later. They then receive an annual booster, usually before lambing themselves. As the lambs are fairly spread out in age we have split them up into three batches, depending on how old they are. This makes it less of a big job as we only have to do a few at a time, but we do have to take the time to make sure we have the correct lambs, so we have to check all the ear tag numbers and cross-reference to a our records. We weighed them while we were handling them too, to see how they’re growing, and were fairly happy with the results. Our Snowy was around 3kg when she was born, by 6 weeks old she was 20kg. She’s going to be a big girl!

Snowy at around 6 weeks.

Now that this season’s lambing is just about over, we are already looking ahead to next year, planning which lambs we are going to keep back, and thinking about buying in new stock to increase the flock. We went to a sheep auction around the middle of the month and picked up 7 Swaledale ewes with a total of 14 Mule lambs at foot, 12 of them being ewe lambs which we will be breeding from. They have settled in well and the lambs have really come on in the past few weeks, so we’re very happy. We also now have 4 pet lambs in the garden…

One of the late additions…

Toby with 2 of our pet lambs.