Getting Ready

We're getting ready for spring.  The garden is underway.  We've done a little bit outside; most of our work has been inside, planning our layout, our planting dates, and ordering our seeds.

Snowball loves gardening.

It's a little over a month until our first expected lamb.  (It might seem a little early to go through lambing supplies, but we wanted to have plenty of time to order whatever we need.) We keep our lambing supplies in three 5-gallon buckets: mommy, baby, and general health.  The buckets are great because they are easy to carry where you need them, and you can sit on them.  The mommy bucket has things we might need during lambing: gloves, scalpels, a pulling rope, Nutri-Drench, and SuperLube.  The baby bucket has after-lambing supplies: a hanging scale and a lamb sling to go with it, Triodine and a navel cup, scissors, lamb jackets, and more gloves.  Our general health bucket has things we might need all year round, as well as the elastrator and ear tagging supplies.  There's also a big box of old towels, and I carry a backpack all the time during lambing season.  There are more gloves, more towels, Managing Your Ewe and Her Newborn Lambs, my cell phone, and a clipboard with the ewe's breeding sheets.  (There's usually a few snacks for humans, water bottles, and some easy knitting and/or spinning in case I'm in the barn a long time.)

Clipboard with breeding sheet.

 While we were doing this, the children did this:

"Stop playing with my food!" Barack O'Llama

 Elsie is getting ready for lambing, too.  She's huge!  I know I say this all time, but this year, her baby bump is enormous--visible before shearing and from a distance.  Or, she's just really, really fat.

My opposite ewes: Elsie & Henrietta

Peanut