This year Spring seemed to be a long time coming and so did our lambs. But eventually come they did, to find themselves arrived in a cold, wet May Bank Holiday weekend.
However, there is still one ewe to lamb, and we hope that it won’t be too long now.
I was terrified of the whole lambing process and and the more advice I sought the more nervous I became. I insisted that we buy every product and device known to modern shepherding recommended to us by other people and the books I was pouring over. We spent a fortune. Why I felt that the ewes wouldn’t know how to get on with such a natural thing for them, I’m not sure.
We had prepared the lovely pole barn (see InTheWilds/Events page) at the bottom of the fields and filed it with fresh straw and lots of lovely hay to eat, thinking it was the perfect, clean, safe and warm place for them to lamb in. By the next morning all three ewes had manged to escape and were happily back in the fields, nonchalantly munching grass, without a care in the world, and that’s where they chose to give birth.
I was visiting the field first thing in the morning and twice more throughout the day for a week….and yes of course, they gave birth all by themselves, problem free, the one morning someone else offered to check them for me.
They did all the things that needed to be done for the new born lambs and their mothers and I got to see them later that day all iodined sprayed and used to the world.
And of course, they are the cutest, prettiest lambs in Somerset. Now they will probably spend the rest of their lives finding ways to get through the fence into the other fields, and forget how to reverse their escape, causing me and their mothers endless hours of anxiety……I am smitten………..
Heydon Hill Tree Nursery 