Spring Lambs

ARCHIVED NEWSLETTER - 21st June 2006

Summer Solstice

Apologies for the late arrival of this newsletter--it is always difficult to think back to what happened between March 21st. and June 21st.-especially when you leave it until July!

As I remember… the winter lamb crop sold very well at Easter. This has turned out to be quite profitable. We pull out all our 7-year-old ewes at weaning and put them with the rams mid-August. They start cycling in early September and lamb in February. This last February we lambed out 50 ewes and they produced 110 lambs. It is very different from our May lambing with lots of "hands on".

On the other hand our best, brightest and cleanest woolclip ever is worth half of what it was last year. The world price of wool is down and our dollar is high. We are going to hold onto the wool and hope prices improve.

We had a very good visit with Bill Wilson in April. Bill managed a 1400 Coopworth ewe flock in the Fraser Valley (where our Coopworth rams came from) that was sold (very sadly) last fall. He is going back to N.Z. and his three Huntaway dogs have come to stay at Footflats. They have settled in very quickly and are great in the yards. April is the month when the barn is filled to capacity and the days consist of chopping hay and keeping feed up to all the flock. The new water system in the barn woorked well and we didn't have any frozen pipe problems for the first time ever- The weather was warm and there was enough rain for fantastic growth and we turned out the ewes on May 01 to the lushest pasture they've ever had.

May was lambing -it went very well and we met our target of 1.5 lambs per ewe across the whole flock (including hoggets).

In June the sheep started to move out from the home farm to our other pasture fields. They end up in two groups - the hoggets and two-tooths and all their lambs on one farm and all the other ewes (about 600) and their lambs on another farm. Mark and Andrew have been fencing- the next big push will be haymaking at the end of the month. It looks to be a great crop; we have had good growing weather following the early spring.

The cottage is fully booked for the summer but there are still some openings at the Farmhouse.

All the best, Mark and Cherry