Lets Try This Again

Lets Try This Again

Well I looked and saw that I hadn't posted in about 2 years. Wow. So I am going to try this again. After 2 hard years of hanging on by the fingertips through "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune", I seem to be getting a grip on matters again and putting things to right once more.

I had a good lambing this spring. No losses, two ram lambs (Pan and Puck) and five ewe lambs (Firefly, Lady Bug, Persephone, Black Eyed Susan, Snowdrop). All are out of my two brown rams, Abram and Rusty. Black-eyed Susan is a black reverse badger face. Her mother, Lorna and her aunt, Queen Boudicca are milk sheep (1/2 Dorset, 1/4 E.Fresian, 1/4 Lacune). Abram and the rest of my ewes are Finshetdors. That would be a blend of Finnsheep, Shetland and Dorset. Black-eyed Susan was the first lamb of the year. She is huge compared to the other. Only Snowdrop who was born a week later is close to her size. The funniest thing is that Queen is Snow's mother and the largest ewe. Lorna is much smaller and her Susan is almost her size.

My tiniest lamb is Lady Bug. She is white with pheomelanin (red) spotting. She and her brother Puck both have a red spots on the backs of their necks. That is the only spot that Puck has but Lady Bug has smaller spots on her hips and back. That is how I thought of her name. Now pheo spots in wool are not bright red. In fact most sheep that are born with the red color as lambs fade out to an oatmeal shade by the time they are a year old. The chemical, pheomelanin, that causes the red color is dark in hair fiber. As the hairs grow longer more pheomelanin is added and the color stays dark. But in wool fiber the pheomelanin that they are born with is all that they have and as the wool fiber gets longer it is stretched out over the length of it.

Tunis sheep are born all red and when they are grown only the hair on their legs and faces remain red. Because of the Shetland blood Puck and Lady Bug are dual coated so the top coat will retain the red color. Firefly also has this red spot on the back of her neck but it is not as dark. Rusty was the father of all three. Peaseblossom is Puck and Lady Bug's mom. Pixie is Pan and Firefly's.

Pixie is Peaseblossom's daughter. She has full horns. She is often mistaken for my ram. She has golden pheo freckles on her face and red strips up the back of her hind legs. She has a magnificent cream fleece that looks like an Icelandic's but is very soft and fine. Even the top coat is unusually fine. She can't count to two. She will take one lamb and reject the other. Her voice makes you think of Fran Dresher. She will let you know if you forgot to fill the water.

Pan is the bottle lamb. He is brown with white HST spotting. HST stands for Head, Socks Tail. He has an additional crescent moon spot just above his tail and his face is marked like a panda with the white running down the front of his throat. All four feet have socks. He half believes he is a dog. His sister Firefly is bigger than him but she loves him and comes looking for him when she can't see him. Pixie doesn't mind him tagging along as long as he won't nurse. I tied her up for 3 days trying to force her to take him and she began to dry up from the stress so since I didn't want two bottle babies I gave in.

Abram is not just brown. He is a brown English blue. English blue is a dilution gene that causes the back and sides to turn lighter. It Not like a defined spot but a gradual shift from full dark color on the head and shoulders and belly and britch (back and lower part of the hind legs) to a lighter shade at the spine just about where a saddle would sit. It is often referred to a saddle but their are no hard edges to it. With it comes white "teardrops" on the face. Pan is also a brown English blue. He was born dark but has begun to lighten up at the saddle. Abram was very unusual in that he appeared black for the first two weeks even in the sun. Usually a brown can be spotted in the sun. He was a flat black though. It took him a full three years to lighten up to the frosty shade that he is now. If he was a black based sheep he would look blue.

When Abram was born my electricity was out and he was so small he was hypothermic. I milked his mom into a large oversized syringe and got some of the colostrum down him. I wrapped him in towels and took him inside and made some water with brown sugar and Nutri Drench (vitamin supplement for sheep) and tucked him in bed with me. Half way through the night he woke me up panting because he was so hot and I fed him the bottle of sugar water and tucked him back in till morning and took him back out to his mom Peaseblossom and his sibling.

Omega is my oldest ewe. She is a dark English blue. There are different levels of expression of this gene. I believe it has to do with how many copies of the gene is inherited similar to the dilution gene in horses with palominos, ambers, champagnes, creamellos, perlinos, dunlinos and smokey blacks. This is only a hypothosis. The phenotype (physical appearance) of a dark English blue is small teardrops and just a slight silvering at the saddle area. Sometimes the teardrops and the silvering don't even appear evident until they are one year old.

A middle level English blue will lighten up with the saddle by six months and the teardrops are seen by the second week. A bright English blue is evident from the very beginning. The full graduation is there and the teardrops are larger. Their are sometimes ribbons of white in the saddle area.

Omega is half Finn. Her sire was a registered Finn ram, Beaujuleah. He was black with a blaze face and for white anklet socks and a white tail tip, HST. He hated fighting and when my other rams would fight he would hit first on and then the other in the butt to make them stop. Omega took more of her personality from the Shetland quarter. She will come up for treats but doesn't want you to lay a hand on her. Her fleece never looks all that while she is wearing it. It isn't until you wash it and spin with it that you appreciate it. It is even from neck to tail and longer than you think at first once you pull the fine crinkles straight under the tension of the wheel.

She has always twinned for me. One year she tripled. This year she had a single and it was a hard birth. It was the day after Spring and I saw her straining in the sheep pen. I let the other sheep out onto the field and went to help her. The lambs front hooves were sticking out. But she was having none of it she jumped up and ran to the other corner of the pen. I let her settle for a few minutes. She lay down again and strained again. The legs advanced about an inch but as soon as she relaxed they lost all the ground they had gained. She had squeezed out a dollop of birth fluid and she jumped up and sniffed it and licked it up and started looking all around for the lamb. I tried to sneak up on her but she jumped up again. We repeated this cycle about 3 times until I was frustrated and worried about the lamb. I began to chase her without letting up. I figured that I would run her till she squirted it out if I must. She took a misstep and had to come to a full halt lest she roll over like a car flipping.

I caught her and she was done.  I pulled her between my legs and reached back and gripped the little legs and pulled. The lamb slipped out with a great wet slurp of a released vacuum. She was limp in my hands. I turned her over and gripped her hind legs and swung her back and forth a few times. She began to shake her head to clear her ears and nose of fluid. She was breathing. I turned to see Omega scanning the ground for her lamb. I put her under her nose and Omega looked at me like I was a magi or goddess. I had made the lamb appear! She began to rapidly clean her up. I hung around to make sure she could get to her feet and then went in to wash up.

I was on the phone to my daughter telling her about the birth and she suggested that I name her Persephone. I had been going with flower names this year and asked her why Persephone. "Because," she said, "Yesterday was the first day of Spring when by the Greek tradition, Persephone returned from the Underworld. Today you pulled her out of the darkness into the light." Well you can't argue with that.

 This is Abram at 2 years old. He is a brown English blue. You can see the beginning of his sugar lips. He is 4 now and he looks like he has been deep in the sugar bowl.

 Atlanta one week old above.  Right and below at 2 and a half months. She is a bright English blue. She also had some additional face and neck markings. The frosted lips called sugar lips is part of the pattern but the neck ring was unusual as was the white bar across the nose bridge by the eyes. Her mom is Omega, Abram is the sire.

 This is BeeBee, Omega's mom. she is nine years old here and her muzzle has gone white. She was a dark English blue and an amazing sheep. She crossed the Rainbow Bridge 3 years ago.

 This is Aprhodite. That she was some sort of English blue I was sure but her color pattern wasn't the norm. The chest and body were gray to start with black legs. I never got to find out what she would become because of tragedy she never got to grow up.

This is Omega and Atlanta, mother and daughter. Both are English blues but you can see the clear difference between a dark English blue and a bright one.




Below is Night. She is a very dark English blue. Only by looking closely at her head and neck and then at her back do you see the change in shade and see the blue gray sheen.

This is Frost. He is a bright brown English blue. Below him is Rusty my junior ram. He is an enigma. His sire is Abram, a brown English blue. His mother is Omega a black English blue. He should be English blue but there are no teardrops. No graying/dilution of the color on his back. That should be impossible except by mutation.

I have been washing wool like crazy this summer. I mean what else is really hot dry weather good for anyway? I have developed a technique that seems to get me cleaner brighter wool. The first wash and rinse is cold water. This way the scales don't open up and trap some of the dirt that I am trying to get out of the fleece. After that I use a warm wash and rinse (120 degrees) to get more of the dirt and most of the oils out. Then I boil some water and add it to the tap water to bring it up to 140 degrees and then wash and rinse the wool the last time. I usually add vinegar to the last rinse. It increases the softness (non-prickle) of the wool.

Since I wash in plastic tubs I pick an area of the pasture that is needing water and after washing I bail the water out on the thirsty ground. This has helped keep some troubled spots green in this dry weather.

On a more serious note this has been the worst summer for my sheep ever. I lost my whole lamb crop which included some very uniquely colored lambs. The first one was a twin ram lamb who wormed out of the shed and froze to death. The next ones were during the middle of my chemotherapy when your mental processes are affected. If you were still in school you would be riding the short bus. I could not figure out why the lambs were dying in the nursery pen. I had plenty of water out for the ewes. I lost 6 before realizing that the ewes weren't drinking very much of the water and their milk was drying up. I scrubbed the water tub thinking that a bad taste had been throwing them off drinking. They resumed drinking and I didn't loose anymore lambs to dehydration.

Then the coydogs came. By the time it was done I had lost all but 6 sheep and one goat (Pinky who despite being 3 legged must have been intimidating enough with his horns). The other goat Eric the Red is playing stud at another farm to 14 nannies. I was planning to cut back to this size but I really would have rather taken them to auction and made money to buy the winter hay.

Well now that it is September I am going to start construction of Pinky's peg leg. I am going to form a cup out of silicon calking and use a short piece of rattan (solid bamboo, not hollow) for the leg. Rattan is very tough but light compared to wood. It occurred to me that I should dress him up as a pirate for Halloween and take a picture.

One of THOSE days!

I woke up yesterday with my hands swelled and my body aching. Especially the nerve that threads between the jay henge on the left side. When I had an outbreak of shingles during chemotherapy, it started there where I have TMJ damage. So I had taken the last anti-viral pill the day before. But I have been under stress so it is not surprising that it would try for a second round. I had an appointment with the VA that afternoon so I called in a refill that I could pick up while I was there.

So I get home in the evening and no one has fed the sheep and goats. Neither hay or letting them out to graze. So I let them out and they act crazy. The were all over the place, take a few bites and run to another section on the lawn. I would no more get one group out of a trouble area than the other side would go off the other direction. So I was busy moving sheep for nearly 2 hours straight. At last I got them back in .

Pink Floyd the 3 legged goat

My faded red Angora billy, Pink Floyd, aka Ninja Goat, jumped a fence in a thunderstorm and hung his foot. He yanked so hard getting himself out of the fence he dislocated the pastern (what most think is his ankle) so bad that the end of the legbone broke through the skin. I tried to save it but he had damaged the blood vessels so badly that it couldn't re-establish circulation and began to die. I was in a pickle because I had just finished chemotherapy and had not returned to working yet. I was about to go buy a bottle of vodka and amputate the leg myself when some wonderful e-friends said they would help me with the bill and to take him to the vet.

So Pinky went and became the 3 legged goat. His surgery has healed well so far. I was going to try to take out the stitches two days ago and got as far as taking off the vet wrap when he got away from me. It is amazing how fast he can still move with only 3 legs. I caught him again this evening and tied him up thoroughly. I could see that it was mostly good except for a place he had skinned the day he was running around without the wrap. So I got some betadine and gauze and vet wrap and fixed him up despite the fact he was dancing and trying to pull his leg stump out of my hand. I'll give a couple of more days and see if the stitches are ready to come out then.

First Blog

So this is my first blog ever. I raise Finn/Shetland/Dorset crosses. I shear my own sheep with Fisker sewing shears. I wash my own fleeces and process them. I have an Etsy site called DyeInTheDark. I like dyeing the dark wools to get rich heathered colors. I am working on making my hobby profitable.