October Update

It has been awhile since the last post, but lots of exciting things have been happening.

On August 16 we filled the trailer up with purebred and commercial stock for the Priddis & Millarville Fair. It was a nice day for the fair and once again there was a good turnout for both competitors and spectators. It was great to get to visit with all of our friends there and talk sheep. We competed with our purebred Hampshire ewes and one ram lamb and were very successful, taking home the award for the Champion Purebred Ewe with our mature ewe Prairie Winds 17Z.

Champion Purebred Ewe: Prairie Winds 17Z

We also participated in the grade ewe, market lamb and coloured sheep classes. 

The grade ewe lamb class.

The coloured sheep class.

Thank-you to the judge and all the volunteers who worked hard to make the sheep show and the fair a success this year!

We are happy to report that the alpacas have settled in nicely and are doing a good job keeping the ewes safe while out on pasture. They are quite interested in what is going on when we bring their sheep in to work with them (shearing, vaccinating). The one bad habit that we have noticed is that they like to stand in the water trough, especially on hot days, since it is low enough that they can step into it. This means we have to dump and clean it out more often than we used to. 

We also purchased a new Hampshire ram lamb from Clint Wiens in September. We gave him 10 ewes to breed this year and are excited to get some new quality genetics into the flock. The rest of the ewes are also out with rams. The other sire we will be using on on Purebred ewes is Prairie Winds 6Y and for our commercial ewes we are using 2 black Suffolk x rams. Lambing will start earlier this year for us compared to last year as we are planning to take lambs to the 2015 All Canada Classic in Winnipeg. We are working on getting the barn cleaned out and putting up some new fences for when we move the ewes back home.

 

Hope everyone had a good summer and good luck going into lambing season!

July Update

It's been a long time since the last blog post, so here is a little update and some pictures.

Lambing started and ended with purebred Hampshire ewes this year. Our first lamb was born February 9 and our last lamb was born May 15 (next year we are hoping lambing season won't stretch out this far). The sires we used this year were Bell Hank 21Z, Prairie Winds 6Y and our black Suffolk cross ram. The majority of our ewes chose to lamb in March when we got some extremely cold weather here in Alberta and this didn't make lambing easy. Even though the weather made it a tough year we are very happy with how this year's lamb crop turned out.

We had to wait longer than usual before moving the ewes out onto pasture because of the late winter. We sold our first batch of 25 lambs and a few cull ewes on June 3. They made two pretty nice pens of feeder lambs averaging 79 and 89 lbs. per animal.

 About a week ago we made a new acquisition of two alpacas to be used as guardian animals for the flock when they are out on summer pasture as we had a couple of lambs go missing. They are currently in a 'trial phase' with 20 ewes to see how they will work out.

We are looking forward to participating in the Priddis and Millarville Fair again this year coming up in August and are also hoping to head back out to Regina this year to show at Agribition in November (weather permitting of course).

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