Animal Babies

I drove to Mr. Baker's farm and collected our ram this week. We have him on loan, the same ram we had last year.

I was pleased with him. He got on with the job, shortening our lambing time considerably from the previous year. The quality of his progeny seems pretty good too, though one sheep judging seminar doesn't make me an expert on lambs. There are no obvious weaknesses or defects, and they're, you know, lambs. So that's good.

Did I mention that I can borrow the ram for a tenner? Like a good farmer, I'm cheap considering the input costs to overall profit.

I dropped the back of the trailer, so he could see the ewes. He casually walked out and sauntered over to them -

The ewes seem pleased with my choice -

After going to the trouble of wrestling the raddle harness on him, I forgot to change the crayon. No problem. The first cycle will be no colour butts, and I'll put a new crayon in for the second cycle, so late lambing ewes will have coloured butts. In this case my un-preparedness saved me the cost of a crayon. Well, heck, I'm just racking up the savings! 

While Ram was getting down to business in the field, our partridge eggs were delivered - 10,000 of them from France. I gave Mike a hand to inspect and tray each egg. It's a pleasant task, stood in the incubator house with all the machines humming around you. It can be done one-handed while you drink a cup of tea. Jobs which you can do concurrent with drinking tea are usually the best jobs.

Because they come from abroad, each egg is stamped and when the stamps smudge, they look like smiley faces.

That makes me cheery.

Only a scant number of those eggs is for us. We custom hatch for other clients so the bumblebee-sized chicks will hatch and be put into special boxes and sent away again to other counties. These birds are well travelled even before they can fly.

Our first pheasant hatch is Tuesday, only a couple of thousand eggs, also sold to a client. At home, I'm still waiting on Grumpy and L845 to lamb. It should be any time now. I check them at night when I get up to check on Podge and the pups.

Oh, the pups. Or tiny timewasters, as they should be called. Mum and litter are doing fine. After making a batch of scones, I had the kitchen scales out, so I figured why not check and make sure that the puppies are putting on weight-

So far so good. And a silicon loaf liner makes a perfect non-slip puppy holder.