I can't wait until Friday....

I'm travelling in South Carolina, Tennessee and North Carolina this week. I hate being away from the farm, the dogs, the sheep, the work outside and of course my husband John. I travel about 10 days a month leaving John to attend to all of the chores, lambs, dogs, and expecting him to have time to feed himself.

This week is special as I fly into Buffalo on Friday and am picking up the newest addition to our doggy household. I arrive at 6:18 from Charlotte and she arrives at 6:32 from Spokane via Minneapolis. I'll make the introductions of all my other dogs and my husband when I get home and have access to all the pictures.

The newest addition is a border collie pup 15 weeks old currently named Zoey (that'll probably change). She's fluffy and tri colored....and i don't generally do fluffy dogs. Zoe is the one on the far left. Color doesn't matter really too much. I love the look of a rough coated dog...just don't love grooming them. Burrs and misc farm products have a way of working their way into the coat. Her lineage is out of Alta-Pete dogs and Diane Pagel's Delta Bluez dogs. My husband has always loved Pleat (great grandsire) (see http://www.altapletestockdogs.com/) and Scott Glen had John almost ready to offer a retirement home for Pleat but he got to stay at home with Scott & Jenny. My friend Nathalie Labelle has the red tri second from the right

We were not in the market for another puppy. But as many of us do, we will always make room for one more (what's 15 dogs when you have 14 now....). Now the fact that she has some very coated dogs in her background is a slight problem for me. We have one rough coat now, my husband's dog Dixie, and I am a self proclaimed smooth coated dog person....However I've always said I would take any dog if it worked well. I'm hoping she has all of the drive and push that we expect from her.

I will do my best to keep the blog up to date with the goings on of the new puppy and training of the older ones. Keep tuned!

By the way, the winter lambs keep coming. My husband texted me today and we had 3 more lambs today, one last night. I wish I had a picture of the one last night. It was a yearling ewe who had a very small single. Apparently John carried the lamb under one arm and the ewe under the other back to the barn. For those that don't know yearling ewes can be a bit crazy...not wanting anything to do with this crazy wet lamb that just caused them pain. I have many notes in my lambing book...crazy ewe lamb, had to tackle. I'll take some pictures this weekend.

Cold winters..it makes training hard

So as I sit here with my toque on in my office, the outside weather is -18C and I am still on lamb watch. We are still officially in breeding season for another week and than we will be able to take out the rams and put the sheep all in one spot.



For now we have the hair sheep in the front yard, the dorsets in the training arena, the main wool flock behind the driveshed and in the open field, and lambs/imminent lambers behind the barn..Oh yeah, and the ones that have lambed are in the barn.



This of course is wonderful for my youngest border collie Spec (an accident out of my bitch Pam and my husbands' dog Preacher). She is laying by my desk looking particularly unamused at another cold day where I won't be training her on sheep. She wants to be in Alberta training with Scott Glen and her Aunt Stella (Preacher's sister). I started Spec late this summer at around 11 months of age. She has beautiful balance (like her mom) and is thoughtful like Preacher. She is really a lot of fun to train and I hope to take some pictures of her in the upcoming months so you can moniter her progress.

Lambs in the winter

We keep saying that we do spring lambing on pasture. Our rams are put with the ewes in December for april/may lambing...so why is it that I just picked up two lambs from the Dorset breeding group.

when we were worming the sheep in late September we realized that we had tagged 2 of the ram lambs in the wrong ear. We tag all of our females in the left ear and all of the males in the right ear so sorting is easy...We were foiled by two ram lambs; It must have been late at night when we tagged those two. Needless to say we are winter lambing again; I expect (by the number of ewes with marked backsides) that the two promiscuous buggers got about 1/2 the flock (close to 100 ewes)

Well at least we will have some sheep to work in the spring! I will be much better about removing ram lambs this year...I really will!