After having a couple of the cutest Black Lambs born this year, I decided that we would at least for 2018 get a Black Hair Sheep Ram for the breeding season.. So we will be breeding with Onyx this year, he is a young ram and I will not have a clean up ram so it could be interesting.
I am breeding late this year, I am keeping the females without a ram till Mid-Oct so we should be able to push our lambing season further into the spring then we normally do but we are still breeding our Milking Goat Juno for the earlier kidding and milking time.
All the lambs are reserved as is Yearling ewe’s.. They will head to the butcher right around the second week of Oct, so I will only have them for another six weeks.
So we will head into fall with a flock that is a third of the size of normal for us.. We will have our old girls 9 coming ten years old already Bubble and Mocha, our young yearling ewe Babble, our lovely two year old female Maude and then we have our prime girls between three and five, Spot, Tandy, Tawny and Tully..
I have not had this small of a flock for about ten years on the farm but I think it will be a very good thing for the coming years plans. It means that we are going to be able to move the expecting girls to the croft(little barn) for the winter instead of needing the big barn for them. The big barn will be for the horse’s and for Jack and Crème the male goats and for Onyx the Ram.
We are not getting a new calf to start raising till next spring, we will be butchering our pig in the next month and so its going to be a very quiet year in the big barn and a very busy winter in the croft 🙂
Just another Day on the Farm 
J & D > Oh but you’re tupping is so early compared to ours! We put ours to the ram in December (yes, really!) because then the ewes will start feeding their lambs when the grass really gets growing strongly. Our soils are either cold wet peat (very slow to warm up), or thin soil over the hardest rocks imaginable (even slower to warm up). What we like about your post – and this so often true on your blog- is you don’t just tell us what you’re doing or going to do, you tell us why – the thinking behind it. And it’s clear you don’t just do things the way everyone does – you have the FarmGal way of doing things, which it seems to us is pretty darn well thought-through.
wow, that’s so late, my ewes will have stopped their cycle normally by dec, most breeding if allowed naturally is sept, oct with the rare nov breeding, I almost always have someone that caught in aug. seven years we have had new year babies. I have one ewe that looks like she breed out of season an is carrying now and a maybe a second one or she is just a chunk lol
amazing on your soils, so interesting to me.. yes, I am always trying to figure things out.. so I know you will find it interesting, at the current winters hay prices, the base line cost per adult ewe or goat will be 17 per month, that includes a what they need to eat a hay, wastage that Is normal and I added in another 10 percent waste due to poorly timed haying due to the year (we have more hard stemming etc)