Our Sheep
When we moved up to Orkney we brought our little flock of 7 breeding ewes with us. Of those girls we still have ...
Caitlin, our beautiful brown unregistered pedigree Balwen (rare breed)
Domino, her white Balwen (3;1) cross Border Leicester (BL) daughter
Dot (Dominos daughter) a Balwen cross BL
and
Beauty a much larger, longer fleeced home bred ewe, Balwen (1;3) cross BL (Jasmines pet sheep who has had triplets the last 2 years)
We have bred some beautiful lambs and kept different ones for different attributes, we also bought in a couple of pure bred rams, and a starter flock of Jacob ewes. So our other sheep are all characters and are...
Molly a large home bred Border Leicester x Cheviot ewe (Bethany's pet sheep out of Bethany's original BL ewe Maisie- who was from the Winningtons)
Emily
Ellen Jean
Margaret
Our BL ram, Ceasar, is pure bred and was bought in locally. He is a lovely animal, sires lovely lambs, but sadly he struggles with scouring if we get salt spray on our cliff top paddocks. Being a fast growing commercial breed his feet need much more attention than the hardier Jacobs or Balwen and Balwen x sheep we keep. However, having a pure bred ram ensures we have larger white lambs to bring into the white fleeced flock or to send to the mart for meat.
We started a pure bred Jacob micro flock. This picture is some of our 2015 Jacob lambs.
Wildy
Sparky
Chocolate,
V
Razor
Trip
+2
Samson is our impressive pure bred Jacob ram. Also bought locally he has 4 lovely horns (though that is not what the shearer says about horned sheep!). It is a little daft keeping 2 rams for around 20 ewes.. but our two micro flocks work well for our small holding.
All are eartagged.. and at shearing I roll each clip separately and label it.. so I can trace any of our fleece, yarn or knitted products back to the sheep or lamb it came from.
