Posted By jenifleur on March 4, 2009
I’m not a natural farmer. I grew up in a suburb and then lived in cities until three and a half years ago, when we decided in Oliver Wendell style that farm living was the life for us. I’m not that far removed from the rural life, both my parents grew up on farms, but they had removed themselves as far as possible from it by the time I came around. Sometimes I think I’ve really got the hang of it and it’s no big deal. Then we have lambs a full month before we’re prepared for them and I realize nothing could be further from the truth.
One morning a few weeks ago we went up to feed and found two little ram lambs born to two ewes; Camille and Jemima. This was a whoops moment since we had thought that Absinth (our yearling ram) had been too young and had shown no interest in the procreative process and had therefore not separated him until we bought our other ram, Rhett. However, this was a full 20 some odd days too soon for these lambs to have been fathered by Rhett, the ram selected for both ewes, meaning Absinth had been up to some mischief as a 9 month old lamb. To complicate matters, Jemima is Absinth’s mother, making her new lamb the child of his own brother. The real surprises came the next morning when two more lambs turned up in the barn having been licked dry but otherwise unclaimed by any ewe. An investigation of all lady parts ensued (we even checked the chicken for good measure) and the only viable explanation at the time seemed to be that Jemima had given birth to an additional two lambs. Research turned up no examples of this happening ever, so it remained a bit of a mystery to us. There wasn’t much time to dwell on it as we busied ourselves building jugs to try and graft the babies to the mother, who wanted nothing to do with them. Camille was set free with her strapping young son (Barley) and while Jemima was happy to nurse her first lamb (Basil), poor little Bamboo and Burdock were the targets of all the abuse she could muster. I tried every remedy in every book and website I could find to trick her into loving them. I tried vicks vaporub to confuse her sense of smell, I tried pouring power punch on them. I tried covering them in cracked corn. I tried wetting them. I tried rubbing them with the afterbirth. Oh wait, I didn’t try every method because I refused to try the one where you put a fist inside the mother to simulate birth. That one crossed a line for me.
Burdock (solid black), Bamboo (white on face) and Basil (brown and black) in the jug with Jemima
So we tried the routine of locking her up, sitting in the jug with them and allowing the other two lambs to nurse numerous times a day for about five days, at which point the ewe is supposed to be able to detect her milk in their poop and give it up. She didn’t. Instead, she shoved Burdock into the water bucket and he was discovered dying of hypothermia. I took him to the house, soaked him in a hot tub of water, held a hot blow dryer on him and then wrapped him up and held him against me inside my warm winter coat for several hours. He survived and enjoyed a brief stint as a house lamb, but we came to the decision to give up and allow Burdock and Bamboo to become bummer lambs. We bottle fed them until Premier Supply could get the milk bar to us. They happily drink from a bucket with nipples mounted to it now and have gained weight and are thriving, no thanks to their mother.
Just as this was ironing itself out, we went up to the barn one night to do the final feeding before bed to discover that Pie had given birth to a pair of premature little lambs. All of our shetlands have their lambs at dawn, this was unacceptable. The female (Blueberry) seemed to be doing quite well despite being small. The little male was extremely tiny and she wasn’t as concerned about him. We jugged her with them and hoped the lack of our presence would inspire her to get him up and about. By morning she had rejected him so Jared brought him down to the house for colostrum, warmth and love. We discovered then why she had thought he wasn’t worth the time; he was quite premature. His hooves hadn’t finished growing out yet and he was very weak and small. In fact, he was about the same size as the coke bottle we were using to feed him. Poor little Bean is progressing, though, with lots of help from us.
It’s been an around the clock deal, trying to get all the lambs fed and taken care of while trying to get the barn in better shape for lambing. Just proves that if you think you still have a month to do something on a farm you should have done it last month. Jared has been mucking out the stall-there’s a giant mountain of poopy hay (awesome stuff if you have a garden-looks like pure gold to me!) out in the pasture, lime on the floor, new hay in the clean and dry areas, a creep feeding area for the orphans and more jugs. Bean still lives in the house with us, but hopefully soon he can join Bamboo and Burdock, whose favorite pastime is to race the bigger boys and claim ownership atop Mt. Muck.
While doing some research about premature lambs I ran across a piece of information that made everything fall into place and the mystery of Burdock & Bamboo is now solved. It seems that Camille gave birth to both Barley and Basil. They look so similar and are the same size and Camille was positively enormous, I was expecting triplets from her, so this makes sense to me. Jemima was so close to giving birth that she got confused and stole Basil away from Camille. When her own lambs, Burdock and Bamboo (who also are similar in looks and size to each other and so different from the other two) were born the next morning, she rejected them based on her belief that she already had her baby. If we’d caught it in time we might have been able to correct all of it, who knows. Meanwhile we’re up to three bottle lambs and 7 more ewes yet to lamb. This is so atypical of shetlands, all this trouble. I’m sad because we’ve had 5 males out of 6 lambs, which means my beloved Absinth probably needs to retire as a ram. We’ve already castrated the two oldest and the other two are on the schedule for today or tomorrow. Bean can wait until he’s a little bigger.
I passed a miletone as a farmer during day two of the Lamb Grafting Wars, though. I found myself sitting on the floor of the barn. Sitting in the old dirty hay full of poop, no gloves on my hands to protect me from the ick, bits of barn floor stuff going down the back of my jeans and smelling of afterbirth, sheep shit and lanolin. I was exhausted and cold and filthy; I hadn’t eaten and was a bit shaky. When I took stock of the amount of effluvia and filth on me, I thought to myself, “Oh well. It’ll wash off.” It doesn’t sound like an epiphany to you, I’m sure, but for me this was something of a rite of passage to becoming a real farmer. Life changing, I tell you.
Meanwhile I have been sort of neglecting every thing else. Before lambs rained down upon us I set up a second shop on 1000 Markets and I just love it there, but I haven’t had time to get it into the sort of shape I wanted to. The setup is very user friendly and the shops are juried by picture quality, merchandise and other factors. They don’t permit the sale of supplies, only finished products, so you won’t find yarn or roving there, but if you want to sell there it’s free to list and there’s a set fee of 5.5% + $0.50 per sale. It uses Amazon cart, so the main disadvantage is not being able to sell outside the US with it. My shop passed all the qualifiers and was approved within an hour; I was pleased as several people have told me they generally ask people to tweak things to fit within the aesthetic and take around 48 hours to approve you. My shop was featured in the first 24 hours and got 50 views in the first day and a half. Pretty good for a site that’s not actually live yet. (Everything is functional, they’re just still in beta.)
I also joined a brand new social networking site called byhand, which is exclusively for people who hand make things. It’s like Facebook for crafters and artisans. You can list all your shops, all your social networks, create spotlights, etc. I keep telling people on Twitter and Ravelry about it, but so far nobody has replied. I wanted to form a Rubberneckers clubhouse there, but none of those hoars can be bothered to join. If you join, find me (jenifleur) and make contact. I think this will be a neat site when people start to use it.
Artfire has rolled out some new features that I love. For every thing I wish they’d change (the colors and layout especially), I find at least one that excites me. You no longer have to create an account to purchase from the vendors, which I think is a great idea. They also have a new thing called rapid cart where items can be purchased directly from the blog that I’m going to try out right here. I’ve made what I believe is my final prototype of my magnetic chart minder so let’s see if it works. It should show up in the sidebar if so.
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