Shearing Day

Overall shearing went well, we started a bit late due to Paul having a few difficulties with generator before he came out, but once we got the truck backed into the shed, and a board down for shearing on, we got into it. The pens worked really well, we had two large holding pens which opened into a small middle catching pen, which in turn was gated into the shearing area. First we did the 4 ewes, with all the fleece off we were able to confirm that the large ewe is pregnant, and her teats have even developed since last week, in addition the other ewes also looked pregnant. Unfortunatly DevilSpawn might be in lamb aswell. That was somothing we didn't want 'cause she is so small. Oh well, might have to be midwife again this year!

After the ewes we got the 5 rams out of the way, in total the 3 ewes (excluding DevilSpawn),and the 5 rams cut 25Kg, I'll take that to the woolpackers next week to sell (we were thinking about using it ourselves, but we've got so much spare fleece (DevilSpawn, goats, alpaca, last year's sheep, angora rabbit!) we didn't really need anymore.

Then we got started on the goats, we changed to a "SnowComb" so as to leave a bit more fleece on to protect from the cold (goats don't have a layer of fat like sheep), but the snow comb has wider teeth and what with the wriggling, some very nasty cuts were made on Queeny unfortunatly. Thankfully Paul knew why he was making so many cuts, and changed back to the ordinary comb, and Bully got off lighter, and Mikey only had a few small cuts. It just means that each evening we're now locking the goats in the Alpaca house (which the Alpaca's don't use) so as they don't get too cold.

Then we had a brief break whilst I moved the goats down to the paddock, moved the rams into the goat's holding pen, and brought Jenny's (our neighbour) 4 rams from the yards into the pen. Then Paul and Steph got started on them whilst I went and collected "Annie". Annie is a sheep that is HUGE, it is seriously overweight, and I had great difficulty in getting it into the trailer to bring over. Took Paul and I to get it to the shearing board where he somehow managed to flip her. Once she was done, Steph took Annie back across, and Paul and I started packing up.

In all shearing took 4 hours, admitted there was a fair bit of chatting, and standing around, but in all good clean fun! (well not really clean!).

Oh, almost forgot, in the middle of all this, the sprayer came along, and quickly killed of all paddock, on Tuesday we'll let the rams back in 'cause the grass will start to become sweeter until it dies.