I had the good news this week from the vet, that both the lumps that we aspirated from #209 were sterile. so NO bad heebeegeebeeies in her that we know of. Marci is coming to get her and her black ewe lamb on Monday and I was a bit stunned at how much weight that lamb has put on in the last few days of me not picking her up. 209 is a great mom. When I pick up her baby, she stands there and baaaaas at me in a very insistent voice, runs around in circles, and stamps her feet over and over at me. She is not thrilled when we pick the baby up.

239 stands there and usually doesn’t even know that I have picked up her baby, and even when the baby cries she won’t take her head out of the feed bin.  The little white ewe lamb from #239 is not growing like a weed, but rather slowly. Her mom, 239, doesn’t seem to be all that great of a mom. She will look for her on occasion and she does feed her but mostly she doesn’t really pay all that much attention to her. Good thing that we are keeping her and don’t intend on breeding her a lot. I would like to breed her to a full white merino ram this next fall, and hope that we get a white ewe lamb from her so that we can retire her from breeding entirely and let her grow fleece the last few years or her life. She has a glorious fleece and produces so much lovely merino that I would be happy with her just growing the fleece and not taking care of babies. But we need to get ONE good ewe lamb from her that is mostly merino, so next year we need to do this hopefully only one more time so that I do not lose her wonderful fleece genetics. The little lamb that she has now is 75% rambulette and I don’t want that breed.

We sold the last 2 rambuleletts on Sunday, along with Ace of Spades the llama and gave away a couple of pregnant mouser cats. We did not buy any new livestock, but I did get a lovely new rooster that was bought purely for his crow and his pretty face.  He is a buff lace Polish Rooster.  Since we gave our last rooster to a friend as he was getting attacked by his hens and later by the llama, I wanted a rooster again.  it is just not a ranch without at least ONE rooster.

We made numerous contacts for future sales as there are folks that want some of our Nubian kids and some of our other cross dairy kids. So for this moment, we have finally lowered our head count down from 42 to 35 with 3 more hopefully going on Monday. Just in time for the dorper explosion and the goat explosion. Boy are they getting big, soon they will pop!  I will keep you updated on pics when they lamb or kid.

Still feeling under the weather and very tired, so haven’t been doing much at all recently other than a lot of baking and experimenting in the kitchen. This has been wonderful on the taste buds but not so wonderful on the scales. hmmmm…. I am getting the hang of this artisan bread making though and it is really fun. I don’t know if we will need to buy bread again. Certainly is not on the grocery list for this week.

I haven’t left the cabin much this week. Over the weekend though, along with the swap, I did finish skirting and boxing up the last of the fiber to go to the mill today. I have two more fleeces to skirt, but those will not be going to the mill. One is a lovely lamb white Lincoln Long wool, and the other is the white lamb fleece from my Teeswater/Costwold cross ewe. I will be putting these up on www.albaranch.etsy.com for sale. If any of you are interested in either of these two fleeces, than let me know before I put it up on the site and I can cut you a deal for purchasing the fleece.

I have been working on redoing our business cards, one for charlie and one for me. I think I have a good idea of what I want, now I need to find someone that can do them here in the USA instead of having my printer do them in the UK. Than we will have an official Ranch card that has all of Charlie’s things on his card and all of my things on mine including my holistic things and fibre both. I don’t know if I can find someone that can do our logos and colours the way that they are, if not, well I will have to pay to have them shipped here from the UK.

I am off to help Charlie with the chores this morning as we have a long list of things to do today.