I just came in from feeding a lamb in the paddock. It’s 11pm and the sky was still bright enough for me to be able to walk about without a light. A snipe was drumming overhead either looking for a mate or establishing its territory.
The lamb went into feed from its mother who had not been letting it feed after a difficult birth, but she is showing signs of relenting- tonight I only had to stand a few feet away for her to stand still. The lamb is the biggest born this year; and certainly demands a lot of food, but, once allowed to, it sucked so vigorously that when he finally emerged from the udder his face was flecked with milk drops.
It’s been a good lambing year on the whole, and the weather has been mostly dry although cold. Our lambs can cope well with dry cold as they are on their feet minutes after birth and once licked dry with their mother’s warm breath, they are soon running about. Even when the weather turned into showers of hailstones and sleet, the lambs were just tucked behind tall grass clumps known as tussocks, and were as warm as toast.
We have been having the same bitter northerly winds that have swept across most of the UK in recent weeks and when I come back from a lambing round I am cold and always keen to get in and sit by our warm stove fuelled by peat cut on the hill. In my spare moments, I am designing a new shawl pattern for our yarn at present working out the different stitches I want to use as I go and combining our two shades of grey with some lovely purple dip-dyed yarn. The colours are blending well together and I am beginning to see the finished shawl emerge. I am very excited about getting this product finished and sharing it the result with you.
I hope that it will be a lot warmer when I write the next blog post, but meanwhile, enjoy sharing hugs with your loved ones and being able to see friends indoors.
Teresa