Mud, blood and other farming things!

My blog has been a bit quiet on the farming side lately–only because I’ve been so busy in the sheep yards.

The approaching spring is a really busy time, particularly for sheep graziers. It means flies. We’ve been running all our sheep through the jetting race, trying to head off any problems. We’ve been crutching so they won’t get fly-struck, and we’re also shearing the ewes. We shear now, and again in January.

The rain we’ve had recently, although welcome, has made for interesting times in the yards! Being muddy in all areas and downright sloppy in some, has meant we’ve been wading around in rubber boots. My jeans have had to soak overnight before I dare put them in the washing machine. Last week I came out of the yards and had mud-soaked hair, face and clothes. I can’t begin to tell you what I looked like.

(See the line where my rubber boots come up to?)

Poor Hayden was running through the yards at one point and tripped and fell flat into the mud! (That was really funny, but we couldn’t let on to him we thought that).

All next week we’ll be shearing so the yards will get another workout.

This afternoon will be fun though, as we’re weighing up our second lot of sucker lambs. With so much green grass, they grow like mushrooms and we always love watching them pig-root and buck and play when they’re feeling so good.

Yesterday we bled our stud rams for brucellosis. It’s standard stud practice to make sure the rams we’ll be selling don’t have any nasties in their blood that could stop them from siring lambs. An afternoon with our vet Dave is always good fun — even if we’re wrestling 150kg rams to take their blood!