odd socks and pet lambs

Here we are surfacing from lambing live although we have 22 pet lambs we get uninterrupted sleep!

We now have over 900 lambs and the shed is almost empty (still 3 to go!!)

We have had a good crop of lambs and the only challenge was the wet bank holiday Monday when we had to bring our new lambs and ewes back into the shed to dry off and warm up.

We have some characters in the pet lambs my 2 favourite are Woolly and Balaclava boy:

Woolly wasn't strong enough to follow his mother and sister out to the field so we gave him some TLC and his mother came back to visit each day to check we were looking after him, after a week she decided he was better off with his friends in the shed.

Balaclava boy born April 1st was one of Quads, 2 stayed with their mother and we lost no 4 :-( but he was lucky although his head was bald, we kept him in the porch for a week until he grew too big for his box and started following me around. We took him out to join the others but he got very cold overnight so had to be rescued again.

Lambing Tip 1: what to do with your odd socks?





I cut off the toe end and cut 2 holes for his years and folded the sock around his neck solved the odd sock problem and is keeping him warm until the wool grows :-)

 

10 Green Bottle recycled Greenhouse and Bridgend SMILE project

I was fortunate to be invited to the award ceromony of SMILE in Bridgend recreation centre last month and met Claire George.

Claire is an IT Lecturer at Bridgend College and has received the ‘Most Enterprising Teacher Award 2009' from the education team at Enterprise UK, the campaign to increase entrepreneurial behavior in the UK.
Claire has worked with 5 primary schools which entered into the SMILE (Students Motivate Innovative Learning via Enterprise’) project and has plenty of more ideas for further projects.Claire with her fellow colleagues in the construction academy from Bridgend college are going to build a 10 green bottle recycled greenhouse in a local primary school annually.

Claire approached me "Our Welsh Farm" to come along and help the pupils plant some seeds ready for the greenhouse. I attended the school and with the pupils made some recycled plant pots from newspaper and the children planted salad leaf seeds these they were going to take home.

We then used the bottoms of the 2litre bottles that had been discarded from the build and planted these up we had a talk about the properties of wool and put some raw fleece in the bottom of the seed planters as an experiment we are hoping that by watering daily the moisture will last in the pot by absorption in the fleece to save the caretaker watering over the weekends we will let you know the outcomes......

Below are the photos we took and along with the seeds and weeds club hoping to have a project with pumpkins in the autumn.

We are very grateful to FACE http://www.face.org.uk/ and the NFU for the seeds

Shearing time 2010

It's that time of year again.

Am working on putting a kit together to take to schools to make felt.

We have just sheared our Jacob ewe and now know why they are kept for wool the fleece is 4 kg twice as heavy as our normal BFL (Blue Faced Leicester) ewes.

I bet she is feeling cooler now!

We have plenty of fleeces for sale please contact us if you wish to buy.

Dawn the kid and our pet lamb now named FluffyBelle (by Little Fingers after school club in Evanstown) have been around and about visiting local playgroups and they were very well behaved.

Dawn took a likig to the kid in the mirror at Tumble tots and had a good rummage through the Fancy dress section!!

Sheep Fleece what can we do with it?

A secondary school has explored natural textiles. A fleece from our sheep was attached to the teachers wooden sheep and the all clipped and processed it into different products It was spun , weaved and felted.
The website was used as a resource if you want to contact us to sign up for this resource please contact us

info@ourwelshfarm .co.uk

Prince Charles & The future of Wool

An initiative was launched by Prince Charles to enhance the qualities of wool.

A spokesman from Clarence House said: ‘The Prince was getting very concerned about the prices that farmers were getting for their fleeces and decided that something had to be done to help them.

R Whitefoot came to film our ewe lambs that have just been sheared to report on "the Future of Welsh Wool" if you wish to read more Welsh Wool a bleak future?

Wool can be used for felting, spinninng and knitting, insulation,weaving for clothes and carpet support a natural product buy wool!

We are just starting to lamb and our first set of twins appeared on Valentine's Day so keep an eye on our webcam.

Bonjour!

We had our 3rd visit from an agricultural college in France they must enjoy it here. Most of this years students were dairy farmers so they were curious about sheep farming. Husband promised to get County up and running this year as not a lot happened since they saw it last.
The college is Issat de Chatelet and we hope to visit them and Jean Claude one day.

They also were off to visit a large dairy Farm in the Vale of Glamorgan in the evening. Our welsh weather didn't let us down it was a damp and miserable Feb day!!

Earlier in the day we had a visit from Rebecca Whitefoot, studying journalism in UWIC she has been given agriculture and made a film about the future of Welsh Wool in response of Prince Charles's new campaign.