We Bought a Farm: When you accidentally lamb in January

 "A man's heart plans his way, But the Lord directs his steps." Proverbs 16:9

Our farm has a plan. (I'm a planner? Would you expect any less?) The plan is that we put our big daddy ram in with the ladies in November and the sheep have their babies when it is warm -- in April or May. (While other farmers choose to lamb earlier in the year, we have made the choice to lamb in the spring.)

However, when will I learn? On a farm, plan A is rarely how things go down.

This last season, when we had our 12 baby boys born, we decided to castrate them. This was a new thing for us. We did it so that the boys could stay with their Mamas longer and so that we didn't have to run a separate paddock for them. 

A young boy sheep (ram) can technically his mother and sisters and aunts at four months old. Thus, unless they are castrated, they must be separated right around that time.

So we castrated our boys and went on about our merry way. Back in November, Anni discovered that one of our little rams had had a failed castration. So she pulled him out. However, in December, we discovered that there was another male in with them that we hadn't realized.

(Lesson learned: after you castrate a ram, you need to make sure that it actually works.)

Yesterday, Jacob and I went out to check on the sheep together. We were deciding whether to move them to a new pasture or not. As we debated and discussed, Jacob spotted Patience, one of our brown sheep, nearly completely camouflaged in the grass and quite separated from the rest of the herd. By the time he got a video, she had rejoined her group, but this is what he saw: 

Obviously, that little boy (that was actually quite a good-looking ram) had gotten very busy in there with the ladies. Because not only did we find Patience with two little boys, but this morning, Jacob went out and discovered this:

That's right. Dear ol' Mercy decided to have two little boy twins as well. And then, Jacob turned to spot our Snowball (and Fennel behind her) quite a bit pregnant:

It's funny. When you aren't looking for something, you don't see it. We kept looking at our sheep thinking: "They look really big already," but since we weren't looking for pregnancy, it never crossed our minds. We kept thinking: "Man we haven't seen Captain -- our big daddy Ram -- doing the deed." Well that's because he probably wasn't!

So now we are lambing in January and February. In fact, Patience's boys were born on the very coldest day we will probably have all year super healthy and great!

Bring on Plan B,