Love Is In The Air

Don't these two kissing sheep make a cute couple?  The ram (on the left) is "the wool ram" at Final Frontier Farm.  His name is Rocket and he's from Nistock Farms.  He came in with Hershey who was supposed to be "the colored wool ram", but Hershey took one look at our farm that summer and decided he'd just stay put.  I'm not sure who the ewe is, but that's why they were in the pen.  

"You're missing out, Hershey!  Look at all  my girlfriends!"

I know who this is.  It's Olive, one of my favorite ewes.  She's of the Keebler vintage, so has a fair amount of Cotswold and a little Wesleydale mixed in.  We know what to expect with her babies (long pretty curls :-) but we don't necessarily know what to expect from other breed crosses - the more Texel-y ewes, the ones with some Suffolk mixed in, Polypay, Dorset...  This year we are going to do a better job tracking what each cross produces.  

A few weeks ago Kathy and I picked out 31 ewes to put in Rocket's breeding group.  One afternoon last week we penned them all up and Miss B made notes about their breeding, fleece type, temperament...  I then took a quick picture of each sheep's number and a fleece shot.  

Curly, long, lustrous fleeces

Short, but finer crimped fleeces

Lofty fuzzy fleeces*

This is going to be a fun project.  Something to work on this winter while we wait for the start of Lamb Camp next spring :-).

*These are my favorite fleeces.  The lofty, fuzzy fleeces and some medium curly fleeces are what we picked out for the Lamb Camp yarn last spring.  I'm really excited to see what we get with our other crosses though.  If we could, say, add some length to the short fleeces and get crimp somewhere between the fine and loopy curls that would be really pretty, eh?

 We'll keep you posted!