Ancient Prophecies

Lambing Season Ends With Heartache and Hope on Cold Antler Farm

Every season my priorities change. They have to. There’s music to everything on this farm and the song is very old. My life revolves around daylight and temperature. It’s scheduled around breeding and planting seasons. around harvest dates and migration patterns, around hay and firewood storage. Because I live like a 19th-century tenant farmer, work like a 21st-century online feminist, and write like an introverted lesbian witch. Are you not entertained?

All this to say my life is simple, at least in concept. Nature is in charge and I like that. There is peace is accepting a lack of control, and in understanding how my most-pressing duties change depending on the month. In June the first thing I do is weeding. In September it’s stacking firewood. And the the first thing I do during morning chores in March is check for lambs.

I only have a few ewes, but this year could change everything. If healthy ewe lambs are born (at least one per mama) I will try to keep them to double my breeding stock. I say “try” because I don’t want to promise anything. (Sales are really hard to make and getting harder, so if I can’t afford to buy in a few ram lambs to cover this year’s lamb customers, these gals are not seeing Christmas. I’m just saying don’t get too attached until this substack gets some legs. )

Alternatively, if rams are born I can use them to cover this year’s meat customers and not have to spend any money on the flock outside hay, grain, vet, and shearing/butchering costs (maintenance). And if I still want to add breeding ewes to the flock, I can see if there’s enough sales to buy a few in before fall.

So, ewes or rams, if it’s born alive it’s a bonus to this farm. New livestock that I don’t have to pay for out of pocket can only be a positive acquisition. The farm either grows in numbers or lamb chops…

Which is why what happened last week was so hard.

In the last audio post I explained what happened during Gwynne’s lambing. I try to add bonus farm, pop culture, or personal news to the end of those audio posts because it feels like I’m talking to friends.

I also share farm news (in most audio posts, not all) because while my writing that week may not even have anything to do with homesteading, I want there to be a constant flow of backyard news to paying subscribers who have been following me since I was just out of college and still dreaming of farming full time. Which is why anyone who has been kind enough to hire me already knows about the stillborn rams. But I wanted to write about it in a little more detail.

I don’t remember exactly what I said, as I was pretty devastated while recording, but if you listened you heard about the loss of the newborns out of my black sheep Gwynne, here’s the whole story. I promise it has a happy ending:

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I was out repairing horse fencing when I heard Gwynne cry out from the lamb shed. I dropped everything to run over and found her pacing in the shed alone, clearly in labor, the first red bubble of fluid protruding from her rear.

I ran to get towels, water, electrolytes, iodine, lamb paste, everything you need. I was back in the shed within minutes, and soon as I saw those first white hoofs come out and the snout I felt a rush of excitement I hadn’t felt in years.