Lambing Season Has Begun!

The First Lamb Born in YEARS at CAF Has Arrived!

Nothing Smells Like A Newborn Lamb.

It’s that time of year! Get your towels, tail bands, and CD/T shots because there are babies on the way! Lambing season has begun! And as a woman who came into farming with fantasies of walking out to her pasture with a border collie at her side, shepherding her own flock on a hill - it feels less like a chore and more like what Homecoming was supposed to feel like in high school. A time to return to a sense of community and belonging…

…and I belong with the idiots checking icy hillsides for lambs at 3AM.

The first lamb dropped on Imbolc morning, which as a a practicing Pagan felt like such a good omen. Imbolc is an old agricultural holiday usually celebrated February 2nd, directly between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox on The Wheel of the Year. The old Gaelic holiday’s name derives from the word “oimelc” which translates to ewe’s milk, meaning the beginning of the traditional livestock birthing season. Sheep farmers all over the northern hemisphere are either preparing for lambing or smack dab in the middle of it.

Imbolc is a halfway mark, an exhale of relief, a time to either start looking forward to the promise of spring or the serious reminder to keep your scarf wrapped tight against the last throes of winter. It’s why we still have silly modern traditions like a woodchuck looking for its shadow in my home state, because it lets us whimsically gamble with the thought of more or less winter doldrums, something people have been emotionally toying with for thousands of years.

Well, hope arrived on Imbolc Morning in the form of a healthy black lamb named Connie. So here’s to more light!

She was named Connie by a friend over text. I sent a happy little video of the lamb playing by the wood stove and I was told “…she looks like a Connie to me” and I am not one to argue with fate, so welcome darling little Connie to the farm!

The Plague Ewes (the three sheep I bought in the 2020 Pandemic Lockdown) are all hopefully pregnant thanks to the ram lambs I bought in last spring. Those boys did right by the farm, because for the first time in years, lambs are dropping at Cold Antler! And I get my Homecoming. Maybe I’ll set up a boombox on the hill and play Boyz II Men and sway with Friday.