Breeding Season Begins

So it's that time of year again...Breeding Season.

After giving much thought to the ram lambs, we've decided our lives will be easier with them all in the freezer. This means we will have one breeding group, and Xavier (pictured below) will sire the whole crop of lambs.
Of our six breedable ewes, five decided to join him on Sunday when we mixed things up. Wynona, our crazy ewe, decided she didn't want to be part of the fun this year, and we were just as happy to have her not join. She tends to make the other ewes spook and makes life much more difficult when moving animals around.

The five ewes that are in with Xavier are two who we used last year and three first-timers. Below is Poa who gave us two ram lambs - yay for grass-fed lamb!

And Clover, who gave us this nicely fleeced ram. Yay for more lamb!

And Mocha, Crystal, and Kira (back to front), non of whom have lambed. Mocha and Kira were '08 lambs and Crystal was an '09 lamb. I'm hoping to get some HST lambs from the Crystal-Xavier cross.

Hopefully we'll get a mix of lamb colorings and markings in late March. It's always nice to have something to look forward to in March!

AND...time for the mystery game. Can you guess what this is?

It's a HUGE mushroom! This has been growing under our Maple tree for the last few weeks. Gus isn't quite sure what to make of it.

The chickens are still laying and enjoying scratching for bugs.

And I'm very excited that in a week we'll have bacon! These are two of the three pig-pigs we've been raising for the freezer. Hopefully they'll fit in the freezer!

On Sept. 12 we put the meat birds in the freezer - all 60 of them! They weighed in at an average of...11 lbs for the roosters and 7.5 lbs for the hens! I guess we'll have enough chicken for the year. We calculated a cost of $0.88 per pound if we excluded bedding. Next year we'll have to find a way to exclude bedding! With all this chicken our 22 cubic foot freezer is almost full!