Friday, April 6, 2012

Soggy Sheep and Shearing Day

It rained all night. I lay awake all night stewing over the fact that our shearers were to arrive at noon. Not sleeping did not make my sheep dry this morning. As expected they were soaking wet. After calling the sheep up to check, I sent them back out in the pasture hoping the wind and soon to appear sunshine would dry them. Thankfully our shearers agreed to be on call.
In the meantime I baked and delivered bread and arrived home to open the gates for our intern who was to arrive soon after. With her help we fed all the dairy kids. Next on the list was cleaning the barn hall in case the shearers were able to get here. Our final barn chore was to comb the cashmeres, trim hooves and worm. By this time the sheep were dry and I called the shearers. They would arrive around three.
That finished, we had a quick bite of lunch and started on the garden. She weeded the strawberries while I picked our cheese coop order. Once back we worked in the garden until the shearers arrived. She headed home and I headed to the barn.
Unfortunately shearing was not as smooth as I had hope and one of our girls got a pretty nasty gash. She was being a very hard to handle and the shearer could not get his blades turned off. It scared me half to death and I really was afraid she might bleed to death! We finally got the bleeding stopped after about 30 minutes.  They finished up with the others and we finished her standing up. We cleaned the wound, packed it with antibiotic ointment and started her on penicillin. Four hours later we were done. We cleaned up and evening chores were finished. By this time it was almost dark. We were mentally and physically exhausted and called it a day!

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