We had our first lamb yesterday. We knew the accidentally pregnant ewes were near term, but weren’t quite sure. Now we know just how close. Mother and baby are doing well but they are outside and it isn’t practical to bring them in without causing additional stress so it looks like we might be lambing outside for this batch.

These are pictures from last year, most of the people shown cuddling lambs found out why farmworkers wear overalls…

That’s what happens when you buy a batch of ewes at market that have been served by a tup that escaped and passed on his genetic material two or three months early. While it’s a good thing, in evolutionary terms, for the tup at least, it’s not necessarily good for anyone else. And no, I’m not sure why we bought them, unless it’s a cunning plan to make lambing even more hard work than usual.

There are all sorts of lambing programmes when you start to look into it but “random lambing” doesn’t seem to be one of them!

You have to remember two things in analysing this, two things that could form the basis of a set of farming laws.

One, when something is going cheap at the local market there is usually a good reason for this and you should think hard before sticking your hand up. Good things seldom go cheap. Apart from chickens, but that’s a very old joke.

Two, a man is generally a farmer not because he is distinguished by intelligence, but because he is the eldest son of a man with a farm. My grandmother, who was the eldest daughter of a man with a farm, had strong views on the process. Her younger brother, on the other hand, had the farm.