Olympia Update

We've been trying to get Olympia assimilated into being a sheep. Look how big she has gotten!

She's still getting milk (similar to infant formula) from the bottle but it's almost time to withdraw that. She also eats grain and hay. Every morning, after sleeping with her doggie pals Phoebe and Ness, we move her out into the field to be with the newly arrived lambs. She isn't happy but she doesn't have much of a choice. Olympia spends her day picking at grass, longingly looking at us every time we go in and out of the house or drive up in the car.

In the evenings, we let her out of the fenced in field and she wanders around with us. It's a curious site here - 100 lambs in a fenced pasture and the humans, dogs and one little lamb outside the fence. Pretty soon, she'll be sleeping in the field with the rest of the sheep.

Last winter, we fenced in the pasture right outside our house using 4 foot woven wire. In the past, we have used the electronet fencing pretty exclusively to control the sheep. It did an okay job but the lambs had to be moved everyday and they often would escape, breaking through the fence, or finding a way out of the marginal fencing that came with our farm when we bought it. We often lost lambs to coyotes. That number was 36 lambs last year. We're hoping that that lamb loss number shrinks and this new fence will help us save lambs that we can then sell to our customers at the Farmer's Markets coming up this summer and fall. We'd rather feed neighbors who enjoy our local, healthy farm raised lamb than the coyotes.