Sorry we're a little behind on the blog, trying to keep this up to date whilst having some rather naughty escapee sheep and doing all of our other day to day jobs, this fell by the wayside.
It's been a busy couple of weeks for us. We did our first trade stand for the handmade side of the business at The Royal Bath and West Show. We had some beautiful weather and met some really lovely customers. Got some great feedback and now have some other ideas on what to bring to the public and what we can improve on!
It even got us a space at Open Farm Sunday with the lovely folks at The Slow Farming Company. (Check out our insta stories for more information on this and where it's being held) so Nick hopes to see you there, as Racheal will sadly be away working in London. He will be taking a handful of sheep, our handmade items (so you can all see for yourself the things that we make and feel the soft lovely textures of our products) and he will be talking all things sheep, wool and regen.
We did a little bit of experimenting with the commercial side of our flock before lambing and bought some Exlana ewes and a ram. These are naturally shedding sheep, which would save Nick time sheering, but also we have had a lot of issues with fly strike the past couple years with there being such intense heatwaves.
Fly strike is where bluebottle flies lay eggs within the fleece of the sheep, where the sheep get hot and sweaty, it's a great place for these eggs to then hatch and the maggots start eating away at the flesh of the sheep. When they have such large woolly jumpers on, it can be hard to spot and can lead to death if they go entirely through the skin to their internal organs. Not nice! So we felt shedding sheep could help with this issue and if all goes well, these will become the majority of the flock.
Sadly they will be going to market tomorrow as we have had such an issue with keeping them in behind electric fence. We rent a lot of our ground and none of it is stock fenced. Everything we do is behind electric and we can't be constantly upsetting our landlords and neighbours with wayward sheep here, there and everywhere. They're even teaching our older well behaved sheep to get out!
And to top off weeks of daily phone calls (2 or 3 times a day) that they're out and in peoples gardens, in the local campsite and down the road. When catching them up to bring them in to the shed to sort for market, Nell has injured her feet.
She loves her work, but the ground is so hard from the lack of rain and she runs so fast in comparison to the other dogs, she's clearly turned at the speed of light on a super dry part of the ground and ripped holes in the pads of both her front paws.
It was only a tiny tiny limp that made me think she had something stuck in her toes that made me look, and the tiny limp doesn't do the damage justice. Nell really takes the phrase "pain is all in the mind and I have no mind for it" to the extreme. She's a tough little cookie. She won't stop bouncing around and off her box in the kennel, so she's had a bath, and is currently snoozing on the sofa and she will be inside for a while until she's recovered.
We need her (and all of the others) in tip top shape. We couldn't do any of what we do with the sheep without the dogs
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