Welcome to our farm….and our adventure! Last February we brought home twenty yearling Dorper/Katahdin ewes and began our adventure raising sheep on our farm in South Carolina. Our goal is to breed a healthy and happy flock of sheep and to stock our deep chest freezers with prime free range lamb to sell to discerning customers who think it’s important to be able to meet the farmers who provide their food, and find out first hand how the livestock is raised. These are our first little girls. Now they are grown mothers and are sharing a pasture with a registered full blood Dorper ram from the famous Powell Ranch in Texas, so we’re on our way to breeding registered Dorpers.

In the process of learning about our new sheep, we still planted our large (for us) garden and sold an abundance of organically-grown produce.

 

Our sheep gave birth to lambs (they made it look so easy!) and the babies were adorable and fun to watch. Our flock of twenty more than doubled!

Almost right off the bat, we got a “bottle baby” when a ewe stepped on this little guy’s leg and broke it. Now we know how to fashion a splint for a broken leg. This is Louie. He lived his first three weeks in a Rubbermaid tub in the house, being bottle fed four times a day. Now he’s grown, and he’s our farm pet and loves to be scratched and petted. He was such a precious baby!

We bought a small chicken coop and a mixture of heritage breed chickens to start our flock for eggs and meat. We have eight hens and three roosters…a start, anyway!

We brought home a livestock guardian dog, then two more puppies, and then decided we needed a fourth, so now we have four livestock guardian dogs to keep our sheep safe from hungry coyotes and feral dog packs.  Here’s Aunt Bee with some of her young ram lambs.

We look forward to announcing soon that we have products to sell from our farm. All we’re waiting for is the inspector to come and give us a meat and poultry handling license. Stay tuned!