Only yesterday I was smugly telling a friend that we were not starting lambing until the first week of April – (Remember the saying that Bonfire Night makes April Fools?).
I went up to feed the sheep tonight and heard a higher pitched bleat amongst the hungry ewes.
First lamb – six weeks early!
Oh well, only another 99 to go!
Category: About
New Star Ram Makes his Entrance
Our search for a new ram is over. Meet Allt y Brain Leroy (not our choice of name!) who arrived at the farm last weekend from a beautiful farm deep in the Breconshire Countryside.
He is in quarantine for a couple of weeks, as any new stock has to be, but he is less than pleased about being in a field on his own when there are a hundred ewes waiting not far away!
Choosing a time for lambing is always difficult for us. Our lambs are born outside and so we like to wait until the worst of the weather is over and the mornings are not quite so dark before starting. At the same time, we want lambing to be over by early to mid May to make sure that the ewes get the best of the spring grass to make milk.
Generally, we follow the old adage that “Bonfire night makes April Fools”, which means that if we put the ram in with the ewes around the 5th of November, lambing will start on April 1st. This also ties nicely in with the Easter holidays, so we can coerce the children into helping! This year, as Easter is a bit later, we are aiming for the week after bonfire night, to begin lambing around the 7th April.
Sadly for Leroy, that means another two weeks of waiting……………..
Welcome to the Black Welsh Lamb blog
This is the blog for Black Welsh Lamb – high quality organic black welsh mountain lamb from Pen y Wyrlod Farm in the uplands of North Monmouthshire.
On this site we want to show you how our lamb is grown, the sustainable methods we are trying to adopt and the historic landscape that we farm in.
Pen y Wyrlod has been here since the mid 1550’s and the land has hardly changed since that time. The fields are the same size and shape, the hedges all survive, we have ancient trees and there are more than 40 species of grass and herbs in the pasture.
This all helps us to grow lambs which only feed on natural grass and hay, developing slowly to reach maturity after seven or eight months. Their meat is tender, low fat and has a complex flavour that more commerical lambs simply cannot match.
