Monday, March 10, 2008

Queen Anne's Lace - Rich


Whispering Pines Queen Anne's Lace (S23371, 4/06) is Lily's first lamb. She's a two year old ewe out of Sheltering Pines Mahogany (S20984), a moorit yuglet HST ram that we sold last fall. We were on the fence about selling her last year, but Jen and I both liked her a lot and decided to hold onto her another year. She was
bred to a grey spotted ram last year and had a very nice spotted ewe last spring. The spotting wasn't as strong as we would have liked (and the ram wasn't either) but the lamb was very nice. We know Queen Anne carries nice spotting, so we'll see what she has this year. I expect more white lambs, but who knows? She has a very good conformation and perfect tail. Also, we always felt like she had a very nice head, if
that makes any sense. She's a very nice white ewe and you have the love the potential to have spotted lambs. Of course, any white lamb she has might also be spotted and we won't know it. She doesn't have many flaws. She doesn't have that patch of wool on her forehead like many shetlands do, but that's about as close to a flaw as I can find. Although that's mentioned in the standard, it's way down my list of attributes I'm concerned about.

So, this is our last posting in our series that features our breeding stock. We have way more sheep than I ever imagined. Right now, we have 17 ewes (16 of them bred), three rams, and
two wethers. Although I like all of them, we need to cut back a little bit this year, which means we need to sell a few of our adult ewes. It's going to be tough to decide and I'm not even sure how many to part with. Some of that depends on what lambs we keep this year, but I think we may have to let four adults go to get down to a number I'm happy with for next year. If anyone out there sees something that they really want, let us know and it might help us decide. There are probably 10 ewes out there that I wouldn't sell right now, and another seven that I really
don't want to sell, but might have to. Picking four of those isn't going to be easy.

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