Welcome to The Chronicles. I hope you will enjoy my posts about the joys of raising the oldest breed of sheep in the world -- the always intriguing, easy-to-raise Soay sheep. With few exceptions, posts contain what I hope is useful information interspersed with a bit of whimsy. Feel free to comment on anything you find here. If you want to send me a private message, that's okay, too. Send your note to the address on the "contact us" page of our main website (***saltmarshranch-dot-com). Meanwhile, enjoy The Soay Sheep Chronicles! Priscilla
Allow me a brief detour from the Lamb Kit to introduce Llucy, our guard llama. Steve took this picture last lambing season. I was watching a new lamb cavorting when without warning Llucy snuck up behind me, I felt warm damp air on my neck, just barely heard a soft shwoosy sound, and I was nose […]
Dousing a newborn lamb’s umbilical cord in iodine as soon as possible after birth is an inexpensive way to guard against infection. After a few weeks when our lambs go back out into the pasture, they have to fend for themselves as far as scrapes and cuts go; it is not cost-effective to treat them […]
When I looked at the first draft of this post I nearly cancelled the whole blog in despair. Nitrile gloves — now there’s a headline grabber. If I did not lose you to generalized boredom, I was sure to lose you to a bad case of MEGO. Then I remembered the “dance” I describe here, the task where the […]
Anticipation, excitement, and a certain tension are in the air – a sure sign it is almost time for lambing to begin. When we start getting edgy about all we have left to do before the first lamb appears, one of us inevitably asks how we are doing on supplies and equipment. On a rainy […]
The realization that lambing starts in five weeks sent Steve out to the barn today to count what’s left of our winter hay supply. Do we have enough to last until the pastures green up? When we put in our order last summer for winter hay, we factored in the extra needed for gestation and nursing, but the thought of […]
If you managed to find this site, you must like Soay Sheep. Good. So do I, and so does my husband Steve, the head shepherd here at Saltmarsh Ranch. No matter what time of year, those of us who are hopelessly addicted to these little creatures have much more to talk about than our non-Soay […]