Thanks for the welcome! I have made a bit of a boo boo about the festival date, I have just realised that it is the day before we have our annual highland pony day, so now need to talk VERY nicely to my mum to see if she can do extra babysitting so I can come to the festival - she'd need to have my boys Friday, so I can set up for the pony day and prepare the sheep, Saturday for the festival, and Sunday for the pony day. Hmm.
Simon - thanks for your message, I'll message you back once I've spoken to my mum.
Rosemary, we do breed our Cheviots pure, but the draft ewes are causing us a dilemma at the moment - we keep them bringing them down to the lower ground round the steading, but have always tupped them with Texel X British Milk Sheep tups, which has produced a perfect cross as far as we are concerned - the resultant females are fab mums with loads of milk who produce 2 or sometimes 3 lambs who get straight to their feet and suck. (These are then kept as our 'field sheep' and tupped with a MeatLinc to produce prime lamb) However, we can't get the Texel X Milk Sheep tups any more, so tried a Blue Faced Leicester this year the produce Cheviot Mules, but we aren't that excited by the offspring. We are really unsure what to do this year. we have an old Zwartble tup here and use him a bit, and that is a fab cross, but buyers don't seem so keen on the black lambs. We are thinking about going to the Logie Durno sale to have a look at the Logie hybrid tups, but are really unsure at the moment, so any suggestions would be great.