Expanding the Sheep Paddock: Making Room For a Growing Family

It feels like every day I'm surprised by just how much the lambs have grown. They spend pretty much their entire waking moments eating, so I really shouldn't be, but perhaps today even more so. I worry that we won't be calling them lambs much longer, but then again we still call Astro a kitten, and he's eleven years old!

When we got our first lamb, Holly, we didn't have a plan for where we were going to put her. We had a laundry, and enough uncertainty of the carry capacity of a Wedge Tailed Eagle, that we may as well have not had a paddock. When we got the other five, we felt much better about leaving them out for the night, but we still didn't have permanent fencing for them. We setup 100 metres of temporary electric fencing, that allowed us to shift their location periodically, but centred around the shelter I carted up from the dam from its previous life holding pool toys. This limited how far we could actually shift the fence, and led to the area around the shelter becoming rather messy. And smelly.

During the day, we could allow them into the laneway and the house paddock to graze. It wasn't well set up for animals, but it looks like it was the only pasture that had been looked after by the previous owners. We really needed to prioritise the more permanent fencing, so I got stuck in. I started with the biggest paddock, as it shared a fence with the goat paddock, which meant we were a bit closer to it being serviceable. It took me a lot longer than I expected just to get the two guide wires in, making mistakes and doing my best to learn from them. Once that was done, I could put up the prefabricated fencing, which went up much more quickly. Fixing it to the posts worked out to be quite hard work, using a hammer on the staples. Turns out there's a tool that makes that job a lot easier, but let's not dwell!

Finally, I'd managed to get the fence secure from the goat paddock to the gate at the top of the driveway! It's missing the two top wires that we'll eventually use as hot wires, and I hadn't actually managed to enclose the full paddock yet, but after putting up some temporary fencing, it was enough to keep the lambs in.

The size of their original paddock was probably not much more than 500m², and after fencing in the section I'd completed, they now had about 5,000m². I disassembled and relocated their shelter, setup a new water source for them, and Anita and I welcomed them to their new home. I'm sure they'll be much more comfortable, and the pasture will be much better for it too!