Here a lamb, there a lamb, everywhere a brown lamb.

I woke up early (earlier than usual) this morning to spray the frost off of my fruit trees. The temps didn't dip quite as low as expected, but there was still a frosty coating on most everything. The only hope to save my potential fruit crop was to spray cold water over the trees in the morning before the sun hit the frozen leaves and blossoms. I know, it sounds a bit counter intuitive, but it actually works.

Before trying to get my garden hose thawed out enough to get water to run through it, and for it to stop sputtering out snow cone looking sludge so that I could spray the trees, I went to the ewe barn to check on Trillium to see if she had decided to go into labor. She looked remarkably the same as she had the night before...and the same as at 1 am when I put on 5 layers of clothes to go out and make sure that I didn't have any frozen lambies. All was well in lambie land, so I finished with the trees and went in to take a shower at about 7 am. I went back out to check at 8 am and found these little cuties all wet, but on their feet and nursing.

A ram and a ewe, both VERY dark brown...again.

Little brown ram (perhaps you have noticed that I still have no names for any of the lambs).

Little brown ewe.

Maybe you see a theme developing with all of these lambs (except Edrea's katmoget ewe). Yes, they do look strikingly similar. Yes, I have noticed that too. I intended on adding some moorit (brown) to my flock since that seems to be a desirable color of fleece for my knitters and spinners, hence the dark brown rent-a-ram with very nice fleece. I fully expected Lovey (black krunet) and Willow (ag/grey) to have solid color or grey/musket lambs, but I was hoping to get at least one spotty out of Trillium...nope. Daisy is my last hope for spots. Sage is Musket, so she will have to have some form of brown/musket lambs.

There was a discussion on one of the Yahoo groups a while back as to whether krunet (head spot) genes were at the same locus as body spotting or a different locus all together.........looking at my lambies, I am going to say not so much with the same locus. It's not like rent-a-ram was wildly spotted by any stretch of the imagination, but he had quite a large krunet, so I was hopeful that there were some spotting genes lurking about in there that would be coaxed out when combined with Trillium's very flecket (spotted) markings. I am not going to pretend that I am not a teensy bit disappointed that I don't have any spotties thus far, but I have some really nice, healthy, beautiful lambs (and no overabundance of rams this year) and there is not a thing wrong with that.