Sheltering Pines Pompey Magnus

I brought in Sheltering Pines Pompey two years ago because I thought both he and his bloodline seemed to consistently produce sheep that I liked.

The first year, he didn’t disappoint me either. I liked all of his lambs, and we still have two of his daughters (Siena and Genoa). Unfortunately, I didn’t give him that many ewes that first year, and I gave him the year off last year while I went in another direction. It’s one of those things where you want to try different bloodlines and see what happens. And good things did happen, but he’s too nice to sit idle again, and I really would like to get more ewes like Genoa and Siena. Quite frankly, they are our nicest sheep.

Pompey has held his fineness very well over the years. He’s six now, and his last micron test was 25.6 on average, and his CV was 20%. His spinning fineness of 24.9 puts him in the super fine category. It’s not a long fleece (probably three inches), but it has great crimp and density. There are some good polled rams around, but he’s really nice, and certainly one of the finest for his age.

I picked ewes for his group based exclusively on correct type and fleece quality. Obviously, I didn’t put his own daughters in with him, however.

The ewes are:

Blue Sapphire

Blue Diamond

Frangelica

Itasca

Kiyah

Irish Rose

Vogue

Constantinople

I didn’t much care whether the ewes were katmogets, spotted, or solid. I am interested in getting great lambs only. The patterns just don’t matter to me. Plus, I really like katmogets.

Obviously, no one can predict which ewes will have the best lambs, but I think we have a good chance of getting some nice ones out of this group. I don’t really even know how many ewes we will keep next year, so I don’t think we need to get more than three or four great ewes out of the three groups I’ve set up. The way I look at it, the more the lambs we end up keeping, the more ewes we’ll have to sell to make room. I don’t really want to sell any of these ewes. I would like to get some more blacks since we only have one right now, but I’m not really that serious about that or I’d be using Egyptian King. Hopefully, I’ll be able to use him next year. If all goes well, I shouldn’t feel compelled to use Pompey again next year, but you never know. It’s easy to assume there’ll be another breeding season down the road for some of these rams, but that isn’t always the case.

I'll close with some pictures of his group. Pompey is in the middle of the top picture. He's trying to blend in.