Summer Pedicures

Although I am not apt to be found at a salon with my feet in the soapy little dishes, I do find time to give my sheep pedicures. Of course, this summer with a 4 month old and a 2.5 year old my dear husband has been trimming the most of those over grown toe nails. This is major back breaking work, but at the end of the day when you can barely stand up there is a feeling of accomplishment and oneness with the flock. The sheep may not think that, but they are happy to walk unencumbered by long toes and overgrown flaps!

August is the new October!

The weather has been perfect for sheep, cool but sunny! It makes me long for those bright crisp
October days that are in the near future. Nights in the low 60's start the wool growing process going!

Finally on Grass!

The flock is feisty and so happy to be on new spring grass finally! It's been a long cold spring, but the grass has started to grow in earnest now no matter what the weather does! This morning I woke up at 5:30am and took a walk with the sheep, what a beautiful way to start the day!

More sheep!

Ever seen the movie Babe? The old ewes are border leicesters, one of my favorite breeds for their appearance, fiber and personalities. A small flock of 30 has come up for sale near us and we are debating purchasing them. We have a co-op who would like us to supply them with lamb, although this would mean growing our flock considerably! But even though we may grow for meat production my first and foremost goal is fiber and our girls will be pampered to the extreme for their fiberliciousness. I am considering ordering some sheep coats to keep the fiber as clean as possible. I have thought many years on this, and have decided to give it a go and see how it works. We'll see next spring how quickly i'm able to skirt the fleeces!

Wool has been sent in!

We have brought all the fleeces in to the mill now and they have begun washing the wool for the rovings. We plan to have a bulky merino, a fingering cormo/BFL/merino, a worsted chocolate alpaca/merino/border leicester, a worsted gray merino/border leicester, a dk fawn alpaca/merino/border leicester, and rovings from these as well!

Shearing Day!

*sadly I hit the wrong button on my camera and deleted the shearing pictures from this year, I am devastated! But this is a nice one from last years shearing.

Shearing day went off without a hitch, thankfully, since David arrived to our place about an hour earlier than we expected, and we had just woken up! It was unfortunately a bitterly cold day with wind and drizzling rain. The fleeces are gorgeous though and seem to be bigger than previous years! Fritz our full blooded Merino wether's fleece weighed in at 15lbs pre-skirting. Skirting is the process of painstakingly picking through the raw fleece to take out the hay chaff, sticks and random bugs that became entangled in the fleece.

Easter Sunday looks like it will be finally a nice day for skirting! I am psyched to get out to the garage and get my hands in some greasy fleeces! So far I have 5 out out of 26 fleeces skirted, and I must say, although on the smaller side the Blue Faced Leicester crosses from last year have beautiful long crimpy fleeces!

On a different note - we are proud to announce the arrival of our second daughter Mae Louise, who was born at home on April 5th. She was a day shy of being 3 weeks overdue, but finally made up her mind to enter the world! So far she is quite the trooper and endured a morning of loud shearing without trouble!

The two ladies yet to go...

Here is Bernice and Llama. We are still waiting on them to lamb. Llama always has just one lamb, but we'll see this year. Bernice had triplets last year, sadly only one survived due to a traumatic labor. We are assuming she will have at least 2 lambs this year and all should go just fine! :)