Spring 2022 Newsletter
Hello! It’s only been a few months since the last newsletter, but it feels like we are in a whole new world. That is the transformation of Spring.
When we last left off, we were preparing for the sheep to get sheared. I had scheduled for the shearer, Mary Lake from Vermont, to come about one month before our first lambs were due. However due to her scheduling, she had to push the date back two weeks, which put us a bit dangerously close to lambing. However, I trusted that she would handle the sheep gently and efficiently, and at that point I really didn’t have another option anyway! For some reason I was really nervous leading up to when she arrived. Maybe it was because we had more sheep than ever before, and maybe because we were in a new space. But I had borrowed some sheep panels to make a small corral from our friends at Barred Owl Brook Farm, and I had recruited my friend Isabelle to assist us in catching and moving the sheep. Mary was held up at the job she was doing before us and got to our place around 5:30 pm. We had put lights up in the barn so that she would have enough light to see, and we tried our best to be quick and prepared for her. Luckily everything went smoothly and she was out of there by 7 pm, which I think she was grateful for. And I had about 50 lbs of beautiful wool! The next day I laid out each fleece individually and skirted them, which means removing all the dirty and poopy bits, and pulling out any sections with a lot of hay or debris stuck in it. Then I bagged them all up by color and made an appointment to drop it all off at Battenkill Fibers, the mill which spins the wool into yarn.
Then, just one week after shearing I came out to feed the sheep and was greeted by a fresh little lamb! Actually, she wasn’t that little. She was a single and came from our largest ewe, Gladys, so was a hefty little creature right from the start. She was still wet from birth, so she must have come no more than half an hour before I got out there. I felt a little guilty for missing the signs of this first birth, but she came about 4 days before our lambing window officially opened, so I cut myself some slack. Two more weeks went by before our next lambs came. In that time, since she was the only lamb, Pip (which Taylor named her) became very friendly with us in a way that many lambs don’t. Usually when I bring fresh hay into the manger, all the mamas get right to eating, and the lambs who aren’t interested in hay yet have some time to frolic and play. But since Pip didn’t have any siblings she would focus all her energy on us, and learned that humans are happy to give her scratches. After Pip we had two more sets of twins, and then one final set of triplets to finish our small lambing season up. Happy to report that everyone was born easily and healthy, all the mamas have great mothering instincts, and the lambs are growing vigorously.
Pip!
Two more lambs, Loretta and Lyle
Starting in April, all the snow mostly melted and the ground began to thaw. We started the gardening season by clearing some small beds around the porch and planting them with perennials. I bought some perennial seeds and began propagating as many as I could, and quickly realized that I’d need some nursery beds to hold them all in until I have garden beds prepped for them. There were some old raised beds on the side of the house which Taylor took apart and moved to where I wanted them. I’ve been filling them with sticks and debris, then composted sheep bedding, and finally some topsoil to make a kind of “hügelkultur” raised bed. Now the plants are quickly filling them up. We also took down an old chicken coop, which had rotted out on one side anyway. There is a sweet sugar maple growing next to the foundation that we plan to transform into a stone patio. Once built (hopefully by the fall!) I will begin to move plants from the nursery beds over to that location.
We also received orders of fruit trees from Fedco, nut trees and forage crops from Barred Owl Brook nursery, some landscape shrubs from the Essex County Soil and Water spring tree sale, and 15 new red wine grape vines from Northeast Vine Supply. Every free moment in the last two weeks of April we spent planting, planting, planting away to get them all in. Now everything has started to grow, and it is a battle with the grass to not out compete our new little shrubs and trees. Luckily, we have a lot of composted sheep bedding to mulch everything heavily and keep the grass at bay.
Plums flowering
The sheep are very thankful for the grass though! They got their last bale of hay right at the end of April, and have been out grazing ever since. In the early days of spring, I was moving them every day, or even every 12 hours, so that they wouldn’t eat the fresh growth down too much. In just the last week though the growth has become so quick that I am leaving them in their paddocks for about 2 days in order for them to finish it all. We’ve had some really unseasonably 90+ degree days in May, and on those days, I made sure that the sheep had access to shade from either mature trees or buildings. It seems that with the unpredictable weather patterns that we are getting due to climate change, planting for shade is going to be important for raising sheep humanely, especially since we have some black sheep who can really suffer in the sun. So, we hope that the orchard and nut groves that we are planting now will be good shade for our future sheep, as well as tasty and productive for us.
In early May we lucked into three new ewes who have now been successfully integrated into our flock. A local family was looking to pass along these sheep, who are about 6 years old which is nearing retirement age for production sheep. They are purebred Romney sheep from a fancy fiber farm in the Hudson Valley, so I hope to get maybe one or two generations of lambs from them to continue to improve our overall fiber quality. When we got them, they hadn’t been shorn yet, so I sharpened up my blade shears and got to it. I am very excited about the quality of their wool and can’t wait to see how they do as mothers next spring.
The new ewes: Bertha, Althea and Rose
We also have found our ram that will be used for breeding this fall, from a sweet little operation raising purebred Finnsheep in Vermont. Apart from the fact that they are the Finnish landrace of sheep (which is appealing to Taylor who has some Finnish ancestry himself), they are a wonderful breed to crossbreed into flocks to increase lambing percentages. I really don’t understand why, but Finnsheep usually have triplets, and regularly have quads or even up to 6 lambs in one “litter”! While that is not really what we want (because inevitably then you are bottle feeding lambs) to cross their genetics into our flock will increase our lambing percentages to hopefully about 250% (which means 2 or 3 lambs per ewe instead of the common 1 or 2). They also have beautiful fiber, and have the easy keeping characteristics of many of the Scandinavian short tailed breeds such as thriving on grass, being good mothers, and having naked legs and faces which makes for less maintenance throughout the year, and makes shearing easier. My goal is to use this ram to create our maternal flock of fiber ewes, and then each year bring in a terminal sire to breed them all and get a crop of lambs which we will then harvest for meat and sheepskins. What that final number of ewes will be remains to be seen! It will depend on what our land can support, and how much we can manage.
Finally, I have been keeping up my weaving practice in a way that I haven’t since the years I was first learning to weave. I’ve been waking up and doing about 1 hour each morning, slowly working away at blankets which I hope to sell online and in craft fairs and markets in the fall. If anyone is interested, I have some available now which you can see on our Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/shop/Wollecru?ref=seller-platform-mcnav). However, as a newsletter subscriber I want to offer you a 10% discount and free shipping on any item from there, if you send me an email to let me know what you want, and purchase directly from us instead of through the Etsy shop.
We thank you for your interest in what we are doing here, and hope you all have a wonderful summer,
Kirsten and Taylor
