Fall shearing & Sacred Sheep plans
Sunday was the prettiest of October days, perfect for a session with Mike & Becca of Buzzclip Shearing. Our Finns and Finn crosses need haircuts twice a year, and the autumn clip is always exciting because it has the potential to be the best wool of the year.
Becca and Mike getting to work on the first two sheep—note the Lister running on Ford Lighting power!
Why is that? Well, the sheep were last shorn in April, and since then they’ve been eating grass, not hay. Anyone who’s ever tried to pick a raw fleece clean of vegetable matter will tell you that tiny dried bits of hay and alfalfa are the most pernicious stuff you’ll encounter. Larger VM, even if it’s prickly, can be teased out easily enough. But the fine bits require discarding large swathes of the fleece from the neck and chest (sadly, these are usually the softest and most beautiful fiber) or just resigning yourself to finished yarn that’s still liberally sprinkled with reminders that sheep are hungry animals who eat lots and lots of plants.
Many years we end up needing to feed alfalfa during the summer, because we farm in a rainshadow and the grasses go dormant when there’s no precipitation for three months. The sheep can still eat the dry matter, but they need supplemental protein to digest it. And they can’t seem to eat alfalfa without getting it all over themselves and their flock mates. (There always seems to be one lamb who ends up as everybody’s napkin, covered in green confetti from stem to stern.) If the pasture set-up allows, we can source additional protein by letting them browse more nutritious woody forage, but releasing them into the scrub at the edge of the forest takes a toll on fleece quality, too.
But this year we had unusual summer rains, with significant rainfall even in August. This was a mixed blessing for the farm community—our friends who farm wheat couldn’t get it to dry down before harvest, and our friends who grow wine grapes lost 70% of their crop—but for the sheep, it made all the difference. The only animals we’ve been supplementing are the weaned lambs, so the two flocks we sheared this weekend haven’t had a bite of hay all summer. And that means CLEAN WOOL, huzzah!
Larkspur being a good, cooperative boy while Mike shears the neck blows
Gorgeous Finn fleece from our little ewe Eclipse
Our friends at Skagit Woolen Works are busting a move to add some of this to our fall run of yarn so we can replenish stock to take to Portland next month. Yes, we will be at the Sacred Sheep gathering November 1-3! Sacred Sheep is an expanded event this year, with two full days of shopping on the weekend plus a VIP event Friday evening. Tickets for the marketplace and class sign-ups are open now at https://thesacredsheep.com/, and we’ll be right in the middle where we were last year, once again sharing a booth with our neighbors North Star Farm of Lopez Island.
What exactly are we bringing? That’s a surprise, even to us at this point, because we are tiny farms working with small mills in a fragile industrial environment where everyone small-scale is hanging on by their fingernails, trying to make the slimmest of margins somehow add up to a living. A lot of mills have closed, meaning that the ones that are still open have much longer wait times, and those like Skagit that are operating on a commitment to shorter turnarounds just can’t take in as many projects. We know San Juan Woolworks will have plenty of yarn and spinning fiber, but we don’t know colors and quantities just yet, and we are crossing all our fingers that North Star will get their yarns returned from another mill before the show… they’ve been waiting 18 months. Gabrielle is spinning like mad to produce as much handspun artistry as possible just in case. Whatever we’ve got, we’ll be excited to see you and to chat about shepherding, the different breeds we raise, botanical dyeing, and whatever else you want to know about farm life!