October 7, 2022
We sheared all our sheep and are now tasked with getting the wool out the door and on its way to becoming something more. Before anyone can do anything with it, it needs to be skirted. “Skirting” is the laborious process of hand picking out all the bits of non-wool “thingies” that get embedded in the sheep’s fleece, and removing any wool that is too soiled to be of any value.
Once skirted, we send all the wool to the spinnery for processing. There it gets washed, carded, and spun into yarn. After we get the yarn back, we sell some to knitters and weavers and the rest we send out to various places to get finished products made.
We send some yarn each year to an extremely cranky individual who makes our fabulous gloves and mittens. Some yarn gets sent to a very small (micro) sock “factory” in the Midwest. Some will go to our wonderful weaver here in Connecticut so she can keep making us gorgeous scarves. Some will be set aside for blankets. Some for rugs. It takes about a year for us to get back the finished products from each shearing and in the meantime - the sheep will have already produced a whole bunch more.
Shearing is always a strenuously busy time for us – but the hardest part of it all is that shearing is immediately followed by lambing in the spring and breeding in the fall. We now have the monumental task of separating and transporting all the sheep into breeding and non-breeding groups. We need to remove all but the one breeding ram and all but the 20 ewes we want to breed – and we need to do it quickly. Apparently, time is of the essence!
Sheep breeding season begins whether we are ready for it or not, just as the light begins to change. The timing is such that, after a 5-month gestation, the lambs are born in the spring, and are just getting weaned as the grass starts coming in. It’s brilliant! Who said sheep were dumb? I wouldn’t want them to do my taxes, but they are exceptionally good at being sheep. They are much better, in fact, at being sheep than we are at being humans.