Sunday, April 29, 2012

Rooing

 Just checking in here quickly to share a couple of photos.  Life has been pretty busy lately, and I ended up sick again for about a week :(

Spring has certainly sprung here, and I thought it might be fun for you to see what we do to roo the sheep - our sheep are pretty small, and I can handle the yearlings on my own.  This is a picture of Yadira, partway through the process.  You can see the area that has been roo-ed is darker, over her front leg.  The roo-ing process allows me to pull most of the wool, leaving the hair behind.  The roo-ed wool has almost no kemp in it, either.


And because he is so lovely, a picture of the ever-curious Yves.

Hope all is well wherever you are,

Lisa

Monday, April 09, 2012

Spring here at Leaping Shepherd Farm


The star of the show today was Yves, the young wether on the right (he's the sheep with horns in the foreground of the picture).

Had I known what the day would bring, I would have taken the camera out with me in the morning before all the excitement, instead of taking pictures at the end!

When I went out to feed the sheep I could see that Yves had begun to drop some of his wool -so, being the curious fibre-loving girl that I am, I had to try giving a little tug...

Twenty five or so minutes later, I'd liberated all of Yves last year's coat. This is his lamb coat, and the final pre-cleaning dry weight was 7oz.  It's lovely and light, fluffy and smells all sweet and lanolin-y.  Max came out part way into the process and helped me with this little fella.

For those who are not familiar with sheep, the trick is to roll them on to their bottoms, belly up, supporting their weight against your legs. If you can keep their little hooves off the ground, they will not struggle.  Sweet Yves relaxed into the process without much struggle at all.  We took little breaks from time to time (for grain), and I was able to roo his whole coat in a surprisingly short period of time.  To roo a coat, you pluck away at it much in the same way as you would pull at a dog's shedding undercoat - it lets go with very little resistance.  Not every breed of sheep can be roo-ed, but Soay can.  In the spring, the previous year's coat gets a weak spot in it and, left to their own devices, the sheep will lose the wool in clumps as it gets caught on sticks and branches. Roo-ing is the process of plucking or pulling the coat.




Our sheep have fast friends within our little flock, and Yadira and Yves are close.  Yadira (the blonde) followed Yves around for most of the rest of the day, sniffing him and keeping an eye on him.

He hadn't minded the whole experience all that much, and had come back to us for more grain after Max and I'd finished with him, so we know that he hasn't become hand-shy.

She sniffed and sniffed at him, almost like she was asking, "Are you okay? - how about now?  Really? Okay?"

 The other sheep stayed nearby during the process, and didn't seem terribly bothered by the whole thing.

Yorick, our Ram, showed that he's not above eating hay out of the other sheep's coats, and spent some time rooting around in Winniandy's ruff, looking for tidbits.



You might be able to see in the background that most of the yard and field is still under a foot of accumulated snow.  The sheep's foot -er, hoofpaths are all cleared down to the ground, but the rest of the field is still blanketed in white.  It was a sunny and glorious day, and little Youella spent a good amount of time sunning her tiny self.

Max and I spent a few hours walking on air after the experience.  It was so much fun, and easier than expected, all 'round (I have a hunch that Winniandy and Yorick will be another story altogether).

Hope you had a lovely Easter Weekend.

:)
Lisa

Friday, April 06, 2012

Good news, everyone!

Things are a-brewin' here, chez Thiessen
With starting the business a few weeks ago, I've been getting my fingers into pies in more public ways.  One of those things is to start a YouTube channel of my very own.

If you've known us for any length of time, you'll know that our boys make films very regularly - and have almost 100 posted to their channel on the ubiquitous Tube.

There's no way I'll ever compete with THAT. And with the new biz, I thought a distinct identity from the humour of teenage boys would be, well, prudent (much as I love their movies and watch them).

So.  To make a long story short, my video experiments can be seen HERE

This is a little taste of what I've been up to:


Well, I'd better get back to the drawing board.

;)

Lisa