Washing Wool

We shear our Icelandic Sheep twice a year... once in the spring and again in the fall. The fall clip is the most valuable and desirable for hand-spinners. It is typically longer and cleaner. On shearing day, the fleece is put into a bag and labeled with the sheep's name and the date. The bags are weighed and loosely stored in the barn.

The next step is to skirt the fleece. This involves laying the fleece open on a screen and pulling out any vegetable matter, short fibers or anything else that is not fleece... ok manure :) Even within the fleece itself, I will sort the premium fiber from the less premium and have it processed for different purposes. Once this is complete, I will put it back in a bag and weigh it again.

The next step is to wash the fleece. This can either be done by me or by the wool processor. It doesn't cost much to have them do it. However, the turn-around time for processing a fleece that requires washing is about 4 months. I have a fiber festival in September, so I am washing my fall fleeces. I can then call the processor ahead of time and they will allow me to bring my fleeces and have them processed on the spot.

So today is about the washing. I bought an old ringer washer at an auction a while back. I have it on the back porch outside the laundry room. You must remove the agitator from the machine as you don't want to agitate the wool or else it will felt. I fill the washer with hot water from a hose hooked to the laundry sink. I add laundry detergent and then gently push the fleece into the water. The water immediately turns to mud the color of chocolate milk. I let the fleece soak for about 15 minutes. Then I drain the water and run the fleece thru the ringer.

And, surprise, surprise ... some wasps had started building a nest inside the roller cavity. I battled them thru the washing, but they were sprayed later that night.

I repeat the process again with detergent and a third time to rinse. Hopefully by now the water is clean. I then lay the fleece out on a wire frame to dry. Depending on the weather, it will take a day or so. I then weigh it again and compare it to the pre-washed weight. The fleece typically weighs 65-70% of the pre-washed wool. This weight loss is mostly lanolin. Icelandic sheep are relatively low in lanolin. Many other sheep will lose nearly half their weight in lanolin when washed.

Now the fleece is ready for the processor. I'll share that with you when I drive down their next month!

A Bird's Eye View

Preston fitted his model airplane with a camera yesterday and he and Colton flew it out over Quiet Thyme Farm. The camera took pictures every few seconds during it's flight.

I thought you'd like to see the actual view of the pastures and buildings as it compares to the drawing I showed in my first post.

You can see dots of sheep in pasture 3 now. The rams are in pasture D.

Preston just mowed pasture 2, that's why it doesn't look so inviting, but it will soon.

You can see more of Preston's aerial photos on our website in the Photo Gallery

Oh, and please note the tree where Frank's skin was found ... right outside the back door :)

Holy Lou Ferrigno!

We were just finishing up dinner the other night at the picnic table on the porch. I think it was actually the first night we've eaten out there this summer. As we got up from the table, Ben felt compelled to ring the dinner bell ... just because. Out came a very upset wasp. I guess you would be too if you just got your bell rung! It stung him on the top of his hand before he even knew what happened. My cure for wasp and bee stings is to put a meat tenderizer paste on the sting for about 15 - 20 minutes, keeping it moist. It will draw the venom out of the sting and should eliminate any swelling and subsequent itching.

Well, this wasp must have had "super venom" powers. Although there was no immediate swelling, the next morning, his hand was swollen around the bite. By dinner time that night, his whole hand was swollen. By the next morning, it was half way up his arm. And even today, although the hand has gone down a little bit, the swelling is almost to his elbow. His hand looked like the incredible hulk. We did go to the doctor yesterday just in case. He wasn't allergic, it was just how his body reacted, but it was considered "normal." YIKES!

He ran into a friend of his at the hospital and his friend reached out to shake his hand. Upon gripping his hand, he looked down ... man, what happened?!

The doctor did give us a page out of a book on things you can do for comfort ... anti-histamine, hydro cortisone, tylenol, ice... stuff we all know. It also confirmed my "home remedy" of using meat tenderizer. But they suggested making a solution and applying it with a cotton ball. I thought that was a great idea, as I use a ton of this stuff in the summer.

I am a magnet for wasps, deer flies, mosquitoes, and sweat bees. The sweat bees land on the backs of my knees when I'm out working on fence or something, I bend down, they bite me, they die, I scream ... and then run for the meat tenderizer. I guess I come out with the better deal in the end, but it's still aggravating. Anyway, I bought a new bottle of meat tenderizer today and added water to make a solution and will keep it handy with some cotton balls for the next attack.

I think our llama got bit in the mouth one day by a bee. The white clover is very much in bloom and one day he was eating outside my office window and all of a sudden, he started flailing his body all around and started spitting and coughing for several minutes. I was sure he'd eaten a bee ... poor guy. That had to hurt.

Ah, the joys of summer!

A New Llama

I always get emotional when my sheep leave here to go to a new farm. I know they'll be fine, but they don't understand where they are going or why they are leaving their sheep friends and the only home they've every known. So it's stressful... for all of us.

Well, we had a new llama arrive a couple weeks ago. We use llamas as guard animals to protect the sheep from coyotes primarily. If provoked, the llama would stomp the coyote. Sometimes just the sheer intimidation and vocal alarming is enough to scare them away.

Anyway, my friend Dawn who owns Carmen Llama Ranch in St. Paris, OH has brought me two other llamas and she needed a home for Care Bear, a female llama. So she has come to live with us.

Dawn and Lloyd arrived with CareBear in their trailer. I walked her into the ewe pasture filled with new moms and lots of lambs. CareBear was naturally curious and wanted to meet everyone which basically amounted to her chasing them. After a bit, I let her go and we watched for quite a while and things seemed to be ok.

... about 5 minutes after Dawn and her husband left, Preston and I went into the ram pasture to let the rams into their new grazing area. We look up and see Care Bear prancing from around the old barn and down the driveway!!! Apparently she didn't understand why she was being left behind and was going to let them know they forgot her!

... at this point Valur (our dog) sees her and starts to run after her. We were able to get Valur to come back and saw that Care Bear had gone past the house, but veered onto the lawn down towards the garden which is fenced all around. So Preston raced down the driveway on his tractor to close our gate. After a few minutes I was able to coax her into the pasture where Dudley & Mora were. They were still separate from the new moms. So I thought I'd best leave her there with just the two sheep for a couple days to get used to her surroundings without having to worry about a bunch of lambs and protective moms.

A few days later, I combined everyone together and she had calmed down considerably. She was so intent on taking in every square inch of her new surroundings. I knew then she would make a good guard llama.

She did see her first deer every and it was funny to watch ... it was an alarming llama / snorting deer match for about 10 minutes before the deer ran off. If you've never heard a llama alarm, the only thing I can compare it to is a turkey gobble.

I can tell she is taking her job seriously. The moms tend to get eating and forget about the where-abouts of their lambs and CareBear tends to them and keeps and eye on them. And I could tell the sheep had accepted her when they "let her" into the shelter with them when it was raining.
;)

Yesterday I went outside and saw a deer down toward the bridge. CareBear was busy eating and I called to her that there was a deer. She looked up and saw the deer and immediately took action to shoo it away.

Dawn chronicled her visit here on her blog. You can see more photos there ... http://dawnanewday.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html Scroll down to Fri, June 5th. You will learn about llama shearing and then there are photos from her visit here.

Meet Frank

When you purchase an old farm house, you have to accept the fact that there are permanent inhabitants. Some are friends and some are foe. It's important to know the difference.

For instance, when I see a mouse in my house or in the milk house where the feed/grain is kept, they are an enemy. They eat my food and that of the sheep and chickens. They need to go.

The wild barn cat is definitely a friend who will help eliminate the mice. We call her Tiger Kitty. She came with the place. She was not at all fond of people when we moved in and we would very rarely see her. Then in the winter, we started putting out a little cat food for her every few days. Then she would seek us out and coax us into following her to the barn to feed her. Little by little her trust grew and she ended up sleeping on the porch with our cats last winter and eating with them. Even though she still won't let me hold her, she will pester me until I scratch her head. Just today, she stood on a railing in the barn as I scratched her head and she actually snuggled up into my sweatshirt, purring and purring. She's discovered how nice the human touch can be.

There was another permanent resident who greeted me shortly after moving here. We have named him Frank. He is a Rat Snake. He is actually in the friend category. He dines on rats and mice, so he's helping with the enemy mentioned above. Here are some facts about the Rat Snake.

• The common rat snake is medium-sized, averaging 3.5' to 6' (up to 8') in length.
• Common rat snakes tend to be shy.
• Rat snakes produce a foul-smelling musk and release it on the predator if they are picked up.
• Common rat snakes are excellent climbers and spend a lot of time in trees.
• Rat snakes are very useful around barns and in farming communities because they help control pest populations.
• Due to people's lack of knowledge and fear of snakes, rat snakes continue to be the victim of human persecution. They are actually endangered in Massachusetts.
  

We came home from breakfast this morning and Colton asked if we'd seen the snake skin in the maple tree right outside our house. We checked and sure enough, there was Frank's skin. I was able to get it out of the tree intact and it was well over 6 feet long. You see Colton holding it here and he's probably 6'0" with his sneakers on. It was the entire skin, including the head, as you can see the eyes. We've collected two other skins in our cellar, but they were only partial.












I found the picture of the snake in the tree and the "facts" on: http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/ReptilesAmphibians/Facts/FactSheets/Blackratsnake.cfm

We're Moving On Up!

(I'm singing the theme song to The Jeffersons while I type) ...

Preston is the webmaster for our www.QuietThymeFarm.com website. Any website owner knows that the goal is to be on the first page of Google. We've been working on things over the years to make that happen.

As of today, when you google "icelandic sheep," we are on page 4, up from page 14! But even more cool, on the first page, the 4th item down is "Image Results." The 3rd picture is one of my sheep from our website!! How cool is that?!

If you google "icelandic sheep ohio," we have moved to the #1 spot on page 1 ... even beating out isbona.com which is the Icelandic Sheep Breeders Association. We used to be further down the page a ways. Yippee!!

Sheep on the Farm

I've raised Icelandic Sheep for about 4 years now. They are such a joy... each one with it's own personality, it's own "voice." I moved them to a new pasture today. It's always fun to see their enthusiasm over new grass. It's funny to watch when a couple of them have figured out that a new gate is open and then they are spotted by the others. They cry out as if to say, "Hey how did you get over there?! That's not fair!"

It's been a tough week for one of the moms, Hershey. She stopped eating last week and spent most of the day in the shelter away from everyone including her lambs. Certainly not a good sign. My first check didn't lead me to anything other than a hoof that needed to be trimmed (I couldn't reach it when she was pregnant) and a need for deworming. I gave her a vitamin boost, but the next day there was no improvement. I decided it had to be more than parasites, so I gave her an antibiotic. A day or so later, with no improvement, I discovered one side of her utter was infected. She had mastitis. I had checked it a couple days ago, but didn't notice anything wrong. At this point, it was clearly the problem. It was severely swollen and hard.

So I moved her and her lambs up to the barn and gave them a small area to graze. She had already stopped allowing the babies to nurse, so I knew I'd have to supplement their diets as well. My "bible" for ewe and lamb care is Caring for Your Ewe by Laura Lawson. She suggested an antibiotic, an anti-imflammatory, some vitamin B and to milk her at least 3 times per day. She would also need some oxytocin to allow her milk to let down. When I milked her, I discovered that she had blood in her milk. In fact, it really didn't even resemble milk, just watery blood.

After 24 hours of treatment, there wasn't any improvement, so I called the vet again and he suggested this antibiotic gel that is inserted into the teat. That didn't sound fun for me or Hershey. But surprisingly it was easier than I thought and she took it like a trooper. I think she knew I was there to help. She had been very easy to handle during all this which isn't necessarily like her.

Today I had to administer a 2nd dose of the internal antibiotic gel. She was a little less excited about coming in for her treatment and a little less cooperative during the procedure, and I took that as a good sign that she was getting her spunk back. She also seemed to be outside eating a lot more today ... another good sign. Tomorrow I give her the 2nd and final dose of injectable antibiotic. Hopefully the swelling will start to go down.