We are having a “dry January” so far here at the ranch, no big rains since December. While we need more rain, we were happy to have blue skies yesterday, when John was scheduled to shear our 32 pregnant ewes.
Lolo is in Mexico, but we had several friends of the ranch on hand to make the day go smoothly.
The girls spent Monday night in the barn with no food; this may sound cruel, but actually it is for their comfort. It is very stressful to be sheared when you have a full rumen, and they were much happier with empty tummies.
The first step in the process was to move all the ewes to the corrals and crowd them there, so we could easily grab them and take off their coats.
By 8:30 we had all the coats off, and the ewes in the shearing barn waiting for John. Lisa had started putting all he dirty coats through the laundry. The ewes go down a couple of coat sizes after shearing, and I had clean coats laid out in the barn ready to go on the ewes after they were shorn.
We had Melinda and Alex grabbing ewes and handing them to John. Saill and Mo caught the ewes after shearing to fit each of them with a new clean coat.
Lisa kept the floor swept and made the tags to go with the fleeces, and Cynthia helped me skirt the fleeces. Cynthia and Melinda are missing from most of the photos because they were the photographers!
I always wish we had more photos of shearing, but we are all so darn busy it is difficult to remember to take them.
John was finished by a little after noon, and we took a break for a group photo, then had some lamb chili I had made, delicious home-made cheese from Saill’s goats, and chocolate-chip cookies Cynthia made.
After lunch many hands made light work cleaning up and putting away all the fleeces in the creamery. I was so pleased with them: beautiful, lustrous deep-grey Romney fleeces, along with some lovely white ones; ultra-soft black or white Cormo-Corriedale crosses; and a couple of gorgeous long-staple Corriedale fleeces that Saill was admiring, saying some hand spinner will go crazy over those. I will have some of them up on my web site for sale soon.
The skirtings all go into our compost, where they break down completely and we are able to recycle their nutrients back into our soil.
