It’s been a year since Farm Club members came to the farm for shearing. The pandemic hit not long after and we have had no Farm Club activities. Shearing is this week and we had our annual Fleece Preview when Farm Club members could select their fleeces. It was small—only 3 members plus me—but we did the jobs that were necessary. We checked all the ear tags against my flock list, cleaned up those that were too dirty to read, and gave BOSE injections. We also clipped fleece samples from all the 2019 sheep (now with their full yearling fleece) for micron testing.

I’m way off my game here. I have only one photo of us working. However I have a few photos of gorgeous wool.

Pecan is a 2020 ewe lamb with a beautiful lilac fleece.

Rambler is a 2020 ram lamb.

I like to take photos of as many sheep as possible before shearing day to update my flock list. I wandered around with the camera a couple of days ago and was surprised that I got pictures of almost the whole flock. There are now 58 ewes, 3 wethers, and 6 rams.

I don’t want to overwhelm this post with all those photos but I’ll share a few. You can see all the ewes here and the rams here. This is Sonata, the oldest sheep here, born in 2012. I just checked my records and she has had 15 lambs—that’s 7 sets of twins with a single lamb her first time.

These three are the youngest sheep, Pistachio, Sandie, and Pecan, so named after a Farm Club member suggested “nut” names for what I thought might be my nuttiest crop of lambs. Due to Covid, we didn’t have people coming to the farm and it took a lot longer to socialize the lambs and get them used to being handled. I eventually sorted out those that I planned to keep and worked on halter breaking and handling them a bit. Isn’t this a nice group of 4-horned ewes?

The most prolific ewe here is Ears, a BFL and Jacob cross. She was born in 2013 and has had 16 lambs.

Jade, everyone’s favorite sheep because she is so friendly. Jade was born in 2015 and I have two daughters and a granddaughter in the flock.

Jasper is Jade’s son, born in 2019.

Quora is Jade’s granddaughter from 2020.

Stay tuned for shearing photos on Friday!