Shearing at Timm Ranch - part 1

Every year I get wool from the Timm Ranch, about five miles from here, and have it made into a really great yarn. I sell the yarn in skeins and on cones and I use a lot of it for my own woven products. I could probably substitute blog posts from previous years for this one and you wouldn’t know the difference. Same place. Same sheep. However some of the Farm Club people have changed. So here is the 2022 Shearing Day last week.

The Timm Ranch sheep are what I like to call a ranch blend of Polypay, Rambouillet, and Targhee. That means that those are the original breeds in the flock but over the years, as the Timms have raised their own replacements, the individual breeds aren’t so recognizable. The sheep have traits of all, but most of what we are happy to see is the fine wool traits of those original breeds.

The sheep moved into the lane on the north side of the barn.

Last year there we tried to keep up with two shearers. This year there was only one and we were able to keep pace with him.

The shearer is known as Junior and this logo is a new one.

Several Farm Club members came to help evaluate and skirt fleeces.

We worked at two skirting tables.

The goal was to check the fleece for soundness (most were fine in that respect) and then skirt. Skirting is to remove the parts of the fleece that are of lesser quality—wool at the edge of the belly and that with excess VM (vegetable matter). The timing was just right for shearing and there was very little VM in the fleeces. All waste was bagged for a friend with a project in which she will make a product from wool that will otherwise be discarded. That will be a blog topic later on.

We kept a running tally of the weight so that I could make sure I reached my 200 pound minimum and I could figure out how much to pay for the wool. The skirted fleeces varied from 4.5 lb to 9.5 lb. and I ended up with 222 pounds in one pile and 50 pounds in the other.The wool will go to two different mills.

Some of the sheep after shearing.

The sheep were in two groups. The largest group had fall lambs, but there was one group with lambs born more recently—including the previous night (although that pair was still in a lambing pen). At one point Susan and I walked over to the group with young lambs and they followed her to the barn.

These are locks from some of the fleeces we chose. The yellow paper is 5” wide so you get an idea of the fleece length. There were a handful of extra long fleeces. One was from a sheep that was missed last year so that was a two year fleece—too long to combine with this batch. Some of the other long ones were from replacement ewes born in the fall of 2020 and not shorn last spring. We tried to sort by length and most of the 200+ pound batch is about 3 to 4 inches. The longer ones are mostly in the other batch of wool.

Stay tuned for another post with more photos.