A Recent Farm Visit

About a week ago, I loaded the truck with my skirting table, a new box of giant clear plastic bags, my barn boots, and not enough clothing.  Hogwash Farm is in the next town over and has grain silo, pigs, cows, chickens, and 23 Jacob sheep and at the moment 8 Jacob lambs. Nancy LaRowe runs the place and while the sheep are part of her CSA, she has no use for the fleece and offered it to me if I’d pay the bill to have them sheared.  My friend, Ann, agreed to drive over to help and we set ourselves up in the barn and waited for Gwen, master shear person.  She arrived around 9:30a and we quickly established an easy rhythm of scooping up the fleece off the floor, tossing it on the skirting table, picking out lousy sections, discussing the merits of the individual fleece, and bagging it in a plastic bag in time to scoop up the next fleece.  It was a relaxed morning with four women wrapped up in an annual chore I’ve come to love.  Snow fell lightly the entire time, chatting never stopped and by the fourth or fifth fleece my fingers were busy enough to push off the sting of the cold that comes from a body without enough layers.  I really don’t know yet what I’ll do with the Jacob fleece, it’s texture and coloring being very different from the wool we’re raising, but it seemed like a good opportunity to continue to expand my fiber horizons, still a bit clueless, but happy.

Peggy