Ask the Shepherd The song and dance of breeding season has begun on our farm! As the days shorten and the temperatures drop, ewes begin to cycle and the rams begin to pine away at the fence line. Once the rams are turned in with the ewes, the dance begins. A new shepherd wrote to me the other day asking … Read More
Nature brings most lambs from the womb into this world with ease, filling lambing pens with new life. Ewes care for their young, bonding with them, loving them, and nourishing them. On occasion though, what should be straight forward and simple becomes entangled, even backwards at times, with lambs choosing new ways to enter the world. There are a few … Read More
Curls…lustrous gray Gotland curls…that’s what spinners and felters are so eager to get hold of. Though I raise my own Gotland sheep, I too have ventured beyond my own flock in search of these silver ringlets. “One can never have enough,” I tell my husband when he asks why a box of raw fleece arrives in the mail. raw wool … Read More
Recently, someone sent me an email asking a question about grazing: Is it true that when sheep graze a field, they bite down to the nub of the forage and leave nothing left of the grazed plants, and that this was part of the reason for the range wars between cattlemen and shepherds between 1870-1920: the cattle had nothing to eat … Read More
When we were on Gotland island, one shepherd we visited with, kept saying, “Gotlands are smart sheep.” He told story after story of the many different ways his flock of Gotlands have shown him just how smart they are. In most of his stories, the sheep, and their intelligent inquisitive nature, usually got them in trouble with the shepherd as … Read More
