Winter Chores

Chores must happen sleet, snow or sunshine, which,  by the way, comes later in the morning and leaves earlier in the evening this time of year in Maine.  Though I am often up by 5:30 am I rarely do chores until after 8am as one thing leads to another and I suddenly realize it is light outside.

  We begin with the chickens, who have had a light bulb on since 3am...and find we are getting a dozen eggs now.  A couple of weeks ago they were molting and we were getting an egg a day from our 2 dozen hens.  They get grain and water too, and when their grain has been low they push hard to find a place at the feeder..

Next the lambs, now almost a year old.  We have 3 groups of them. Two groups of 4 for market lambs, separating the boys from the girls.  One group that is with Brother Augustus, supposedly a Finn ram lamb we traded for last summer.  Brother Augustus has horns now, so we suspect he is not really pure Finn. His 5 ewe lambs are the healthiest of last year's girls, and we hope they will have lambs in the spring. These girls have the shelter of the back of the barn, while the other lambs have the shelter on the north of the pole barn or a chiclen tractor covered with a tarp.  They all scramble for the grain and hay I give them. The water in their buckets has been frozen in the am lately, so I carry the frozen bucket inside where it is warm to thaw and put out fresh water. As I enter the doorway they push to get inside where the hay is stored.  You would think they had not eaten for a week.

Then to the adult ewes, of which many are expected to lamb in late March or early April.  Most, but not all,  had a fall shearing. They have access to the feeder in the pole barn where it is easy to drop hay down from the loft.  I walk through the feeder putting hand mixed grain in the trays on both sides as the ewes eagerly jockey for as much as they can get. Then I drop down 3 bales of hay, break open the bales and place the hay where they can enjoy it.  I watch to make sure everyone is getting a chance to eat, and hand feed the two that are not as aggressive for food.

Next we tend to Bubba, the draft horse accompanied by the two boys...Lester, our Border Leicester Ram, (who hopefully has done a good job), and Timmy, our Romney wether.  They all get grain and hay too.  Water for them and the adult ewes is in an automatic waterer that does not freeze.

Finally we tend to Hattie, who is isolated as she recovers from an abscess, now healing nicely.  She is really eager, standing with both feet on the fence that keeps her well away from the rest of the sheep. Hattie is a favorite, a big Romney with gorgeous huge colored fleeces twice a year.

Not done yet....now shoveling the poop.  Before the ground froze it was easier to pick up the large clumps with a manure fork. Each day it was easy to fill two wheel barrows full and dump it in the pile at the back of the pole barn.  The pile is already pretty big.  With freezing temperatures the poop is often frozen to the ground and an occasional fresh one. Here is a picture of the pile...impressive isn't it.When the sheep hear us coming they begin to baa eagerly, letting us know they are  hungry.


Believe it or not, this is the first year we have picked up the sheep manure daily and we anticipate a much cleaner barnyard come spring for the little time it takes every morning. Standing back I survey the barnyard, make sure the electric fence is back on, and think about getting those 4 coats on some sheep soon to protect their fleeces for the hay and chaff they seem to easily accumulate in their necks. Then off to the Tesseract to wash a couple of fleeces and spread them out to dry, best done on sunny days when the sun heats the water on the roof to 136 degrees.

I'll be back around 4pm to do it all over again. Twice a day, every day, except when we travel and our generous friends come to care for them.  Great friends indeed.

Shop Local at A Wrinkle in Thyme Farm

Open 10am to 4pm until December 20th.
For the knitters and wool lovers on your list consider Wrinkle in Thyme Gift Certificates attached to a Christmas Ball filled with mini skeins of yarn and a knitted scarf on a tiny set of toothpick needles (You decide any amount $10.00 and up).
WE have the farm store all decked out in boughs of balsam, and many knitted items and felted landscapes ...
We have a nice selection of holiday Thyme Tiles Needle Felting kits



We have one of Brenda Sauro's beautiful hooked rugs for sale from the Painted Mermaid, Main Street Norway.

and a sweet doll hand made by Turner complete with basket of wool, drop spindle, and a sheep, $50.00.


and a teapot with a unique knitted cozy and some beautiful batts to spin made by Sue Connolly.


A BiG SALE is on for Meredith's Recycled Sweaters with unique needle felted designs, Regular $100, marked down to $80. plus a free pair of her fabulous mittens.
Remember our incredibly soft hand dyed and natural wool yarns and a new batch of 50/50 mohair blend, soon to be skeined off the cones.




Best Wishes for a wonderful holiday,
and
Fleece On Earth, Good Wool to EWE

Holiday Hours at A Wrinkle in Thyme Farm

We will be open 5 days a week for your holiday shopping beginning now and until December 20. Our hours are 10a to 4p Friday through Monday and 10am to 8pm on Tuesday.
Come Tuesday afternoon at 1pm or Tuesday evening at 6pm and get started on that knitting or needle felting project and have it done for that very special person in your life. The knitting sessions are a drop in kind of thing, open to beginners and experts alike. Join us for a cup of tea while you are here. The kettle is always on.

We have a nice variety of knitted handbags and have have expanded our holiday needle felting kits to include a joyful Santa.

Many Hands Make Light Work.

We made over 50 gallons of maple syrup this year with about 200 taps and sap for our neighbors at Kidds Hillbilly Farm. In years past we have put in over 400 taps. This year we got the first 200 in place, with plan to continue putting them in. The sap ran so well we were getting over 100 gallons a day, so we never got more put in. We kept getting more snow. When the weather was right the sap ran and ran and ran.

TJ put taps in earlier than we did, but the sap was not ready to run right away. When it did they collected it at their place and transported it as they could. TJ boiled at night and Mary Ann boiled during the day.

Our evaporator had a work our this year.We had a lot of wood stacked by the new sugar house, which worked very well though the holes in the metal roof from its previous use did drip when it rained and when snow melted off the roof.

As usual, Kim and family came for a long weekend. In years past we have in some cases carried the children on our backs or on sleds as we gathered sap. Last year they were learning to use snowshoes, with lots of fun, but not much carrying of sap. This year they all really helped. It was such fun to work with them.

Now we are done with the boiling....all that is left is the clean up and bottling.
Nephew John and his friends washed buckets yesterday. Some bottling will happen this week. We are thankful for a good year.

Shearing on a cold day

This is a picture of Alfie, who was born last Tuesday. He looks a lot like his dad, who is a a gray pure bred border leister.

Yesterday we had Jeff come to shear 25 of our sheep, (two were already shorn). He arrived about an hour before we expected him having traveled from New Hampshire. He was very fast with the shearing, which is good when sheep are full and round with lambs.

Several of our fiber community came to help. We had 4 helpers in the barn. Two to catch the sheep, one to record who was done, condition, and help gather up each fleece into a sheet and carry it to the fiber building.

The first sheep shorn was Ruthie, which was washed right away, and this morning is dry already. She will be going with Sally and Sadie to be processed right away as we are low on white yarn at the moment.

In the fiber building we laid the fleeces out on skirting table to skirt away the edges and remove as much of the vegitation as possible, weigh the fleeces, and put each one into a bag marked with the name and weight of the fleece.

Anne, our fiber expert, was teaching inexperienced helpers about skirting the wool. This what I heard her say: "Think of the fleece as a jacket on the sheep with a zipper along the length of the belly from the neck to the hind end. The shearer unzips the jacket and peels the fleece off all in one piece. When you lay it out, you put the cut side down on the skirting table, which is a frame with turkey wire on it. You can identify the neck, which tends to be full of hay and vegitation, the rump, which may have britch, a coarser fiber and manure, and the legs. You then remove the edges with manure tags and most of the vegitation." When the fleece is fairly clean you roll the fleece inside out, folding the sides in first and rolling head to tail. Then the fleece is weighed and put in a paper bag to be washed and carded another day.

The shearer was done by 1pm, we had a pot luck lunch, and some kept skirting, some knitted or spun. We had a lot of fun, good food, and sold one raw fleece to a handspinner. Then Mary Ann announced that Sassy was having her lamb. She has a ewe lamb and we named her Abby. A big girl she weighed in at around 13 pounds. She is black with a tuft of white on the top of her head and the tip of her tail. Mother and baby are doing well.

This morning I estimated that we have over 150 pounds of wool in all. About 60 pounds of it is skirted and in bags. The rest is in sheets or laid out on a screen to dry. Thanks to all who helped with a very productive day.

Handspinning

This fiber I spun using the 20 year old used wheel we just bought, and was very pleased with the outcome. The skein of handspun yarn is pictured in the foreground, the washed fleece uncarded to the left rear. This morning I carded a bundle of it for comparison (right rear).

This is Hillary's fleece, which was one year's growth of lambs wool, her first shearing. Hillary is a ewe that lives with two sheep we sold to a couple who live in West Paris. They appreciate that Mary Ann is willing to shear their animals, and they have no use for the fiber so we brought it home.

When we did the shearing I was at once excited by the various colors in Hillary's fleece, and secondly by the length of the fleece. It was fairly dirty and full of vegetation, but with some picking and washing I ended up with about seven pounds of wonderful long fiber in various shades of gray, tan and some white. Wow!

This past weekend I had the encouragement of other more experienced spinners in a room full of spinners in Freeport at the town hall. Spinning did not come as easily to me as it did to Mary Ann, who took to spinning 7 or 8 years ago. I tried for a while, and gave up in frustration...happier to knit. Then I tried again....and again... I finally decided to spin one day when I found some roving I loved, and stuck with it until it was spun. Since then I have spun enough for a hat twice. I now can say I can spin but have not spent much time doing it.

Usually a spinner works from a batt or roving, which is fiber that has been carded (like brushing your hair) into long ropes called roving. Sometimes it is dyed before it is carded and one can create interesting color combinations with mixing colors. Sometimes it is carded by hand, sometimes with a hand crank carder, and sometimes with an electric carder.

I decided to spin this beautiful fiber without carding it at all to see what would happen. To spin I take a handful of fiber and draft it, which is pulling it into a loose ropelike piece of fiber. To begin you overlap the fiber with a string that is attached to the bobbin, a wooden spool that spins around when you press a treadle with your foot. The treadle is connected to a wheel that turns clockwise as you spin, and the spun fiber is pulled onto the bobbin and winds up like a spool of thread. Experienced spinners can decide whether they want a fine strand or a thick one. I just spin and what I get is what I get.

Mary Ann can ply much better than I can. Plying is taking two spools of handspun, holding them a certain way so that when you treadle the wheel counterclockwise the two strands are twisted together, creating two ply yarn. Mary Ann did the plying for me this time. I need to practice more to feel confident that I will have an evenly plyed yarn.

I had such fun spinning, and I am so pleased with the outcome that I want to practice spinning every day for a while...

Thyme Flies When You are Having Fun!

Have you noticed lately how one thing leads to another? I started in January writing our farm newsletter, which went out yesterday as a February/March issue. The February newsletter calendar had our spinning groups, first and second wednesdays of the month, 10 to 2 potluck, washing wool workshops, the gentle yoga workshop....events that now are history.

The Second Annual Dye Retreat Weekend, coming up March 11, 12th and 13th had consumed some time with posters, the web site, registration forms, and preparations and planning. There is still room, and for local folks who will not spend the night the cost is less. There is still room, so if you are interested go to our web site to register.

We had an extra wet felting workshop for some people who made backgrounds for some landscape art they will enter in a Massachusetts art show. The Walkabout group came to snow shoe, and we fed them a pot roast lunch with all the trimmings. And our afghan class met for the second square, learning a lot about gauge and blocking their squares, and starting the second pattern stitch.

We had two women come to use the facilities for processing their own fleeces. One came with fiber to wash in our two washing machines. The other carded 8 ounces of fiber on our older Patrick Green electric drum carder. They both left happy with their accomplishments. One woman came hoping we would process her fleeces, and left happy with the idea that, although we do not wash fleeces for other people we do offer our facilities for them to do it themselves. She will be back.

The sheep need to be shorn. We have done two of them ourselves, with bags so big we are thinking they will have lambs very soon. They all heavy with lambs and wool, making it difficult for them to all get to the feeder for grain. We "crotched" ten of them, which means we cleaned the wool off their hind ends and around the teats, in case they have lambs in the next week....and we made a decision to have Jeff Jordan, from New Hampshire come to shear them all next week. We invited our fiber community to come for the day, have a pot luck lunch, maybe buy some raw fleeces, and visit and spin or knit. That will happen Thursday, March 3rd. Anyone interested in sheep is welcome to come.

The two sheep that were shorn last week stayed in the barn for a couple of days, and now they are back outside and seem warm enough. We have cleaned out the barn to make lambing jugs and put down straw bedding, and the first thing I do in the am and the last thing at night is a barn check to look for signs of early labor. One thing to watch for is a ewe that is not interested in grain. Lambs could come at any time.

Meanwhile preparations for the sugaring season are underway, doors on the new sugar house, barrells, buckets, taps, washed, wood unburied from snow and stacked.

Who says winter is not a busy time for farmers?
We love what we do....and play when we can.
Life is good.

Grammy's Hooked Rugs

My Grammy Thurston, my mother's mother, enjoyed making hooked rugs. She was well known here in Maine for her talent and skill with hooking rugs. The rug pictured here now hangs above the mantle in our living room, never having been on the floor to be walked on as it was precious to my mother, and now just as precious to me.

Mammy Thurston died when I was eight years old, and I can still remember watching her sitting at her rug frame patiently adding narrow hand cut strips of dyed wool loop by loop until the design she had planned was created.

She used a backing of burlap, to which she drew a design, perhaps using a pattern. She carefully chose the wool fabrics in the colors she wanted. Sometimes she used tweeds or patterned fabrics, such as you see surrounding the floral centerpiece in the rug shown here. If she did not have the right colors she dyed light wool squares in a pot on the wood stove. I believe that the dyes she used were Cushing's Dyes, which come in little paper envelopes. I suspect she had to mix them sometimes in order to get all the shades she wanted for her pattern.

The wood stove was used to heat the kitchen, and my grandfather sat in his rocking chair at the end of the stove with his feet propped up after supper. When Grammy T was dyeing wool she dissolved the powdered dye in a small cup used only for dyeing wool, added some vinegar, and added water from the tea kettle. She then decided how intense the color should be, often dying two or three shades of the same color. This was done by putting two or three pots on the stove with water enough to cover the wool squares and then adding a teaspoon or so to one, a Tablespoon to another, and even more to the third. She added the fabric and let it simmer for a half hour or so until all the color was absorbed into the wool and only the clear water remained in the pot. Then she would let it cool, rinse it, and hand it to dry.

Then she cut the wool squares into narrow strips in three piles and proceeded to work the design in her rug. Sometimes she did not have enough of a particular color, and would dye more, which may have been yet a different shade, but in the finished rug she worked all the colors in so that the end result looked as if it were planned that way.

I have to admit, I do not remember all these details of dyeing and hooking from watching her at such a young age but I do remember her standing at the wood stove stirring the dye pots, and sitting at her rug frame hooking. I have learned much about dyeing and use Cushing's Dyes(still manufactured here in Maine)and a little about hooking rugs over the past 10 years. I believe her example as an artist has influenced me to enjoy dyeing wool yarn and create designs using wool. These activities feed my soul and energize me. I am very grateful for these memories of my Grammy.

Getting Ready for Sap Season

February at the farm is a time for getting ready for maple syrup production and this year is no exception. The harness is cleaned, and needed repairs are in process. We will start working with Bubba, walking him around in harness, then pulling a drag to prepare the trails for collecting sap. Bubba really likes to go, and we often stand in front of him to keep him from moving forward while we are pouring sap into the sap tank.

This year there is plenty of snow on the trails. We plan to jerririg a rounded front for our sleigh runners to make it so Mary Ann can sit on it while driving Bubba along the sap trails. We had talked about making a snow roller for him to drag using a piece of culvert filled with cement, but never got arount to it.

For collecting sap with the horse we use a 65 gallon tank on a very old pung. A pung is a low slung rig with shaves and a seat for two at the front. Ours has two seats (carries 4 people) and the back seat easily lifts off making space for the tank on the back. We tend not to fill it to the top, which could make it too heavy.

The sugar house is built, coupola and all. The evaporator in place complete with a new smokestack. Buckets and taps are emerging from storage to be prepared for tapping trees.

We have entered an agreement with some neighbors, who will tap trees and gather sap, which will make it easier to have enough sap to boil every day. It takes about 100 gallons in the storage tank in order to have enough to boil and in past years it often took a couple of days to have that quantity collected. The neighbors plan to help us collect sap and feed the wood fired evaporator. They have already helped us gather and stack wood and work on finishing the new sugar house.

In previous years there have been 4 or 5 days in the three week season that were "100 gallon days" but usually collection yields around 75 gallons a day and sometimes a lot less depending on the weather. For our trees it generally takes 60 gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup, and we do not want the evaporator to boil to low and burn. This year we hope to be able to boil every day once the season begins. The season begins when there are several days in which the nights are cold, and the days are warm, which is what triggers sap flow in the trees.

Stay tuned for more information about our 2011 maple season....