Yep still here.
Holding down the fort on my own as Allen has been away for most of this month so far with still a week to go. I’m just keeping up with all things sheep and dog related – and a wee bit of wool work too. And cows and horses as well. Just keeping water to the ewes is a regular chore in this dry year.
I moved the ewes to the South pasture which is considerably larger than the lambing pastures they have been in. They are very content there for now. They ewes have pastures they like better than others and the South pasture is one of them. Plenty of variety in tame forage and native, open grazing plus good bush stands that are expansive enough for sheep to settle in on hot days.
This happened as well and it just makes me smile.
This batch of wool was processed at a new mill in the province (we haven’t had a fibre mill in our province for years). I am thrilled to be the first customer to use the services. I am also pleased that this wool batting will now head to a store in Saskatoon, our nearest city. It may seem like small potatoes as it really isn’t that much wool (yet) but it is so satisfying to keep this product within province and to reduce the footsteps of wool traveling around the world as so much of it does when that need not be the case.
I recently attended a fibre fair as a vendor and while a day of talking about did me in, it was a solid day and I made some great connections. I was, however, surprised to discover how much wool is bought from overseas and sold here, completely skipping the connection to the sheep and to the farmer. Fibre is much like food in this regard and we are a nation a people who want what we want, when we want it. It’s my wish to turn the tide on this a little bit. We have good wool in this province, including coarse wools, mediums wools and yep, the long wools and the fine wools too. We have Corriedale, Targhee, Romney, Leicester, and Rambouillet is just next door in Manitoba. What we don’t have is the producer connected to the fibre enthusiast who seeks it.
The other surprise discovery was the number of people who popped by my booth and said how much they enjoy the photography on Instagram or Facebook. Wool Stone Prairie isn’t even a blip in the social media scale of popularity but no matter, there are plenty of you out there who are tagging along and that makes my heart swell. I’ll keep taking and sharing photos of this sheepish life.
… and p.s. if you aren’t getting enough photos in these sporadic posts, do check out Instagram or Facebook as I seem to be able to manage posting photos there on a more regular basis.