What a treat for our April Studio Hours! We had a spring celebration with Anna Hunter and Christel Lanthier who presented together, sharing anecdotes about their neighbouring sheep farms and their friendship. Our special guests also brought a bottle-fed lamb and young chick to enliven our screens. (Ed. note: Find the recording in the Studio Hours video library.)
We learned about spring on a Manitoba fibre farm, where the weather is always unpredictable, with forty centimetres of snow in the first week of April and fifteen degrees Celsius on the day we met, one week later. Both Anna and Christel are lambing in April this year, though they usually try to time it for May when conditions are warmer for both the sheep and the shepherd! They usually shear two to four weeks ahead of lambing. Anna’s early lambs happened because a sneaky ram jumped a fence last fall.
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Anna gave us a quick introduction to her family and farm. Anna and her family moved to Manitoba looking for a closer connection with their food and fibre, and that desire for connection quickly led to farming and a fibre mill. Long Way Homestead will be celebrating their fifth anniversary this summer.
Anna has a flock of Shetland sheep. When she started her flock, she wasn’t certain what breed she wanted but trusted the seller. She loves her heritage breed—one that comes in eleven distinct colours with many different markings—and would still choose Shetlands today. She shared photos of a past shearing day with sheep shearer Stacey Rosvold, another Manitoba farmer. I loved the photo showing a beautiful grey wool staple being held up by grinning Anna. The next photo showed a great pile of fleeces loosely wrapped in old bed sheets, which work well to reduce the moisture issues that can happen with plastic bags. Anna processes her fleeces into yarn and roving in her mill.
Christel began with a video of a black lamb, just three minutes old, as it made its first attempts to stand while the mother ewe cleaned it. The lamb’s first instinct to get up is a form of predator avoidance, and they are usually feeding within thirty minutes. Both Anna and Christel said that they find it magical to witness lambs being born and how quickly they get up and moving.
Christel started farming with coloured Rideau Arcott sheep and has been adding more rustic, hearty breeds to her flock, including some Romney sheep (Celestia and Bella) from Disdero Ranch in British Columbia and a CVM ram. CVM stands for California Variegated Mutant, which Christel’s kids say is the “best name ever.” She has also recently added some Rambouillet/Icelandic-cross sheep, giving her a mixed flock with mixed genetics, which has come to be called her “skittles” flock. For processing her wool, Christel has recently purchased a felting machine.
After seeing their beautiful photos, we moved into a question-and-answer period.
We talked about sheep lifespan, which can be as long as fifteen years for some breeds. Anna’s oldest sheep are nine years old. Generally, sheep aren’t bred beyond eight years of age and wool quality can change as they get older. One of Christel’s ewes had quite a dark fleece when it was young, and it is getting lighter with age. Christel has saved one skein of yarn from the ewe each year and plans to knit a fade shawl from the skeins.
One member asked about predator control. Thankfully, neither Anna nor Christel have had much of an issue with predators. They both have guardian livestock animals in with their flocks: Anna has llamas and Christel has both llamas and dogs. Electric fences can also be useful. In their area of Manitoba, the most likely predators would be coyotes. During the severe drought two years ago, a bear did check out Anna’s sheep, but her large llama quickly herded the sheep to shelter and then screamed and stomped at the bear, chasing it off. There are also cougars in the area and they noted that a llama might not be a big enough deterrent to a hungry cougar, but through their land management practices they have a healthy natural ecosystem around their farms, leading to lots of rabbits for the cougars. Llamas are fairly low maintenance. They eat the same diet as the sheep and so are even easier to keep than a dog. A member asked whether alpacas could serve the same purpose; Anna replied that they are not nearly as large or aggressive as llamas.
Christel shared more about her recently purchased felting machine. It can create a felted sheet that’s about 1.2 m (48 inches) across, has 780 felting needles, and controls for needle speed, input rate, and the movement of the needles forward and back across the sheet, allowing for fine control. The wool needs to be clean and carded before felting—thankfully she lives next door to Anna and her wool mill! Christel is learning new ways to use the felter and is creating things like wool insoles and dish scrubbies to replace similar items made from single-use plastic and microfibres.
We also briefly discussed land management and sheep stocking density, as members wondered how many sheep can be raised on a hectare of land. Anna and Christel said that those numbers cannot be static and really depend on a particular piece of land, the grass, and the weather. They both have grazing plans for the summer that require moving sheep frequently to allow grass to recover, but also drastically reduce the need to add fertilizer to their pastures. Anna did say that if you put three or four sheep on your two-acre lot, you’d never have to mow again!
And speaking of fertilizer, Anna also shared the benefits of wool pellets. She sees pellets as a great first step in revitalizing the Canadian wool industry. By making and selling pellets, she can pay farmers triple the market rate for their wool and put the nutrients found in wool back into the land, all with only a small investment in infrastructure. Pellets are made with heat and pressure that kills any weed seeds that could be present in the dirty wool. A member wondered if bacteria could survive the pelletizing process and if we should consider using pellets from our own bioregion. This seems like a good idea and will also reduce transport emissions and help to regionalize our wool system.
Show and Tell
Patricia shared her finished Radicle Shawl (Ravelry link) found in the From Sheep to Hand ebook. She made it with assorted souvenir yarn skeins from her travels, including brown alpaca from Kelowna, B.C., and other yarns from the U.K. This is her second project from the book, and she may yet make all five projects, even though she is not a sock or mitten knitter. Cheryl is working with a Finn 2-ply DK weight yarn from the Long Way Homestead breed of the month club to make the Tales from the Isle of Purbeck shawl (Ravelry link). She recommended Anna’s yarn and noted that it comes vacuum-packed to save on shipping. Laura shared a swatching project she’s undertaking as she plans a new Fair Isle-style cardigan for her daughter. She has made three swatches using woolen-spun yarns and one with worsted-spun yarn and is hoping to find a swatch that both she and her daughter love. Lia showed a detailed embroidery project. She has dark linen fabric with text backstitched in white, and an appliqued image of a human liver made with organza fabric in two colours. In the chat, members offered suggestions for sources of good linen fabric, including Fabricville, Blackbird Fabrics, Pure Linen Envy, and Maiwa. Kim shared her excitement about planting a patch of flax seed in the front yard of her Vancouver home. She’s participating in the EartHand Flax to Linen Network this summer. Karri, of Leystone Farms, is in the midst of lambing due to a medical whodunnit: the ewes were impregnated by either a ram who’d been castrated or one who’d had a vasectomy! On an unrelated note, her farm is getting a pelletizer soon and then might invest in a felting mill, too. And finally, we admired Kirk’s Canadian Shield blanket squares, made with yarns from Topsy Farms. He has truly captured the Shield’s rocks and lichens in muted greens and greys. The blanket will have alternating abstract squares and more representational ones, including a beautiful version of A.J. Casson’s White Pine painting.Lamb photo by Anna Hunter.