Spinning A Yarn

In an attempt to justify the existence of our one and only sheep, I am finally getting around to using the wool that we worked so hard to sheer off of her last spring. The wool had been washed twice and allowed to dry on a sunny porch, but after that it sat in a clean pig feed bag all fall. I had been talking with my parents during the course of the summer and fall about borrowing the spinning wheel that they have had (and never used) to attempt to spin yarn from wool. My husband had been adding his healthy dose of skeptism to the idea, but finally I prevailed when this last week my parents brought down my great grandmother's spinning wheel.

It is my dad's one and only heirloom piece of furniture from his grandmother, so he made it very clear that this thing is only on loan for a while. This is probably a good thing because I am already very nervous having a 110 year old piece of furniture in a house with five kids running laps through the kitchen. Last know wool spun on this wheel was somewhere around 1900.

I have seen this spinning wheel many times before, but I have not actually seen one work since I was in second grade when there were some women that came to the school and demonstrated how things were done in the "olden days". They showed us spinning wool and making candles, and one other thing that escapes my somewhat porous memory. Needless to say, despite remembering the demonstration of spinning, I don't remember doing it. Thankfully, somewhere in the piles of books that I have inherited from my grandmother, there was a spinning and dyeing book.

I tend to be very much a "learn by doing" kind of a person. It takes a lot of patience to actually stop and read an instruction manual. I flipped open the book and glanced at the pictures and read a few captions. Good enough....now let's do it!

But here is the thing about spinning wheels.....they are not intuitive. They are simple in design and the concept is fairly straight forward - I pull and the spinning wheel spins the fibers thus making yarn. This is much easier said than done.

This particular spinning wheel is a Saxony wheel which is one that you treadle the foot pedal to keep the bobbin and the fly wheel spinning while simultaneously using both your hands to stretch and feed in the fibers that are being spun. There are a few too many sides of the brain required to accomplish all those above listed tasks - seriously, this made rubbing my tummy and patting my head very simple.

The first night I carded some of the wool which, as it turns out, also takes some getting used to. I have a lovely set of scratches on my arm from one of the carding combs to prove this point. I then sat down at approximately 9 pm to start figuring out how the spinning wheel really works.

This particular spinning wheel felt like and old friend. When I was a kid I used to play with it up in my parent's bedroom where they kept it. I would sit and marvel at it as I worked the foot pedal and made the wheel go around and around as fast as I could. I never could quite figure out how it actually spun anything. So, starting late in the evening with a cup of coffee at my side, I sat and fiddled with it, looked at the book and then fiddled some more.

I started with only one string on the wheel and couldn't figure out how the bobbin and the fly wheel were supposed to go different speeds until it dawned on me that maybe there needs to be two strings on the wheel. Looked at the book.....yep, they all have two strings....okay, time to find and tie another string onto the pulley that runs the fly wheel. Voila! By this point it was 11:30 pm.

Now the book says to start with 18 inches of spun yarn. How exactly is that supposed to happen when you don't have a way to spin it? Spinning yarn by hand is brutal, and 18 inches of it would have taken me until 3 am. Of course what I didn't realize at the time was that it doesn't have to be perfect to start out. A foot of crappy hand spun yarn would have probably worked. I resorted to regular yarn that I have lying around and figured that I could tie into that after I got it going. Once I hooked up the regular yarn to the bobbin and started spinning, it went like a breeze....until I added in the carded wool and then it would promptly gum up and derail the entire operation by breaking whatever thread I had on the bobbin. It was now 1 am.

Why so late? I have no idea what kept me up and going. I had been struggling all day at work to keep my eyes open and my head above water, but when I sat down with that wheel I felt happy and content. I honestly think I could have probably worked with it all night. I didn't feel rushed to get it going or figure it out and I was very content to have to restart again and again. I simply loved the rhythm of the thing, the gentle "whirring" of the wheel once I got it going, and the lanolin that started to build up on my fingers from messing with the wool. I pictured my grandma and her mom before her sitting with this same wheel and it made me feel connected to them. Crazy as it may seem, I felt like they were there with me. Chuckling at my fumbling fingers and encouraging me to try it just once more as my grandma had done so many times before with other craft projects that she had taught me. She was the epitome of patience and skill with doing things by hand. It was only because I knew the morning would come quickly and I had plans to take the kiddos sledding that finally convinced me to turn in. Total accumulated spun yarn - zip! New found appreciation for all my ancestors - huge!

Since Tuesday night I have worked with it more and steadily climbed the steep learning curve. By Wednesday night I had a small ball of crudely spun wool with multiple breaks and varying degrees of thickness. By Thursday night I had more yarn spun, slightly thinner and more even in the thickness of the strand. I am hoping that maybe by the end of the weekend I will have the rest of the wool carded and spun with some degree of competency and then I can embark on the dyeing process.

The biggest question that I hear uttered from my husband's lips periodically as he trips over my bag of wool or has to navigate around me in the middle of the kitchen is, "Why?" Why am I bothering to learn how to spin one sheep's worth of wool? The reasons are two fold. 1) It gives Lambie a reason for living. How insane is it to keep this crazy, random sheep fed and housed if she does not give us anything in return. Sheep are good for two things - meat and fiber and as much as I was against getting her in the first place, I honestly can't see taking her to the butcher at this point, not when she has spent the first months of her life living in my entry way behind the door - that practically makes her family. 2) it is something that I have always wanted to learn to do.

I totally understand that it is much easier to go to a yarn shop and pick up whatever yarn I like in any color and style, but I know this sheep and her wool, I know what had to be done to get the wool, and I know this spinning wheel and the ancestors that used it before me. I feel more connected to this yarn than any that I have ever picked up in any shop. It may not be the finest and it may end up being difficult to knit with, but I have raised, sheered, carded and spun every fiber of this yarn. I like to think that Grandma would be proud.

The Week Between

There is this weird and funky week between Christmas and New Years. Nothing of any great importance ever gets accomplished during this week. You sort of check into work to make sure things are still going alright, but no new projects are usually tackled unless you need a serious tax write off.

This is the assessment week. The week of the year when you kind of wrap up all the miscellaneous odds and ends that need wrapping up. What were the top new stories? What were the best movies? Was it a good year? Did you accomplish what you set out to do? Did you stick to the resolutions? Do you even remember what they were?

I don't make resolutions anymore. Too much pressure and guilt associated with that practice. I will, periodically make a resolution in the middle of the year out of the clear blue, like "I will no longer drink pop except for special occasions", and then do it. I only tackle the resolutions that I am absolutely ready to do and know I can accomplish. Gives a person a feeling of satisfaction. It is like making the "to do list" and writing down the things that you have already accomplished for the day.

One of our spontaneous resolutions this last month was to not spend much (if any) money on Christmas presents. I am proud to say that we accomplished this resolution. With five kiddos - three under the age of 8 - this can be a little tricky. We did spring for a few nice gifts which of course came from Santa himself - a "multi-use" tool for my son, an art pastel drawing book for one daughter, water color paints for another daughter, and two webkins - which were the only two technologically advanced gifts we bought. Everything else required some imagination and/or work. One of the favorite gifts by far as been the five decks of playing cards that we then put to almost immediate use to play "Nuts" also known as "Oh, Hell!" in some circles - ironically, the 4 year old was kicking our butts last night. The rest of the gifts...., well let's just say that re- gifting is alive and well at our house and we keep the second hand stores in business.

Christmas has gotten entirely out of hand. There is simply too much STUFF that people feel they have to have. What does it do for us? Does it make us happier? Does it save us time? If we are in it to save time, what do we do with all the time that was saved?.....go out and buy more stuff? It is crazy! The thing that what scares me the most is seeing what it does to kids that think that they have to have all this crap and have really no idea of what it costs - both in money and in the destruction of brain cells.

We don't have a gaming system at our house. We do this on purpose. If I had my druthers, we wouldn't have a T.V. either. My kids sometimes tell me that we are very old fashioned compared to their friends. I asked my only son once if this bothered him, "Not really. There is too much other fun stuff to do." he said......he is my favorite son.

They seem to get it though, why we deprive them of all the crap....I mean stuff that all their friends seem to be inundated with and if they don't get it I just shove them out the door and tell them to go find two sticks and have a sword fight with a sibling. I just watched my kids have a blast all day playing cards with each other, painting, playing pretend dress up, drawing and putting a puzzle together. I have a feeling that when they think back to their childhoods, they will remember the crazy things that they did together rather than the time that they spent glued to a computer for their allotted 30 minutes of time. I know that is what I remember from being a kid. I remember blowing up army guys with my brother out on the driveway, I remember swinging on the swing set, I remember dressing up and playing house - those were the fun times. Sitting in front of a computer, although sometimes very cool.....like now..... it is also very lonely. What we humans seem to have made up for in technology we have lost in social connectedness and meaningful interaction.

This has led to a new spontaneous resolution for this new year that is rapidly approaching - I will be attempting to send out hand written, personal letters to family and friends. Each day or two I think of a person that I haven't written to in a while and sit down to write a few lines in a card to them and send it off. No cookie cutter holiday cards this year....there wasn't enough cash for that, but there is enough care and affection to take the time to write and let people know that I think of them. It may take me until June, but I will hopefully get through my holiday list before next winter. So far, two down and about 120 more to go.

A Breed Apart

No farm would be complete without a few farm cats around. I have quite a few. Occupational hazard as a small animal veterinarian....you accumulate all those that desperately need a home or face extinction. The one advantage I have, however, is the ability to be sure that they are all spayed and neutered and vaccinated for the worst of the cat viruses.

I have seen many farms (and grew up on one) that was not able to provide this service to the cats that came to stay. What would start out as one cat, would quickly turn into seven.....and then 49....and then...well, you get the picture until some horrible virus would sweep through the lot and kill off 90% of them. That was devastating as a kid. That is one of the many reasons that I became a vet - hard to look a dying, beloved kitten named Fred in the face and know that he is being killed by a completely preventable disease without making promises to devote your life to stamping out disease and illness.....and so, several years later and several thousands of dollars poorer, I take on the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

I try to keep it within reason though. After a while it gets to be a little nuts when you can't make it from your car to the front door without tripping over three or four cats all winding around your legs and purring for affection.

The outdoor cats when I was a kid, were scrawny and wormy and scruffy looking. The ones that I have collected now are a beautiful clowder of cats thanks to a little help from modern medicine and good nutrition. Fed twice daily (or they wouldn't let you get a thing done outside) they are all hefty with thick coats in the winter. A few of them are the farm "Originals" - bred and raised here on the farm by a wayward cat named "Slinky" because she never did stay around - Festus, Abby and Shadow are from that original bunch.

Then there is Tigger. I came across him while working as a relief vet. He had been abandoned by his original owner at the clinic - left him to board and then never came back to get him. One of the techs tried to take him home but discovered that he peed on everything. So, Tigger spent approximately two years in a small 2 x 3 foot cage and would be at the clinic every time I came in. One day, I simply couldn't take it anymore and Tigger came home with me. He is every ounce the appreciative cat. He lives to be held and cuddled and will happily drool all over your lap while you hold him. I love to find him lounging among the flowers in the summer and curled up in the straw or hay in the winter. He ambles along with a shuffle that is similar to that of a raccoon, so he has, at times freaked me out in the dark of the night when I see him trotting up behind me.

Frodo found us. No idea where he came from but he was definitely a wild cat when he showed up. I enticed him with food for several days before I brought my net home from work and managed to catch him. He was promptly neutered and vaccinated before being released back into the wilds of our farm. Originally, my son named him "Mittens", but I simply couldn't humiliate the poor boy with that name and when I realized that he has a perfect white ring around the end of his tail, his name became obvious....Frodo- he carries the ring. It took Frodo a while to warm up to us, and I wasn't entirely sure that he would stick around, but then one day he inadvertently got close enough to pet and suddenly he realized what he had been missing all his life - affection! Now, he sees us coming and his tail will shoot straight up and he will run along side with his funny bunny hopping gait and then sidles up to us and flirts until he gets the attention that he seeks.

Raven is our two year old kitten. She is the boss of the lot and most of the other cats hate her. She is very food motivated and will strike fear into any that attempt to eat before she does. Her first winter on the farm she even took on our dog, Gina, a large Golden Retriever/Great Pyrenees mix. Suffice it to say that more blood was lost from Gina than from Raven. Her best, and only friend appears to be Tink. He is the new boy this year. One of a litter of strays that needed a home and after spending the requisite amount of time in my clinic where I completely fell in love with him, he was brought home to the farm. He is as crazy about food as Raven is. He, too, took on Gina over her food bowl and once again, Gina was the one to loose more blood through an impressive scratch to her nose.

What amazes me the most about these little cats is how tough and resilient they are. I always say that when the people of the world ruin it completely with our pollution and atomic bombs, there will be two things left - cockroaches.....and cats. Cats are obligate carnivores which means that they are best suited to getting their protein from meat. Plant material really doesn't do their system any good simply because they don't break it down well. This has never stopped a cat from trying however, and typically they do get a bit of plant material from the prey that they catch . Hungry cats are really not too picky about eating select parts of birds and beasts....they eat all the parts if they are hungry enough. And when they aren't hungry, they bring what's left as a gift for the people in their life that they love most.....never mind that we aren't really into the whole "headless mouse" thing.

Obligate carnivore aside, I have seen these farm cats eat everything from left over soggy cereal to ears of corn. They can be ravenous little animals. I have had visions of falling on my way to the barn and having them quickly devour me.

The biggest problem that we have on this farm is that the great majority of the cats are male. Now, no offense to males of any species, but male cats tend to be very lazy. Most of this crowd finds the warmest, sunniest spot to hang out for the day to wait for the food to be served in the evening. The girls tend to be the ones to take off hunting for a while. Abby was gone for about a month, we had given up on her coming home and then one night I looked down and there she was amid the mob as usual.

Farm cats will often disappear for days or even weeks at a time. You have to have a very relaxed relationship with farm cats because you just never know if it is an extended hunting trip that keeps them away, or if they have gone to the great cat beyond in some unfortunate accident on the road. There are nights when I will know that one or more of the cats didn't come home for dinner and then hear the coyotes off in the distance and I say a silent prayer to whatever god might protect wayward cats. It isn't that I don't love them and wouldn't like to protect them, but I have come to realize that they are a breed onto their own...wild, yet accommodating and affectionate when the mood strikes. I simply co-exist with them and appreciate them when they arrive. There should be more relationships like this in the world.

Sometimes it is nicer not knowing exactly what befalls them. We have found our share of them on the road after an unfortunate encounter with a car or truck. The sudden knowledge stabs right to your core as you realize that one of your friends has been run down. It doesn't matter that "it is only a cat" because to those of us that love them, they are family.

Occasionally, they simply disappear and we don't know where they go. I had a cat on the farm when I was going to vet school named Tanner - he was a big cream colored, bowlegged boy that had been there from the day we bought the farm. Two years into our stay on the farm, he disappeared sometime in early January. I missed him. Not that I depended upon him for anything, but I missed him trailing around after me while I was outside. Cats have a funny way of just wanting to be with you. They don't want to lick your face or play ball like a dog does, they just want to hang out. Generally, they hang out and sleep, but at least they are there for you.

This last fall I was digging potatoes and had to physically move two of them from their warm nests that they had claimed among my potato plants.

Anyway.....back to Tanner.....I was standing outside on sometime near the middle of April, and as I looked across the plowed field I noticed a cat trotting toward the house. He was big and cream colored,....and bowlegged just like.....Tanner! I called his name and the trotting cat broke into a run across the field. It was like The Incredible Journey with me falling to my knees and Tanner running to sit in my lap, purring as though he had never left. I have no idea where he was or what took him away, but I was glad he was home. Glad, and amazed, and awestruck! Four months he was gone! Where did he go and how did he get there? How did he know how to come home? The questions never have answers, they never tell their tales.

I am always sort of flattered that a farm cat would want to spend time with me. They are such amazing animals and I am often in awe of their abilities. They don't need us, they can take or leave humans, they have the ability to hunt and feed themselves easily and yet they seem to enjoy spending time with us. I have a hypothesis that they are as entertained by our crazy human antics as we are by their feline ones and we are both just waiting around to see what the other one might do next.

Like a Kid at Christmas

My favorite of all favorite catalogs came yesterday. It comes only once a year and I treasure it all year long. I cut pictures of from it to use in various places, I dream about all the fun stuff that lies within it and I drool over the pictures and imagine what it would be like to have one of each. I am worse than any kid approaching Christmas with a toy catalog in their hands.

It is my Seed Savers catalog. This thing is amazing!

Seed Savers is a company out of Decorah, Iowa that exists to provide heritage and heirloom seeds. These are seeds that will reproduce produce year after year that is of consistent quality.

There are other seed companies in the world, such as Monsanto and Novartis and many others that you will see with their names in very small print on the packets of seed that you buy in the stores-those seeds are raised to provide produce for one year only and if they do happen to come up the next year they are typically of inferior quality and will never make it to a third year.

They have genetically modified the seeds that are produced to be unable to produce viable seeds of their own (sterile seeds), thus ensuring that you will need to buy more seeds next year as well. It keeps them in business. Monsanto has taken this to the extreme and trademarked their modified genes. If any farmers are caught storing their seed, they are sued and not many small farmers can stand up to the agribusiness giant.

Seed Savers is NOT that type of company. They work to provide the best quality seeds they possibly can knowing that if they are saved by the purchaser, they will provide even more seeds for the future. They are dedicated to storing seeds of countless varieties of vegetables to protect them for future generations.

One of the most dangerous problems that we run into with producing crops is the loss of variety. We are turning into a monoculture of vegetables - corn. It is in everything! And much of the corn produced is Monsanto corn (at least in the Midwest). A single culture of anything is not healthy for the environment.

Think of this from a honey bee's perspective. Thousands of acres and only one plant for pollen....corn. And honey bees don't usually use corn for pollen. With the lack of other pollen options due to herbicide use, huge numbers of bees get lost. One day of spraying insecticide on the crops while the bees are busy...more bees wiped out, or worse yet, they take the insecticide back to the hive and pollute the hive with it. A bee, without options, will not do very well. Think of the bees as a the proverbial "canary in the mine"....if the canary comes up dead that is a good indication that the mine isn't safe.....the bees are coming up dead. Colony Collapse Disorder is becoming more and more of a problem - one in which they don't completely understand the cause, but regardless, I think we should be taking it as a warning sign that things are not looking good for the bees.....or us.

So, it is because of their business policy and their mission, Seed Savers is the only place that I buy seeds for my summer vegetable garden. I have purchased many of the seeds and saved many from year to year with great success, yet somehow I still feel compelled to try new varieties and new fruits and vegetables. Their seeds cost a little more, but if you consider that they send with them instructions on how to save them for the next year, it is really more of an investment.

This is the time that the garden starts. Now, while there is still snow on the ground and a ton more to fall yet this winter, while the days are way too short and the nights incredibly long....now is the time that the garden gets planned for the year. I pull out the drawings from the last few years for where everything was planted and I contemplate how much energy I may or may not have. I think about how many kids will need 4-H projects to grow and how much work I can con them into. I count how many seeds I was able to save from last year (or the year before) and contemplate the germination percentage. I read through my garden journal from last year to determine which crops were the best and which ones I should pass over.

Corn....I will need new and different corn. This is one of the problems with trying to raise heirloom quality seeds amidst and ocean of field corn. I had wonderful corn two years ago and I saved the seed. Problem was there was genetic drift from the field corn that first year so the second year that I tried to grow the corn, it had taken on some of the characteristics of the field corn and didn't produce as well. Chances are good that I had acquired some of Monsanto's trademark genes much to my dismay. Don't want them - they didn't do my corn any good.

Heirloom seeds tend to produce very vigorous plants and, if you stick with one variety you can keep your seeds very pure. When the varieties start to mix however, you can come up with some interesting crops....like the 'cuash' that I grew a few years ago - a cross between a cucumber and a squash. Needless to say, these are not typically the seeds that I keep.

And then there are the seeds that are hard to harvest - carrots, for instance, have to be grown for two years before they will produce seeds - this can be a bit of a trick and not something that I typically tackle. It has happened by accident now and then, but that is really more a process of chance and poor tilling in the spring.

This year we are planning to expand the garden. We have just cut into our last onion for the winter, so we will definitely need a few hundred more onions to plant for next year. Carrots we ran out of sometime in September. Trying to grow enough to supply a family of seven through an Iowa winter can be a definite challenge.

The potatoes that I picked out last year - German Butterballs - didn't produce very well and despite the fact that they are supposed to be excellent keepers, you can't keep what you weren't able to produce in the first place, so I will be switching back to Yukon Gold Potatoes because they produced bushel after bushel of potatoes that lasted through most of the winter, and they were huge!

One of my favorite of all crops to grow is tomatoes. I, personally, cannot eat a raw tomato....it's a consistency thing. But any and everything made out of tomatoes are my favorites. I toss them in salads, I make bruschetta, I make pizza sauce and can marinara for the winter. I usually manage to put up about 45 quarts of marinara every year using a recipe that I found in the wonderful book by Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I plant Amish Paste tomatoes that make a magnificent sauce and the seeds have kept and germinated nicely year after year. Typically 13 tomato plants is enough to provide a family of 7 with home made spaghetti sauce every week for the entire year.

I could go on for days about the wonders of the seeds contained within this catalog. There is no other seed catalog that comes that can match it....and trust me, I get a lot of seed catalogs. So, the wind may blow and the snow may fall, but I rest easy in the knowledge that spring is coming. How do I know it is coming? Because the Seed Savers Catalog is here.

Surviving Winter

It is December. Technically, Winter hasn't even started yet and already I am ready for spring to come. But then I stop and force myself to remember how much work is actually involved with spring. Winter is the time to hibernate, the time to drink lots of tea, the time to take long hot baths, read really good books, sleep and write.....and knit. I have never been a tremendous knitter. Can't do a cable stitch if my life depended upon it, but I can turn the heal of a sock with the best of them. I have yet to tackle a sweater, but recently set about with my new set of bamboo knitting needles and I think I may have hit upon the makings of a sweater without really trying. I learned how to knit from my mother years ago and then promptly forgot again until the thought of having a sheep around the farm sparked my interest. As though by simply having a sheep would lead to reams and reams of yarn as if by magic...... I like to dream. I bought my daughter a book on basic stitches and then proceeded to nab it from her time and again to refresh my memory on how to do simple stitches, how to cast on and bind off, knit, pearl, etc. Then, I found my favorite of all knitting books. Knitting Rules by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. It combined no nonsense patterns with a witty delivery that led me to read most of the book just for the fun of it. I used her instructions to finally figure out how to knit a sock using 4 knitting needles. My first sock was a bit of disaster, looking more like a sock for an elephant than a sock for a person, but I got the basics down and now, I can honestly say that every one I have knit gets slightly better than the last. Can I just say, knitting socks is way too much fun, but the hardest part is that you have to do two of them! My patience is usually good for about 1 and 1/2 socks and then I get side tracked on some other project like cleaning out closets for a while until the kid that I was intending the pair of socks for has grown and will no longer fit them. It is a good thing that I have five kids - one of them can always use a pair of socks.

The biggest problem is that I get going on several projects at once and have to try to remember the patterns or counts on each one. One of these days I am going to turn a heel on a hat without thinking.

This is the current state of about four projects in my house:

One resides in my cubbie in the entryway....a half finished sock from last year....I desperately hope it still fits someone

Two new skeins of yarn with needles that my son and daughter have been toying around with. They haven't been completely bitten by the knitting bug yet, but they pick it up when I am busy in the middle of my knitting and ask me to help them get going again. Perhaps someday, when they are in their 30s and trapped in a house with a bunch of wild kids they will call me up and thank me for teaching them how to knit.

My new bamboo needles and the work in progress (even though I have no idea what it may actually become) I used to be a strictly metal needle person - the yarn seemed to slide better, but these needles are awesome! I can knit along to any movie and not have someone turn to me and say, "Man, are those things loud!" as the "tick, tick, tick" noise of the needles slowly drove them insane. These bamboo needles are silent. I am now stealth knitter.

This year....it's hats. And whatever large thing I end up making with the orange yarn on my big needles. Hats are fast and I can use up all the left over yarn from knitting socks last year. I turned this little cap out in two days while standing around in the kitchen waiting for food to cook and watching Christmas programs with the kids. Generally, it looks better when it is actually on a person and my kids are all competing for who gets to have it....it is Christmas time and I have Ella's name....hmm....I had her try it on just to be sure it fits.

And so, winter will continue to go by in a knit one, pearl two kind of fashion until I can sink my hands into the soil again and get back to the gardens.

Raising Tea

I love herbal tea. It is the English in me. Tea, in the day, was all there was for medicine and really, many of today's medicines are simply distillates from plants. Digoxin, a potent heart medication is a derivative of Foxglove, a lovely flower that grows in my yard. Aspirin is a derivative of the Aspen tree bark. Penicillin is derived from a mold that blows about on the very wind. Ask any herbalist or homeopath and they will be able to expound the virtues or terrors of thousands of plants, flowers and herbs. It is very enlightening to talk with people that know and use medicinal plants regularly because you come to realize how much nature provides for us. For almost every ill there is a cure. The hardest part is just figuring out which one will work best for you and where you can find them. I remember the exact moment that I fell in love with flower gardening. I was kneeling on a small triangular plot of soil at my old house in Winona. I had just dug out the soil and had it piled up next to me and I was planting hyacinth bulbs and daffodil bulbs that would come up the next spring. Maybe it was the day - it was a beautiful fall day with the light shining on my back, the soil still warm under my hands and the air so crisp and clean. All was right with the world in that one moment - the light, the air, the humus, ... I fell in love with gardening. Now, I had grown a vegetable garden when I was going to school in Iowa, but I hadn't fallen in love with that type of gardening. That seemed like a lot of work at the time....still does to some extent, but suddenly flowers were my thing. The house in Winona was also the first place that I started to grow some herbs, but then life intervened and we moved to LaCrosse and it was crazy busy with two full time jobs and three kids and before I knew what happened we were here on the farm in Iowa. There wasn't much to the yard in terms of flowers when I first moved in. There was an old rose bush and a few bulbs that popped up in the spring, but other than that, not much to work with ....But, now I had room and time - two things that are very helpful when planning a big flower garden. My husband would probably say that I have gone completely over board. Approximately 85 percent of the front yard has been taken over by my flower gardens and I have my eye on the other 15 percent still requiring a lawn mower. I love taking the "morning constitutional" through the flower gardens. They are more my sanity gardens than anything. My gardens are where I hide from my children, but am still close enough to the house to hear any of them if they truly need me. Flowers are strictly beautiful, something pretty to look at that soothes the soul, but herbs are flowers with a mission. They are kind of a cross over. They aren't flowery and showy, but many of them will, at some point in their lives, produce flowers that the butterflies and hummingbirds absolutely love. My herb garden started out small. A little oregano, a little basil and a few chamomile plants. My downfall (or so my husband would likely term it) is the garden center next to the grocery store. How convenient! For a while I think I would buy $30 worth of groceries and $75 worth of plants! And when I wasn't buying plants, I was buying books to better understand the plants and where they would grow best. Suffice it to say, I now have a fair number of herb and plant books that help to select which ones will grow the best in my area and what they can be used for. I also have acquired a fair number of books explaining how to make useful things out of herbs, not the least of which....is tea!

So What's The Difference?

The tea that you buy in the store is usually good, it comes in little bags and there are sometimes wonderful sayings on the box or on the tags of each individual bag, but it has been around a while. It has probably been factory farmed, dried, processed, mixed, bagged, boxed and then shipped. Fresh is always best....and by fresh I mean picked off the plant and put into tea. This is hard to do in Iowa in the winter. So, I play the part of a squirrel and during the summer I collect plants and flowers and squirrel them away for later use in the dark, cold days of winter. The wonderful thing about most of the herbs and flowers that make the best tea - they grow like weeds and often are weeds. My bee balm happily reseeds itself every year.....all over the garden. Every spring I have to patiently either remove it from its new favorite spot and put it back where it belongs (in my mind at least), or I let it run wild and form beautiful drifts of color in mid summer. As you can see from the picture, I prefer the later of the two options. Who am I to say where a flower will grow best. No flower I have ever known has read the text books....they like what they like. Actually, one of the most obnoxious weeds, stingy nettle, makes a very nice tea. While I was out hunting mushrooms this last spring, I was completely skunked in finding any morels on many days, but I did go through many lovely nettle patches. Nettle, although very painful to work with (especially when you find yourself without a pair of gloves),it does make a great tea that is very good for people with respiratory problems. On the days that I didn't bring home mushrooms, I brought home bags full of stingy nettle instead. Herbs are wonderful things to grow. A little sun, a little rain and they are good to go. It takes almost nothing to make herbs completely happy. So happy, in fact, that they will spread themselves all over the garden to the point of becoming a nuisance. My Lemon Balm has taken on this trait. Every time I turn my head, it has gone wild and spread itself everywhere. Thankfully, it is one of my favorite teas, so I am never without in the winter months. And weeding it out a garden full of unwanted Lemon Balm leads to the most wonderful citrus smell filling the air. Calendula, is another of my favorite all purpose, flower, herb and medicinal plants that loves to spread itself all over the garden....but really, who would be unhappy to see this gorgeous flower growing in their yard? So, the growing of herbs for teas is definitely NOT a problem! The control of them might be.

When to Harvest

For most plants that will be used as tea, the best time to harvest is before they flower. This works well for the flower garden as well because if you remove to tops of some of the herbs they form their flowers later in the season and prolong the flowering time overall. The one exception to the rule of picking before they flower is Chamomile....those you actually pick the flowers - which seems almost cruel to do to those cute daisy-like flowers, but I enjoy them ten times more in the middle of winter. Chamomile flowers I simply toss in a freezer bag in the freezer right away, without drying, to maintain all their freshness.

The best time of day to harvest is usually in the early mornings when the essential oils and nutrients are highest in most of the herbs....but there are the occasional plants that are better to pick at night - this is where the books sometimes come in handy. I tend to not pay much attention to what time of day I am picking as long as I get them hung up to dry right away.

Drying is a piece of cake. A sharp scissors, a piece of string or rubber band and someplace to hang them where they can dry. I tend to not put them in direct sunlight as that seems to bleach the leaves out while they are drying and I can only imagine that it causes them to loose during that process. Typically, an upside down tomato cage works very well, but really any place in my kitchen has been known to have herbs drying on them. I tie small bundles together and then hang them upside down to dry for a few weeks. If the weather is exceedingly humid like it was this last summer, I dry them a few minutes in a 250 degree oven and then strip off their leaves, put them in plastic Ziploc bags and put them in the freezer, or I put them in air tight containers for the winter. I have one entire freezer and one shelf of my cupboard packed with these herbs.

A list of the herbs that I have grown and saved for this winter include:

• Bee Balm

• Chamomile
• Stingy Nettle
• Peppermint
• Lemon Balm
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage I could add Catmint to this list, but that never seems to make it past my cats.

Every one of those herbs listed is a perennial, except for the Rosemary. That means that every year, without fail, those herbs come back (typically with a vengeance) and all I have to do is pick them and dry them to be fully stocked with tea all winter long. When it was just me, this didn't take much, but my kids have now latched on to the tea and how wonderful it is, so my stock pile has grown.

A Spot of Tea

To make a great cup of tea, as only the English (and the Japanese) can do, you need only three things: Loose tea leaves, a pot and boiling water. It helps, however, to have an actual tea pot. This one came to me by way of a friend, who, when hearing that I had an interest in loose leaf tea, managed to come across this little gem at a thrift shop. I have yet to find another like it, but I am always on the lookout. The basket holds the tea leaves and keeps most of them from finding their way into your tea.....but lets just enough through for a reading of the tea leaves later.

If you don't have an official "tea pot" then a regular coffee pot will work and then just strain the tea through a coffee filter as you pour it into your cut to filter out the loose tea leaves. And, as a complete aside, the chickens absolutely love the left over soaked tea leaves in their daily ration.

Use whatever tea leaves you have stored. In my case I usually like a mix of Lemon Balm, Peppermint and Chamomile, but I vary it sometimes to include Sage, Rosemary, Thyme, Cinnamon, Bee Balm, Nettle, Cayenne Pepper (very good for the digestion), or Ginger....whatever combination you feel like dreaming up or (better yet) what you feel your body needs. I am always amazed at the intuitive sense of our own bodies. There are many times when I will be making a pot of tea with some nagging problem lurking, - a head ache, an upset stomach, a sore throat, etc. So, I toss in the pot what I feel will make a good tea for that night and then while it steeps I look up in one of my many herb books what the herbs that I am using are supposed to be good for. Nine times out of ten, I have put together a tea that is good for what ails me. This last Friday, my daughter came to me with a horrible sore throat and a fever. Great! Going into the weekend, no doctor's office open and what looked like the makings for Strep throat. Gave her some ibuprofen and made some tea that was heavy on Thyme and Cayenne pepper. Hot tea with honey can cure just about anyone of anything. As she finished her tea, she came over to me and said, "hey Mom, my throat doesn't hurt anymore!" By Monday, she was doing great...no more sore throat. Chances are good that it was just a passing virus, but even then....3 days is a pretty good recovery time if you ask me.

The most important step to making a great cup of tea is to let it steep. Minimum of 5 minutes and really the longer it steeps the better. My husband will often find that I have left tea in the tea pot overnight when he goes to clean it. He poured one such cup of tea in a cup for me to reheat and I thought it was a cup of coffee because it was so dark in color - it was wonderful! I am also a big proponent of the "tea cozy". Keeping your tea pot warm with the steeping tea inside helps to bring out more flavor. A little honey added for sweetening and you will have the perfect cup of tea.

Ham and Eggs

What goes really great with eggs? Yeah, you guessed it. We figured that since we had officially launched into having animals on the farm that we would try for a well rounded farm and bring on a few pigs.

I love pigs. Grew up with them for the most part (and, no, that is not a veiled reference to living with my brother). We always had a few on the farm for 4-H purposes for my brother and eventually for me when I got old enough. We even had a sow named Gus, that had a litter of piglets one year. The runt, Porkie, lived in our basement for about 3 weeks drinking milk from a baby bottle attached to the end of a hockey stick......hmmm, maybe that is where the idea of Lambie in the basement came from.....

There are very few farm stories from when I was a kid that didn't somehow involve a pig in one way or another. Leaping Leland, Gus, Dr. Jekyll, Brutus....all pigs of legend on our farm. Our pigs always had a great time of it. They were never confined. We had a wonderful English type piggery at our farm in Minnesota - they could come inside the hog house at any time, or be outside in the cement walled enclosure if they wanted. And, if they were very good pigs, we would set up a low electric fence and run them out onto dirt and then I would overflow the horse tank and let the water trickle down to the hog wallow where they would happily lounge for the entire day like crocodiles in a swamp with only their eyes and noses above the mud.

People that don't know pigs always assume that they are very dirty animals when actually, the exact opposite is true. Pigs are, by nature, very clean animals and highly intelligent. Of the farm animals, the pig ranks the highest in GPA. If they are given half a chance, and a little room, they keep their enclosures clean.

The very worst thing that modern farming practices have done is to confine these wonderful animals. If this entire blog does nothing more than convince just one person to consider where their meat comes from and consider that their "meat" at one point had a life that should have been worth living, then it will have been entirely worth all the writing.

As a veterinarian, we are required to learn about some production animal medicine. We have to have the basics down for approximately nine species - cats, dogs, pigs, chickens, cows, horses, goats, sheep, turkeys....and, as you can see, most of those species are production animals. So we learn about the antibiotics that get put into feed to help them grow quicker or protect them from disease since they are raised in such large quantities in such close quarters. What people don't understand....not even veterinarians in many cases, is that this is not the way these animals developed. They didn't develop to live in tiny confinement units with hundreds, if not thousands of others. If you take them out of that horrible artificial environment and put them in a more natural setting, guess what?..... they don't need any of the food additives or antibiotics to survive. The salmonella and pathogenic E. coli strains disappear.

I have seen confinements, been in them as well and I can tell you with all honesty that I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy much less an animal that lives and breathes to rut in the dirt. It is sad to see a pig in a confinement. They are stressed from the first day there and they are denied every essence of what being a pig really means.

CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) this is what they are typically called in the business. In the business of agriculture, an animal is reduced simply to an end product from the moment of its birth. It is only seen as a "unit of production" as in "how many units of production can we fit into that new building". We have become so focused on producing as many units as possible in the smallest space possible, that we have completely forgotten that these so called units are beings with a similar physiology to our own.

What is sadder still.....most non-farming people have no understanding of the conditions that these poor animals suffer in before they are butchered and served up to us in a grocery store under so much plastic wrap. Movies like Food Inc have definitely helped to open peoples' eyes and journalists like Michael Pollan have also helped with books such as An Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, but what helps the most?....drive around and look at where these animals are living! If you live anywhere in the Midwest I can almost guarantee that you can find some close by. It is depressing, disheartening and simply wrong on so many levels and the apathy that we have for these animals.....even more wrong.

It depresses me, as a veterinarian, to see animals treated this way. I stand very much opposed to the American Veterinary Medical Association's stance on antibiotic use in animals not to mention the entire idea of a CAFO in and of itself. For a group of people whose lives and careers are devoted to the care and well being of animals, we are a sad lot when it comes to production animals. I typically get the response, "well, they are just food animals" to which I say, any animal that will be forced to give up its life for me deserves to be treated better than they are.

I can sense my production animal vet friends sharpening their knives to come after me. Questions such as, "Well, how would you suggest we raise enough animals for this country then?"

Easy! Small family farms. The way that it was done a generation ago, before Americans became fat and slow and idiotic. Joel Salatin, owner and operator of Polyface Farms in Virginia has been farming with a conscience and sustainably for years. We all bemoan the loss of the "family farm" and hate to see corporate farms take over. Why do they take over? Because we buy their cheap, confinement raised, unsustainable meat, that's why. If we were to STOP buying it, the confinements would disappear.

If I can say nothing else about this issue, it is this......PAY ATTENTION! Notice where your food comes from, how it was raised. If you cannot account for its well being, then you shouldn't be eating it. We are what we eat and likewise, we are what our food eats as well. If our food is raised up to its elbows in shit....it is very likely that we will soon be up to our own elbows in shit (metaphorically, if not literally).

Alright, enough soap boxing for a while.....back to the pigs. One of my clients happened to have pigs that she raised. Farmers that actually farrow pigs are starting to become fewer and farther between (another type of corporate takeover, I'm sorry to say) but I lucked out with her because she had just had a litter of piglets one day when she came in for some other animal related service. We struck a bargain.....2 piglets at weaning for a bag of cat food.

I received 28 pounds of piglet and she went home with 17 pounds of cat food. Who said bargaining wasn't alive and well.

Two tiny little pigs in our new "piggery" section of the shed. They looked so small and lost the first few days. There were times when it appeared that they had disappeared entirely because they would be buried under the straw beneath the heat lamp, but pigs are very food motivated animals and within a few days they recognized us as the prime "food givers".

The reason that pigs are one of the main "meat" animals is that they are about 99% muscle. This was quickly realized as they grew incredibly fast and could move 60 pounds of cement block around with just their snout. We had to catch and treat the smaller of the two pigs once with a shot of antibiotics, but catching him and holding him up long enough to give the shot was a full workout of its own.

We had toyed with the idea of naming them or not. I was one to suggest that maybe we shouldn't name them, as then it becomes exponentially harder to eventually eat them, as discovered by the "Bob noodle soup" incident. So, we decided to name them based solely on marks....we had "Patch" and "Bongo" .....how exactly we came to Bongo is a bit of a mystery, but it involved a thesaurus and an alternate meaning for the word "stripe" I believe.

Pigs love to play. They chase each other, they have running "dashes" and will often make a "woffing" noise that sounds a little like a dog bark when they are having a good time. They are mischievous and humorous and very friendly. I made friends quickly with Patch and Bongo because I almost always had old produce from the garden that I would cart over for them to have. That, and I would share my beer with them.

Pigs will eat just about everything. They are omnivores just like us, but they are much less particular about what they eat. Left overs were a main staple of their diet at our farm. We would save all the scrap produce that we peeled off carrots or potatoes, left over onions, squash seeds, old beans, etc and take them out to the pigs at the end of the day. They would come running for any treats that we would bring. Old windfall apples, peach pits, corn cobs, watermelon rinds, rotting squash and cucumbers, pulled up grass weeds.....any vegetarian produce that we could come up with they loved. We had a strict rule though....no meat, although there was one instance of them catching a chicken on their own and making quite a feast of it. Eggs and milk however were allowed.....so they weren't vegan pigs. They also had an incredible sweet tooth and loved the chocolate chips and marshmallows that sometimes found their way out to them.

Our Patch and Bongo went from 14 pounds each at the start to well over 260 pounds within 6 months. And then it was time to go to market. The week before they left however, they received a special treat every day and split a beer between the two of them the night before.

Thankfully, we live in a small town where there is a small butcher. These, too, are becoming harder to find as the USDA grows in strength and tries to further limit what people can and cannot eat.....apparently it is fine to eat unwholesome, CAFO meat, but healthy happy meat....not so much. But I digress.

Was it difficult to watch Patch and Bongo go off to market? Yes! The shed was a sad and quiet place suddenly, but they had been reaching an age and size that they were clearly uncomfortable and the place had to be vacated so that we could clean it out and get it ready for winter and then, in turn, next year's piglets. The meat from those two pigs filled a chest freezer for us and fed our family of 7 as well as two other families throughout the winter. I cannot express to you how wonderful is bacon that has been raised on marshmallows, beer and fresh air. So, as sad as it was, we gave those two pigs the happiest life we could, we loved them well and cherished their bodies that helped to feed us. They were well treated and well thought of their entire lives and even after.....I would be happy if as much could be said for me when I die.

The Advent of the Lamb

I had nothing to do with this one. In fact, my exact words were, "No! They are nothing but problems....No." But, I guess I shouldn't really have been surprised when my words were not heeded.....she was really kind of cute.

It is a problem when the bus driver, who sees your kids every day and talks with them, also happens to raise sheep. It was early spring, lambing season, and he happened to talk with the kids about taking on a bottle baby lamb. The kids, of course, then passed this on to Keith.

We had just put a new roof on the "chicken shed" but had agreed that there was plenty of room in it to add a few other animals. Little did I know how quickly that would happen....a bit like Field of Dreams "if you build it, they will come".

Somehow, and here is where is all gets a little questionable as to who actually called whom initially, but Gene and Keith somehow got to talking. I have my suspicions that it was Keith that called Gene. Regardless, I came home from work to find a small, weak, seven day old lamb in my kitchen. She was all legs and really not much else - nothing to her. She was one of a set of triplets, and while sheep do alright with two lambs, three is a bit of a stretch to feed. This one apparently, was the odd man out at almost all the feedings. According to the bus driver, she had been drinking from a bottle, but that first night (and for many following nights) we struggled to get any milk down her at all.

We took her out to the shed because I just didn't feel that it was good to get her used to living in the kitchen....that didn't work - it was just too dark and cold to leave that tiny little beast out there all alone! We tried to introduce our outdoor dog, in the hopes that her Great Pyrenees breed would come out and take to her....no go, but she did almost have lamb chops for dinner. We thought that maybe even something like a cat would befriend her and help her out....nope, they were too freaked out by her, but they did want her milk.

Back in the house we went and we set up a place in the basement for her to live. The containment was essentially the same as the original brooder that we had used for the chicks when they first came. This confinement lasted all of about 20 minutes. But, she did find a spot in the corner to call her own, so we went with it and moved the straw and blankets to that corner of the basement which was close to the wood burning stove....smart lamb.

Approximately one week into this little lamb adventure and she still wasn't gaining any weight. That is not a good thing in a young lamb's life. Babies of all species need to be taking in enough nutrients and calories to grow - she hadn't grown a bit. We despaired that maybe she wasn't going to make it. Then I stopped and remembered that I am, in fact, a veterinarian and should know how to handle this conundrum.

The next day at work I gathered together a few items that I thought might be of help, namely a 60 cc syringe and a red rubber feeding tube. She had to have nutrients one way or another and if she didn't take it in herself, then she was going to get it via feeding tube. In general, this isn't too difficult of a thing to do for most animals. Sliding a tube to the back of the throat naturally elicits a gag reflex and they swallow and if you pass the tube with the swallow....it goes down the right tube. I showed my husband how to check to be sure that it is in the stomach - there should be negative pressure on the syringe when you pull back. If the syringe fills with air, you have inadvertently passed the tube into the trachea, or windpipe, and that can cause huge problems if you were to then pass the formula down that tube right into the lungs.

So, after refreshing myself with how to do this, and then teaching Keith how to do this, "Lambie" was thereafter subjected to three times daily feedings whether she liked it or not. That, and a shot of penicillin and she was well on her way to gaining weight.

We tube fed her for about three weeks and then, finally, the grass started to green up a bit and suddenly she realized that she was a herbivore. She never looked back after that point, but she had developed quite a bad habit of coming into the house. For the three weeks that she was being tube fed, she occupied a spot either behind our front door amongst the shoes, or downstairs in the basement by the wood stove. She bonded to my husband because he was, after all, her main care giver. She followed him all over the farm and would bound around him like a crazy gazelle, pronking, leaping and inadvertently running headlong into him and anything else that was in her way.

I think the original plan was to raise her up and then take her to the local butcher shop. That is very hard to do with animals that you have tube fed, worried over, and then watched grab hold of life for all they are worth and enjoy it with as much vivacity as a baby lamb. I suspect now that Lambie is a permanent, life long resident of the farm.

A Fence Emerges

As much fun as it was to have a lamb come traipsing into the house, it was also kind of messy as they are not exactly careful about where they leave their deposits. We had to have another place for her to stay. The north corner of the chicken house was fixed up into a very nice stall for her to stay in during the nights and during the day, she wandered around with Keith. We needed a fence however, and this became readily obvious when she wandered up to the house and happily started nibbling on my tulips. She is actually lucky to have survived that event at all.

A fence was planned out and materials purchased. I attempted to set a few posts, but as is typical, they were not just the way Keith had pictured in his mind, so I let him take over and slowly, the fence emerged. "Your fences need to be horse-high, pig-tight, and bull-strong. " Keith got all of those with the fence that he put in. You would often see him out there tamping in a post with Lambie attempting to climb on his back.

There is a reason that I originally said, "No" to this whole lamb idea. I grew up with a bottle lamb, actually two of them....Burt and Ernie. Ernie wasn't bad, but Burt would head butt you really hard any chance he got. I was happy the day that Burt left the homestead. We had another sheep at some point too named "Doc" and he would get out and promptly steel something from the shed and drop it somewhere out in the yard. This became a real problem when my dad was fixing a car and the sheep kept running off with parts. Lambie was working at becoming as much of a nuisance as Burt and Doc had been, but the fence did seem to help rein her in a little. Add to that pasture a Shetland pony that we had received a few years earlier and they were pretty good buddies. The thing that we didn't realize in putting in the fence was that the chickens now were within a pasture as well. We thought that they would leap over it - they are fully capable of leaping at least as high as the fence, but they seemed oddly content to stay within its confines as well. We now had quite a farm yard - chickens ranging around, a pony and a willy-nilly sheep that seemed to get a profound kick out of herding the feisty rooster "Brownie" around. She was the only one that he didn't spur every chance he got, he would instead flee from her. I think it was mainly that she was just so unpredictable - like a bipolar person off their meds, you just never knew what she might do.

Food is a huge thing for Lambie - almost ironic in some ways given that we couldn't get her to eat for the first three weeks of her life. She and Casper vie for any chicken feed that they can possibly lick out from under the dog of the chicken coop, and if anyone happens to leave a door unlocked you can bet that Lambie will be in there and she doesn't hesitate to let in anyone else to help with feasting on any food that she can uncover. More than once we have come into the chicken shed to find it in complete disarray with Lambie happily munching down on cat food and a flock of chickens at her feet helping as well.

How To Shear a Sheep (or Not)

If we weren't going to use her for lunch meat, we had to come up with some purpose for her existence on the farm.....not that the horses really have much use, but they clean up any hay that we have lying around. Sheep are a wonderful dual purpose farm animal - meat and fiber are both possibilities, so we opted for the fiber. We weren't about to splurge on an electric clippers for one sheep, so we thought that we would try the old fashioned way of shearing a sheep - hand shears. If you have never seen one of these, they look like really big, sharp, metal scissors that are sprung so that the only motion you have to do is to close the scissors to snip the wool. Biggest drawback is that it requires a strong wrist to use these babies and you are working on a living animal that is not always lying still, so you are almost bound to snip the skin periodically as well as the wool.

Lambie had no idea what was coming for her the morning that we decided to give it a try. The entire family meandered out to the pasture to watch the event. The book makes this look like a fairly simple thing. Usually, when you get a sheep set up on their butt, they kind of relax and stop wrestling.....or so the book says. Lambie clearly did not read this part of the book. The book also shows just one person doing the shearing and holding the sheep all at the same time. Clearly, this was a person who had had more practice than we did.

She came to Keith, as she always does, and he attempted to get her set up the way the book describes, on one hip. The hard part was that she weighs almost as much as Keith does. What followed was similar to watching a wrestling match, and unfortunately Keith wasn't coming out the victor without a serious fight. It was amazing to see how many legs a four legged creature seemed to have when she was struggling to stand up right. Eventually, she was brought down for the count, but it was more or less on her side and it took both of Keith's hands to keep her that way so there was no way that he was going to be able to use the shears at the same time.

I launched in with the sheep shears and managed to get going on quite a roll. Once you find the plane in the wool that is actually clean, it goes along quite nicely, but then you have to flip the sheep over at some point. This allowed Lambie the upper hand for the moment and she used it to her best advantage. She jumped up and was off like a shot having now decided that these people were clearly out of their minds. The book also mentions trying to keep the fleece clean. This is very hard to do when half of it is still attached to the sheep as they are running through all kinds of farmyard muck.

Another few minutes to catch her, another wrestling match and she was down on the other side and the sheering could continue. The only time she would really flail was when the shears would inadvertently pinch some skin, but unfortunately that usually led to a hoof to the head or a lip or some other sensitive body part.

Eventually, the wool was off. It wasn't necessarily pretty, but it was off. Lambie looked a little like a piece of foam that had had chunks cut out of it, but she didn't seem to mind all the kids giggling at her new do. Now, what to do with the fleece, which was nowhere near "fleecy white" It was full of dirt, manure and straw. Washing was the first order of business.

Dawn dish soap, Woolite and a lot of patience are necessary to get wool clean. I washed it twice and got all the gross disgusting things out of it. I wasn't perfectly clean, but good enough to start carding. I found some carding combs on ebay and had them in hand within a few weeks.

Now, I would love to be able to say that I have taken the time to card and spin the wool, but unfortunately, I have not. It sits where it has been for several months and taunts me with tracking down my grandmother's spinning wheel which currently resides at my parent's house. Maybe with next spring's wool, which I picture as a perfect, clean fleece obtained from a calm, relaxed sheep, I will feel inspired to card and spin it all. But then again, it is Lambie I am dealing with.