The end of March is always punctuated by a series of phone calls - When will you guys get here? Hey, we’re a few days behind. It’s supposed to rain. Should we wait a few days? We’ll be there tomorrow. Making plans for two busy spring days on the ranch: shearing the sheep.
We had good weather for shearing this year – bright skies and calm winds. Some years the spring winds howl all day long, flapping tarps, flinging bits of unsecured wool around, and getting grit into everything. But this year the sun shone and it was almost warm for what seems like the first time this spring, which made the two long days of work much more comfortable for us and our crew.
Of course, good weather can’t disguise the fact that shearing is hard work; it takes the help of many hands to cut, clean, and bag all the wool from the flock. One team sorts the sheep by breed and color and sends them down the alley to the shearing trailer. Inside, the sheep line up in a chute on one side of the trailer with little spring-loaded doors that allow the shearing crew to take the sheep out one by one, relieve each of her wool, and let them out down a ramp into the pasture.
A fantastic Churro fleece! (And a newly shorn sheep photobomb.)
The fleece leaves the trailer by a hole in the floor near each shearer and slides down onto tarps waiting below. This is where the cleaning and baling crew retrieves them, shaking and picking through each one to remove the any second cuttings and excessively soiled areas, and sorting them into graded piles.
Once a pile of fleeces gets to a good size, into the baler it goes to be compacted into heavy rectangular bales that can be easily moved and stacked with the tractor. Although they’re very heavy (as in several-hundred-pound-heavy), this makes the wool much easier to manage for transportation and storage. No one wants wool on the loose, especially outside!
It is pure delight for a fiber lover to see all the newly shorn fleeces, especially the long, marvelously-colored ones from the Churro sheep. A few will be saved for spinning in the grease but most are bagged separately to be made into the variety of natural shades we offer. When the bales are stacked, the tarps are folded and the shearing trailer has driven away with its crew, it feels good to know we’re full up on wool again for the coming year and that the ewes are ready for lambing next month.