Hurricane Farm

We finally found someone to shear our sheep.  We'd placed an ad and had several reponses, but people tend to get busy, time slips by, and before you know it the sheep are sporting dreadlocks.  (And not the nice ones like Erica's!)

We eventually found a "shearer" through our friends at Terrabyte Farm in Canterbury, CT who was not only willing to come over, but who was interested in bartering for some of our meats as well.  Nice.

We ended up with a couple of usable fleeces, and the rest went to various other uses, including bedding for the cat, nesting for some birds, and unknown uses by whatever animal dragged it off into the wetlands (whatever it was left a nice trail, though).

I won't go into the details of our own attempts to shear the sheep in the past.  Suffice it to say we used the old-fashioned hand shears and took about 1000% longer than we should.  We gave it our best, a couple of times even.  But now that we have so many other tasks to keep up with on the farm it was not practical for us to spend so much time at what ended up taking a "real shearer" only a few minutes.

Our "shearer" will return in the Spring to take care of the fleeces on the lambs.  And so the cycle continues.

Is there a term that I should be using instead of "shearer"?  Maybe.  But I kind of like the sound of "shearer."

Hello electric shears!