Tuesday, March 15th - Shearing Day
Aside from hosting a wedding or some other once-in-a-lifetime event, this really is the biggest, single day of the year on the farm.

I spent weeks cleaning the barn so it would be ready to receive these beautiful fleeces! I scrubbed out horse stalls, power vacuumed the floors, set-up my fancy new skirting table, lay down tarps on the already clean floors, organized wood blocks with fleece numbers to mark the fleeces, gathered the notebook that keeps annual evaluations of each fleece, the genealogy records, etc, drew a How-to-skirt-Fleece poster for my helpers and then waited for the starting bell.

My husband Andrew put many long hard hours into cleaning the feedlot. Taking advantage of good weather days, he removed all the winter bedding, realigned gates and put temporary plywood flooring down for the shearer. We were nothing if not prepared.

Tim Kroll, our shearer is a real expert. I wish I had a picture of his hands. He removes a fleece in a single cut, and the sheep grunt as if they were having a massage at the spa. How he maintains his back after wrestling with these 300 pound ballerinas is more than I can figure out!

Monday, Minnesota was hit with a lot of snow. We were still able to drive but the roof on the barn was covered in white. That was merely beautiful until the snow started to melt with the high-noon sun on Tuesday. Madly, we rearranged gates to keep all the sheep out of the dripping snow, ready for shearing and able to be released into their proper group. We have three separate pens right now- one for the pregnant ewes, one for lambs and one for the ewes who are not pregnant. They all have different nutritional requirements and so must be housed separately. Therefore, managing their exit chute out of the shearing area became the challenge of the day. Having a move-as-you-g0 chute system to avoid snow melting off the roof and onto their coats made it nearly an Olympic sport!

My mother, step-dad and daughter-in-law came up to help as did our friend Kayla. All of us in winter snow suits, moving fleeces, measuring and rating them, skirting them, moving gates and generally responding to whatever the day brought. My mother and daughter-in-law loved the smell of lanolin. Every time we brought a fleece inside we were inhaling like mad.

Kudos go to my step-dad for bringing the coffee pot into the barn and running into town to get sandwiches for lunch. I dare say we would have collapsed into the wool out of exhaustion had he not kept us in coffee and food.

10 hours and 35 fleeces later we had successfully made it through the day. Most of the fleeces have been skirted and the rest will be done in a day or two but we succeeded in this the biggest, single day of the year. Now on to lambing.....