Today I am doing hard things.

Welcome all - it’s been a long hiatus on the farm blog.

As it turns out, raising sheep while working a full time job eats a lot of my time. By the time I have a few minutes to take a breather, the last place I want to be is stuck to a keyboard - and even if I was sitting still long enough to do that, I’m not sure I’d have much in the way of brain cells to contribute anything worthwhile to read.

That said, one of my goals this year was to get better about writing and updating. It’s clearly taken me 5 months to get started on that, but better late than never.

One major difference in farm operations this year as compared to any previous years is that we welcomed our first crop of lambs starting mid-April and now only have one ewe left to lamb. She was a “whoops” breeding - I had intended on giving her another year to heal from an injury before adding pregnancy stress, but she must have wagged her butt at the ram and he went right through the fence. Nature always finds a way it seems.

So far, we have 9 lambs bouncing around the very green pastures (we’ve had a healthy inch or so of rain this spring) and all the ewes are looking good and holding weight just fine. Everyone is about due for some foot trims and a few are starting to stretch their coats a little and are in need of a change to a larger size.

Shearing went well this year and we ended up with a bumper crop of really nice fleeces. Today’s hard thing has been largely centered on photographing and writing product descriptions in the store as well as figuring out some of the e-commerce glitches that come with the territory. Last year, I either sold fleeces in person at the Wool Market or posted fleeces individually on the Raw Wool for Sale board on Facebook and while that worked okay, it was pretty clunky. There were a lot of buyers who purchased fleeces from me who wanted to be on a wait list for first crack at 2025’s clip and the old system made retaining and retrieving the information challenging. Thankfully, our fleece sales were pretty small last year, so with some digging I think I have everyone on the list that wanted to be.

This year, I decided to get my stubborn on and actually use this website (that I pay for) to do actual website things and take care of the e-commerce part of the deal. I think I have the glitches ironed out and will test the checkout in the next day or two.

For now, all raw fleeces are priced with the shipping to anywhere in the contiguous US included. Any other product in the store does not include free shipping - just the raw fleeces. If you’re outside of that area, please use the contact form on this site to ask for a shipping quote. I use Pirate Ship to get the best price possible. In this scenario, rather than set up a specific shipping profile for you through the site, I’ll invoice you separately through PayPal for your purchase.

Down the road a ways, I will have some other wool product offerings - bags of neck wool too nice to throw in the skirtings pile, possibly some washed fleece available by the pound for those who don’t have the means to scour raw wool. If an entire raw fleece is out of your budget, just know there will be other options to give Debouillet a try. In the future I may consider splitting any fleeces that don’t sell by the pound, but it’s a lot more legwork to do that (plus I have to charge shipping on smaller lots) so it’s less than ideal for both of us.

A few notes about this year’s fleeces:

Normally, I would wait until after Estes Park Wool Market (during the 1st weekend in June) to post fleeces for sale. This year, I am likely going to be out of town that weekend, and I don’t anticipate participating in any other shows this year, so it doesn’t make sense for me to retain any of these fleeces any longer than I have to so things are being posted for sale earlier than usual.

I put this information in all the relevant product listings for each fleece, but last year I had a lot of things going on immediately after shearing and the sheep didn’t get re-coated for about 6 weeks. We had some gnarly dust storms that blew through and I couldn’t cope with all of that dirt and sand sticking to the wool and was actually worried it would cause damage. I went ahead and cold-water rinsed out the few sheep that were really caked with dirt. I think this was the right call, but you can tell in the fleeces where some of the lanolin was rinsed out at the tips along with all the crud. There’s no damage to the wool anywhere along the length of the staple and when I’ve washed sample locks, once the whole lock is clean, you can’t tell the difference.

Also, in years past, I’ve skirted the fleeces pretty ruthlessly because the ultimate goal was to put them in a show. Since I am not showing this year, I did not skirt quite as harshly. The fleeces are still very clean, but I left in wool that maybe wasn’t quite as flawless along the edges of where the coats sit. For anyone that purchases, I would like your feedback if I should continue doing this so you get more fiber, or if you only want the pristine prime portions in the future. I’m always on the fence about it.