The Woolley Farm

I just came into the living room and see Wilden Woolley has pulled a knitting bag off the wall of art, and he’s waiting very patiently for me to work on it.

  Oh how pretty! I wonder what’s inside…

  Oh, wow, I remember this!  I bought it in Ireland. It’s a wonderful mossy green that reminds me of our fields over there in the spring after it rains and everythings all mushy & soggy & mossy. Now, what was I going to make?

   Ah yes, a feather & fan type afghan (now politically correct to call it a ‘throw’).  It was going to be for my friend Patti who has a lake house up here and she has a lodge thing going on in her living room. It’d be perfect for her. Let’s see how far I got:

  oh.  very tiny oh.  not very far (hanging my head in shame). About 4″ worth. I wonder why I got sidetracked; it was such lovely yarn with little bits of stuff in it. It must want to be something else instead of a throw.  Sorry Wilden, but you’re not getting this done up for you tonight. You’ll have to settle for the chenille throw instead. Besides, the dark brown chenille shows off all your loose dog hairs so well…

Yesterday we finished our lambing, with the birth of Knit’s baby boy, a black 9 pound Romney/Moorit. Last night we put another pan of syrup onto boil, and started combing out our 4 cashmeres and 2 pygoras. Daphne the big silver cashmere was full of the fluffy stuff and fun to comb out. Apollo, the male pygora, was so matted we had to shear him and I doubt if the fleece can be used. Athena (the honey colored pygora) cried bloody murder, but we did manage to get a big can full of fine cashmere from her. Goats are so vocal and everything is a crisis to them. They are really drama queens.

We ended up with 2 ounces from Daphne  and 1.5 ounces from Athena and a sheared fleece from Apollo that will have to go to the processor.  For the combed stuff, we’ll start the tedious picking of the guard hairs with tweezers. Great for doing during a movie. The final useable amount should be just over an ounce, which when put into roving and spun will sell for about $18. That’s about 6 hours of work for $18. OK, I don’t wanna do the math on that one, but I’m sure glad Brandon has a REAL job!

Here are pics of Daphne the cashmere and Athena the pygora being combed out. Daphne enjoyed it so much she didn’t want to leave the stand. It feels good to them, plus they get handfuls of grain the whole time. Food & a massage - It’s a day at the spa!

Four pounds & 0 ounces, that is. So he’s gained 1.5 pounds in 3 days.  In celebration, I put him into a new coat, but it’s way too big. Looks good with his sparkly collar though.

I’m also posting a pic of the Tunis I’m working on. Remember that blog of wet wool in the basement? I’m slowly putting it thru the drum carder. Once I have a basket full I can start spinning. I like to spin. Just as fast as I can treadle. Makes me feel like I’m getting somewhere.  where? I don’t know, just… somewhere. Somewhere else. Vroom Vroom

Homer is eating like a pig today! No, wait, he’s eating like a SHEEP!  He drank down 2 ounces (about an inch of formula in the bottom of the bottle) and cried for more but his little tummy was so round & tight I didn’t give him any. Sheep can eat till they explode, they are so numb. Really. It’s true. So I have to measure everything to be sure he doesn’t do that. There’s even a shot for sheep for ‘overeating disease’. Hmmmm…… I wonder….. if it’ll work on sheep, what about ME??? Not that I could give myself a shot, but maybe if I mixed it in my apple martini……

Note in the picture Homer has a new collar to match his outfit. It has shiny rhinestones on it and a little bell. When he walks about on his spindly little legs, he bleats this pathetic little baby cry and the bell jingles. This will be amusing for about a day, till he drives me insane.  Homer is still terribly…well, terribly homely. Shhhh. Don’t say that in front of him, he thinks he’s pretty darn cute.

Here’s Homer waiting for milk to magically appear in his bottle. Note the bottle is bigger than he is. I think I’ll go weigh him and put him into a new jacket. Those doggie coats I knit up for the Yorkie are coming in pretty darn handy. Brandon says I can’t put him in pink, as it’ll turn him into a woosie-sheep, but I’m OK with that. We all don’t need to be RAMs ya know, Brandon!

Click on little pics to make them bigger

As promised, come with us as we tour 3 sugar houses. We woke this morning to 3″ of heavy wet snow, but that did not deter us at all. We were all ready and animals were all fed by 7:00 but the places didn’t open till 9am. We were the first ones there for Pumpkin Hill Farm pancake breakfast in Sebago/Gorham. After a hike up the hill thru the mud, we came to a white tent, where ladies were ladeling out Ployes, a thin pancake batter favored up here in Maine. Ployes originated up with the French Canadians and people in the pancake-know swear by them. They were hot off the griddle, with little cups of syrup and hot coffee. Add 2 sausages, and it’s all the Ployes you can eat for $7.00. The only other thing I would have liked was butter for the Ployes.

We walked across the yard to the sugar house, where the sap was boiling in stainless steel vats and the owners were selling various maple products. There was free vanilla ice cream with maple syrup, too.  I often have this at home, and I add whole walnuts to it — a home made maple walnut icecream. Yum.

After Pumpkin Hill we finally got the truck down thru the traffic another mile to ‘the big one’ - Merrifield Farm. The owners are friends of Jo & Kathy’s. What a place! The line for the maple glazed doughnuts was sooooo long. They also had maple cheddar cheese, maple chili, maple hotdogs, maple hamburgers (not bad, actually!), maple pop corn, maple candy, maple cream (to spread on toast), and maple butter. Oh, and of course, just plain ole maple syrup in various grades from light amber (highest price & clearest) to dark (lowest price, at the end of the season).  This place also had barn tours and wagon rides. I know, I know— we look a little silly in winter coats, sitting out in the mud eating breakfast, but this is TRADITION and it means the end of winter and it’s just the thing to do. The place was mobbed with city people from Portland, so we only stayed about 45 minutes, then we took off for home.

Just down the road from us about a mile is ‘Grandpa Joe’s’, which is run by a friend of ours. This was not the city crowd, like at Merrifields, this was the Baldwin crowd, about 50 of us milling around, eating, visiting, and having fun. country style. We even got a copy of the prize winning recipe from the maple cookoff last year—Free! It’s for Maple Cupcakes by Marilyn Doloff - email me if you’d like the recipe.

We came home with full tummies, hyped up on sugar, and tapped more trees. Brandon sat out in the barn in the sun, reading a book and boiling sap. We’ve got 1 gallon so far, which means we boiled 40 gallons of sap. We just have a turkey pan and a gas ring, so we’re really low tech.  I worked on that Tunis fleece from the basement, got a couple of batts thru the drum carder, & played with Homer.  Brandon will go to sleep tonight dreaming about $40,000 evaporators and I’ll drift off remembering that cheeseburger with maple syrup.  All in all, a perfect day in paradise….

Homer had 2 decent feedings during the night and at 6:30 am consumed almost 2 ounces, which is great!  Wilden has adopted him, but Murphy just wants to attack him, so Homer must stay in the crate unless Murphy is outside. He’s finally got the sucking reflex down pretty good, too. So I think he’s got a very good chance of making it.

We’re off to Maple Sunday tour of sap houses & pancake breakfasts. Will post more later!

Last night at 6pm Surely, our first ever sheep, gave birth to triplets. And yes, it’s SURELY not Shirley; as in ‘Surely she’s going to be a great sheep’, ‘Surely she’s going to stop this obnoxious eating’, and ‘Surely she wouldn’t trample her own babies to get to the grain bucket first…. would she?”  And of course, we named her first twins “Goodness and Mercy”. For you non-religious types that would be “Surely, Goodness & Mercy followed me all the days of my Life, and I shall dwell in the barn House of the Lord Forever.”  As Surely only has 2 teats, and she’s what my vet calls “A bag of guts on 4 sticks”, she did not want the smallest baby, who weighed in at 2.75 pounds. So we have a new bottle baby. (We???  More like I!!!) Unlike 2-Damn & Chilly (renamed Mac & Tosh), who are bottle babies but still with their mom, Homely Homer can’t be left with Surely, who tried to grind him into the ground with her head. Bad Surely! Bad Mommy!

So Homer came into the house last night and into a dog crate in the pantry. He’s so tiny, he doesn’t suck very well, his tongue sticks out the side of his mouth instead of around the nipple. Each feeding he gets about 1/2 oz, if I’m lucky. Most of it ends up dripping down his chin and onto me. I have to be careful he doesn’t inhale it into his lungs. Even a tiny drop could lead to pneumonia, which could be deadly.  Last night he did manage to get the ‘tar’ out of his intestines, but hadn’t peed yet as of 7am. He was still dehydrated and his ‘innards’ weren’t quite ready to work.  

Today we had to go to Cumberland to the annual Sheep Shearing School, where Brandon is an instructor and I do the fleece skirting and help Joan with various other stuff, like showing people where the bathroom is and snickering at rescueing people who have gotten kicked by 150 pound sheep they are trying to shear. Homer was passed from person to person. He FINALLY went pee, and did so all over the sweatshirt of a little girl who was holding him. Then I went to grab him and he pooped all over me. This provided great entertainment for the crowd of about 50 on-lookers. No one wanted to hold him much after that, but I took this as a good sign that his rear end was working properly, so I don’t have to tickle his butt anymore to get him to poop.  People think little lambs are just too darn cute, but they are usually looking at the front end. Ya can’t be squeamish with bottle babies, although Brandon manages a pretty good job at doing just that. In ‘Brandon-World” he “doesn’t do poop”, unless it’s in the barn, then it’s OK.  He’ll sloosh thru 3 feet of manure in the barn, but in the house it’s “Your cockroach of a dog (the Yorkie) left you a present on the rug in the living room and you need to pick it up NOW as it stinks”.  But I digress….  Back to Homely Homer.

He (Homer, not Brandon) is now back in his doggie crate with a full tummy, taking a nap on the hot pad. He’s eating a little better now, and his sucking is stronger, but he’s still too darn tiny to know for sure if he’ll make it. And if he DOES make it, his fate may rest around the corner from the panty in the ‘big white sheep box’ aka the freezer. There are only so many male sheep we can keep and Surely’s babies are not registered, nor do they have very good fleece.  Now before you all SHRIEK and MOAN and Shiver in disgust, remember that it costs $200 a year to raise a sheep and if I’m lucky, I’ll make $20-$40 on the fleece each year. It doesn’t take more than a 3rd grader to do that math.  No wonder farmers are becoming as rare as a Republican Bush supporter in Maine — but I digress yet again!  I said Homer MAY end up as lamb chops, but then again, I don’t even like the taste of lamb, so we’ll see…. Meanwhile, I’ll do whatever it takes to make him live, although at 2am I have to repeat that phase to myself at least 12 times before I can get outta bed for his feeding.

I’ll keep you all posted on Homely Homer’s progress. Keep your hooves crossed for his pulling thru.

   (click to make bigger)

It’s official. It’s spring. And the sap is running. We just took in 10 gallons of sap to boil down tonight. Here are pics of the new-fangled plastic taps and piping and our version of the sap bucket.  If you stick your mouth under the tap , you’ll get a faint taste of sweet maple, very diluted. Not that I’ve ever done that of course. And there’s maple icicles, too, hanging from the tree.

This weekend is Maine Maple Sunday where you get to go around to all the sugar houses and watch them boil down sap. They give out maple syrup over ice cream, maple whoopie pies, hot dogs steamed in maple syrup. And there’s a huge maple syrup pancake breakfast at the church. EVERYONE goes! It’s the social event of the season.

I made whoopie pies yesterday. I left one at the yarn shop last night for Dagny. What happened next is like a CSI episode & is hysterical. Please go here  to read what happened:

http://www.theirishewe.com/mt-static/

Well, imagine my surprise this morning when I found not one, but THREE, great emails on my computer, all telling me how I’ll be a millionaire by the end of the day. First is a letter from poor Mrs. Saniba Thermouli from Nigeria whose husband was beheaded by terrorists and she has to wire some money to a bank in the US to save it from bad bankers. Can you imagine she found ME to trust with her $3,000,000??? And I don’t even know her!  God told her about me, so it must be all right. …

Then there’s Felix :My name is Felix Thambo, leaving in South Africa and I am 47
years old. I have been working with Africa Development Bank for quite a
number of years now, as the Chief Operation Officer to the Private Banking
Service Department. My aim of contacting you is to solicit your sincere
co-operation and assistance based on a financial portfolio of (21.5Million
United States Dollars), placed under my supervision for investment purpose
since 5 years ago. But presently the said Money is lying dormant in another
bank here in the South Africa, where i have transfered it to for safe
keeping and easy transfer. this is  due to the sudden death of the
original owner who left nobody as next of kin to claim this Fund.”  So Good ole Felix wants to give it to ME!

And then, just when I was getting suspicious, a note from Fred:

I am Fred Williams Adams, a Manager in the Bills and Exchange at the
Foreign Remittance Department Of One of the Leading Banks in Ghana. I am
writing this Letter to Ask for Your Support and Cooperation to Carry out
This Business Opportunity in My Department. We Discovered an Abandoned Sum of $US$51,000,000.00(Fifty _One Million Us
Dollars)In an Account That Belongs To One Of Our Foreign Customers Who
Died Along With His Entire Family A Wife And Two Children in November 1999
in an Auto Crash. Since We Heard Of His Death, We Have Been Expecting His
Next-Of-Kin To  Come Over and Put Claims for His Money as the Heir,

Now, I’m sure it’s just me that thinks that if someone REALLY had access to $51 million, they’d be able to afford a spell-check for their computer. I’m just being picky, I know.

By tonight I should have close to $100 million in my bank and all I have to do is give the 3 parties my bank routing # and account number.  I have absolutely no reason to worry, as Allah has picked me out of the whole  world to’help’ these people.

So, I’ll be very busy today, sending my banking info to these people and buying my tickets to Disney for me and my closest 1,000 friends. Don’t you just love it when you wake up to such thrilling emails? People are so nice, aren’t they?  If anyone wants to share my money, I’d be delighted to send you a $1,000,000 or even more. Just send me your account # and routing #s and I’ll wire it right down to your bank…..