February is a month to wrap up a lot of our production in anticipation of spring and starting a new cycle all over again. During this month we will be processing our lambs and steers for the year and arranging shearing dates for the sheep. Contact Tom, tombarse3@gmail.com, for wholesale pricing on lamb or beef.
The current January thaw has given us a head start on the maple sap collection. The white buckets you may see hanging on trees are collecting sap. Tom has put the taps in the maple trees to collect syrup using a somewhat different system this year. Once it gets into the forties during the day but is still below freezing at night the sap starts to run. (You may also notice the sheep and ponies nibbling on the bark as the sap starts to flow). There can be significant differences in flow even on the same tree depending on whether it is the north or south side, over a large root or under a big branch. The sap flow will turn off when the tree’s internal temperature reaches 45 degrees.
We will be looking forward to getting yarn orders back from 2 new-to-us fiber mills. Painted Sky is on the Eastern Shore and Round Barn Fiber Milll is in Illinois. The closure of several mills this past year has meant that we have had to look farther afield to find ones that can process our wool
Preparation of the hides to be tanned is also critical to ending up with a quality product. They must be collected promptly from the butcher and then hand trimmed and salted for several weeks to dry them out. We then take them to Bucks County Furs in Pa or send them to Sterns Tannery in Wisconsin for tanning
Meanwhile the rest of the sheep are mostly just hanging out. We may not like 9 degrees but they far prefer it to 90 degrees! We also are carefully watching hay consumption. Due to the drought this year our production was way down, and we have already had to cut off our regular hay customers to preserve enough for our own stock. We have also started planning for our lambing prep – primarily at this point making sure we get an early March shearing date. (More on lamb prep next month!)