I took a break from our camp sock yarn this week to clean up some off-white Suri alpaca floor sweeps from a shearing. (Yes, I know most...

If you follow us on social media, you may have noticed that some of our sheep are wearing coats at this time of year. We coat our sheep to keep the hay and straw (vegetable matter or VM) out of their fleece. A coat is exactly what it sounds like. It slips over the neck of the sheep to cover their back and sides with leg ties to keep it in place. We haven’t found that the coats are very common on sheep farms here in Canada (when we bought them from the U.S. company, they comme

A current growing pain we have is how to economically keep the sheep’s fleece as clean as possible. Unfortunately, the nature of wool means that once vegetable matter (hay in our case) gets in there it is practically impossible to remove. Our Belfast Mini Mill equipment does remove some of it as a by-product of processing, but it definitely has limits, and it definitely doesn’t remove all of it! It is meant to start with relatively clean wool fleece. So, the goal becomes keep

Toby Keith passed away last week. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, he was a country artist that Bryan and I listened to especially in the...

Welcome to the first of four posts in a series about tallow. Tallow is basically rendered animal fat, either from cattle or sheep. For beef tallow, the primary sources of fat include the suet, which is the dense fat located around the kidneys and loins of the animal. In the case of lamb tallow, the term is broader and can mean the fat is from a few different locations, including the internal organs and areas where fat accumulates under the skin. Tallow has been used for vario

When I first started working with sheep, I assumed that over time we would develop some sort of “relationship”. Even at the beginning of...

I think we have mentioned in earlier blogs that I had bought some additional sheep – four rams and five ewe lambs for breeding. They were...

It’s funny how life works. A few months ago, I was not thinking about making soap. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that we could make soap out of lamb fat. Fast forward to today and now my YouTube feed is filled with videos on how to render tallow and how to make soap with tallow. My Google search history consists of articles about the reasons to use tallow in soap, from the hardness tallow contributes to the lather to the benefits to our skin. I have soap on order from a shee

Like most people, I tend to focus on what is not going well or what we didn’t get to, but before we swap out the calendar, I wanted to...

So, the other day I was scrolling through Instagram reels to get a few laughs. I stumbled on one talking about the construction of a...

Back a few months ago when the #tbayinseason folks came out to interview us for their website, we somehow landed on the topic of how we...

My journey to growing garlic started with the passion of one man: Ted Maczka, of Fish Lack in Prince Edward County, Ontario. He was a...

A few weekends ago my daughter and I attended a dye shop training hosted by the Range Fiber Art Guild in Cotton, Minnesota, which is just...

As we continue to learn more about sheep farming and the various (and numerous) procedures associated with the lambing process, it seems...

I’m so looking forward to the next fibre adventure in my life. As a teenager I primarily designed and sewed clothing as my creative...

This is the very first blog post for Borderlands Farm, so I decided to write it about “firsts”. This past month we had our first lamb...