I had spinal surgery in April of 2022, so I spent a lot of time last spring sitting in our recliner and watching the birds in our yard. On April 18, I wrote about a house finch couple who had decided to build their new home on the paddles of the ceiling fan of our back deck. They brought load after load of nesting material, positioning it carefully on one of the fan paddles. As soon as a breeze kicked up – and we have many breezes up here on the ridge – the entire nest would fall to the decking, leaving them once again homeless. The pair was quite determined, though, so in short order they wou ..read more

Our oldest llama, Orbit, will be eighteen years old this year Even though we have only seven sheep in our flock these days, we still have three llamas – all of them old in llama years – to guard them (the average lifespan of a llama is about fifteen years and ours are between fourteen and eighteen years old this year). We need two llamas to protect our sheep against the occasional bear, so we keep three of them – now all good friends – to work together in their old age to protect our flock. Our sheep know that the llamas mean safety, and it isn’t unusual to sit outside and hear one or more of ..read more

When we downsized our flock last year and made the decision to no longer produce lambs, we realized that instead of shearing just before lambing, we now had the option to shear whenever we wanted – within constraints. Of course, our date of shearing is primarily determined by the schedule of our shearers, as they only pass through this area four times each year: around the first of the year, in mid-April, in early July and in mid-October. When a shepherd finds a shearer they like, it is a near miracle (good shearers are few and far between in the U.S.), so we do everything we can to make them ..read more

This is the first time in twenty-three years that we don’t have any lambs in our flock. When we bought our first sheep in 2000, we purchased two adult ewes and a ram lamb. The next year, the ram was no longer a lamb, but one of the two ewes gave us twins, so we again had lambs on the farm. After that, the number of lambs that we had in the flock each year increased exponentially as the previous year’s lambs began delivering lambs of their own. Eventually, however, we reached our limit determined by available space, time and physical energy. Depending on the year, flock health and other factors ..read more

There comes a time each spring when we shift our sheep from “winter mode” to “summer mode” – from the barren cold of the non-growing season to the fun and sun of spring and summer. Exactly when this transition occurs depends on a lot of different factors. Obviously, the weather factors into this since no matter how much we want our sheep out in our fields grazing, if the grass is still dormant, our pastures have little to offer them. This winter, things were a bit different than usual, since we have so few sheep now – and no lambs to worry about. In previous years, we had to make sure that our ..read more

I know that when you read this blog, you kinda expect to read about our sheep, but my mind isn’t on sheep this week. It’s on chickens. We’ve got a problem in our chicken coop that is making me crazy. We have eleven chickens in a run next to our garage. There are only hens; no roosters came with this order. The eleven hens have access to a small shelter with two levels and nesting boxes in the top level. The bottom level is where they can find dry food, shelter and a roosting rod. Oh, and that’s where they get regular visits from our local vole population that I am still trying to move out – bu ..read more

Since our move to Virginia in 2018, we’ve wanted to plant a forsythia in our yard – you can see what they look like in the free stock photo on the right. Their sunny yellow blooms are among the first flowers to be seen each spring, and they can’t help but remind us that winter’s cold will indeed give way to warmth and new growth. Besides that, they often require some pruning to keep them controlled, and my sheep love variety in the prunings we throw over the fence for them to taste! I don’t know whether they would like forsythia, but I’d like to find out! A forsythia bush is ornamental, and a ..read more

I have been working at understanding sheep color genetics for about twenty years, give or take. Setting an exact start date is nearly impossible because at first, it wasn’t a project. It was a curiosity: how on earth did we get this lamb from this dam and that sire? It didn’t seem to make sense, so I began looking for answers. The funny thing is that although there were a lot of answers available to my many questions, I soon realized that the more questions were answered, the more questions we had without answers. Somewhere during that time, I began to try to answer some of the most interestin ..read more

As is the case in most of the United States, there is no reliable way of knowing when spring will bring budding trees, warmer temperatures and gentle rains to the mountains of southwestern Virginia. Punxsutawney Phil (the Pennsylvania groundhog), The Farmer’s Almanac and the wooly bear caterpillar are all fun, but also less than accurate. Like everyone else, we watch weather forecasts and look to the skies for the coming of warmer weather. Believe it or not, unless something dramatic happens, it seems that perhaps spring has arrived early at Pine Knoll Sheep and Wool! At first, I didn’t want t ..read more

We have done a lot of construction on our home since late 2017 when we purchased it. We added on a garage, a laundry room and an office, then we added a stamped concrete patio behind the garage – followed by a pergola over the patio. To better frame the house, we added rock-lined flower beds and stamped concrete walkways with exterior lighting, and we filled the beds with small trees, flowering shrubs and perennials to add color. It has been a labor of love, with each step carefully considered to make the most of outdoor relaxation and entertaining. One of the projects I started this winter wa ..read more