Sheep and Wool Festival: Adel, IA

The rain clouds parted for a few hours last weekend so the Adel Sheep and Wool Festival could proceed amid raindrops in steamy sunshine. The festival is a unlikely mix of livestock and fiber people. The common denominator, of course, is sheep.

You can distinguish the sheep/goat/alpaca raisers by their outfits: muck boots and jeans. The fiber fans are decidedly more colorful, some wearing hand-loomed garments.

As always, the dog trials were a hoot to watch. The "field" was a puddle-filled, mud-fest with a Border Collie expertly moving three sodden Dorset ewes around in a figure-8, a gate run, then into a corral. The test of wills between dog and ewes is filled with tension and comedy. The ewes create a united front of wet wool and angry attitudes, stomping a front leg in indignation. The dog takes a step closer and the sheep run like ninnies. So much for the show of toughness.

Some dogs exhibit amazing control, dropping on command, and lunging fast in large outruns at a "Way to Me" command. Others are tongue-hanging, crazy-eyed, trigger-happy zealots that shoot the sheep all over the field like pool balls on a billiard table.

I bought a really cool, hand-loomed scarf from an alpaca raiser from Maxwell, IA (C&M Acres). The scarf is made from the fiber from Black Label Johnnie and Alydar (a black- and a white-fleeced alpaca, respectively). Both are pictured on the scarf label. What a cool way to market fiber products--by the alpaca the fiber was shorn from.

New Sheep at Cat Crossing Farm

Meet our new flock! This month we bought five spring Katahdin lambs from a very dedicated breeder who raises a large flock about 10 miles from us. We’ve never raised Katahdins before (over the past 20 years we’ve raised English or Scottish sheep breeds including Cheviot, Jacob, Romney Marsh and Border Leicester). So this is our first American sheep breed. The breed originated in Maine, named after Mt. Katahdin, the highest peak in the state.

Another first is that Katahdins don’t have to be sheared. They are called hair sheep and they grow a thick coat that sheds off in the spring. Our lambs are undocked too, which means that they have long tails. They look more like a flock of little dogs right now.

A very vigilant llama guarded our sheep at their previous home, so our new lambs were totally comfortable with sharing a pasture with our three donkeys and three horses. It’s nice to have sheep again. Just seeing them grazing on the hill makes the farm look so pastoral, so peaceful.

Springtime in The Netherlands

I just got back home from a trip to The Netherlands where I saw millions of blooming bulbs: tulips, narcissus, muscari and hyacinths. The fields of flowers in and around Lisse are beautiful. And surreal. After living in Iowa much of my life, row crops are a familiar sight--long straight rows of green corn and soybeans. But sections of red, yellow and pink flowers aren't. Big blocks of color like a Mondrian painting.

Canals rim the bulb fields. In fact there's water nearly everywhere, but it stays well-behaved in canals because the Dutch are masters of water management.

The farm pastures were carpeted with grass and Texel sheep, Holstein cows and Friesian horses (all Dutch breeds) grazed happily. Long-legged European hares danced in the fields and white trumpeter swans nested along the canals. The landscape there is just startling beautiful.

And when I arrived home after 10 days abroad, Spring had arrived at our farm too. The narcissus were up and waving, the crab apples trees held tiny fists of petals that were ready to burst open and the grass was the same emerald green as in the Dutch farm fields.

Lambless in Spring

Last fall we sold our flock of Cheviot sheep and this is the first spring in 18 years that we haven't had lambs. My husband Doug can attest to how great it was not to worry about lambs being born in snowstorms (and having to rescue newborns when their afterbirth froze them to the ground--yikes!). A winter without middle-of-the-night breech births was bliss. But a spring without lambs gamboling in the pasture seems sadly lacking. Our Border collies Wink and Nell think so too and keep staring through the woven-wire fence at the horses and donkeys with wistfullness and memories of a good chase. To keep the dogs happy (and Doug too), we're getting a few lambs this spring. More on the new additions later...