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The weekend before Easter weekend we had the sheep shorn, 41 ewes done and 4 rams to go (in mid-May.)  This past weekend, my friend Shannon at Kenleigh Acres visited us on her way through to deliver some sheep for delivery back East (no, she wasn’t going all the way back east, though with her drive it probably felt like it!) and she helped me go through my fleeces.  We made three piles; raw/show fleeces, process fleeces, and compost fleeces.  The nice thing was that I had more raw/show fleeces than the other piles and the compost pile was definitely the smallest.  That was a good feeling – all in all, some nice fleeces to be had!

Yesterday I was lamenting that I had to get all my fleeces skirted and cleaned so that I could list them for sale or send them off for processing – BUT I didn’t have a skirting table!  Since we had an Easter lunch, instead of dinner, we had the whole afternoon to ourselves and Hubby decided to head up to the barn with skirting table plans in his hand (thanks to bide a wee farm!).  He knocked it out quickly, and it’s portable, all I have to do is fold it up and take it where I’d like it to go which will be handy for the piles of wool at the house still from last year and the piles of wool in the barn from this year!

So here’s Paisley’s fleece being cleaned – second cuts, and dirty wool being pulled off.  The second cuts were allowed to fall through the chicken wire and pile up on the floor leaving a beautiful fleece behind.  One down, 40 more to go (give or take a few.)  Here’s to hoping I can get it all done within a reasonable amount of time – and boxed and sent to a fiber mill!

So thank you to Hubby, Shannon, and bide a wee farm for the making of my skirting table, and fleeces – may you continue to smell like wood dust and lanoline.

One tree I’ve always wanted to grow, but never could here in the mountains is citrus – Lemon, lime, tangerine, mandarin (maybe orange and grape fruit for the Hubby but I don’t care for them.)  Now with the new house we can follow in the steps of the previous folks and grow citrus in pots in the Sun Room.

Of course my mom has embraced this idea and bought my first lime, a “Mexican” which is sometimes called a Key Lime in Hawaii.  She also talked my Aunt Denise in to buying us a Mandarin, “Satsuma” (thank you Aunt Denise!) and I bought a “Meyer” Lemon. 

I’ve been reading up on what Citrus need / like and think I can actually pull this off.  I just need to find a good sale on pretty pots now (glazed in large sizes are expensive!) 

My Mandarin already has a lot of fruit on it.  That will be fun – some fresh vitamin C in the winter!

Gracing the Sun Room with it’s presence is also another favorite plant of mine – Bougainvillea.  We cannot grow this plant in the mountains too as we get too cold and our freezes are much too hard.  This beautiful vine grows all over the place in more mild California climates and is prolific in Mexico.  I’ve always admired its and bright cheery blooms and hope to train it up a trellis on a wall in the Sun Room.

We’ll see how I do… Now back to reading.