I’ve decided it’s time to give WGW yarns a bit more of the limelight normally taken up by farm animals. My plan is to alternate Yarns from the Farm posts, with a Yarn Edition followed by a Farm Edition. I’m hoping this will satisfy both the crafters and the animal lovers among you. This will be the inaugural Yarn Edition, featuring our new range of colours in 4 ply (fingering) silk merino blend.

It wouldn’t be WGW without some kind of experiment in progress, and this winter is no exception. Read on for an account of NQS: Not Quite Shepherding.

Well, lots has happened in the last seven months. You may remember I was on the point of starting the first lambing I’d done in several years (Call the Midwife). As it turned out, none of the things I was worried about, and therefore prepared for, eventuated. Unfortunately, I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of an infection that would cause most of my lambs to be stillborn, late in pregnancy. Of the 25 or so lambs conceived, only eight survived. Unusually severe spring weather contributed to the losses.

It doesn’t often come up in farming conversations, but my title is officially Dr. I’m not the useful sort of doctor, though — just an academic. In retrospect, I should have studied medicine, as I originally intended. Instead, my academic qualifications extend to explaining climate change, but are totally useless in the project that is about to take all of my time and energy for the next few weeks: lambing 33 ewes.

This is the first time in six years that I’ve had lambs of my own. I had lots of good rationalisations for why it was a good idea to buy in lambs, but the truth is I chickened out. Lambing, like ageing, is not for the faint of heart.

An early season bush fire on my farm earlier this year led me back to studying the knowledge of indigenous Australians about using fire to shape the landscape and enhance biodiversity.

It was a cross between a flying tackle and a wrestling pin to the mat when I tripped and fell on top of the old ewe I was trying to catch.  She’s a 14-year-old with severe cataracts, and she’d gotten lost in Chicory Hill tree reserve a few days ago. It was pure blind luck I found her when I did.

Long time followers of Yarns from the Farm will remember Davey Carnes as the kind, gentle old-school shepherd who taught me so much about the care of sheep. Davey died peacefully at the age of 97 in October. Davey came out of retirement (which he loathed) at the age of 75, to help me through a rough patch for a few months just after I bought my farm. He stayed for 13 years, retiring for the second time at 87. In the intervening years he not only taught me much of what he knew from his past experience, he also stayed open to new ideas and approaches and supported my experiments as I gained confidence as a woolgrower.

There must be nearly as many ideas about how to start a working dog as there are people trying to train them. Working livestock with a dog is a complex, frustrating, amazing interaction between three species, where almost anything can happen, and usually does.

There is an astronomical level of uncertainty about the outcome when you ask a young dog to figure out what she is supposed to do with sheep before she even really understands her relationship with you.

Like the three bears’ porridge, managing biodiversity can be tricky to get just right: either too much grazing or too little can result in less species diversity. Diversity is critical for the resilience of the landscape and for the quality of nutrition for animals depending on it. Fire, like grazing, can improve the vibrancy of the environment if we get it just right. IIf we overdo either grazing or fire, recovery is slow and the impact may well change the environment permanently, so when it does recover it may not be with the same species mix. If we undercook, the most resilient species will dominate the others, and biodiversity will decline.

For the first time in my 22 years of growing wool, I have shorn sheep wandering around in the middle of winter. I didn’t intend to. A perfect storm of less-than-perfect decision-making on my part combined with a shortage of shearers turned my planned autumn shearing into a two-month-long exercise. Happily, all have survived the shock of losing their lovely wooly coats, and in fact are thriving on the abundant forage from the last couple years of enhanced rainfall.

If I had it to do over again, I would design the underpinnings of my holding shed differently, to make it much easier to extract the accumulation of sheep poo. Big modern sheds are built on pilings tall enough to allow front-end loaders to drive under and scoop out the poo. Sadly, my holding shed was one of the first things I built, and it never dawned on me that someday the job of scraping out the poo would fall on my shoulders.