Shearing took place at my girlfriends farm, last weekend, it was not ideally in the sense of it coming off a week of rain but timing is as it goes, I headed over to pick up a HUGE stuffed full bag of so much WOOL!
Once we got it out of the bag and started to pick and spread it out to dry as we have five days of warm/dry, each day i will go out and work on finding the part on each sheer that i want to use for making and selling bags of raw unclean wool for homemade wool tags locally.
I am of course very excited to use a huge amount of this wool in my own gardens, i have studies on what it can offer in terms of plant growth. There are so many studies now compared to when i started doing this, i remember at the time of my first posting on this, i could only find three studies out of EU all of them very positive, the big one was how amazing they were for tomato’s and that they were using it as a natural peat moss and how well it could feed the soil in dessert like conditions.
Now, you can find so many studies, in Canada, in N.A. and across the world, the bottom line is that all of them are proving what i have seen with my own eyes, they can be used in many ways in the garden and all of them can and will prove to be useful, common sense is needed.. clearly adding them to a cactus pot would not be a good idea lol
However adding them to your patio posts, YES, add them to your garden Heck YA! Raised beds, you want this big time, IN ground.. you bet!
Now if you want it machine perfect, there are more and more folks that are investing in the machines to shed the wool and then put it though a pellet making machine and i am doing some experimenting on this myself on a very small scale
If you want to do it yourself, put a post out to see if any of your sheep owning friends have wool trimmings available or if they have extra to share or barter for, if they raise sheep for fleeces for spinning and such, they will still be trimming the edges and those leftovers can be used in the gardens or pots
I will have limited farmgate sales and some local spring sales in prepared different sizes, and the good news is that the wool acts as a slow release upwards of 6 months More information on availability coming soon.
Just another Day on the Farm 
How do you currently use the loose wool in your garden? Do you spread it about? I bought some wool pellets that I’ll use with my strawberry bed, spreading on top initially as it’s supposed to discourage slugs. But I’ve also put short loose wool threads randomly in the garden, to see what the birds do with it (they actually seem to prefer my hair cuttings, lol). Do you dig the wool in?
for loose wool, i tend to put the whole thing on top of the soil and just step it down to compress it some to hold in place, typically the only time i use whole wool like that is in swales, i have not had luck with it stopping slugs, perhaps because its not the pellet form, it slows them a bit but only when really fresh and as i am using it as a slow release long term fertilizer . I do dig it in, i either push it down in the soil like a wool ball or i will place a handful in the bottom of pots, or holes when planting or in a few cases i did a trench line, added the wool and covered it back up.. I have seen the video’s of them using the wool pellets on the top but for me with my raw wool I have never done it that way personally.
I put a fluffy wad in the bottom of my small pots before I sow seed or prick out small plants. Wool first, then potting compost, then seed/seedling. When I go to plant out, I find my plants are hardly affected by transplant shock. This is really good, as the plants keep growing and can usually withstand slug/snail damage–there a lot of slugs here and I’ve lost a lot of plants in the past due to transplant shock (it’s also why I mostly transplant, as they will mow down most emerging seedlings).
that is very good to know, i am glad that is working well for you, i will give that a try more in the pots for transplanting out on some of my heat loving seeds that i am starting soon. I have placed wool in the soil hole itself but had not done that in the seed starting pots.. thanks for the tip!
I have to be careful that the wool is completely covered though, as I’ve had little birds come and peck it out for their nests, wrecking my seedlings! I guess I can’t blame them 🙂
that’s certainly fair, as the birds love the sheep’s wool for nests, but they really like my own horses winter blowout coat as well almost as much 🙂 Still i find that as i am keepings this stocked by their feeders that they are using it nicely. https://livingmydreamlifeonthefarm.com/2026/03/26/willow-crafted-bird-nest-materials/