TURKANA FARMS, LLC

WHAT'S NEW THIS WEEK:Radishes are on a break, but we now have spinach and dill. And the baby Oasis turnips have gotten bigger.

Woolology Hello all, Troy here.

This week, our longest stretch of sunny days so far came to an end. While we didn’t necessarily need more rain just yet, our newly planted beans and cucumbers delighted in the midweek showers. Their little stems and seed leaves have since emerged triumphantly from the soil. The peas, radishes and turnips we planted several weeks ago also seem rather thankful for the water. The sheep, on the other hand… Well, it’s never easy to tell what they’re thinking. But suffice to say, they got wet.As for me, I find it hard to motivate myself to do outdoor tasks in the rain, and I end up focusing on indoor things I’ve been putting off. So I finally pulled out my new spinning wheel this week and gave it a whirl.The process of spinning wool into yarn is surprisingly simple. So much so, it seems almost magical as it happens before your eyes. I gently pedal the treadle, the wheel spins, the bobbin spins, and voila! A clump of wool transforms into a strand of yarn. All I really do is pedal my feet, draft out the fibers (meaning separate them from the clump in small bits), and let the yarn spin onto the bobbin. If it sounds easy, it’s because it is. However, there is still a bit of a learning curve. The rate that I draft out the fibers must match my pedaling speed. If I pedal too quickly (or draft too slowly), then the yarn gets overspun and kinks up on itself. If I pedal too slowly, the  fibers don’t twist together enough, making the yarn weak. It is all very rhythm-dependent. As long as I can maintain a steady tempo of pedaling and drafting, the machine does most of the work for me. I imagine that listening to music as I spin would help quite a bit. But then comes the delicate art of crafting a playlist of bangers that perfectly match the tempo of my spinning.Of course, I’ve skipped over a few critical steps. Before I can spin, I need to comb the raw fleece so that the fibers are aligned (this makes drafting much easier). Before that, there’s the optional washing the fleece, which removes a sticky oil called lanolin. But the most difficult and important step of all is producing the wool fiber itself – which we outsource to our trusty flock of Karakul sheep.If creating yarn seems magically simple, the fiber itself is on the other end of the spectrum – astonishingly complex. This was made clear to me by Kimber Baldwin’s eye-opening lecture on the science of wool at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. She delved deep into the unique properties of wool fibers, right down to their molecular structure. As it turns out, biochemistry explains a lot about why we like wool so much.To start, a single wool fiber is made of a long tube of bundled cells encased in a wall of protective scales. Each cell is jam packed with thousands of strands of the protein keratin. Put into water, the outer scales initially repel the water molecules, but eventually the molecules seep between the scales to the interior of the fiber, where they bind directly to the keratin protein. The formation of these bonds actually releases heat into the surrounding environment. At the same  time, the water molecules get locked away within the fiber’s interior. This is why wool fabrics feel warm and dry even if they get wet! On the flip side, in hot and dry conditions, the water is slowly released from the inner nooks of the fibers and evaporates off. Breaking those bonds absorbs heat from the surroundings, having a cooling effect, just like sweat does for our bodies.Cotton is very different. It is made of plant material – cellulose – which is a long, stable chain of carbohydrates. It is not tightly coiled, and, compared to keratin, has scarcely any binding sites for water. Thus, when it gets wet, it gets saturated immediately, and has none of those beautiful temperature regulating propert