Stoneheart Farm welcomes visitors
By Joyce White
Special to the Sun Journal

SOUTH PARIS – This was the first Open Farm Day for Stoneheart Farm, where Columbia sheep graze the lush, rolling pastures on Streaked Mountain Road in South Paris.

Stoneheart is a working, diversified farm with sheep its main focus, but both owners also have full-time jobs. Doreen Simmons is a nurse at Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston; John Simmons is an emergency room physician at Stephens Memorial Hospital in Norway.

The farm is their recreation, they say. Even though farming is work, it is work of an entirely different nature, just what they need after the stressful days at work in their respective fields of medicine.

No heading out to the golf course or sitting in front of TV for them.

“It’s peaceful here. I love to come home to this little piece of heaven,” Doreen said.

John and Doreen welcomed visitors to their restored 1800s barn where sheep and hay are housed and where sheep-related displays were set up. Two women demonstrated the art of spinning raw wool into yarn.

Doreen, meanwhile, explained her method of making the felting in her colorful hats and handbags. Using natural-color wool yarn from their sheep, she knits very loosely, making the item much larger than the finished product she plans. After she dyes the item in hot water in the washer, it comes out felted and about three sizes smaller than when it went in. She also spins and weaves on a large loom.

The farm buildings were in disrepair and the land had grown up to bushes when they bought it 10 years ago, they said. Now the house has been remodeled, keeping some of the features of an old Maine farmhouse but adding beauty and convenience.

The barn still has its old beams but is now sturdy with new shingles and a new section for the ewes.

Fields are now clear of brush and rocks, neatly fenced with five strands of electrified wire. They hear coyotes, John said, but so far they’ve not lost any sheep.

In 1912 the U.S. Department of Agriculture started the development of Columbia sheep, an American breed. Long wool Lincoln rams were crossed with Rambouillet ewes to produce large ewes yielding more pounds of wool and more pounds of lamb, John said.

At Stoneheart Farm, their 20 brood ewes are bred in the fall to produce 35 to 40 lambs in the spring.

By diligent record-keeping they are able to continuously improve the quality of their flock by keeping the most productive animals and those for whom birthing and mothering goes easily.

“The better the ewes, the more sleep the shepherds get during lambing,” he said.

Their sheep get sheared in October, John said, because they get cleaner fleece, and they’ll still have time to grow enough wool before winter comes. They market most of their fleece to Atlantic Blanket Co., which makes heirloom quality wool blankets, he said. They sell some raw wool rovings and some yarn as well as a unique comforter filled with wool.

Herding time

Out past the gardens, John gives Tess, their young border collie, her best treat of Open Farm Day: She demonstrates how she herds the sheep, bringing them in from the far pasture to John’s feet twice, just as she was taught.

“She’d rather do this than eat,” he said.

All the parts of this farm fit together in some of the ways of old Maine farms. The turkeys they raise for Thanksgiving fertilize the fields in summer from their frequently moved pens. The grass grows lush from their manure and the sheep eat the grass the next spring, John said. The composted manure from the winter sheep pens fertilizes the gardens and fields. They can and freeze vegetables and berries from their gardens, store garlic, potatoes and onions in the cellar.

“We eat from the farm most of the year,” John said.

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