Ewe flock move to great oak field & busted 2 myths about dock & thistle
Channel: Zwartbles Ireland Suzanna Crampton
Date: 2022-06-27

Most farmers will tell you their sheep or cows will not eat dock or thistles. Well in this film I show how sheep strip the mature dock plant of all it's leaves and one ewe even eats dock seed head while I film. She also eats thistles while I am filming her. She is not starving as their is still loads of food to graze within this field. The interesting thing about dock is that when fields are fertilised with artificial fertiliser it makes dock leaves bitter, so less palatable. The ewes really didn't need to be asked twice when I suggested they could move fields.


Zwartbles Ireland is a small company run from a farm in County Kilkenny in Ireland. We are a regenerative farm which means restoring soils health and regenerating its natural carbon and nutrient cycle with biodiversity of pasture sward with grasses, legumes, forbs and herbs. This also means we farm with nature. Healthy soils are important for healthy environment. So we encourage all life from the microbial to dung beetles, ants, pollinators to flora biodiversity, birds, hare, hedgehogs, rabbits, fox, badger as well as our livestock. This mean we farm in a style of mob grazing and giving fields long rest times between grazings. We have seen a huge increase and return of wildlife including woodcock and snipe in winter months foraging for dung beetle larvae, red squirrel, wood peckers and pine martens. We also have the rare natter bat and previously thought extinct Tawny Mining bees.
We sell, Zwartbles sheep, Zwartbles blankets and yarn made from the sheep, and calendars featuring Inca the World's Smallest Sheepdog and her coworkers. We also sell alpaca yarn spun for our own alpaca. Our yarns are 100 percent natural, grown by our sheep which grazing our small green Irish fields. This wool is naturally sequestered carbon which you can then knit into warm environmental friendly clothing.