Tyddyn Bryn

There’s a phrase I come back to again and again when talking about our flock:

Small is a choice.

Tyddyn Bryn isn’t a huge farm. We have a small parcel of land, and we have two backs, two pairs of hands and only so many hours in a day!

But more importantly, we choose to keep our flock at a size that we can genuinely manage well.

For us, keeping sheep isn’t about seeing how many animals we can fit onto our land. It’s about being able to give every animal the care and attention they deserve.

We want to know our sheep individually. We know their personalities, their quirks, their friendships and, of course, their fleeces. We want to notice when someone is a little quieter than usual, needs a bit of extra help or simply isn’t quite themselves.

That becomes particularly important at the difficult times of the year.

Lambing can be exhausting. Winter can be wet and miserable. Summer brings its own challenges. And sheep have a remarkable talent for finding new and inventive ways to require your attention at exactly the wrong moment!

Keeping our flock small means we can respond.

It also means being honest about what our land can sustainably support. We don’t want to overgraze our little patch of Wales, nor do we want to spend every waking hour trying to keep a larger flock going.

We want healthy land, healthy sheep and a smallholding that works for us rather than one that works us into the ground.

And there’s another side to keeping things small.

We genuinely love our sheep.

I didn’t spend a whole day making sure Ygritte survived her C-section and bonding her with Jadis, her sister’s weakest triplet, because they were simply livestock. I care about them as individuals. I love their characters, their quirks and their wonderfully different fleeces.

That’s also why our wool means so much to us.

When you buy yarn from Tyddyn Bryn, you’re buying something with a story behind it. We know where the wool came from, we know the sheep and we care about what happens to that fleece.

But there is a slight problem…

You lot love our wool!

And while we have absolutely no intention of turning our little flock into a wool-producing machine, we do want to meet the growing demand for our yarn.

So we’ve found a way to do that without compromising the reasons we chose to stay small.

We now buy fleeces from carefully chosen neighbours and friends with flocks we know and trust.

That means more beautiful local wool can make its way into Tyddyn Bryn yarn, while our own flock can remain at a size that suits our land, our resources and our ability to provide the very best care.

So yes, small is still a choice.

But it doesn’t have to mean small in ambition.

It means growing thoughtfully, working with our local farming community and finding ways to make more wonderful wool available without simply putting more sheep on our own land.

Small flock. Big woolly ambitions. And apparently, a growing number of you who want to knit with it!