Ivar’s Workshop

Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Ivar Groves, and I live on a 10-acre homestead near Northfield, Minnesota with my parents and five siblings. I am 15 years old and I have been raising Katahdin sheep for three years now, ever since I bought the flock from my dad.…

Two years ago we hosted a maple syruping workshop at our farm, teaching the basics of tapping maple trees and evaporating maple syrup. One of the families that attended this event was Keith and Anna Johnson & family. Since then we have stayed in contact through other get- together’s and events, and they were a…

I woke up this morning to 8 inches of snow that fell last night. We ate breakfast, and then I went out to the barn to do chores and see how the animals had fared. The wind was blowing hard from the north, picking up falling snow and snow from the barn’s roof, swirling it…

Since I was young, I have always wanted to pursue Woodworking as a future career. The problem, however, is that there is no one in our area that has the skillset I have been wanting to learn that could take me on as an apprentice. So, I decided to just continue learning by doing, as…

When my dad bought the first sheep for our farm several years ago, we had no idea what we were doing. You can’t, after all, coming from a city background with no experience with animals whatsoever (besides a lapdog and a house cat), let alone experience with sheep. We had just built our barn, and…

A few years ago, we had a big brown Katahdin ram that we bought from a farm in Wisconsin. He was a great ram, and he bred every one of our ewes (female sheep) for three years in a row. Well, we ended up keeping some of his daughters to add to the flock, so…