When my husband introduced me to his two icelandic sheep, I asked what their names were. He looked slightly embarrassed and told me he hadn’t named them. Strangely, two names instantly came to me, and I asked if I could use them. He kindly acquiesced.

So let me introduce you to two of the biggest contributors to our gardening enterprises, the makers of our sheep poop, Duncan and Isadora.

This is Duncan.

He is the more outgoing of the two, and will come over for noggin rubs. In fact he kept coming so close to me that I couldn’t get a good shot of him.

Isadora, on the other hand, is the shy one. Usually she runs across the pen when I come out to say hi to her. She is not camera-shy it seems, as she came over to check me out when I held the camera out towards her.

Don’t you love her teeth? More stunning though is the beautiful wool on these guys.

I actually knew nothing about Isadora Duncan when the names popped into my head. I looked her up of course and had a very strange feeling – my type of person! Wild and unconventional. I added her autobiography to my reading list. Also, I’m pretty she’s the one my grandmother warned me about when I took to wearing long flowing scarves as a teenager.

Wild dancers aside, these guys are a great source of organic matter for us. We let their manure compost over the winter and then add it to our gardens in the summer. When you don’t have trees providing you with leaf mulch for compost you have to find some other way to add organic matter to your garden – sheep poop from the sheepy poos works!

It is about time to shear them and there are sunny afternoons full of wool washing in my near future. So far we haven’t used their fleeces but that is about to change very soon. I think it would probably be fitting if I knit a scarf from their wool to leave at Isadora Duncan’s grave. So I guess I better learn to knit!