Oh the Stench

There is something that captivates me about the ability to make things from scratch.  I am constantly thinking of new things that I can produce for my family using the products from our farm.

After having sent my sheep wool off for processing into sock yarn, I was left with a bag of wool discards.  Most of it was unusable for spinning because the wool fibre was covered with a very thick coating of lanolin.  Lanolin is the special grease that sheep produce to make their wool waterproof.  It is essential for keeping them warm and dry as they live outside. 

As I read up on what to do with wool discards, I discovered that most people throw them in the compost.  But as I tossed the first handful into our compost bin, an incredible thought stuck me - what if I could extract the lanolin from the wool?  I know lanolin is used as a moisturizing cream for breastfeeding women and I bet it could be used in soap making.  How exciting!

And so began a two day journey into lanolin extraction on the homestead.  I began by pulling the hay, burrs, sticks, straw, pine cone pieces and poop nuggets out of the wool and stuffing it all into a huge pot. 

After rinsing the wool five or six times in cold water, I boiled it in a lightly salted water bath for several hours (as per internet instructions).  This made the house smell horrendous.  It was so, so bad.  Like gag-inducing bad.

I then scooped out the wool with tongs and continued to boil the "lanolin water". 

At this point Ian was looking more than a little green at the stench and when the boys came home from school, they refused to enter the house until I put the pot of foul smelling liquid outside and opened all of the windows.  I sort of hoped that overnight the lanolin would congeal on the surface of the water kind of like chicken fat does on the surface of bone broth.

Nope.  The cooled liquid looked pretty much the same come morning and still smelled just as bad. 

With the failure of my cooling experiment, I returned to the internet instructions and "boiled the mixture until all the water was gone and only the lanolin is left".  After about an hour of boiling during which I was outside doing the morning chores, I came inside to check on the progress and ran into Ian wearing a gas mask.  No joke.  The stench was so unbelievable that we were forced to abandon boiling inside.  Instead, we set up a natural gas burner outside and moved the pot onto the back porch so the disgusting smelling steam could pollute the great outdoors instead of our house.

After more boiling, I finally had the liquid reduced to about two cups which I strained through cheesecloth. 

As I considered the revolting sludge I had remaining, it finally dawned on me - my attempt to refine lanolin had instead resulted in me making a very concentrated solution of sheep crap.  Yup.  I spent two days making very stinky poop water.  So gross.

Well, if there is one thing I am good at, it is making lemons into lemonade - or poop water into rhubarb food as it were.  I remembered reading that rhubarb is a heavy feeder and used to be planted on top of old outhouses because it flourished with access to a ready supply of manure.  And so, I joyfully drizzled my laboriously produced sheep poop concoction over the snow covering my new rhubarb patch.

And so, we may not have farm-produced lanolin but I am hopeful that we will have a bumper crop of homegrown rhubarb this year all thanks to this extremely foul smelling but highly nutritious poop soup.