Ten years in the SHED

SHED Chetwyn Farms celebrates its tenth anniversary

Both Ted and Shauna Pickering have a love of fibre and fibre arts, so when they bought their property on Closson Road they entertained the idea of having some alpaca as a way to ensure a supply of high quality yarn. “Shauna is a knitter and we thought it would be fun to get a couple of alpaca, and we would shear them and spin the yarn and it would be a bit like a home hobby,” said Ted. They went to an alpaca farm north of Stirling with the intention to bring back a pair of animals, but instead they came home with five. “We had a budget and we knew how much we could spend, and we first chose two, and then two more. Then it was explained to us that the fifth animal we ended up with—Aurora, who we still have on the farm—was deaf and she followed one of those that we had chosen, so that meant we had to take her too,” explained Ted. They named the property SHED Chetwyn Farms, where chetwyn is a Welsh word meaning “little cottage on a twisted road”, an apt description of the farmhouse. SHED came from the first two letters of Shauna’s and Ted’s (Edward) names as well as a reference that their shop would be located in a repurposed chicken coop on the property. They chose to raise alpaca both for the quality of the wool and for the temperament of the animals. “Alpacas all have distinct personalities, so that came into play too,” said Ted. He added that alpacas are low-maintenance animals. “They roam the pasture during the good weather and in the winter we feed them hay. They have a communal poo-pile; once one goes poo, they all go poo on the same pile, so cleanup is easy. They don’t have any upper teeth, so they’re like a lawnmower when they go along the pasture. They are clipping the grass rather than pulling it up by the roots, so they’re much more sustainable as a farm animal.”

Their initial business approach was to have a small farm store as well as farm visits, but on a whim they signed up for a year at the Wellington Farmers’ Market when it was still being held at the United Church in the village. “We didn’t know if people would actually support the idea of alpaca, because it is a higher-end product, but it just went from there,” said Ted. He explained that an alpaca yields enough high-quality fleece to make just one adult sized sweater, plus an amount of lower quality fleece that is used for making felt. “The fleece is hypoallergenic and it is warmer than wool so you don’t need much of it. A light sweater will give you much more warmth than the same weight in wool or cotton,” he said.

To keep products affordable, the shop offers an array of smaller items such as socks, mittens and tuques or baby clothing, where not as much yarn is used in those smaller pieces. SHED now has a herd of 19 alpaca and they supplement their production of yarn with fleece from other alpaca farms, including Noble Beast here in the County. The animals are sheared in May and the fleece is cleaned and processed at the farm before being sent to a mill to be spun into yarn. The yarn is distributed to local knitters who make products for the shop.

Over the years, the farm has become a destination for people visiting the County, but as Shauna and Ted celebrate the 10th anniversary of SHED, they are being drawn back to their love of the fibre arts. “The whole point of our business was the fibre arts, and we are going to make a little bit of a change this year. In addition to being a destination we are going to hone our skills more on the workshop side of things. We have some amazing workshops coming up and we are carving out space in the SHED shop for the studio space so we can have artists working, or we can have a pop-up shop in there. We are going back to our fibre arts love, rather than just being an alpaca farm,” said Ted. For more information about upcoming workshops, please visit shedchetwynfarms.com