Meet Our Instructors:

Farm Pickings

News and Updates from Sanborn Mills Farm

— March 29, 2023 —

The Sanborn Mills Farm Scholarship Program

To help make our workshops more accessible to all, Sanborn Mills Farm is now offering financial scholarships for workshop attendance, housing, and meals. Full and partial scholarships will be awarded on the basis of financial need of the applicant and their commitment to the mission, vision, and values at Sanborn Mills Farm. Scholarships provide access to our highly regarded multi-day workshops and engaging residential experience when registration and/or lodging fees are out of reach of prospective attendees, especially when combined with the cost of transportation and being away from home/work lives.

Supporting first-time workshop attendees and applicants to the draft animals’ workshops are priorities in 2023.

More information and a downloadable scholarship application are available here on the Farm’s website.

Questions? Email Lea Rossignol at lea@sanbornmills.org or call the office at (603) 435-7314.

Meet Our Instructors:

Ray Ramsey,

Helen Westergren,

Bobbie Tilkens-Fisher

Ray Ramsey, who teaches our Draft Animal workshops, is the Farm Manager at Sanborn Mills Farm. He learned traditional farming skills as a farm kid growing up in Indiana. In April he will teach Draft Animal Basics from April 21-23.

Helen Westergren, as Head Gardener at Sanborn Mills Farm, oversees the ornamental gardens across the property, maintains the Natural Dye Garden, and designs floral installations for Farm events. She has worked at various East Coast gardens including Stonecrop, Chanticleer, and the John C. Campbell Folk School. She will teach two workshops this year at the Farm, Grow Your Own Natural Dye Plants, May 13 and 14, and Flower Arrangements from the Field and Garden, August 19.

Bobbie Tilkens-Fisher, a self-taught weaver, says she found her voice as a weaver by “engaging in/with those techniques and fibers that I found pleasurable. And by manipulating or plain out ignoring some of the traditions of tapestry weaving, I have arrived at a style that is all my own – sculptural, vivid and flowing.” She works primarily in merino wool roving. In May she will teach Introduction to Modern Tapestry Weaving, May 6 and 7.

New Lambs!

While you have been perusing seed catalogs, our Border Leicester ewes have been busy this month. To date we have four new lambs to join our wool herd.

If there’s an animal cuter than a baby lamb, well, we haven’t seen it!

Photo Credits

Photo of Ray Ramsey by Lea Rossignol.

Photo of Bobbie Tilkens-Fisher courtesy Bobbie Tilkens-Fisher.

All other photos by Steve Bjerklie.