I went to the barn this morning planning to move the fence and open up the next paddock. It seemed a dramatic scene.
It was foggy, but was most obvious was the dew on the spiderwebs.
The spiderwebs seemed to be everywhere, especially obvious on the net fence.
The dew makes the webs much ore obvious.
This is only dew, no webs.
Later in the day the fog burned off and the dew was gone.
Here are the spiders that are responsible for what looks like webs. However they are not the typical web.
If you look up “spiders ballooning” you’ll find out that baby spiders will produce a strand or two of silk and be carried away by the wind. The net fence and the pasture plants easily catch those silk strands. So I don’t know how far those spiders have dispersed. Didi they start out here or elsewhere?
This morning’s view. I walked across the road to take this photo.
Back on our side of the road, this is the group of sheep with Hornblower, the 4-horn ram farthest back on the photo. They don’t need to be fed when they are on this pasture, still in great shape in late October. If you’re new to this blog and want to catch up on the pasture renovation start at the October 3, 2024 post and find 13 others titled Pasture and Irrigation Renovation and later 8 posts titled Grazing and Irrigation starting with this one in May, 2025.
On my way to the barn I stop and feed Tiger and Tippy. These are Dan’s garage cats, but I started feeding them in April after his knee replacement surgery. Now feeding cats is on my chore list, because they expect to be fed earlier in the day than Dan will come out. Each of these cats showed up here at different times (dumped or stray?) and now live here.
Breeding Season gets complicated because there are several groups of sheep. The next stop is the group of sheep with Clancy, the BFL. There are two significant points of this photo. One is the blue rear of the ewe in the back. She was the first marked September 27 but re-marked with blue at the next heat cycle. Also notice all that green behind the sheep. That is all new growth after that 2″ rain we had just 9 days ago.
At the barn there are multiple groups. These are non-breeding sheep. Jade, in the back near the post, is the oldest sheep here and will live out her live as a pet. There are six others in this group. Sparky and 5 other lambs (some Meridian and some KJ Royalty, Kirby’s flock name) are here because I want to may want to choose some non-nursing yearlings next year if we decide to go to any shows.
This is another breeding group that has access to the north pasture.
Elvis is the ram with this group.
These are two young rams that I did not use to breed this year. The two horn ram is Meridian Dynamo. The four-horn is bide a wee Peregrin. He came from Oregon in September, was still on the young and small side, and I was able to get Starthist Hornblower, the adult 4-horn ram with the group in the pasture. So these guys will be in the line-up for next year.
Hunter is the two horn ram in the middle. He has six ewes.
I had two adult rams here, but one has been sold. Meridian Blizzard is hopefully sold and there is a ram lamb here that is the last of this year to be harvested for a customer.
I am ready to be done with Breeding Season, but when I look at the calendar I see that it has only been 3-1/2 weeks. I look forward to being able to put all the ewes back together and having them on the pasture together. There are challenges in putting the rams together, but I’ll deal with that when the time comes. For now they are all in separate places.
We have been riding the Foxy’s Fall Century for several years. I just looked back through blog posts to see if I could figure out when we started. In Foxy’s Fall Century 2015 I referred to this being a revival of a ride we used to do so I don’t know when we rode it the first time. Same bike. Same truck. The only other reference I found to Foxy’s is to a blog post about the three-year anniversary of the accident that could have changed all our lives. That post ends with a photo similar to many of these in today’s post. See that post on my website blog if you want to go off track and find out details of that accident and recovery.
Here is the tandem we bought when we were first married. We get a lot of comments. “Cool bike” “Beautiful bike”, etc. I’m not sure if people comment in the same way as car enthusiasts would comment on a ’67 Camero (which I had in college). In other words, this is an old bike as cycling trends go.
We did some good rides on this in the old days.
This is the only kind of photo I can get while we’re riding. The sun is low when we start so that’s the view–big bike, small people.
This is about 40 minutes later riding south. Those hills should be familiar from west-facing photos from our farm. We weren’t that far from home.
At the rest stop at Lake Solano near Winters. I took this photo because Dan’s brother texted while we were stopped there.
About 15 miles from Davis. This is the view I have while we are riding. Actually this is distorted. The phone photo would have shown only the green backpack canteen but I expanded the view a bit.
I held the phone above my head for this view.
Ride over. Back at the truck.
I feel fine, but maybe next year I’ll try to get a few miles in before the day of the ride.
As I’ve said before Breeding Season is a Season, overlapping the traditional seasons of summer and fall. If defining a Season influences how you live your life, Breeding Season definitely qualifies. It doesn’t take long before I’m ready for it to be over. It’s easier when all the ewes are in one place, the rams are somewhere else, and I don’t have to feed groups differently and watch my back when I’m with the ewes.
We have 4 breeding groups, a non-breeding group (the oldest sheep, Jade, and six ewe lambs), two young rams with potential for breeding (too young and/or small this year), and two older rams who are sold but still here. The breeding group with the most ewes is on the main pasture. Hornblower has about 30 ewes with him. Doesn’t that pasture look great?
Elvis has eleven ewes and is on the pasture to the north. When I moved the Hornblower group to the next paddock of the south pasture I needed to separate the two groups with more than a single net fence, especially since I’m having some issues with the power to the north one. So I set up two fences and was able to power the north one from the south one.
Those pasture photos were taken October 10. On the 13th it rained. We had 1.6″ the first day and .5″ the second day. A significant rainfall usually marks the end of grazing. It is late in the year and the pasture is depleted or dormant. Also, the land is flat and the water doesn’t drain well. This year is different because the pasture has been renovated and there is a much better stand (mostly clover, trefoil, and chicory). We are not sure how long we’ll be able to graze but it seemed appropriate to continue as long as I moved the sheep to a fresh paddock.
Five days ago I moved Hornblower’s group to the paddock closest to the road.
The lane is adjacent to Clancy’s group. However there is hot wire on both sides of the net fence and there doesn’t seem to be any problem with either ram trying to get through.
You may notice some blue marks on the ewes. Those are more noticeable than the orange marks on several, The rams wear marking harnesses so we have a better idea of when to expect lambs. I hadn’t noticed as many marks lately.
Is this why? The rams went in with ewes three weeks ago on September 27. I substituted the orange markers from Clancy and Hornblower with blue markers a week ago. You can see the difference in a new one and the used ones.
Clancy’s group is in the field between the barn and the shop–not one of the renovated pastures. Notice two blue marks. The ewe in the background marked blue was the first one Clancy marked with orange on September 27.
So we now know that she was not pregnant after that breeding. If all the ewes in this group are re-marked that would indicate a problem with the ram. Hopefully that is not the case. The other ewe marked blue in the photo above this one had not been marked before. I’ll keep watching to make sure that more of the oranges aren’t also marked blue in the next week.
Ginny’s birthday was October 12. She just turned 11. I have only about a zillion photos of Ginny so it was time consuming to narrow this down.
December, 2014. Ginny was two months old.
Many of my photos focus on action with a ball. I wouldn’t say that Ginny is ball-obsessed to the exclusion of all else. On the other hand, she is somewhat ball-obsessed. I have lots of photos taken during our walks Across the Road of Ginny leaping for a ball I have thrown. One reason that there are so many is that I kept trying to get that perfect shot and Ginny was a willing subject over…and over…and over…
I am a sheep farmer and the real reason to have a Border Collie is to help with sheep. That is not necessarily a good time for photos because we are trying to accomplish a task. I don’t have as much work for a dog as the dog would like. We have a small place and pasture management and fencing that makes it easy to move sheep. In recent years my main use of Ginny is to help move rams to catch them or to move the ewes into the barn from the corral. When I need to get sheep out of the pasture it’s usually easy to call them in.
This is a photo from 2018 taken on a walk Across the Road. At that time 5 dogs lived here. Rusty, the first red Border Collie came from Terry Mendenhall, as did Ginny. That’s Maggie at the top of the photo. The two black dogs are Finn and Sawyer who moved to Boise when Chris and Meryl moved.
Rusty, Ginny, and Maggie pursuing some kind of critter, probably a ground squirrel that ran into the woodpile.
This was a celebration of Finn’s and Sawyer’s birthday. All dogs had to wait for permission to have their treats.
Ginny in 2019.
Ginny has always created her own entertainment by dropping the ball at the top of the ditch and letting it roll in. I tell her to “get it”, she retrieves the ball, and does it all over again farther up the road.
I try to pay attention when we get to the part of the canal that is cement. There are places where the water level drops a couple of feet and the water flows quickly, creating a whirlpool effect at that drop. Ginny can get in and out of the cement canal when the water is not so turbulent, but I don’t want her in this part. She seems to like the game of dropping the ball at those places and then expects me to get it out. The drop-off creates a turbulent whirlpool and the ball disappears and then resurfaces over and over, but doesn’t move downstream. I’m not getting in there and I’m not sending Ginny in. There have been several times when I was able to create a net with a forked stick and the leash, and eventually snag the ball by leaning over the wooden plank that is the walkway over the canal.
Here is another of Ginny’s habits. When the skirting table is in this part of the barn and I am working Ginny intentionally puts the ball in this spot and then moves behind the wall of the barn and that upright pipe and expects me to get the ball, often barking at me if I haven’t paid attention.
Lambtown was last weekend and Terry was there with her sheep and her older dog that she didn’t want to leave home. This is Jill, Ginny’s mom, who is now 14.
I took this photos of Ginny last week. Looking pretty good for11!
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