About Robin

Owner of Meridian Jacobs, farm and fiber shop. I raise Jacob sheep, teach fiber arts classes, weave handwovens for sale, and manage the store.

Rams and lambs

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Robin

I had my camera with me this morning in the barn. I meant to take pictures of the fog. You know those postcards that are black and say “Hawaii at night”? So I can have something that is gray–“Sheep in the fog”, “Sheep herding in the fog”. This time of year fog is common in the Central Valley. Thick fog. Wet fog. Cold fog. People that live in the foothills look down on the top of the fog in the valley. There are days when the high and low temperatures only very by 2 or 3 degrees because of the fog. Fortunately we are at the edge of the valley and somedays don’t have fog at all when there is a thick blanket of it less than 1/2 mile away.

These photos are some I took–but not of the fog. This is Meridian Moonshine. He is one of two ram lambs that I kept from this spring’s lambs.

Moonshine, ram lamb

Here is Meridian Ranger, who will be 2 in February. He still has a great personality and has never shown any aggression (although I still don’t turn my back).

Ranger

Chicory Lane Houdini, below, is another story. He has nice fleece, horns, etc, but his personality leaves something to be desired. He can’t be trusted at all.

Houdini

All three of these rams will have lambs here in March. That seems a long way off. Usually I am getting ready for lambs in late January.

Shearing Day

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Robin

Shearing Day was a week ago now. What a great day! The sun was out and a lot of people came to watch and buy fleeces. I sold 28 of the 60 fleeces we sheared! I started to worry that I wouldn’t have enough left for me!

Here is a photo of Judd shearing Houdini.

Judd doesn’t mind a crowd of people watching.

A couple of friends (Joan in purple and Toni in black) helped all day at the skirting table.

Freshly shorn ewes.

Donkey, Amaryllis, is now out with the sheep full-time.

Tribute to Mom

Posted on November 22, 2008 by Robin

My mom died on Monday. This is not as tragic as you may think. After all, she was 92. The tragedy is that she spent the last several years in the haze of Alzheimer’s. She lived here until, after breaking a hip and losing a lot more mental capacity, I couldn’t care for her. For the last year and a half she lived at a place called Summerfield House in Vacaville. The following is part of a thank you letter that I wrote to the care-givers at Summerfield. I thought I’d share it before I go on with the usual ramblings of my blog.

I wish that you could have known Mom before she moved to Summerfield. She was one of the first women in the Army—the WAC’s—during WWII. She was always very proud of that service. After she moved to Summerfield I found letters that she wrote to her parents while in the service and letters to her from her Mom. My daughter and I have been transcribing them because they are a fascinating insight into what was going on in the lives of everyday people back then. I think they are worthy of a book.

Mom married a University of California professor, my Dad, was divorced when that was quite a difficult situation for a woman to be in, and raised my brother and me. We moved to a couple of acres in Sonoma County and my brother and I raised a variety of animals—horse, cows, sheep, pigs, etc—thanks go to Mom for letting us venture in to all of that when she had absolutely no experience with any of it. She developed her skill at pottery, taught pottery classes, and sold pottery at her Pot Shop on the property. She had quite a following of potters and other crafts-people.

Mom retired from pottery when Dave and I went to college and she moved to Healdsburg. She took up spinning and weaving (she had always been a wonderful knitter) and finally had time to tackle all the old family papers and photos that we had stored for years. She wrote three books about her ancestors, researching additional documentation of all the names and dates and places. Mom’s great grandparents were pioneers who settled in the Stockton area and her grandmother was born in a log cabin on banks of the Stanislaus River so there is a lot of interesting history. Mom meant to write a fourth book to finish up the stories of all her ancestors, but Alzheimer’s overtook her before she could work on that.

Mom was a 2nd Lieutenant in the WACs during WW2.

More about the pasture

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Robin

This photo is of the same field that is in the last post, but it’s taken in the other direction. See that tower on top of the barn? That’s where I was when I took the other photo. This 5-acre pasture is divided into 8 vertical strips with high-tensile electric wire. I subdivide those strips with electric net fence and it’s that fence that I move when I put the sheep on fresh feed every day or two. In the photo below the sheep see me on the other side of the fence and they are waiting for me to let them in. In the photo you can’t really see the green grass and clover because the dry grass is taller, but it’s there.

This is a not-so-flattering photo of Ranger waiting with the ewes.

As I open up the net fence the sheep go rushing through.

I spend time just watching sheep eat! I like to see what they go for first.

Pasture observations

Posted on November 8, 2008 by Robin

Are you going to get tired of reading my pasture observations? Hey, it’s what I do. When you raise livestock on the land then you are really a grass farmer first…or should be. My first observation this morning was the dew on the grass that I have learned is called yellow foxtail. It is one of the late summer grasses that is NOT desirable. The sheep don’t like to eat it which is why you see so much in the field. But it did look pretty this morning.

Another observation is what has happened to our crop circle. Our crop circle is not like the ones you may have read about. If you see our place from above (which we can do even in the flat Sacramento Valley now that my husband has built a 2 story barn with an additional tower) then you see this area in the middle of the pasture that is a different type of plant. It is some kind of reed, another undesirable plant and one that indicates poor drainage.

Do you see that darker area in the middle of the pasture? That’s the reed. But do you also see the bright green part of it on the right? That’s new annual grass that is outgrowing anything else in the pasture right now. This summer my brother built a prototype shade structure that I could move around to various parts of the pasture. That is where I had the shade while the sheep were in that part of the pasture. A few days of trampling that reed opened that area up to allow grass to grow now that it has started to rain. Here is a closeup.

I have more observations, but I’m going to put them in another post. The last couple of times that I included a lot of photos it fouled up the format of not only those posts but all the previous ones too.

Amaryllis arrives

Posted on October 28, 2008 by Robin

No, I don’t mean the flower, Amaryllis. This Amaryllis is a spotted donkey. She arrived on Saturday. She was foaled in a sheep pen in Iowa and has lived with Jacob sheep all her life. She will continue duty as a guard donkey here, but also as my equine buddy.

Amaryllis

Sheep investigating Amaryllis

Zena is a favorite yearling and this is how she came in from the pasture this morning.

Zena

What happened?

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Robin

I don’t know what happened. I just wrote the post about the pasture. I finished up with a paragraph about the blankets I wove. That paragraph got attached to the previous one and the photo didn’t show up. Here is the photo.

: Five blankets on one warp

Also, it seems that the normal formatting of all the previous posts is gone. I don’t know why. I sure get frustrated wtih this stuff. Any ideas?

Pasture Productivity

Posted on October 21, 2008 by Robin

I still have the rams in with the ewes so I have the flock split into two main groups. Ranger and his ewes are in the main pasture and Houdini and his ewes are in what I call the horse pasture. That’s because that pasture is where we have had horses and a cow or two in the past. This year was the first time I had sheep in that pasture. If you want to grow healthy pasture there is more to it than just opening a gate and letting the animals in to graze. This pasture has been severely overgrazed in the past, but I was amazed at the amount of clover and trefoil that grew in parts of the pasture after several months of rest. The problem with this pasture is the amount of dallas grass, a summer-growing perennial in the west half. It grows fast in mid to late summer and then dries out in the winter. It was so thick in half the pasture that nothing could grow under it. There was just a thick dried matt of it–that is cutting the productivity of the pasture. The photo below shows this summer’s growth of dallas grass. The sheep will eat it when it’s young and palatable, but when it gets larger they can’t keep up with it and it is not as desirable. The grass in the photo below was at my shoulder height before the last north winds. Some of it has been blown over. If you look closely on the right wide you see the top of a black plastic post sticking up. There is also a post on the left side but the grass is built up against it. The sheep don’t even venture into this thick thatch.

: West view of sample plot in pasture

So what to do about it? I could try to get some cows in here. If they didn’t eat it at least they’d trample it. But I’m trying to make something work with the sheep. I have started feeding hay out here. I break the flakes of hay into smaller pieces and place it in strategic places in the tall grass. The photo below shows those same posts after 2 feedings in that area. (Note the wooden post in the background of each picture.) The sheep didn’t eat all that grass, but a good part of it is trampled down and hopefully broken up enough that something will grow through it after the winter rains.

: West view 24 hours later

The next two photos show the same plot looking north. You can barely see the black plastic posts in the first photo, but they’re obvious in the second.

Pasture plot, north view before grazing

North view after 24 hours

Look at how much grass there is behind this plot. I’m working my way north with the hay feeding. The goal is to get all that dallas grass eaten or trampled. Then when it rains i’ll get more palatable feed in there.

Power ram?

Posted on October 6, 2008 by Robin

I took this photo of Houdini and told my husband that I thought he looked like an evil cartoon character.

Dan replied that he looked like one of the Power Rangers, which he just happened to see on Saturday morning. (I guess it came on after This Old House.) Now that it has rained and the sheep are walking around in tall wet grass a lot of the color from the marking harness has come off of Houdini, but in the first few days of breeding season I was ready to call him Alien Ram because he had a green tinge all over his wool.

When I’m not dealing with sheep, hay, classes, etc, I’m supposed to be weaving. I finally got a huge job finished. These are 4 queen size blankets and one double blanket that I just shipped on Friday. They are woven from wool grown by the customer’s family and she wanted blankets for her family members. They don’t look too impressive in the photo, but it was a lot of time.

Now the fun stuff (while my computer is still letting me download photos–don’t know what happened overnight). I like making these V-shawls and here are some friends helping to model them.

And this is my son making his escape after I made him take these photos.

Below is a striking shawl made by one of my students in the last v-shawl class I taught. This is her 2nd weaving!

A Gorgeous Day

Posted on October 5, 2008 by Robin

It rained last night–not a lot, but enough to get rid of the dust and make everything smell fresh. This is the first rain since sometime in March! We were due. The best thing about the rain was that my hay was all in the barn BEFORE it started, thanks my husband and son. I had 440 bales waiting to go in the barn. This is just half of it.

haystack

I started did my share of stacking hay, but eventually Dan and Chris got involved and at that point I got to use gravity and throw the hay off the stack while Dan dragged it inside and Chris (age 17) stacked it. We filled 3 horse stalls and part of the aisle of the horse barn. These are HEAVY bales–a lot of them are over 125 pounds and up to 150 pounds.

So the hay was in, the sky was fresh and blue this morning, and the weather was perfect. I spent the day with a ewe and lambs at the local feed store where they were having a Grand Opening for their new store. Nice weather, good food (that’s always important), and I sold a few handwoven pieces.

It’s finally breeding season. I put the rams in with the ewes on Tuesday and 16 sheep are marked already. Here are some of Houdini’s girls. I sure hope that we get some rain before my November shearing date because these ewes are really green. Ranger’s ewes aren’t marked nearly as much–different brand of marker I think.

: marked ewes

Well. I had a lot more photos to post but my computer is running way too slowly. It took me 10 minutes to get this one photo into the blog. I’ve been shelling walnuts while I’m waiting in between clicks. So I’ll sign off for now.

Meridian Jacobs' Blog

Life on the farm and at the loom.

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