I was going to get away from a weather report, but this morning the sunrise behind the fog inspired me to take photos.
It was daylight as I finished cleaning the barn, but still foggy. Sheep are off the pasture now because it’s so wet, so they were waiting to be fed.
When you sit down for a meal at home do you always sit in the same place? Probably. These sheep are always at the back part of the barn because that is where they want to eat. And Zora always puts her feet up on the feeder to eat out of the top.
This is the barn from the back. There was a prompt on the phone to clean my lens. I think the phone objected to the fog.
The ram pen is just behind where I was standing for that last shot. This is Starthist Hornblower, sire of many of the lambs to be born in February and March.
Have I been too focused on weather? Fog, Fog, Fog, and then Rain. The sun was out today–all day! And it felt wonderful!
It was a chilly morning with frost. But it makes all the difference when the sun is out.
I moved the net fence (to the right in this photo) and let the sheep out to graze. In the last post I said that they were off the pasture while it was so wet, but today I thought that it had dried enough to minimize impact to the soil.
After chores and while I was still wearing all the layers I thought I’d take Ginny for a W-A-L-K (I have to spell it if she is near me) Across the Road. That’s Mt. Diablo in the distance (see the birthday hike post).
I’m always curious about what makes these patterns. Any suggestions?
Some of the patterns are from some kind of creature ON the soil. What about the others from a creature UNDER the soil?
Towards the end of the walk Ginny saw something across the canal that looked familiar. I could see that it was an osage orange fruit, and not a tennis ball, but she was sure focused. I suggested that she go “get it”. Do you see the “ball” at the far side of the water, just about center in the photo?
Ginny swam across the canal but was disappointed to find out that the yellow object was not a ball. That made me wonder about colors that dogs see. I didn’t think that they distinguish color. Here is what AI says: “Yes, dogs can see yellow, and it’s one of the primary colors they distinguish well, along with blue; they have dichromatic vision, meaning they see a spectrum dominated by blues and yellows, while reds and greens often appear as brownish or grayish shades. Their vision isn’t black and white, but it’s limited compared to humans, making yellow tennis balls stand out clearly against green grass for them.” Look at what you can learn when reading this blog.
Later in the morning, working in the sunny garden I spotted about 20 turkeys at the far end of the pasture. That’s the neighbor’s house in the background.
The shortest day of the year! Thank goodness we can look forward to sun again. I thought I’d share some photos of one of the things that most makes me think of summer.
Sunflowers!
This is the view from Across the Road a few years when sunflowers were the crop. That’s our barn in the background.
Two sunflowers here at the farm that brighten up the foggy winter. On the left is a sunflower that is in the Weaving House (my studio/classroom). This is made by one of the Artery members who creates art from bicycle inner tubes! The one on the right is my birthday present made by Dan from horseshoes and metal scraps. You can’t tell from this photo but it is as tall as me and now marks my parking space near the garden!
This morning I shared photos of our grazing set-up now that it’s one year after the big project began. I just looked back through my blog and found this post when we seeded. That was November 19, just hours before we had a lot of rain. A lot has happened in a year. This winter it feels like a whole new experience because prior to this project I would not have been grazing in late November and would be waiting for spring.
Yesterday about noon I walked out to check the fence. Some of the sheep were on their way in.
This is the corner of the new paddock I’d just set up. I think I mentioned something in previous posts about acquiring five new sheep. This is one of the three Corriedales, so far named Corri 1, Corri 2, and Corri 3. Yeah, not very creative. This is Corri 3…
…and she is one of my best friends.
Sparky is another.
I have been taking photos of individual sheep to update the pages on the website. I have updated this page with the current ewes, but haven’t included all the new photos yet. The ewe in this photo is Ophelia, a yearling.
I also took photos of new lambskins yesterday. I stopped in the middle of writing this to list them here.
The hedgerow project wasn’t completely finished yesterday. I found more cardboard and cut it up for the remaining 19 plants and added more straw. We hadn’t got them all watered yesterday so I brought out a wagon to haul more water at one time.
I finished just as the sun went down.
In the evening I jumped on Zoom for my final Basics of Bark Tan class presented by Traditional Tanners where I have had the latest sheepskins tanned. This is leather I made from deerskin! I highly recommend this class. It is very well presented and a lot of fun!
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?
I woke up at 5 and thought of things that need to be done. No point in staying in bed.
Rewrite minutes from Tuesday evening’s Artery Board meeting. ✓ Make one more 15′ length of e-net fence so I can switch sheep to another paddock. ✓ Walk across the road with Ginny. ✓ Do a fresh-leaf indigo dye bath to over dye the weld-dyed yellow yarn. ✓ Here are the photos to accompany that check list:
There are 3-wire electric fences every 60 feet in the south pasture. These are charged by attaching to a hot wire at the south border fence. I need to connect a 15′ net fence from that hot wire to these north-south fences. My goal was to have all electric net fences for blocking off the 60′ spaces and the 15′ connection fences in place and not have to move those lengths of fence every time I switch to a new paddock. I have finally accomplished that goal with this morning’s 15′ fence! (I think–maybe I need one more.)
Another accomplishment is to organize and label what’s left. There are three fences that will make up one long north-south fence if I decide to split the 60′ paddock in half lengthwise. The other two bags are leftover but still useable portions of net fence.
Time for a walk Across the Road. This is for Ginny’s mental benefit and for mine. If I go in the morning then all day I can remember that I got at least a little exercise.
This tractor was parked near the hayfield. That tire is taller than I am!
A view of the new paddock from the main road coming back from our walk.
Indigo in the garden.
I harvested about a pound of leaves to overdye the yellow yarn I dyed with weld the day before. I dye with fresh leaves using ice water and a blender. After that dye bath was in place I could move on to something else.
What is the plan for the afternoon? Make more horn buttons ✓ Thread the hemp warp that is on one of the looms. ✓ Photograph all the unfinished pieces for yesterday’s blog post. ✓
I cut more buttons. The next step is to drill holes and then sand. I found some that already had holes but I had not sanded them. Those are in the three cups at the bottom. I keep track of buttons that will match by keeping all from one horn together through the process. I sanded all those that already had holes in them, but still need to drill the others.
While I was working in the barn on buttons we had a hay delivery. This is 88 bales that need to go in the barn.
I took the indigo-dyed yarn out of the bucket and hung it up to drip. When I’m finished here I’ll cut apart the bundled skeins so they can dry better. The yellow one is what the green ones looked like before putting in the indigo. The blue yarn was white yarn in the same bucket.
I went to one of the looms in the shop to thread my space-dyed hemp yarn and finished about chore time. Now it’s ready to weave. That is on today’s list, along with sanding those buttons.
It’s not easy to leave when you have animals to care for. I am fortunate that there are long-time Farm Club members who have become good friends, and they are willing and able to spend a few days at the farm. Three friends organized the dates to suit their schedules so I know the animals are in good hands.
Anytime Dan and I will both be gone I spend at least a day getting organized. I needed to get the pasture set up to make it easier to graze. This has been “on the list” whether I was leaving or not. So Farm Club members came Saturday to help with that project and I shared that here.
This is on the list of things to fix, but there was no time to do it right before we left. This is the ram pen shelter and they have been enlarging the holes in the plywood. There is a 2×6 board on the inside so I haven’t been worried about the rams getting out, but do I want to take a chance when I’m gone? So I tied a metal panel to the outside.
The water trough needs cleaning at least weekly in the summer because it gets full of algae.
I needed to finish a proposal for an article for one of next year’s Handwoven magazines. That was due August 1. This is a photo to accompany that proposal.
After photographing the cosmos flowers I harvested this batch to dry. I pick them every few days so they will continue to bloom and to save them for dyeing later. The pink flowers are dahlias.
We were down to only six bales of alfalfa in the barn. Although the ewes would be on the pasture while we were gone, all the rams need to be fed hay. Since Dan’s knee replacement we have bought hay by the stack so it would be delivered. This is the first batch of ten bales that Dan has loaded himself since the surgery.
This job was not a priority but I continue to be distracted by gardening chores. I know this is not the time of year to prune roses, but I was tired of being attacked by rose branches every time I walked on that path or the deck at the Weaving House.
The lamb page of the website has not been updated for quite awhile and I needed current photos. The last photos are from mid-May and those lambs have changed a lot since then. I took these photos a couple of days before our trip but have not yet updated the site. Maybe by the time you read this post I will have added some of these. I will need to take more photos when I’m home.
A couple of days before leaving I was at the Artery to remove all of my pieces there. The Artery will be closed for two weeks while the floors are completely refinished. The old carpet and tile will be removed and the floor will be refinished. We found that there would have to be the added job of asbestos removal. The Artery will reopen August 11 so I’ll be returning my pieces the day before.
I got my Timm Ranch wool back from the mill right before we left. I had time only to open the boxes. I will list it on the website when I’m back.
Stay tuned for photos of our trip. We camped the first couple of nights but I’m in a hotel room right now and finally got my computer out. Now to try and make some updates to the sheep pages. Or maybe I should review 5 days of emails…
I’ll start with a random photo. This is the newest animal here, if he/she (?) is still here. Every morning we feed the two Garage Cats in, well, the garage. For a couple of weeks we have seen a third cat off and on. It (haven’t identified gender yet) has started to come in while I’m still there if I don’t make any fast moves. We don’t know where it came from–a neighboring property or dumped. The local newspaper had an article this week about the overwhelming number of dogs and cats that are abandoned. So we’ll never know about this one. I put out a live trap a few days ago but one of the other cats went in for the food. We’re going to be gone for a week so this is not the time to catch this kitten anyway. I did not see it the last two days so I don’t know if it is gone or just being more cautious. I’ve name it Smudge.
Back to sheep things. This is Patchwork Amara. You can glimpse the beautiful clover and trefoil in the background. This is what the sheep are grazing and that’s what this post is about.
Farm Club members came Saturday to help with a fencing project. We finally have all the permanent fencing back in the pasture. Dan has been working on that a bit at a time while trying to let his knee fully recover after knee replacement in April. Since last fall I have written a lot of blog posts about the pasture renovation and irrigation improvement. Grazing properly this spring was a challenge when I had to set up electric net fence for the whole paddock. Now we have 3-wire electric fence going north-south along every other check. That’s every 60 feet. Initially I was grazing each 30 foot width separately. Now it seems to work to graze the 60 foot width for four days. I think they are grazing it evenly enough.
I still need to use the electric net fence though. The posts for the permanent fencing are about 15 feet from the south perimeter fence so that we can drive a tractor there. We use net fences to block that 15 foot gap. That net fence is also important because it is how the charge is carried from the perimeter fence to the north-south paddock fence. In the past I have moved those fences from one end to the other as we moved the sheep. Wouldn’t it be nice to have enough of the 15′ fences to have them always in place and ready to go? I also wanted one fence to span the whole north-south distance in case I wanted to split those 60′ paddocks into two for grazing when we have fewer sheep out there. Another need is 60′ fences to block off the north end of those paddocks. That’s where Farm Club comes in.
I have been putting this off (not like I’m sitting around doing nothing) and thought that it would be a good task for Farm Club. Also if Farm Club members came to do it, I wouldn’t be able to procrastinate and move it to the “deal with it later” list.
First we measured all the spaces in the pasture where I needed net fences. North-south lane fences need to be about 15 feet. The north-south fence to split the 60 foot paddock is 368 feet.
Then we gathered up all the fences that I’ve been using to create paddocks.We measured them and checked for damage.
We used bright red labels provided by Susan so that we could easily find the label. This is Rachel marking these.
Rachel made a list so we could match the needed fences with what was available. I found two 162 foot lengths and a 40+ foot length to use for the long fence I wanted. Then we started to cut the other fences and make sure the wires were attached at each end to carry the charge. I used to use 75+ foot fences to close the gaps in the old system. We could cut those into 60 and 15 foot fences or make multiple 15 foot fences, especially if there were bad spots to avoid. We did not finish the project, but made good headway. Now that all the fences are labeled we’ll have another Farm Day to finish the project. I have enough fences now so that the paddocks are set up for the week I’ll be gone and Farm Club members will be supervising.
Back to random photos.
Those are all mine. The green and blue shoes are wool and I like them best in the summer because they don’t get so hot.
Young pigeons. A couple of months ago I realized that a pigeon had made a shallow nest at the top of the stairs in the barn. I should have tossed it out then. Last year Dan spent days cleaning out years of accumulated pigeon droppings in the second story. He blocked off all the access points, but one pigeon figured out how to fly over the top of the door at the stairway. There were two eggs I think. I took a photo of the baby pigeons on June 30 and I think they were only a few days old. I’m surprised that they didn’t try to fly when I walked up here. They look like they are old enough. I wonder if they haven’t figured out how to fly through the gap where the mother pigeon enters this space.
And there are two more eggs. I don’t remember if I had seen four eggs and only two hatched, or if this is another generation. I have tossed these eggs. As soon as we get back from our upcoming trip I will move these pigeons out and clean this area. We don’t want to start another pigeon rookery.
Oxalis, also known as sour grass, wood sorrel and other names. It is considered a weed, but the flowers give a dye. Before Dan took the mower to these growing in the front yarn I picked flowers.
Dan started to fill in the low spot behind the barn.
First he re-stacked the compost pile and then moved dirt and ash from the burn pile that has accumulated over years.
Four rams posing. Left to right: Sterling and Griffin, both yearlings; Horatio and Blizzard, older.
We’re getting close to lambing. This is Tranquility and Eileen, due in the next ten days.
Roca
Trista, also due in the next 10 days.
Zoe is a 2024 lamb and is not pregnant, but I included here because I just skirted her fleece and saw something interesting. The locks below are from her fleece.
I have seen one other ewe’s fleece this year with a similar change in fleece color occurring part way through the year. I’m not sure of the cause.
Wool sorted and ready for the mill. I have more to finish before I can deliver this.
This was a catch-up day at the computer. I’m still not caught up, but accomplished a few things. Did you know there is a Meridian Jacobs YouTube channel?
I spent some time today editing videos.There is probably a way to embed them here, but I don’t know how. I’ll include links. Two are from shearing day. Shearing Jacob Rams and Shearing Two Jacob Ewes. The third is one I’ve been meaning to put together for quite awhile. I show how I Using A Warping Wheel to warp my big loom. This is a specialized piece of equipment that is hard to explain even to other weavers.
To make this post a little more interesting, here are some photos that relate to the videos.
This is one of the ewes that was shorn in the video. It’s not always possible to keep hay out of he wool!
This is Eli, one of the rams in the shearing video.
Here is the warp I was winding in the Warping Wheel video. These are the blankets just cut off the loom.
These six blankets are some from the previous photo after wet finishing. The yarn in the blue blankets is dyed with indigo I grew and the brown yarn is dyed with walnut hulls.
There is are cycles to farming. The sheep are shorn and starting to grow new wool. The ewes are pregnant and lambing season will start soon. These blankets are woven using wool I get from Timm Ranch and have spun into yarn. Timm Ranch shearing will be in March and I’ll skirt fleeces and buy wool for the 2025 yarn. I am still waiting on the 2024 Timm Ranch yarn. Due to unforeseen circumstances I will be combining the 2024 and 2025 wool for the next batch of yarn.
The dye garden has its own cycle. I won’t be ready to dye blue yarn until the indigo plants get big enough…and they aren’t even planted yet for this year. Fortunately I have some dried cosmos and hollyhock flowers that I can use, but that’s only if I have enough yarn left from previous years. The cycles don’t always overlap the way you want them too.
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