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Category Archives: Farm life
Farm Day – help with sheep chores
Our first Farm Day of the year was on Saturday and five Farm Club members helped me get ready for lambing. I forgot to take photos at the beginning but started with vaccinating all the ewes. In the meantime we kept an eye on the two ewes who were supposed to be bred that day so that they will lamb at the fair in July.
There was no question about Miller and Donna, but ZZ left me wondering. He seemed more interested in his buddies in the adjacent pen than he was in Clover although she was doing her best to entice him. I decided that I’d better try another ram so Faulkner was the one. He knew just what to do.
While the rams were otherwise occupied and I had plenty of help it was time to clean the ram pen.
Rusty usually keeps the rams away while I clean so he took his usual position although the rams weren’t there. 
The ewes watched through the gate while we moved wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow load. Those red marks are just from the marking crayon we used as we vaccinated.
After cleaning the ram pen it was donkey play time! Lisa discovered the bliss of brushing a donkey.
Amaryllis had to hold still for me to measure her. She is about as svelte as she ever gets and I wanted to have a baseline measurement for her (670 pounds according to the tape, which is really meant for horses). By the way, I looked up svelte because I wasn’t sure how to spell it. Svelte, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: thin in an attractive or graceful way; and a. slender, lithe. b : having clean lines : sleek. Hmmm. So maybe svelte isn’t quite the right word to describe a donkey.
Across the Road Close-up
I just wrote a post using photos that I took Across the Road from our mailbox. I started that to document the changes in the field that we see from our house everyday. The photos themselves are kind of boring and not all that attractive. Here is some of what I see when I walk Across the Road. (And here is Rusty’s version.)
Last year the main crop was sunflowers but there is a corner of land owned by someone else. Last summer’s crop on that parcel was corn.
Hot dog.
Irrigating the sunflower field.
Pollenating the sunflowers.
Stickers in someone’s fur.
Sometimes our road seems like an alfalfa highway.
Swarm of bugs.
Another hot dog. 
Irrigation water. This sure looks appealing when it is 100+ degrees.
Signs that I’m not the only one Across the Road. 
Hope of the next harvest.
Last Year’s View Across the Road
We don’t have very much acreage, but across the road is a much larger parcel. We appreciate living here and being able to walk, run the dogs, and just a enjoy the view across the road. In 2013 I planned to take photos from the same location, of the same view, and at the same time each week to document the changes through the year. You probably don’t mind that it didn’t work because who would want to see 52 photos of the same thing? This field has been planted to alfalfa for several years but in 2013 there were sunflowers. Here is the year Across the Road:
January 10
January 25
January 31
March 7
March 26
April 4
April 11
May 5
May 21
May 28
June 13
July 4
July 12
August 8
September 30
October 10
October 18
November 24
December 31
There you have it. I stood at the mailbox for each photo. But the photos are obviously now always the same view or even using the same camera.
The most striking thing in my mind is how dry it was last year. The Central Valley of CA enjoys a Mediterranean climate which means hot dry summers and cool wet winters. We rely on winter rainfall to replenish aquifers and reservoirs to provide the water that keeps the valley from being a desert in the summer. This link shows graphs of the average precipitation and temperature for our area. According to accuweather.com the average annual rainfall for Sacramento is 18.5″. We have had only 30% of that (5″ in all of 2013). The hills (and the field across the road) should be green right now with the growth of the annual grasses that germinate from fall rains. Grass started to grow with each of the two (only 2) rainy days that we had but has mostly dried up.
On the bright side, I’m not slogging through calf-deep mud when doing chores and we don’t have to run the sump pump to keep the the water heater in the basement from flooding.
Hoping for a wet 2014!
Amaryllis is a Good Sport
Rusty has never been a willing partner in taking cute holiday photos.
His friend, Moby wasn’t much better. 
Nor was Ozzie.
Maybe it would have worked with a smaller hat.
Some of the sheep are OK with it. This is Noel.
Here is Paulette. But now we have a new star.
Spinners’ Day Out was yesterday. Most of the people here were part of Farm Club (which, by the way, anyone can now join as an e-Farm Club member) and they were willing (more like insistent) on getting photos with Amaryllis. Dona and Mary took these photos.
“Would you get that thing away from my eye?” 
Shearing Day
Sunday was Shearing Day and we sheared 71 sheep (61 ewes and 10 rams and wethers). I said “we”. Not really “we”, but John, my fabulous shearer. The sheep looked great, the fleece looked great and he finished shearing in two and a half hours! Shearing was finished by 11:30.
Here are sheep ready to be shorn.
Clover.
Mary.
John started with the rams…
…and moved on to ewes.
Farm Club members were the other wonderful helpers who made it all work.
Alison spent the morning at the skirting table explaining skirting and helping buyers skirt their fleeces.
Shelby and Gynna were our sheep wranglers, making sure that there was always another sheep for John to shear.
Mary and Carol bagged fleeces while Anna swept and Jackie worked the exit gate.
Linda weighed and recorded fleeces. Other members helped too but I didn’t get photos.
What would shearing day be without chili…
…and Dona’s brownies (and Lisa’s Jacob sheep cookies, Jackie’s corn biscuits, Mary’s wonderful tangy chicken and fancy rice krispie treats and more).
After shearing the sheep look so much thinner. This photo looks as though it was stretched vertically, but it wasn’t.
Lila.
Cascade.
Gynna looks happy with her Farm Club fleece.
And look at this gorgeous one!
After shearing we (Farm Club again and other friends) did demos of all kinds of spinning and fiber prep, but that’s another story, especially because it’s too late to write more.
Fall Color
We really need rain, but I must admit that the weather is sure nice. I spent an hour in the pasture yesterday morning enjoying the fall color.
It’s not just the trees that are colorful:
Red and yellow and green are pretty…
…but black and white are two of my favorites.
Odds & Ends…or what do I do all day?
I am always behind, but this year I feel more behind than ever in the weaving department. I read the blog of a production weaver I know and she commented that any weaving she does now through the end of the year is “extra”. Everything for this season’s sales is finished. What? I should have woven my scarves and blankets LAST January? I thought about it. I also thought about it in March and July and August and September. I knew that I’d get to it in October. What have I been doing when I should be weaving? Here are a few examples beside the obvious sheep farming, Lambtown, etc.
Last week I hosted a field trip of middle school home-schooled kids and their families. We spent a couple of hours in the barn and at the shop. After lunch I guided them through a needlefelting project.
They all made up their own designs. This is one student’s work. Cute, huh?
I taught a Learn to Weave class a couple of weeks ago.
Here is the scarf woven by a brand new weaver. She used Zephyr Jaggerspun yarn and doubled it in warp and weft. It turned out great!
One of the students couldn’t come back on the second day of the class and she finished her scarf today. This is a close-up. She used Jaggerspun Maine-Line yarn.
I taught three students in a Rigid Heddle Scarf class, which, by the way, I will offer again once in December. No more other classes until January. 
This is the blackberry jungle growing (for those of you who know the farm) just north of Faulkner’s pen–in fact part of this IS the fence-line for Faulkner’s pen. There is an engineered septic system under those shorter blackberries that is supposed to be maintained and inspected every year. 
This is what I did on Sunday after working another several hours on the final Lambtown reports and finances. There is still a lot of blackberry work to do but at least the septic guys can get to the valve covers.
Farm Club was here all day on Saturday and helped with the list of chores on the clipboard. We didn’t get to all the barn cleaning, but did a lot of other stuff. Maybe I’ll ask Rusty to write a post about that since he hasn’t done much writing lately.
It’s the time of year that the pomegranates need to be picked or they will split (if we ever get any rain that is).
When I take the dogs for a run across the road I see all the black walnuts going to waste. Here is what to do with them.
Boiling black walnuts.
Add white yarn.
End up with brown yarn.
Maybe I’ll get to the loom tomorrow…after I take my kids to the airport.
Fall Grazing
Hendrix and his group of ewes have been in the back pasture since breeding season started and they have been at the north end of that pasture for a couple of weeks. Since hardly anything is growing (start the rain dance please) I figured that they couldn’t do too much damage leaving them that long. I thought that maybe that could take down the dallisgrass and they actually did a pretty good job of it in most of the pasture. It is still a challenge however along the ditch and the fence-line. (If you search dallis in the blog search you’ll see several posts about my attempts to conquer it.)
This is the north end of the property. Notice the blackberries on the north fence. I cut these away in the spring to uncover the electric fence wire on the inside of the field fence. The sheep could help in that job except that this time of year the dallis grass growing in and around the ditch keeps them from going over there. It may seem hard to believe that a grass keeps sheep from something, but this stuff is so coarse and strong it’s like hacking your way through a jungle. And it’s very sticky now from a fungus that grows on the seed head. Several years ago I found a ewe whose horns were so tangled in it that she was stuck upside down in this ditch. The only reason that I knew she was there was that she was baaing. The sheep in the photo above are in the ditch because I trampled some of the grass and put alfalfa there. 
This photo shows that they are making progress. Now I can actually see a ditch and the sheep can get through it to the side with the blackberries.
They are finding the hay in the blackberries and it makes it worth their while to work their way through the grass.
After about a week we have worked our way through the ditch and I’m putting the hay near the fence. 
Then I moved beyond the blackberries and had them trample the dallisgrass along the rest of the fenceline.
This is the east fence and it looked almost as full of grass before I started this project. It is more overrun with blackberries. The sheep have eaten some of the leaves off. I think I have to get in there with clippers now though. There is an electric fence hiding in there somewhere.
Molly – 19 years
Molly was the garage cat. Many of you who come to work in the barn or to see the sheep never saw her because the dogs are usually with me and Molly avoided the dogs. Molly’s hangout was the garage. She was Dan’s cat.
Dan rescued Molly in 1994 when she was a tiny kitten and we had a dairy. He found Molly trying to lap up milk leaking out of the dairy cows who were waiting to be milked. A baby kitty wasn’t going to last long while standing under the cows so Dan brought her to the house. I’ve been looking for photos of her and this was the only one that I found.
This was an attempt at a family photo for our Christmas card. Molly is the little kitty in the middle. Katie and I are holding Stripes and Myrtle, two cats rescued from the Barn Cat life. The calf was one that lived on the back porch for a couple of months after being born as a premie. I named her Sequoia to give her a name to live up to. We had dogs, but I guess we thought it would be a bit tough to get this photo with dogs too.
Fast forward to 2012 or so when these photos were taken.
When we first moved here in 1999 Molly went missing. I was driving the kids to school and saw her up the road running between haystacks. I brought her home and we made sure that she had a safe place in the garage. Dan uses the upstairs of the garage as his office/man-cave and that became Molly’s home base. 
I probably had the dogs with me when I took this photo because that is how Molly stared at them while holding her ground. 
Molly lived a good life for 19 years, but a couple of weeks ago it was time to say that final goodbye.
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