Shearing Day was yesterday. I have far too many photos for one blog post. Starting with the beginning, the night before.
Lots of barn cleaning and organizing. One of the last things to set up is the shearing corner. This board has been in use for many years, labeled so that it never is cut up to use for something else.
The evening before shearing Dan and I went to Trish’s farm, a few miles away, to pick up her 24 Jacob sheep. With sheep in full fleece it took two trailer loads. After shearing they all fit in the trailer with room to spare. These are Trish’s three rams.
I put 10 or 11 ewes in each of two stalls for the night.
I recognize this ewe’s hairdo from when she was here last year.
John began with Trish’s rams.
As John was shearing the three rams we moved the ewes from a stall to the shearing corner. The shearer doesn’t want to stop once he starts, so we do our best to always have the next sheep ready.
I woke up early on Shearing Day so I could finish the prep for the day. One of the jobs was to get all of our rams into the shearing area before people got here. While John was shearing Trish’s sheep I worked on the rams, vaccinated and trimming hooves on all. That way I didn’t have to think about catching them later to deal with that.
After Trish’s sheep were loaded back into the trailer John started on our six rams and the wether.
In the meantime Farm club members started gathering our ewes. This photo shows what a fabulous day it was, after so many days of thick fog. We were really lucky, because that drippy wet fog was back today.
I am fortunate that I have such a willing and capable team of people.
Sheep are in the lambing area and this will be the next group to move in.
Thanks to Roy Clemes for sharing some of the photos I used here.
As part of our Pasture Renovation project last fall and into this year, supported by NRCS (Natural Resources Conservation Service) we installed two Soil Moisture sensors and a flowmeter. (If you want to start from the beginning to see photos of this project search in the blog for the topic, Pasture and Irrigation Renovation.) The goal of having these sensors is to aid in planning the timing of irrigation. However I find it interesting to see what is going on now with the rain.
I took the photo below from the website we use to read the soil moisture info. I thought it would be interesting to see the aerial view of the farm. Our 10-acre farm is the green square in the center (plus buildings). There is an almond orchard north of us and alfalfa on the east. When I write about Across the Road that is what I’m talking about. There is a large canal on the south just past the driveway that leads to the neighbors on the west. This photo is from before we did the work in 2024 and still had an open ditch for irrigating. You can tell that we had eight fence lines in the south pasture. There are now nine interior fence lines running north-south, each 60′ apart. There are valves in the new irrigation pipeline every 30′, so when I graze I can either graze the 60′ wide strip or split that into two 30′ wide paddocks.
This photo provides a good visual for the post I wrote (and plan to do more) about sheep grazing Across the Road. The trucks in that post were parked just across the main road and between the trees just south of the house on our side of the road and the bushes on the other side just south of our tree.
Back to the purpose of this post, the soil moisture sensors.
Let me explain what you’re seeing. The red line is the flow meter. It’s at zero except when we are irrigating. That shows the water coming into the pipeline from SID (Solano Irrigation District). It took some tweaking to get it right. The July reading stopped but we didn’t know why. By early August we had the solution. We needed a screen over the intake area so that weeds and branches didn’t physically impede the propellor going around in the pipeline.
About the other colors. There are two soil moisture sensors. Both are at the south end of the pasture. Now that I have added the aerial photo I can refer you to that–southwest corner and south edge about 2/3 of the way to the east. They are not right on the south fence line but about 20′ north of that.
Each sensor measure soil moisture at three depths–4″, 8″, and 12″. The goal is to know the moisture in the root zone of the pasture plants. Those depths are color coded: green is 4″, purple is 8″, and blue is 12″. When I look at the chart I have to orient myself to know that I’m not seeing the soil profile as it is if I am standing there. I think it as green for the plants and blue for the deepest water. Then it makes sense. The darker colors are the sensor on the west and the lighter colors are the east sensor. So you can see that when we irrigate or it rains all levels being measured are mostly saturated. The 4″ depth dries out most quickly while it takes longer for the other two to lose moisture, and during the summer they don’t lose nearly as much moisture as the ones closer to the surface.
November 13 and 14 it rained about 2″. The weather stayed foggy for weeks after that and into December. The soil moisture level remained high. I assume that is because #1- It was so foggy and damp, and #2 – plant demand slowed way down because of the cold and the season.
To be thorough I thought I’d show you most of the year. Early May shows our first irrigation. We were having the problem with the flowmeter but didn’t figure out the solution until August.
This view of the last two weeks makes it easier to see what’s going on. This explains why I have the sheep blocked off the pasture now. It is very wet, and I think it is better for the sheep and the pasture to have them off of it. It’s not that sheep can’t handle some rain, but, just like you don’t stomp around in your vegetable garden when you’re irrigating, we don’t want to impact the soil as 60 sheep (240 hooves) would.
Now I’ve convinced myself that I made the right decision to lock them in for now.
The title is significant. I don’t know that we have ever grazed into December. There wasn’t enough feed and the ground was too soggy. Now we have lots of green feed and need to keep the sheep eating it. The downside is that the rain seems to have stopped and we will need more.
This is Paddock #1 (west property line) after two days of grazing.
This is Paddock #1 North, just across that fence. Notice that my boot is under the bottom wire, but it’s pretty well buried in foliage. I walked along this stretch of fence to clear that bottom wire.
Happy sheep.
More happy sheep. The last time we grazed this paddock was three months ago on September 1.
The big leafy plant is chicory and so is the one with blue flowers. It took me a long time to accept that they are the same plant.
After looking it up online I found: “Forage Chicory: Perennial broadleaf. Up to 18” (flower stalks up to 6′). Tap-rooted broadleaf perennial with bright blue flowers suited to well-drained moderately acidic soils. As annual or perennial forage: well-managed stands may persist 5 years or longer, but also valuable in annual stands for pasture or green chop. Very high digestibility and protein levels up to 50% higher than alfalfa. Digestibility is reduced if plants are allowed to bolt, but the flowers are very attractive! Research shows reduced parasite loads in animals fed or pastured on chicory. “
This photo is after grazing Paddock 1N for three days. A lot is trampled, but they were still eating out here this morning.
I opened the fence to let them into the next paddock. I have video and I just spent time on iMovie after not using it for a long time. Let’s see if I can share this on YouTube. Here is the link.
Back to regular blogging. More happy sheep.
This view is interesting to me because this is the area where ryegrass completely overwhelmed the clover last spring. This post is one of several I wrote about that situation. If you pursue the Grazing posts you’ll see the whole story. This is good feed here, but it is patchy, more so than in the rest of the paddocks.
This ewe, Meridian Pecan, isn’t bothered by any of those details. She’s happy to have fresh green feed.
A few days ago I heard sheep making a lot of noise and saw that they were all going from the pasture to the barn. It seemed like more baaing than usual. Then I realized that I wasn’t hearing my sheep.
These trucks were parked just down the road but where I couldn’t see them from the house because of the trees.
Notice that the two noses poking through the holes are different!
These trailers have four levels and all were full of ewes and lambs.
They move the ramp once because two levels can unload to one position of the ramp.
Two guardian dogs were with the sheep.
I was surprised at how young some of the lambs were. It shouldn’t have been a surprise. It’s just that I have no experience with this kind of operation. Our sheep have it easy with barn access and personal attention all the time.
It was quite noisy with lambs and ewes looking for each other.
The second truck pulled up to unload.
Each driver was responsible for unloading his truck. They switched to rubber boots so they could climb in with the sheep if necessary and keep their other footwear clean. I didn’t see any other fences so I wasn’t sure how they were going to deal with this many sheep.
I have seen other alfalfa fields where they graze sheep but this is a first for “our” field–the one Across the Road that I know well. I talked to the truck drivers a bit. I think they said they had about 450 sheep to unload. I thought they said that was the number of ewes but maybe it included lambs. I wasn’t sure what they were going to do for the night because I didn’t see any other fences.
There were a lot of sheep crowded into this fenced area. It turns out that this was just a holding area while the trucks were being unloaded. This was late in the day and rain was coming in that night.
The fence was opened and two men with one 4-wheeler and 3 Border Collies moved the sheep to the east. Fencing was already set up somewhere else and a herder would stay in an RV near the sheep.
It rained that night and it was too muddy to walk across the road the next day and I was busy all day anyway. The following day I wanted to see where the sheep were. I walked half of my normal route but didn’t want to get close enough to alert the guardian dogs and cause a problem. It’s complicated to bring sheep to graze areas that aren’t set up for it. Fencing is supplied by the grazers–you can’t see the electric net fence in this photo. And they have to have a water source–that’s the white tank.
I’ll probably walk over there today and find out if they are in the same location.
When I wrote a newsletter yesterday I referred to the series of blog posts about the pasture that I wrote over the last year. You can find any of these by searching Pasture and Irrigation Renovation (14 posts) and Grazing and Irrigation (7 posts).
Tonight’s post will follow up on this Grazing and Irrigation post (#7) written in June about May grazing. The pasture looks much different now than it did then.
The ryegrass is gone and you see mostly clover.
Next most prominent is birdsfoot trefoil, and more recently the chicory has taken a foothold. Those are the three broadleaf plants that were in our seed mixture. All of the paddocks in the south pasture look like this now. Back in the spring we started topping the ryegrass with the mower before grazing and mowed again after grazing. This prevented the ryegrass from being flattened over the clover and becoming a mulch layer.
The smaller field on the north is different. We didn’t graze early enough and this is where the annual ryegrass had such a head start on the clover and overwhelmed it in places. I took this photo while irrigating two weeks ago. While the pasture was flooded, some of the ryegrass “mulch” floated and I was able to rake a lot of it into piles thinking that I’d be able to move it out with the tractor.
A few days later I realized that I didn’t want to wait until the field dried out enough to use the tractor. I was ready to graze again but the lane was still too muddy. I realized that I could use all that straw to cover up the mud. So I used the wheelbarrow.
I used at least a dozen big loads of ryegrass straw to fill in the lane.
This is Sparky in that north field. Hopefully over the course of winter these bare spots will fill in now the they aren’t covered with mulch.
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.
Way back in January I wrote the 14th Pasture and Irrigation Renovation post. I like my posts to be in order, but now I have skipped some important updates. Too many photos. Too confusing. Too much other stuff going on–lambing, teaching, deadlines, etc. The whole point of this renovation was to feed sheep and make it easier and more efficient to do so. If you look back at that linked post you’ll see plants growing, but they are small and there is a lot of bare ground. Fast forward past winter rain, warming temps, and 3 months. I’ll change the name of this series to Grazing and Irrigation.
The original plan when we applied for funding was that we might not be grazing for a year. It was evident by April that the pasture needed to be grazed NOW. I was committed to a teaching gig at the end of April and was going to put off grazing until I got back. Dan was not able to work on this only two weeks after a knee replacement. My brother, Dave, knowing how important it was to get started with this, offered to help set up the grazing before I left and handle it while I was gone.
A major problem was that all the permanent interior fencing had been removed at the beginning of this project. We would have to rely on electric net fencing. We gathered all the lengths of net fence that were stored in the barn.
We spread these out to figure out what we had and in what condition it was.
Dave made a plan and laid out fence, beginning in the northwest pasture, the one we call the Horse Pasture. Grazing started April 20.
This gives an idea of how thick the grass was. The seed mix we used had three forbs (clover, birdsfoot trefoil, and chicory) and three perennial grasses. There is a lot of clover and a moderate amount of trefoil. I don’t identify any chicory and all the visible grass is annual rye.The seed already in the soil completely overwhelmed any perennial grasses that might have started to grow and was covering the clover as well. This is one reason we needed to get going on the grazing.
Dave made strips going north-south and we blocked the sheep into a portion of the first strip. The idea is to get them to eat one area down more thoroughly before moving them to the next.
With no fences left in the pasture Dave had to create a lane to direct the sheep from the barn to where we wanted them.
You can see in this photo how the tall grass is trampled more than eaten.
This ewe may have not got the message about eating the grass instead of wearing it.
There is no drinking water in the pasture so at some point the sheep go back to the barn for water. This is something we have to work on.
Can you tell that I just watched a Creedence Clearwater Revival documentary (and I’m of an age to have that phrase pop into my mind)? Did you know that the CCR members got together in junior high?
But I digress. This was to be a post that follows up on the Pasture and Irrigation Renovation posts because it’s about the pasture….and rain. After NO rain in January the first few days of February were wet. We had almost 5″, with close to 2″ in one day. That doesn’t sound like a lot to people in many parts of the country but it’s a lot for our flat property. That is 1/5 of our annual 24″ in five days.
This was before the last inch of rain fell. There was a break in the rain and I walked to the south end of the property. That post with the orange flags holds one of the soil moisture sensor I mentioned in the last post.
This is the other sensor. We are not happy about the lines in the field that have become ditches. We needed to disc and seed the fields before the heavy rain in November, which was finished hours before that storm (blog post). However the irrigation pipeline work was not completely finished. That involved more traffic back and forth in the field and we have truck tracks to deal with.
Back to the barn. For those of you who have been here, you know that this is where we walk to the barn from the house. It doesn’t take much rain (well, 2″ on top of 3″ the previous days) to look like this. Thankfully our barn stays dry inside…so far.
Looking south from the barn door. Normally I’d be digging a ditch to drain the water from here to the irrigation ditch. But we don’t have an irrigation ditch anymore. We have a pipeline which will hopefully make life so much easier and more efficient in the summer.
What looks like a ditch in the foreground is where the old ditch was. Now there is a buried pipeline on the other side of that row of dirt. All of this is still settling so we don’t know what it will look like eventually. The water drains off our property from the southeast corner (near the tree in the top right corner of the photo). Dan set up a pump to take the water from the near the barn through an old pipe and over that row of dirt into the field. It seemed to work OK.
This is the view behind the barn.
Later in the afternoon I walked back to the southeast corner and brought a shovel. Like I’m going to drain this with a shovel. There is a ditch that is between the fence and the road with a culvert that takes water into the canal, and water was starting to flow under the fence here. The problem to deal with eventually is that the water flowing along the south fence line erodes the soil there as it goes under that fence into another culvert, and eventually those posts will go.
Wednesday’s total.
Yesterday was dry and sunny. Today it started raining again and that’s why the title of this post came to me.
The last time I wrote about this project was over six weeks ago in December.
About two weeks ago one of the NRCS representatives came to check on the progress of the pasture seeding. Not a great photo, but he is putting down a grid to aid in evaluating plant growth.
This is what it looks like and I should have asked more about it. I didn’t see him mark where he put it or count plants. We were talking about generalities in the pasture, but now I’m going to ask. Did you know that my degree from UC Davis is in Range and Wildlands Science? So I recognize this for what it is–a tool for analysis of plant germination and growth–but we didn’t talk about it.
Do you see how hard it is to evaluate growth when you look across the field and not straight down? Compare the first photo to the next two. In the second photo close up photo it shows grasses and forbs. There were three of each in the seed mix. We identified clover and chicory, but I don’t see trefoil yet. I can’t identify the grasses.
This is the field west of the barn. The grass growth is thicker here, at least in that small area.
This is a photo taken from the same spot as the last one, but looking north. This is the check where there was traffic from the people working on the irrigation system. We’re thinking that it probably needs discing again.
Last week we met with a representative from the company that makes the soil moisture sensors that were installed. He showed us how to see the info generated by the two sensors and we talked about how we’ll use that. They are sensors are at the south end of the field, one near the west edge and one in the center, still in line-of-sight with the sensor in the northwest corner.
The flag in the foreground marks where the sensor is at this station.
This is what it looks like inside the box.
We haven’t had rain for a month and there have been north winds that make things dry out even more. We were getting worried about this new pasture. Those little seedlings need moisture in their root zone to stay alive. This is a screenshot of what the sensor shows for one station. The gray and white columns each indicate a day. The horizontal green line is 4″ depth, purple is 8″, and blue is 12″. You can tell that today’s 1/4″ rain just started to soak in.
Here is what the other sensor shows. The scale on the left axis is different. This 4″ level had more moisture to begin with than the other two. We will be learning how to use this info. There is a lot more available. I just copied this portion for now. This will sure be interesting to follow.
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