Random Farm Photos

After that last heavy post I thought I’d share some photos from today. Darn, I forgot to take some during the weaving class I taught today. I’d better get some tomorrow.

I took this photo this morning after removing the ram marking harness from Barrett. I am pretty sure there are still ewes in his group who are not bred but I was having a hard time seeing any new marks. This started out as an orange marker but you can see that all the crayon part is gone.

Here is what a new blue marker looks like in that harness.

This is Barrett—Hillside Gabby’s Barrett, to give his full name. He was born in the spring of 2021 and came here from Michigan.

He has a very nice, soft fleece.

This was taken a few days ago after I replaced the worn out marker from Townes’ harness with a new blue one. Let’s hope for some rain to wash those marks off!

Change of scene here. After today’s weaving class I took Ginny on our regular walk Across the Road. We didn’t start out with a tennis ball, but she found one somewhere along the way and then did her usual trick of dropping it into the ditch where the water is too swirly for her to go in after it. That water is quite turbulent and the cement sides of the ditch are steep. I saw her lying on the bank looking intently at something in the water. It was a tennis ball that was trapped in the eddies of the water.

I fashioned a net as I have done before by weaving her leash onto a forked stick. Even with this advanced tool it took me about 20 minutes to get that ball out of the water. I was kneeling on the wooden planks with my toes hooked over the edge so I wouldn’t fall in.

Then we finished our walk.

More Random Farm Photos

This is the view from the south edge of the property.

That distinct line between green pasture and dried out plants indicates the difference between irrigating and not irrigating in the Sacramento Valley in the summer. For a variety of reasons parts of the pasture haven’t had enough water this summer. We had to start irrigating much earlier in the spring due to lack of rainfall, and that has an impact on how we spread out our water allotment through the season. Our water allotment is less this year than in the past. Our irrigation “system” isn’t as efficient as we’d like and it’s very difficult to get water to all the areas that need it.

This is the north end of that same paddock. This is dallisgrass that gets coarse and overgrown at this time of year and the sheep don’t keep up with it. They don’t want to walk through it. If you were a prey animal would you want to walk through grass that is over your head—how would you know if there is a lion lying in wait? The sheep are walking in a gap between the tall grass and where I set up the net fence.

They prefer to eat the more vegetative part of the grass and not the coarser stalks and seedheads.

This photo was taken from the road and there is a fence between the sheep and the grass in the foreground. They were on that paddock last and now are on the one with the taller grass. Their heads are down in the shorter grass and that tall overgrown dallisgrass is behind them.

The title of this post says Random Farm Photos. Here is the fleece of one of the ram lambs I have kept for this year. This is Meridian Rascal with fleece like his sire, Meridian Rambler.

When I fed the adult rams last night one of them didn’t show up. I saw Axis in the barn. He and Barrett were fighting the night before, but I guess they continued the squabble through the day. I hosed most of the blood off his head and sprayed fly repellant on him.

When I was in the barn earlier I heard the chirps of ground squirrels. These two were both up on the top of the fence around the ram pen. By the time I took the photo they were on the ground.

This is the seed pod of a plant called devils claw. The ones above are green and closed. When they dry out they open up and spread into claws with very sharp points. This is nasty stuff to find in a fleece. I dug this plant out and put it the trash. I don’t want it in my compost pile or the burn pile where the sheep have access.

I’m still working on weaving items for the show that I will put up next week. These are three blankets spread out to dry. That’s locally grown wool. The dark wool is Jacob.

Random Farm Photos

This post is just what it says. I’ve taken so many photos with the intent to share them and tell a story, but then I don’t.

Sheep waiting in the shade. They come and go and are in the pasture even when it’s over 110 degrees like it was two weeks ago.

That’s a screenshot from my phone one of those hot days. I forget now how many it was in a row of over 100, but considering that some were over 110 it sure felt like a lot. Thank goodness that is over for now.

Two ram lambs that show a big difference in the spread of their horns. I’d like to hang onto both of these rams for different reasons. They both have good fleeces. The one with the wider horn spread is unrelated to most of the flock. The other is a shade of lilac (that brown/gray color of some Jacob sheep). If I can keep them for several months to a year it will be interesting to see how their horns look at that time.

Before I box and ship pelts for tanning I take photos so I have a record of what I sent and where I sent them. I have shipped 20 sheepskins in the last week or so. It will take from 3 to 5 months to get them back depending on where they were sent.

I’m spending a lot of time on preparing for the Shades of Black and White show that will be at the Artery for 3 weeks in October. In fact I will be setting this up the day before I set up my vendor booth at Lambtown. A lot going on. These are some of the latest blankets to come off the loom. These blankets use Timm Ranch wool warp and Jacob weft. They are very soft and I’m thrilled with both of these yarns this year.

This is Jacob wool warp and weft in progress on the loom.

This is how that fabric looks after wet finishing. I turned this one into a mobius shawl. The twist in it allows you to see both sides of the fabric at once. There is no right and wrong side.

This is where I left off tonight on a black and white Jacob blanket.

I was loading the truck today for tomorrow’s event and I heard a suspicious crackling sound across the “bamboo” fenceline that separates us from the neighbor on the north. (It’s not really bamboo, but an undesirable species, Arundo, although it makes a great windbreak for us.). I walked around the fenceline and into the next-door driveway. There was someone standing near the bushes on the right monitoring the fire. Still, with conditions so dry it’s a bit nerve wracking to see.

The neighbor on the west called me this afternoon to say that she saw smoke and called the fire department. They told her it was a permitted fire. I’m surprised that anyone was able to get a permit at this point. Let’s get some rain first.

Random Farm Photos from the first part of July

Is it a continuing theme that I never have enough time to write blog post? Sorry if that is getting old. But it’s real. Here’s an attempt so that I can catch up with some of the photos I’ve taken and because I know that some of you do enjoy reading blog posts I write.

The first week of July I taught a Learn to Weave class. This is the students with their finished pieces.

Students learn all the processes to wind warp and weave off this sampler in two days.

In the meantime I’ve had a major custom weaving project hanging over my head. Normally I wind warps from cones, but this one was naturally dyed in skeins with no time to put the yarn on cones. Thank goodness I have a good swift—Schacht Ultra Umbrella Swift which I just put on the website now. The yarn winds from the swift to the AVL Warping Wheel to make 2” sections. More about this in another post when I get around to it.

This is 57 yards wound onto the sectional beam of my AVL production loom

This is after it is all tidied up. I have woven one so far, only 24 to go.

In between working on winding that warp I was trying to wet finish the last 20 blankets I took off the loom. Then they need to be measured and photographed.

These won’t go on the website for awhile because they are destined for a show at The Artery in October.

I have ignored my garden other than trying to keep a few things watered. A few plants are doing well despite my inattention. My Hopi Black Dye sunflowers are over 8 feet tall. I have had to prop up a few of them because they are getting so heavy.

Speaking of watering we are trying to keep the pasture irrigated but the irrigation district has reduced our allotment of water for the season. As we let the interval between irrigations get longer and reduce the time for each irrigation, we end up with less water and the field doesn’t fully irrigate. Those dry parts are what the Central Valley would look like without irrigation.

I have been conducting field trips for a summer camp through Trackers Earth. The kids spend time in the pasture, watching spinning and weaving and with sheep. Jade is always a favorite. She is an amazing sheep to let any number of people crowd around.

I don’t need any comments here about masks. I don’t think any of my blog followers would make those kind of comments, but when I posted a couple of photos on Facebook, I got nasty responses about children wearing masks. We are wearing masks in close spaces in the barn but not outside. I am selfishly concerned about my own health and missing out on some very exciting upcoming events. So that’s real life right now.

The most exciting thing going on is that my daughter and grandkids are visiting. That will deserve more blog posts. Kirby goes out with me every morning for chores. Jade is the favorite sheep and is always there for hugs and pets.

This is Kirby’s lamb, Rose, daughter of Belle, who Kirby showed at the State Fair as a lamb in 2019. Kirby will be at the fair to show Rose.

Random Farm Photos - June

I found myself wildflower hunting in my own pasture.

These aren’t your traditional wildflowers but they are still pretty.

Salsify.

As I walked in the pasture a bird startled me when she flew up out of the vegetation between the fence and the road. Do you see that depression in the lower center of the photo?

It happened so quickly when the bird flew up and into the tree I thought she was a turkey. But now I’m wondering if she was a pheasant. It seems more likely that a single pheasant would be nesting here. I’ll have to go back and check.

After I set up the electric fence I tested it and there was hardly any charge. That meant I had to track down the reason that the fence was grounding out. I found this one, but fixing that didn’t change the charge on the fence.

Then I found this one—a branch holding the wire on the ground.

Here the tree has grown so much since putting in the fence that there are multiple insulators to keep the wires off the trunk. Eventually we found that a gadget with a plastic handle that connects the fence at the west side of the pasture to the fence near the barn was grounding out on a metal gate. This fence goes all the way around the pasture and the paddocks so it is important that it is working.

In the barn. Hen in a barrel. The chickens lay eggs all over the place.

Random Farm Photos

Last night’s sunset.

I am still bottle feeding these guys. I need to figure out when they’ve had enough.

I changed the fence this morning so that the sheep had a fresh paddock. The grass at the north end of this one looks great. That irrigation 3 weeks ago and then warm weather really helped.

The clover is finally growing.

There is a big difference between the north and south halves of the pasture. The grass is much thicker on the north end.

Here is how it looks from the south. I have always liked this view of the property with the green grass and red barn and sheep.

This is the water trough that I reposition with each move. The hose plugs into a valve on the pipeline we put in the pasture.

Sheep aren’t the only animals in the pasture. Amelia is due to kid next week. I’m on baby watch right now.

The view from north to south.

My two chickens are now free-range chickens and I’m never sure where I’ll find the eggs.

Maggie's Story - The End

If you’re a regular blog reader then you probably know the dogs who live here. Rusty and Ginny are the Border Collies and Rusty wrote his own blog for several years until he got too tired to do it. This post is about Maggie, who came here in 2013 and died today. Rusty was the only dog here in 2013, and I thought he could use a companion. I searched the rescue and foster sites until I found Maggie who seemed like a suitable companion. She was about his size and, although timid, did not have any aggressive tendencies—important since so many people come out here to visit the farm. The only thing I knew about her was that she had been rescued from a hoarder (almost 200 dogs) and had lived at this foster home for at least a year. She was extremely shy and timid but eventually overcame most of that.

Maggie had lived here a couple of years when I got Ginny as a puppy. Here is a blog post with photos of Maggie babysitting Ginny when she was a puppy.

It turned out that Maggie wasn’t as suitable for a farm dog as I would have liked. She was completely overstimulated by activity with sheep and she barked frantically at them when we worked with the sheep. That made it difficult to teach Ginny appropriate sheepherding manners. To this day I think that Ginny’s habit of barking at sheep who defy her authority when she is trying to herd them came from Maggie. Nevertheless I tried to give Maggie a decent life here. She liked it best when we all took trips Across the Road.

I’d take all three dogs Across the Road on leashes.

Once there I’d let them off the leashes. Ginny mostly wants to chase the ball and Rusty wants to chase Ginny. Maggie was usually off on her own just doing dog things.

Maggie didn’t see any point in playing with a ball or chasing a stick.

She wasn’t thrilled about swimming either but would use the canal to cool off on particularly hot days.

She would have been a good dog for someone who wanted a running companion but she got me instead. We used to go Across the Road several times a week, a mental health time for all the dogs.

None of the dogs are big fans of car rides even though we did get up to the mountains for occasional hikes.

But sometimes a car ride meant a trip to the vet.

They were never happy about that.

There was the time that sheep panels leaning on a haystack fell over on Maggie and broke her foot. She needed a vet visit that day but fortunately the wound healed well.

Overall Maggie did OK here. She put up with the people who came for field trips or on shearing day. She didn’t mind being out in the barn with us as long as people mostly ignored her. She presented a good lesson for kids on field trips because I could use her to teach them to think about what a dog was telling them with her behavior and body language.

The dogs always have been able to sleep in the house at night but during the winter Maggie didn’t mind sharing the dog house to keep dry during the day.

She was OK with other dogs, mostly leaving them alone. Finn and Sawyer are my son and DIL’s dogs and live next door. This is how dogs celebrate a birthday when they have wait their turns for the puppy cake.

One of Maggies’ traits was her obsession with small animals. Ground squirrels chirping in a woodpile set all the dogs off

Maggie’s method of attack though was to chew her way through, whether it was a pile of wood or the wall of the chicken house. I’m surprised that she never had teeth problems.

Speaking of chickens, I always had to be careful if I had let the chickens out for the day that I didn’t let Maggie our on her own near the barn. She occasionally ended up with a chicken in her mouth—usually I got to the scene before the chicken was killed but I could never trust her with the chickens. During “baby bird season”—the time when baby birds seem to fall out of the nests in the barn almost daily—I’d see Maggie trotting by with legs sticking out of her mouth. I guess I couldn’t blame her for that one. We called her the Dingo—listed as an opportunistic predator on a sign seen at a zoo in Australia. This is a blog post that Rusty wrote about a chicken escapade that had a happy ending.

We were never sure how old Maggie was. If she was 3 or 4 when I got her then she was 10 or 11 this year. That’s not that old for a dog but over the last few months she had started to look old. Her coat was rough, her hearing was poor, and her hips were getting weak. She just didn’t look good and over the last couple of weeks I thought that she didn’t seem as aware of her surroundings or activity as she used to and didn’t seem especially happy. This week we noticed that her belly looked fluid filled, her throat seemed swollen, and she wasn’t eating well. The vet I’ve known and respected for years once said in a discussion about euthanasia that “it’s better to be a week too early than a day too late”. This vet has shrunk her practice and works mostly with large animals now so I’ve been taking the dogs to another clinic. But when I called that clinic with my request for euthanasia I was told that there would need to be a consultation and they might determine that the dog wasn’t ready and they wouldn’t do it. I respect their rule and there have certainly been times when I’ve wanted to extend an animal’s life for a positive outcome. But I also have worked with animals long enough to have a pretty good feeling about when the outlook is not so good. I am not saying that I could look at someone else’s dog or sheep or whatever and tell them what is wrong with it, but I think I have paid attention to my own animals to be able to read the signs and pretty much trust that I am making the right decision. Besides a dog here and there, I’ve made decisions to euthanize a goat, a donkey, a sheep, and a horse—these were never easy decisions, but I still believe that they were the right decisions at the time.

I knew that my previous vet would trust my decision and I called to see if she was available. She was in the area and able to help. I took Maggie to her barn office and Maggie didn’t even have to get out of the car. Like I said before, she seemed unaware of her surrroundings and not even stressed to have been put in the car. The doctor at a glance agreed with my assessment of Maggie’s condition. She said that the swelling I saw in her throat was likely cancer and this was definitely time.

Maggie is now buried at the edge of the pasture near a friend’s dog who we recently buried when his time had come and not too far from the pet goat.