CA State Fair 2022 - Days 1 and 2

I have plenty of other blog posts in my head that I want to share but I haven’t had time. I’ll skip ahead to the State Fair that just finished. I’ve given up keeping this blog “journal” in order.

The last time we were at State Fair was in 2019 and after that the world changed. The pandemic shut everything down, but my “altered universe” began after a serious accident in October 2019. I don’t know why I’m including that here, except that I think it contributes, along with the significant demands on my time, to how this seemed so complicated this year. My thanks go out to my Farm Club members who pitched in and to my husband who did a lot of the “heavy lifting”.

I didn’t get a “before” photo. Imagine the blue pens extending all the way to the white chair on the left. That is was a double row of 8 pens back to back. The first step in setting up the display was to remove four pens and figure out how to deal with the tall double panels that make up the fronts and have the power cord attached.

These are the four pens remaining on this side for sheep. We also have sheep in the pens on the back side.

The fair has a Marketing Program competition with the goal of encouraging livestock participants to provide educational information for fairgoers. My display has always been competitive, sometimes trading 1st and 2nd place with some of the other producers. I wanted to rate on top again this year. This is the display area near our pens.

Farm Club members help set it up and demonstrate for the public. Some members came for two or three days and some came for one, but they all contribute in very important ways.

New for this year was that my granddaughter, Kirby, was at the fair all four days. She and her mom and brother were here for two weeks prior to the fair, and Kirby stayed behind when they returned to Texas.

Kirby spent a lot of time at the Touching Table talking to visitors.

We had raw wool to touch (Q: “Why is it called greasy"?), horns and horn buttons to examine, and temporary tattoos to give out.

After talking to people at the table Kirby was glad to show them the sheep and answer questions.

This is Kirby with her lamb, Rose.

Friday was Kirby’s 8th birthday. She had a party on the weekend with her cousins and other grandparents, but we needed to mark the actual day before we left.

The main gift from us was a stable (thanks to a FC member) for her horses. She also got a coupon to pick out a new Breyer horse at the feed store on one of the days after the fair.

We spent Friday with more public interaction. This post has includec mostly photos of Kirby, but notice all the Farm Club members in the background. They played a front and center role even though Kirby is the focus of most of these photos.

These were long hot days, but Kirby hung in there very well. I’m impressed.

Shearing at Timm Ranch - part 1

Every year I get wool from the Timm Ranch, about five miles from here, and have it made into a really great yarn. I sell the yarn in skeins and on cones and I use a lot of it for my own woven products. I could probably substitute blog posts from previous years for this one and you wouldn’t know the difference. Same place. Same sheep. However some of the Farm Club people have changed. So here is the 2022 Shearing Day last week.

The Timm Ranch sheep are what I like to call a ranch blend of Polypay, Rambouillet, and Targhee. That means that those are the original breeds in the flock but over the years, as the Timms have raised their own replacements, the individual breeds aren’t so recognizable. The sheep have traits of all, but most of what we are happy to see is the fine wool traits of those original breeds.

The sheep moved into the lane on the north side of the barn.

Last year there we tried to keep up with two shearers. This year there was only one and we were able to keep pace with him.

The shearer is known as Junior and this logo is a new one.

Several Farm Club members came to help evaluate and skirt fleeces.

We worked at two skirting tables.

The goal was to check the fleece for soundness (most were fine in that respect) and then skirt. Skirting is to remove the parts of the fleece that are of lesser quality—wool at the edge of the belly and that with excess VM (vegetable matter). The timing was just right for shearing and there was very little VM in the fleeces. All waste was bagged for a friend with a project in which she will make a product from wool that will otherwise be discarded. That will be a blog topic later on.

We kept a running tally of the weight so that I could make sure I reached my 200 pound minimum and I could figure out how much to pay for the wool. The skirted fleeces varied from 4.5 lb to 9.5 lb. and I ended up with 222 pounds in one pile and 50 pounds in the other.The wool will go to two different mills.

Some of the sheep after shearing.

The sheep were in two groups. The largest group had fall lambs, but there was one group with lambs born more recently—including the previous night (although that pair was still in a lambing pen). At one point Susan and I walked over to the group with young lambs and they followed her to the barn.

These are locks from some of the fleeces we chose. The yellow paper is 5” wide so you get an idea of the fleece length. There were a handful of extra long fleeces. One was from a sheep that was missed last year so that was a two year fleece—too long to combine with this batch. Some of the other long ones were from replacement ewes born in the fall of 2020 and not shorn last spring. We tried to sort by length and most of the 200+ pound batch is about 3 to 4 inches. The longer ones are mostly in the other batch of wool.

Stay tuned for another post with more photos.

The Most Dangerous Things on the Farm

It’s been almost two months since I wrote a blog post and I never did finish the story of our Colorado road trip. But there were extenuating circumstances and that’s what this post is about. I has taken me this long to be able to figure out accessing my photos and the blog part of my website. I hope that this is just the jump start to get me going again.

When you think about the most dangerous things on the farm there a number of things that could come to mind: runaway tractor? Mean rams?

How about this one?

Or this? Nope. This is not a poisonous snake. And the dog is pretty gentle too.

I want to include some fun photos before I go back to the scary stuff. Isn’t this a fabulous Jacob sweater? My friend, Kathleen spun yarn and knit the sweater especially to fit me and I was going to wear it o the big sheep and wool festival in Rhinebeck New York in the fall. We never made it there because f my injury. At least I have the sweater and I look forward to when I’ll be able to wear it.

This is a Learn to Weave class I taught at Fiber Circle Studio not long befoe the accident.

I guess I was going to write a blog post about breeding season. This is a new marker replacing on that was used up in the harness that the ram wears so you can monitor breeding progress.

Back to the scary stuff. This looks like just a regular stack of alfalfa with a few bales missing. But it’s not as innocent as it seems. It was a stack like this, although complete, that I fell off of in mid-Ocotber. Well, it was either the stack or the ladder that was leaning on it. We’ll never know because I don’t remember. I climbed up to throw a few bales down to feed and because I like to see the view from something tall (living in the flat land). These stack are 80 bales and each bale i 95-100 pounds. My husband found me on the ground unconcious. Unfortunately the stack was on concrete instead of soft mud or sand. I underwent surgery to remove part of my skull to reelease the pressure of the brain swelling. So this photo was taken after I was out of the hospital a month later. I was in a coma for 3-4 weeks at the hospital. The helmet if a snowboarding helmet that replaced the hospital-issued helmet that rubbed in a lot of places. I have a red cotton cap between my head and the helmet. This was to protect the half-grapefruit size hold in the skull where the skull piece had been removed. I douldn’t go anywhere/do anything without the helmet becuase the brain was not protected. In reality I couldn’t go anywhere/do anything anyway. That photo was on one of my few trips to the barn

Farm Club filled in a lot. After I came home they gathered a few times to do barn work and help in the shop.

It is wonderful having such a great group of people to support me.

Fast forward (slow forward ) to February 6. That was the day that the skull plate was to be put back in. First it had to get to the hospital. There are storage facilities for such things and I heard that my skull part was in Kentucky. Then I heard Virginia. We showed up at the hopsital after all the pre-op stuff on the morning of the 6th to find that my bone was on an airplane that was stuck in Georgia. So we came back the next day for surgery.

This attractive iimage was taken the following day I think. Those are ice bags under the net. I was in the hospital for only a few days and thankfully was allowed to go home early the next week.

Another view that show where they cut through the initial scar and lifted my scalp all the way up to slide the bone in. They anchored the bone with titatium plates and screws and then stapled the skin.

This is how it looks otday, 2 weeks after the second surgery. I go in tomorrow to get the staples out.

So this has been a long 4-1/2 months. I am much better after the second surgery than after the first and hopefully will get clearance to do a little more activity than I’ve had this whole time. i mean lambing starts in a day or two and it’s snot easy to think of siting in the house waiting for my husband or son to report in. I just don’t want to do it that way. But the next thing I have to overcome is a frozen shoulder. That is likely a result of being in a coma with no movement of the arm. It’s very hard to think that I could be released to walk aaround and get to the barn but that I can’t use my arm. Frozen shoulder is very painful and the only way to get over it is to tear up the adhesions in the shoulder joint—excercises which I’m trying to do but I think I need more guidance/PT support first.

Thanks for catching up with my blog. Maybe I’ll all least be able to keep up with this—although I can’t use my big camera very well rifht now and I can’t walk around among the sheep because I’m still working on balance issues.