End of October

It was still mild weather. The Sacramento Valley got rain, but not much here—not enough to show in the rain gauge.

The sheep moving to the gate where I will let them into the next paddock.

A sheep farmer’s version of fall color. Peyton, the BFL ram, was the one with the red marker. I moved his ewes out a few days ago and now they are with Townes. Silverado and Barrett still have some ewes, but I’m getting ready to be finished with breeding season.

This is one of my favorite views of the property.

Patchwork Townes is the ram with the most ewes now at the end of the season. His marker has been switched to green, but I think there is only one ewe marked green.

We held Hug a Sheep Day on Saturday, but it was mostly for Farm Club members with a few other friends who came. We had the most huggable sheep available. That’s Jade and her daughter, Hazel.

At the end of the day I walked across the road and took my customary photo looking south to Mt. Diablo. One of these days I’ll share the series of photos I took from this spot throughout the growing season.

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 - 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.

WATER

Our farm is on the edge of California’s Central Valley. This is a Mediterranean climate where we expect hot, dry summers and cool, wet winters. Lately we haven’t had the wet winters that are so important to fill up reservoirs and aquifers to get us through the dry summers.

Here on this farm we don’t face the dire circumstances of those who live in many other areas of the West where forests are dyeing and burning, reservoirs are almost dry, and some people are out of water. We are fortunate that we are in the area served by Solano Irrigation District (SID) and our water comes from Lake Berryessa.

I found this graph from the Solano County Water Agency. I was surprised to see that the lake level was so much higher in July 2020 (left side of graph) than during the winter of 2020-2021. I know that we didn’t get enough rain (about 40% of “average” here) but I didn’t realize that even that amount of rain didn’t increase the water level in the lake.

This blog post has taken a turn other than what I intended but I’m sitting here at my desk at about 8 p.m. It’s still 97 degrees outside and it’s about 90 degrees in the house. I hope that our “delta breeze” kicks in and blows cooler air through the house tonight.

The original plan for this post was to share irrigation photos but I want to make it clear that I know how fortunate we are right here and I am grateful for the water. Notice the dry grass on the left of the photo. That’s what land looks like without irrigation. This is the view at the northwest corner of the property. Lake Berryessa is about 20 miles away in the hills (view covered by a new almond orchard). When we ask for water it comes down that ditch that is off our property and into the standpipe. It flows out at the base of the standpipe and into our ditch.

I should have a photo of the ditch that goes east from the standpipe, but I got distracted by blackberries.

They are so good.

The standpipe and the ditch at the north end of the property are to the right of this photo, at the north end of what we still call the horse pasture, although there haven’t been horses there since Katie left for college and took her horse with her. In this photo the water has already covered the horse pasture and then flows east/west in this ditch that borders the other pasture. At the point when I took these photos we’d had the water flowing for about 33 hours. We usually hope to finish in 24 hours but we have been extending the time between irrigations lately to hopefully extend our allocation into the fall. The ground was so dry that we figured that we would need more time to complete the irrigation at the south end of the field.

I took this photo at about the same spot as the one with the water a few days ago. The ground was so dry that I could barely get the electric-net fence posts in place.

There are cut-outs in the ditch so that the water will flow out of the ditch through the pasture .

Looking southwest. Those fields are finished.

This is from the south end of the property looking back to the barn. This morning the water wasn’t down this far and we really did need those extra hours to get coverage everywhere.

This is the tailwater ditch at the south edge of the property. The idea is to channel excess water into the main canal off the property. However I figured out a system to “reverse irrigate”. Usually the paddocks on the west finish first. By blocking this ditch at the east end the water backs up and irrigates the south end of the other parts of the pasture.

This is at the southeast corner where the water finally does flow off the pasture and into the main canal.

The sheep are ever hopeful that when they see someone walking around the pasture it means that they will get to go out. Sorry girls, you have to wait for it to dry out some.

Some of them were hanging out in the shade near the ram pen.

Here is the goal. This photo was taken in the horse pasture that I showed first. The sheep haven’t grazed this since early June. The last irrigation was after they came off of it about 4-1/2 weeks ago.

Thursday Morning Farm Photos

I was talking about the pasture and someone asked me what birdsfoot trefoil looks like.

The sheep love it. From PennStateExtension: “Birdsfoot trefoil is a perennial that adapts well to production on poorly drained, low-pH soils (Table 1). It can reseed itself, is resistant to Phytophthora root rot and numerous alfalfa insects, responds well to fertilization, and does not cause bloat in animals.” What a great plant! We have some in the pasture and I’d like more. This photo was taken in an area that the sheep can’t access.

One of my chickens wandered by while I was admiring the trefoil.

The sheep have been in this section a few days now and have eaten it down quite a bit. There is still a lot of grass left and some clover hidden in the grass clumps. I noticed that last few days that the sheep weren’t out when I expected them to be in the morning. I didn’t know if it was because they had eaten the plants they like (clover and trefoil) and were turning their noses up at the dallisgrass that is getting coarser or if there was another reason. I wanted to see what they were eating and if the mosquitoes were as thick as they had been earlier in the morning.

I took this photo of my leg a few days ago. The mosquitoes were worse this morning when I walked the pasture about 7:30. The sheep didn’t want to go out until about 9:00 and I took my camera out a little later. That’s when I took the most of these photos. By that time the mosquitoes were not nearly as thick, although I’m sure I’d have had bites if I wasn’t completely covered (overalls over my shorts and a long sleeve shirt with the collar up).

The Western Kingbird is happy out here because there are plenty of bugs to eat, mosquitoes included. I see them flitting around while the sheep graze.

I spent some time watching the sheep eat to see what plants they chose.

This ewe is named Dimitri.

This is Beauty, the March daughter of Belle, the sheep I gave my granddaughter to show in 2019 when she was here for the State Fair. Kirby has chosen names with a Disney Princess theme. If it wasn’t for the pandemic Kirby would be here to show Beauty at this year’s State Fair. The fair is cancelled but Kirby will be here and she and I will spend time befriending and halter-breaking Beauty and other lambs.

This is Juniper, another lamb I am keeping. I’m not crazy about the quilting—that’s what you call the unequal lengths of wool fibers in this fleece. But it is likely to even up after her first shearing.

This is not a pasture plant, but a dahlia. Its one of the few things growing in my dye garden right now. After a rough start my dahlias have finally taken off. Some are almost my height and some of the flowers are massive.

This flower is as big as my hand.

This is 8 ounces of flowers that are going in a dyepot tomorrow. Stay tuned.

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.

Lessons from the Dyepot and the Pasture

The subtitle of this blog is On the Farm and At the Loom. So here is some of each—well as I look through the photos I selected a few days ago I realize that they aren’t “at the loom” but related to that part of the business.

These are some of the latest batch of buttons that I made. Shoppers usually like to dump out the basket of buttons and sort them, choosing as they go, but we have no shoppers in person now. The only way I can think to offer these for sale is to sort them myself and put them on cards. Now they can be posted on the website here and on the Fibershed Marketplace.

I’ve also been dying. I cleaned up my overgrown and wilting dye garden. The yellow is dyed with weld, the blue/green with hollyhock flowers, and the greens are the weld or hollyhock dyed yarn dyed with the opposite (hollyhock yarn dyed with weld and vice-versa).

The next step is labeling the yarn and putting it on the website.

This is yarn that was put in the weld dyepot after the first batch was out. A little toned down.

Now to the barn. This is what happens when I feed the ram lambs. I went in the pen to clean a feeder. Notice what Ginny is waiting for.

I always get help when cleaning the barn.

The two chickens are let out of the chicken house during they day. They always find somewhere to lay their eggs. This seems to be the current favorite spot.

These next photos were from yesterday. This could be its own post but I’m going to continue with this one. In between taking photos I did some Facebook Live recording that is specifically to bring the Cyber Fiber Farm Club to the farm. Then I thought I could include a bit about the pasture in the blog. This is field bindweed, an undesirable weed in most cases, but very pretty here. This is growing on an area that is different than most of the pasture because there is an old cement floor under the dirt in a long strip in this field. I have no idea when there used to be a barn out here but long long ago.

This is the clover that we like to see. We strip graze the pasture. That means that the sheep go into each section for a period of time (2-4 days) and move to the next when we change the electric net fences to allow entrance into another strip. That way each paddock gets at least 30 days of rest to regrow the above-ground and below-ground portion.

Birds-foot trefoil, another desirable pasture plant.

Where we want to close off a strip of the pasture we set up sections of the electric net fence and use these clips to connect from one “hot” wire to another.

A length of net fence set up. The opening is between the white net fence and that wooden post. It’s hard to see but there is a 3-wire electric fence that goes from the wooden post to the wouth (right in the photo). The sheep know it’s there and respect it.

Even though field bindweed is a “weed” sheep like to eat it.

So do goats.

But the clover is even better.

I want to add something to this post. I went to school in Range and Wildland Science at UCD—that was my first degree back in 1977. It was in those years through the early 2000’s that the concept of intensive grazing managment (once called rotational grazing) was developed. One of the leaders in the field was Stan Parsons. That’s who my brother started to work with, eventually buying his business and teaching Ranching for Profit schools all over the country and overseas. Dave was asked to write a tribute to Stan, who died of complications from Covid-19 this week. He wrote a touching and very powerful statement and I want to share that with you. Maybe it means more to me because it’s written by my brother and I know how heartfelt it is. To me it also is sad proof that this pandemic is REAL and it can touch everyone.

Stay safe.