Lambing Season

Lambing is almost over and I’m just now sharing some photos. We had about 65 lambs in 2 weeks and now we’re waiting for the stragglers—some ewe lambs who will lamb in the next couple of weeks.

When a ewe looks like she is about to lamb or if we find the lamb(s) already born we put them in a lambing pen.

They stay in these pens for 2-3 days if we have room. Sometimes we get so many lambs at once that that we not only have overflow pens in the alleyway of the barn, but they get moved out more quickly.

Most mature ewes have twins although there are some triplets. The youngest ewes (one year old) usually have singles.

After two or three days in the pens three ewes with their lambs are moved to a stall. This gives me more time to keep an eye on the lambs and gives the lambs the chance to figure out how important it is to stick around mom and not bother other ewes.

We usually put a bale of straw in the stall. That gives the lambs a way to get away from an aggressive ewe and it also provides seating if we have the urge to sit and cuddle lambs.

This is all rather labor-intensive. Thank goodness for Farm Club—several members live close enough that they like to come help out. And with the unprecedented corona-virus shut-downs, we like to provide a FarmFit experience for those whose gyms and exercise programs are inactive.

After a few days in the stalls, the ewes and lambs are put outside.

In a “normal” year (will we ever have another normal year?) the pasture is too wet and soggy in early March to go out. This year the sheep are in the pasture, but because it is cool we are moving them from paddock to paddock fairly quickly so that the clover and grass has time to recover.

This is BFL-X ewe, Ears, with triplets. She has had triplets three times.

The lambing board. Ewe/ram births are color coded. They are numbered and weights are recorded. The board is filled to the bottom of the third column right now but I don’t have another photo.

Life Goes On

The injury that I talked about in the last post has kept me from doing a lot of my normal stuff. I’m way better but my motivation isn’t there and everything (including taking decent photos) just seems hard.

Farm Club member Dona took a lot of photos of the winter and early spring events going on here and I’m finally getting to a blog post where I’ll use them. Thanks Dona.

Shearing was in early February. Thanks to Farm Club for doing all the work involved in making Shearing Day go smoothly.

Farm Club members went home with their fleeces and other fleeces were sold.

The sheep just kept on coming.

Since I’m not going to be ready to trim feet for awhile our shearer trimmed each sheep as he finished shearing.

Farm Club members and fleece buyers were able o skirt fleeces before they took them home.

The goats were probably glad that they didn’t need to go through the shearing gate.

Lincoln was the youngest person at Shearing Day and I know that in future years he will be a fixture at area fiber events.

Hank is another well-known fiber-immersed baby.

The rams don’t look so impressive after shearing. This is Meridian Axle.

Follow up to Danger on the Farm

Thanks for all the responses to my post a couple of days ago about the accident here last October. I may seem like i’m all back together, but my brain isn’t totally there yet. I hadn’t written a blog post in so long that I forgot to add the social media sharing stuff—I’ll do that on this one.

But I mainly wanted to show you some more photos.

In the last post I asked about dangerous stuff on the farm. Do you think that the bird who leff these tracks would count if you met it face to face on a dark night? (If you can’t tell, I’m joking.)

This is more follow-up to the last part of that post. What i forgot to mention after talking about the head injury was that I also broke a bone in my spine (crushed they said) so I wore this tightly velcroed back brace for a couple of months until the doctor said it was healed (no surgery for that one).

The photo above and below are the last photos I will ever take from the top of a hay stack. It’s a nice place to catch a breeze and enjoy the sunset, but no more for me.

This was going to be the “after” photo and it is, except you can’t see where the staples came out. Now II I can wear a cap.

The Lambing Game

Every year about this time I send photos to Farm Club members so that they can play the Lambing Game—guessing which ewe will lamb first and on what date. The Farm Club members have a list of ewes and their predicted lambing dates based on breeding date. (I am doing this as a blog post so I don’t fill up members’ email boxes with lots of photos. )We are still a couple of days away from the first official due date of February 24 but here we go.

This contests will be open to non-farm club members too. The prize is a set of three farm-scene photo notecards . To enter email me he following info:

Whcih sheep, of these in the photos will lamb first?

What Date?

Tie breaker (in case more than one person gets the first two questions correct): Time of birth.

If a woman told you her due date was March 1 you know that you could expect the baby at least a few days on either side of that. Same thing here. My due dates are based on when I noticed that the sheep was marked by the ram but that is not fool proof either.

This is a 5 year old ewe, bide a wee Bea. Official due date is 2/29. Due date:2/29.

This is 5 year old Meridian Ruth. Due date 2/29.

This is 8 year old Meridian Fandango. Due date: 3/4

Meridian Marilla. She is 4 years olf and her due date is 3/2.

Meridian Vixen, 4 years old; due 2/29.

This is 5 year old bide a wee Hallie, due 3/2

Meridian Sumac, 3 years old; due 2/29.

Meridian Estelle, 6 years old, due 2/24.

So there is the line-up for Game #1. We have many more in the barn than this but these are the onesfor which e could get decent photos. Thanks so much to FC member Mary and her daughter, Maggie who came today to take the photos and ID sheep. I’m can go to the barn but I’m still not allowed to walk around the sheep area. Good luck!!

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.

Farm Club at Lambtown and the Sheep-to-Shawl Debut

I wrote about my experience at this year’s Lambtown in Dixon, California here.

On Sunday morning while I was getting my vendor booth ready for the day the Sheep to Shawl (S2S) teams were gathering. There were to be seven under this tent and one of them was the Farm Club team! Before Lambtown opened for business I looked for the other Farm Club members who were supporting Lambtown one way or another. We had pretty good representation!

Gynna and Roy (along with Hank this year) were the brains behind Lambtown the last few years and responsible for it’s revival and success.

Jackie helped in the Fibershed Coop booth but was also staffing the booth for Solano County CART (Community Animal Response Team). Stephany spent most of her time helping to organize and then staff the Fibershed booth.

Shoppers are an important part of the event. Dona and Mary exemplify the best kind of shopper.

Lisa volunteered at Lambtown and did her share of shopping as well, finding the naturally colored cotton that I was selling.

As I got back to the Sheep-to-Shawl tent I found five more Farm Club members. Alison and Marina were already committed to the Silverado Spinster’s team, but it was Alison that got the Farm Club team organized back in July.

Here Kathleen has joined them, also on the Silverado team.

The all-important tea for Alison.

I didn’t get a photo of Carol but she is represented on this team.

Farm Club member, Deborah, was also on a different team—Spindles and Flyers.

This is the Meridian Jacobs’ Farm Club team (and me) just before the competition started. There are 4 spinners, 1 plyer, 1 “go-fer”, 1 educator, and the weaver. They can all work on fiber prep but they all have to stick to their other jobs. The loom was warped with handspun Jacob wool of course.

Here are the posters that the team prepared as part of the education component of the contest.

When the call to start was made, the team all began fiber prep.

Opening locks before putting them through the drum carder.

Note the bandaid box. Safety first!

Seen on a spinning wheel.

Spinning is underway.

Brenda seemed to be having a good time.

The weaver, Reba, had to focus since she had a rather long treadling sequence to get the pattern she planned.

I love that our team thought up the “secret message” that unrolls as the warp is woven.

Alison, on the neighboring team, used headphones to help her concentration while weaving.

This is the beautiful pattern that Reba wove. The shawl was not finished in the allotted time, and the team agreed that it was better to leave it on the loom and finish it later rather than cut if off just to make a time limit.

I can’t wait to see this when it is really finished! Go Team!