More Ecoprints

I continued last week’s ecoprinting experiments. I consider all ecoprints to be experiments because I’m never sure of the result.

This one has grape leaves, bottlebrush and rose flowers, and Casaurina (the “leaves” that look like pine needles).

I get carried away with photographing all the stages of this process but I find it so interesting to follow the results. These are two scarves that sandwiched the leaves and flowers. With some leaves it makes a difference which side of the leaf is “up”. that is not so obvious in these scarves but it made a big difference in some below.

This scarf has (from left to right) “foxtails”, redwood, grape, pomegranate, madder leaves (and a root), more pomegranate, hollyhock flower, redwood, and lavender flower and leaves.

This view is a good example of leaves turned face up or down. It didn’t seem to make much difference with the madder leaves in the middle but the difference in the pomegranate leaves on either side is evident. The leaves were again sandwiched between two scarves. The dark leaf prints are from where the leaves were vein side against the fabric and the light prints are if the top side of the leaf was against the fabric.

I decided to add a little extra color to this one but took a short cut and just sprinkled a little dye powder on the fabric.

This was the last one for yesterday—with a sprinkle of turquoise dye powder.

I can’t walk around outside without wondering what images I could get from all the plants I see. The possibilities are endless.

Ecoprinting Experiments

I learned to create ecoprints a few years ago and have successfully sold ecoprinted silk scarves at the Artery, the artists’ coop to which I belong in Davis CA. When I saw that there were virtual classes in ecoprinting offered through Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival I thought I’d find out how others are doing this.

I watched on my iPad and had plenty of room to spread out on the work table in the garage. This instructor sent wool and silk samples for the ecoprinting classes so that’s what I started with. I had more silk scarves here because I had intended to do more printing last year. So these classes were the incentive to get me started again. This post is really just a way for me to organize my photos and to analyze and document the results..

There are so many variables in botanical printing it can seem overwhelming to try and track everything.:
Which plants? Time of year—new leaves or mature leaves? Flowers or leaves? Front or back side of leaf on the fabric? Mordant fabric or dip leaves in mordant? Which mordant? Use a “blanket” fabric or not?

In this sample I have used grape leaves, weld leaves and flowers, and redbud leaves (the round ones in the middle).

I used two scarves with the leaves sandwiched between. If there is a difference between using the front and back of the leaves, that should show up here as one would be the reverse of the other. I saw this for some leaves, but not others. Sometimes the leaves actually print and other times they act as a resist and show a silhouette. In this example I don’t much of a difference in the way the leaves printed.

I have found that pecan and grape leaves are some of the best leaves here for this technique. Those three in the middle are Chinese pistache and “leak” tannin, becoming much more blurry and dark. I did no prep to the silk fabric, but I dipped the leaves in an iron solution. I use two scarves to sandwich the plant material so I end up with two finished projects in mirror image.

There are close-ups below of parts of this scarf. Leaves are grape, madder and pecan on he left and grape and asparagus on the right with a sprig of redwood and maybe another pecan.

For this piece I rolled the bundle with a blue “blanket” that was supplied for use in the class and after simmering I unrolled the scarf at the bottom of the photo above. Notice that some leaves acted as a resist while others printed from the pigment in the leaves.

This is the final scarf after washing. It is for sale here.

Ths one has grape, maple, and locust leaves, and I am amused by the little bit of madder root in the right photo, just under 3 individual madder leaves. You have to look for it but you can see that the root did leave an impression in the final piece.

Its also interesting to try and decide if the face-up or face-down position of the leaves made much difference. It looks as though it did with the locust leaves in this one, but maybe not most of the others.

Here is that last one after washing. You can see the root impression—that squiggle just above the folded part on the left side.

Here is one last set of photos. I used three flowers—flannelbush (yellow), hollyhock, and roses. I included locust, rose, and hollyhock leaves.

This is how the scarves looked after unrolling the bundle.

This is the final piece after washing. This one is for sale here along with several others.

Random Farm Photos and Decisions

When you see the title, Random Farm Photos, you know that I’ve either been too busy or too distracted to spend time working with my photos and putting together a cohesive story. Busy and distracted go hand-in-hand. Sometimes the hardest thing to get past is the decision making. Where to start?

I finally finished weaving off a 27 yard warp that was on my big loom. The decisions here are all about where to post the finished pieces. These blankets are woven with locally grown Timm Ranch wool yarn in the warp and weft yarn of various sources. The green is my new favorite non-local yarn that I sell here. The others are leftover yarns that I used to carry—U.S. grown yarn dyed by Sincere Sheep. I can sell these on my website or at the Artery in Davis, or on the Artery’s new shopping website. I finally got the photos taken, but haven’t had time to post them anywhere yet. That’s on the list for next week.

These are more of the blankets from that warp. These can be posted on my website or on the N.CA Fibershed Marketplace website. I listed a few of them on that site tonight, but didn’t finish, and I haven’t decided where to post them all.

This blanket was on that same warp. This is one of my newest ideas and you’ll be seeing more about this as I go further. The colors in this blanket indicate the temperatures throughout the year in my area, progressing from wintertime 40’s and 50’s (gray and blue) all the way to over 100 (red) and back to winter. I’m planning to offer this as a kit for weavers and as a blanket that can be customized for a specific year and/or location.

Next up on the loom is this 50 yard warp. It’s on the warp beam but not threaded yet and there is a deadline. So what am I doing sitting at the computer right now?

More distractions and more decisions. I sorted lambs last week and tried to start making decisions about which I really wanted to keep. That’s hard when you like them all. These are some that may be on my list.

This ewe lamb doesn’t have a great spotting pattern, but she is one of the very few lilac lambs born this year and I want to keep a lilac. (Lilac refers to the color on her face that is not black—her fleece will also be a gray/brown color other than the black and white sheep.)

One of the things that I really needed to do was to finish skirting and sorting fleeces. Lots of decisions there. Which fleeces to put on the website? How much VM (vegetable matter) is too much to go in the barrels for processing at the mill? Do I save back a couple of fleeces for potential Sheep to Shawl contests later in the year?

I’m glad to say that I finally finished with the 2021 fleeces and they are ready for the mill. I had already sold most of the wool I had on the website, but now I have added a few more 1-pound lots of the best parts of the fleeces—those with minimal VM.

I had to make a decision about what to do with this ewe named Alice. It’s a long enough story for a blog post all by itself. I’ll just say that over a week ago I found her by herself and obviously in not very good shape. I am convinced that she had some kind of neurological problem and was blind in one eye. That was in addition to her poor body condition. I brought her to the barn. First decision—vet or necropsy lab or watch until Monday? (It was Sunday and everything would be twice as expensive for maybe not much return.) The rest of the week I kept pondering the pros and cons of all those options. She seemed to be better, but not normal and I wanted help with the decision about the final outcome. So I took her to the VMTH on Friday. There really wasn’t a diagnosis but ideas of what could have been wrong. I came home with medications to be administered twice/day for five days. During this time I had removed the lambs because they are plenty big enough to wean and Alice had no interest in them. After the five days of treatment when I put Alice back with the flock her lambs found her and decided that they were NOT weaned. She welcomed them back and right now you can’t tell that she very had a problem except that she is still skinny—but her behavior seems back to normal.

I’ll end this post with a goat picture. These are two of the triplets and they have decided that this feeder is their personal sleeping platform.

More Wildflowers at Table Mountain

About a week ago I shared photos from our first visit to North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve. We returned earlier this week and explored part of the Reserve that we had not seen last time.

This view isn’t far from the parking lot. We followed the trail that heads to South Mesa.

That trail heads through more of the oak woodland before breaking out onto the mesa.

On the mesa we had a view of the Sacramento Valley and the Sutter Buttes. We wanted to follow the trail marked on our map as the Many Waterfalls loop, but maybe the key word in the description of this route was “cross-country”. There doesn’t seem to be a very defined trail that isn’t just another cow trail. But we knew we wanted to head to the rim of the mesa and follow that rim to see the marked waterfalls.

We saw expanses of yellow on the mesa.

This flower is Dwarf Stonecrop.

It is a relatively small flower but en masse it is quite impressive. It is the dominant species in the bright yellow strips. Goldfields makes up the more orange parts.

Goldfields interspersed with Tidy Tips and lupines.

This is the Tidy Tips up close.

Another view of the valley and the Sutter Buttes. We’re getting closer to the edge of the mesa and Table Mountain.

This is a panorama view of the same location.

We came across useful signs occasionally but it would have been good if we had an app to show us exactly where the GPS coordinates were. We’ll have to figure that out for next time. We missed some of the trails that we had planned to take because in some places it was hard to know where there was actually a trail. We ended up hiking about 8-1/2 miles instead of the 11 miles marked on the map.

The sign above is describing this formation, appropriately called Crevice Falls. Surprisingly there was still some water in some of these. There must be water flowing from springs that run through the basalt layer.

I realized that Ladder Falls was not named for the creek bed of the waterfall but because there is this old pipe ladder to enable people to access the trail.

This trail took us back through more oak woodland grazing area. There are some very large old oaks throughout this part of the reserve.

After our last visit I bought a book that describes the flowers and ecology of North Table Mountain. That was helpful in identifying some of the photos I took. This is a poppy species called Frying Pans.

Kellogg’s Clarkia.

White-headed Navarretia.

I knew I had to find this flower when I saw it in the book. It’s called Cowbag Clover and if the photo was better you could see that, yes, it looks like an upside down cow udder.

This flower is known as Butter-and-Eggs. That is one I already knew from having seen it in other areas.

We spent a beautiful day hiking here and I look forward to returning next winter and spring.

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.

Wildflowers in Northern California

Last week we explored a place that was new to us. Dan had ridden his bike through this area in the Wildflower Century in past years, but had seen it only from the road. This is North Table Mountain Ecological Reserve, 3300 acres owned by the state, 3 miles north of Oroville. The state purchased the land to preserve the unique Northern Basalt Flow Vernal Pools and the rare species of plants that grow here.

There is a parking area but people were already parking along the road because the lot was full. We parked along the road and walked to the Reserve. This was our first view of the spectacular wildflower display and this wasn’t even part of the Reserve.

I am so used to visiting National or State Parks that have complete visitor centers and well-defined trails that I was surprised to discover that there are lands accessible to us that are not part of the park systems. There were a few signs that indicated the direction and distance to a few waterfalls (surprising to me in this area) but no other interpretive signs.

I read later that this area has been grazed by cattle for at least 45 years and that grazing is part of the current management strategy to help control non-native species and maintain the ecology of the area.

This is one of two panoramic shots I created.

There were great swathes of purple and yellow and orange. These are lupines and I’m not sure which yellow flower this is—Great Valley Buttercup or Goldfields? I’ll need to pay better attention next time I’m there instead of assuming that I’ll remember each flower in my photos.

Lupines and I think poppies and popcorn flower.

Purple Owl’s Clover.

Poppies, but I can’t tell you which poppy—there is more than one on the list of wildflower species that occur here.

Sierra Mock Stone Crop. This flower seemed to be growing right out of the rocks—certainly with minimal soil to sustain it.

This one is called Dark-stained Prettyface.

Purple owl’s clover and poppies

The flowers are beautiful individually and close-up, but what looks at what you see at a distance:

It was a suprise to me that there are several waterfalls here, short-lived as they are in this climate, especially with the minimal amount of rainfall that we’ve had this year. I don’t suppose the will last long this year.

We plan to return here before the flowers disappear this spring.

Around the Farm and More Sheep Adventures

We irrigated last week and for a time had our own private wetlands complete with a small flock of Canada geese. Now the pasture is dry but I have heard a lot of honking the last few days. I think this goose was calling his mate.

He eventually flew off…

…but not far. Just into the pasture.

Together.

A Jacob breeder who lives about 2 hours from here wanted to buy the ram, Jasper, and I offered to deliver him. The wether (who happens to be one of the few sheep I am trying to keep coated to keep his fleece free of VM) went along for the ride. It seemed as though it would be less stressful for Jasper to not be completely alone in the trailer. Also we were delivering a ram for Jasper’s buyer to a location that was on our way home.

The horns on this wether are the main reason that he was castrated as a lamb. Most of the rams that don’t meet certain standards will go to the butcher market but this one lucked out and his job is to be a companion to any sheep that needs a buddy.

We drove north and eventually had a clear view of Mt. Shasta. The north wind was incredibly strong that day—so strong that our truck struggled heading due north and pulling the trailer. Time for a new truck?

Jasper ended up in a nice place—a large field and a bunch of ewes. What more would a ram want?

Back home, this is my entertainment every evening.

People have asked why the lambs run and i don’t know. They just do. It’s a Lamb Flashmob. If I’m still in the barn I hear them thundering past.

They run for 15 minutes or so and then they give it up and go find mom or get some hay.

We delivered Jasper on Friday and Axle went to a new home the day before. That left Tamarisk by himself so we put a wether in with him. Today we moved the yearlings, Rambler and Jangle, into the grown up ram pen where there will now be three. We started with a small pen and included a bale of straw as an impediment. There isn’t much space but the idea is that they will figure out who is boss without the major damage that could happen if they were able to back up and charge each other. The wether is still in the ram pen but not forced to be in with the others while they battle it out. Hopefully after a few days they will be BFFs. I assume that Tamarisk, the older ram, will be the boss of the other two.

Lambing Finale

I am a few days late on this post because the last lambs were born on Friday and it is now Monday.

This is Meridian Roca, a yearling (born 3/4/2020) with the last lamb of the season. She delivered easily the evening of 3/26 and was a great mother from the start.

Meridian Foxy is a 6 year old lilac (coloring of gray/brown instead of black) ewe with a small (5.4 pounds) ewe lamb born early that morning. I had given up on Foxy and decided that she wasn’t pregnant even though an ultrasound showed that she was. I thought that maybe she had aborted. I had been keeping the last three pregnant ewes in a separate area but had just turned Foxy out with the rest of the ewes the night before. She surprised me with this lamb the next morning.

This is Cashew, another yearling, with her ewe lamb born on 3/23.

I may want to keep this little ewe lamb. However there are plenty of others I’d like to keep too. Decisions…

I like to keep track of lambing stats. If you look at my lambing board you will see that lambing began 2/20 with twins, six days before the first “official” due date. There was a breather of a few days and then they started coming on 2/24. There were 84 lambs born in 19 days with a high of 12 lambs born on March 1. Lamb # 86 was born 3-14 and then a gap of nine days before the last three. The lambs are color coded for ram/ewe (not very creative here, but I need something easy to remember). The birth weights are as accurate as I can be, but if I find the lamb already up and nursing who’s to say how many ounces of milk it has already had?

I “process” lambs usually the next day or maybe two after birth. They get a BOSE injection (selenium and vitamin E), a tail band, ear tags, and maybe a band for wethering. With the Jacob ram lambs it’s impossible to know at birth if they will grow up with symmetrical balanced horns (if 4 horns) or wide spread (if 2 horns). So I don’t want to castrate most of them because I’m always waiting for that perfect ram to be born but I won’t know until it’s grown for several months. However, I can tell if they are too light or dark in color to be an acceptable registered ram. The Breed Standard allows for 15%-85% color. If a ram lamb is outside that limit then I will band him to castrate. Those wethers may be sold as fiber pets or as ram companions, or for butcher. There will be another blog post coming up about the color analysis part.

We use two ear tags for each lamb. The first ear tag is preprinted with the ID # which includes the birth year. This years lamb #’s begin with 21. Ewes have that ear tag in the left ear and rams in the right ear. The second tag is color coded by sire and I have written in the ID number. This year I used up a variety of leftover tags but next year I need to start by buying new ones. The gray tags I used are too close in value to the white to easily differentiate. In the lower right corner of the Lamb Board I have my reminder of the colors.

Tamarisk lambs have orange ear tags.

Jasper’s are gray.

There are only a handful of Axle and Rambler lambs and those are red and yellow.

Anywhere you see a X P on the lamb board that means that Peyton, a Bluefaced Leicester, is the sire. The BFL-cross lambs are black so they don’t need a special ear tag to tell me who they are. The colored tags are useful not only for identifying sires, but as a back-up if the original ID tag is lost. It is also helpful to know which color to look for when I am trying to find a particular lamb—the colors narrow the search down a bit.

Ears is a BFL cross herself . She was bred to Peyton so her triplets are 3/4 BFL. The other adult crossbred ewe in the flock is Addy but Peyton is her sire and she was bred to a Jacob ram.

This sometimes seems like an overwhelming number of lambs but so far they are all doing well.

The ewes are hard at work raising all these lambs.

To finish out the stats:
89 Live lambs born, 1 long-dead twin delivered along with a live lamb. One tiny (3.4 lb) lamb died before 24 hrs..
44 rams and 45 ewes
2 triplet births = 6 lambs
36 twin births = 71 lambs (plus the dead fetus)
12 single births (including 3 yearlings)
Average weight of 73 purebred Jacob lambs: 8 lbs (Low = 3.4 and high = 10.6)
Average weight of 16 BFL X Jacob lambs: 9.5 lbs (Low = 7.4 and high = 12.8)

Shearing at the Timm Ranch 2021

This is the sixth year that I have purchased wool from the nearby Timm Ranch on their shearing day. Here is an example of the yarn that is spun from the wool and there is a little bit of info about the ranch and the flock at that link.

We were so lucky with the weather. The shearing had already been postponed because of potential rain and if there had been the north wind as the day before it would not have been nearly as pleasant.

The sheep are what I call a ranch blend of Rambouillet, Polypay, and Targhee, all fine wool breeds.

There are not individual sheep of those breeds, as the ranch has raised their own replacements for quite awhile.

I’m glad that so many Farm Club members were able to help because there were two shearers working and we needed to keep up with them.

As a fleece was shorn Alan took it from the shearers and put it on a tarp near the skirting tables.

After the first few years of working at the shearing we figured out that we’d better bring canopies or we’d be in the sun the whole day. It was looking very festive here—the canopies cover three skirting tables.

We kept up the safety protocol and everyone wore masks. Some of the Farm Club members had been to this shearing in previous years and it was new for others. Susan, Marina, Kimber are in this photo (I think that I’m able to see who is behind the mask.)

Teresa and Doris are here.

Beth, Carol, and Sylvia.

Thanks for this photo, Doris. I am in this one.

At a commercial shearing operation, the classes and skirters have seconds to spend with each fleece if they hope to keep up with the shearing when 6 or 7 shearers are working. We are a lot slower. The reason is that I feel compelled to send wool that is as free of VM (vegetable matter) and other faults as possible. When we skirt we remove any part of the fleece that isn’t up to a chosen standard. We pull off wool from around the edges where there is going to be more debris or felting, wool with paint markings, wool that has more VM, and wool that may be tender (brittle) or short. The huge mills have processes that deal with VM chemically: Carbonising is a continuous process which combines scouring to remove the wool grease and a chemical process which removes vegetable matter such as seeds, burs and grass. Carbonising occurs if the greasy wool contains a high percentage of vegetable matter (%VM), typically in excess of 2% to 3%. There is more info at this link. My wool is going to a mill that doesn’t do that process so it is important to send only wool that is as clean as possible.

I also needed to keep track of how much wool we had because I needed to meet a minimum of 200 pounds for the mill where I’m sending this wool. So after skirting fleeces we filled bags to be weighed. After recording the weight the wool was piled on a tarp to be baled at the end. The reason that we had to keep up with the shearers is that they brought the wool press with them. They would press our wool and any that we didn’t take into bales before they left. It was important to not have to stuff this pile into bags and boxes, but to get it into a bale for shipment.

Much of the ranch property burned in the devastating LNU Complex fire last summer, but the buildings at this location were spared, probably because the sheep graze the 80 acres that is right around the headquarters.

They were certainly lucky that these old barns didn’t burn.

Our pile got to 230 pounds as the shearers were finishing. They dragged it over to the wool press.

Farm Weekend

This is random photos taken over this weekend. Lambing is almost over and the lambs are growing fast.

This is Fandango and her twins.

Ears and her triplets. Ears is a 50:50 Jacob:BFL and the lambs are 25:75.

Dan burned the huge pile of brush and tree branches this weekend. He had been waiting for some rain to dampen everything else around and then we lucked out that rain followed the burn to help cool it down. That’s what’s left of the burn pile in the foreground and he has started to made rows out of the manure compost pile. We’re hoping that if we spread it out what little rain we get will help to dampen it thoroughly enough so that it will actual compost.

The burn pile is next to the ram pen and I saw Tamarisk a couple of times lying in positions that didn’t look quite right. Usually sheep sleep propped up on their chests. Maybe his horns just get too heavy to hold up and then he uses them as head-rests.

When you are at the ram pen you can’t help but notice how they have destroyed the fence. This is a double fence with welded wire panels on T-posts on the ram side and the electric fence on fiberglass poles on the ewe side. Those welded wire panels are stout but the rams have bent them into a mangled mess. We have bent these back into shape as much as possible, but this fence needs more work before breeding season comes around again.

Yesterday I noticed bird calls that I hadn’t heard before, and lots of them. There was quite a racket and I had never heard that many annoyed or angry birds before. I thought that some were crows but I couldn’t figure out if the rest were nesting birds trying to warn others away or what I was hearing. I told Dan that it would be a good background if someone wanted to make a jungle movie. I took my binoculars out and still couldn’t find the birds. I sent a recording to a birder friend of mine and she identified what I was hearing.

At first I thought the birds were in our trees along the fenceline, but then I realized that the sound was coming from the new almond orchard to the north. You can barely see through the trees and I hadn’t noticed it at first. It’s the elusive Soundtrack Bird.

Here is a clear view of it. That is a solar panel on a pole with a speaker above. They have two stations where they are playing recordings of a variety of birds. I’ve been doing some checking on line and found that birds can cause thousands of dollars of damage to orchards. Most of what I read talks about the damage later in the season but I suppose that since the almonds just finished flowering maybe they are trying to protect the newly forming almonds. One site said this: “Bird Gard harnesses the power of the natural survival instincts in birds to effectively repel them. Digital recordings of species-specific distress and alarm calls, along with the sounds made by their natural predators, are broadcast through high fidelity, weather-resistant speakers. These trigger a primal fear-and-flee response. Pest birds soon relocate to where they can feed without feeling threatened.”

We had no idea that is what we were hearing. I guess I was sort of right when I said that it sounded like a movie soundtrack. However I was thinking Amazon rainforest, not Vacaville almond orchard. It is a bit unsettling to be in the barn and hear this continually, although as Dan pointed out, it’s better than the cannon bursts that we hear in the fall when the crop is ready to pick.

The pasture seems to be a bit smaller now that all these lambs are out there. We’re sure hoping for some measurable rain with this storm. We need to keep this grass growing.

Those are triplet BFL-x lambs with their mom Jillian.

This is Foxy, one ewe who is still pregnant. Foxy and two ewe lambs are the only ones left to lamb and they are due in about a week.

Belle is the ewe my granddaughter showed as a lamb in 2019. This is her first lambing and she had twins. So this ewe lamb is my 6-year-old granddaughter’s lamb, and she wants to name her Beauty (in a Disney princess theme). She is the only one of the all the Jacob lambs born that doesn’t have the typical spotting pattern on her body but that’s OK—we’ll keep her anyway. Hopefully there will be a show where Kirby can take Beauty next summer.

Amelia and Ellie, the goats who both kidded last year. Amelia on the left is the only one who will kid this year—not until April.

The two adult goats on either side and the daughers in the middle. My hope is that we can get those two to Texas this year for my daughter’s family to raise.

To end on a sheep picture, this is Janna and her ram lamb.

Still Lambing

In my system the sheep lamb in the barn (or are taken to the barn shortly after lambing if they were outside. After two or three days in a lambing pen (jug) I move a group of two or three ewes and their lambs to a stall in the horsebarn part of our barn. I think that gives the lambs time to realize that it is important to stick close to their own mom and it gives the ewes time to not worry so much about other lambs bothering them. The ewes can be somewhat aggressive to other lambs and the lambs figure out that it’s better to avoid the other ewes. After a few days they all mellow out and don’t really care anymore.

This time in the stall also gives me a chance to keep a better eye on each ewe and lamb so hopefully I can be aware of any problem that arises. After a few days in the stall they the ewes and lambs go into an area of the barn that is separate from the pregnant ewe area. As more lambs are born, the pregnant side gets smaller and the lamb and mom side gets bigger.

Right now the ewes and lambs have access to the green field that is behind my weaving studio/shop and that gives the lambs a controlled environment in which to learn about the electric fence. The pregnant ewes are on the main pasture. I wrote in one of the last posts how unusually this is because usually when we lamb it is wet and soggy on the pasture and behind the barn there is a lake. That is why I developed this system of where we lamb and how we move the sheep through the first couple of weeks. Wishful thinking that we will get some rain and we can count on that to grow some more grass!

This post has changed focus from whatever I had planned when I started two nights ago to random photos of lambing season. I guess I got distracted and too tired and didn’t get back to it until now. That is Fandango who lambed two days ago. She is one of the oldest ewes here—lambed with twins.

The ewes and lambs that are out of the barn are on the small field behind my shop. This is Jillian and her BFL-X triplets. I never registered Jillian because of lack of color and face markings but she has nice fiber so I kept her. I choose to breed the few ewes that aren’t registered to the BFL ram.

This one is a 3/4 BFL cross. He has the BFL ears.

A yearling ewe named Trina and her lamb.

It’s too late to finish writing much here so I’m going to end tonight with a couple of lamb photos and some daffodils. More tomorrow.

More Lambing Photos

I am not used to pasture lambing. In a Normal Year the pasture would be wet from November through February or March. It’s hard to remember Normal Years, although the last couple were close. In those Normal Years we lambed in the barn and corral areas because the sheep aren’t on the pasture during those months. This is flat land so water doesn’t drain away—it has to percolate through the soil, and there is a clay layer here so if there is a lot of water it can stay on top for a long time. In those Normal Years, it would be mid-March to April when we put the sheep out and there are plenty of annual grasses and forbs to feed them while we’re waiting for the perennial clovers and trefoil to really start growing well. The last couple of years seemed close to normal at least compared to those previous several years of drought. So it seems strange to me to have lambs in the pasture right now and my managment is set up more for barn lambing.

On Saturday afternoon all the sheep came to the barn except for Alice who had two lambs in the farthest paddock. I needed to get them to the barn. I had to get Dan to help with this becuase Alice was too frantic if I picked up both lambs to carry them and one of them was not on it’s feet yet.

This is the view I am always checking to figure out who is going to go next and be able to put those ewes in while they are in labor. Its actually more about behavior in combination with the physical appearance.

When I went to the barn yesterday morning Ears had one lamb. She delivered two more shortly. These are BFL-X lambs and big (7.4, 10.4, and 12.8 lbs). That’s 30 pounds of lambs!

Jasmine was next with twins. I found myself mutli-tasking here. I had an upcoming Zoom class at 9 so I had arranged to Zoom with my grandkids at 8:30. I took Zoom to the barn with me and they watched one of these being born while I was trying to also watch what they were showing me.

Those lambs cleaned up nicely.

So did Ears’ lambs.

Trina was next that morning. She is just one year old right now and she had only one lamb, which is expected for a yearling.

That brings us to this morning. I’ve been watching Raquel and even put her in the night before. Her due date was a few days ago, she is an old sheep, and she has had triplets more than once, so I wanted to keep an eye on her. She had one lamb when I went out at 5:30. We now have a couple of barn cameras and I checked the camera when I woke and thought that maybe I saw something. While I was waiting for the second I walked out in back.

The ewes are usually bedded down, but they thought they were maybe getting an early breakfast so started getting up when I walked back there.

This is a common site, Amelia and her daughter from last year are often lying together.

So are Ellie and her daughter.

In the very back there was a ewe with two lambs. I was able to carry one and the ewe and other lamb followed.

Terri lambed in the afternoon. This is the first but she eventually had another. Look at those horns! These are number 26 and 27.

There is the views from the barn cameras on my iPad from earlier today. I’m heading back now because I have 3 ewes in the pens in labor.

LAMBS!

Lambing seems off to a slow start. Usually the barn is full a few days after the first lamb is born, but not this year. The first due date I had marked on my calendar was today, February 26.

The first lambs were born February 20 - a set of twins to Zinnia and sired by the ram we picked up in Oregon, Ruby Peak Tamarisk.

Here is how that little yellow lamb looked today, 6 days later.

Four days later I checked the barn in between Zoom meetings and found this scene. Two ewes and two lambs. Upon closer inspection I knew that only one of these ewes had lambed. Ginger is the one on the left and these twins were hers. But Dilly was in early labor and sometimes the ewe’s hormones take over and they are anxious to mother a baby. Can you see how confusing it could be for the shepherd to sort out lambs? This is why I think it is important to keep checking the barn and when I think a ewe is in labor I separate her. These are two experienced moms but if there is a young ewe involved she might completely lose track of her lamb if an older pushier ewe intervenes. Even with these two if I’d been there an hour later I might not have known which lambs belonged to which ewes.

This is Ginger with her twins, sired by Axle. There are photos of the sires on the Ram Page.

Dilly had her own lambs but then Ginger thought maybe they were hers. You have to realize that this desire to claim lambs from another ewe doesn’t last long. In fact not long after this Ginger was hitting the fence when those other lambs got too close. It’s only possible to get an orphan lamb grafted onto another ewe with a lot of work and skill (and luck) involved.

One of Dilly’s twins.

Later that night (actually the next morning at 12:30 a.m.) Anise lambed with twins. The black lambs are crossbreds sired by Peyton, the BFL ram. See his photo on the Ram Page

This morning Betty lambed. There is another reason I like to get these ewes into the lambing pen before they lamb.

The lamb on the right is that one in the photo above after Betty got her cleaned up. The one on the left is how they look if they are delivered in a clean pen.

So my goal every time I go to the barn is to figure out which of these ewes is the next to lamb.

Kirby's Blanket

This is Belle, a 2 year old lilac ewe. Lilac is this color in Jacob sheep that is kind of a gray-brown instead of black. She is pregnant and due to lamb in a about a week. What is special about Belle—at least any more special than any of the other sheep? She is owned by my granddaughter, Kirby.

Way back in 2019 when we all had normal lives, Kirby’s family came from their home in Texas to spend a couple of weeks in the summer. I had selected a lamb to register in Kirby’s name and I got her gentled down before the family got here. This is the story and photos of Kirby coming to the State Fair and showing her lamb.

This is one of my all time favorite photos. Kirby was thrilled to win a pink ribbon! What color is better than pink when you are a 5-year old girl?

I wish I had photos of Belle being shorn and of her fleece. Instead the story will fast forward to fall, 2020. I spun Belle’s fleece, shorn in February 2020, during our weekly Farm Club spinners meeting on Zoom.

I had decided that I would weave a blanket for Kirby to send her for Christmas.

I gave up the idea of spinning all the yarn for the blanket because I just didn’t have time and I knew that the Timm Ranch yarn I use for many of my other blankets would be just fine for warp. I wanted a generously sized blanket so I warped for a double width piece.

I wove random stripes of the handspun brown and the mixed white yarn.

I shipped this blanket on December 14 with plenty of time to arrive before Christmas. However, I made an error in one digit of the zip code. There is a long story to follow, most of which I have forgotten now, and that’s a good thing. I got a message from FedEx that the package could not be delivered. I think it had ended up in a small town in Texas not that far from where it was supposed to go. I corrected the zip code and supposedly all was well. But it wasn’t. I spent countless hours on-line and on the phone trying to track down this blanket and get it sent to the right address. Katie offered to pick it up at a FedEx office, but I was told that wasn’t going to work. The blanket was eventually shipped to Tenessee (FedEx center of some kind) and then to Mississippi to what is called “Overgoods”. It turns out that is a depository for packages they don’t know how to handle or that are lost. The tracking information kept saying that it had been delivered and signed for. I had to insist that it was not delivered to the intended recipient. I eventually worked my way up the management ladder and found that the only way to get the package out of Overgoods was for me to set up an account and request the package.

I did that and eventually got the package back here in California on January 12. This is how it looked. I shipped it back to Texas via good old U.S. Mail.

Kirby has been using the blanket on her bed, but I asked Katie to get some photos so they went outside.

We have all heard about the extreme weather in Texas last week so I think the wool blanket came in handy. Kirby is looking forward to Belle’s lambs and has asked me if she can name them.

It's Time for The Lambing Game

This post will be a little different. I haven’t chosen what I think are my best photos but instead it’s a bunch of photos of sheep rear ends. If you are a Farm Club member you will understand. It’s at this time before lambing that I offer the Lambing Game—a way to test your sheep knowledge and observation skills (really, it’s mostly luck). Farm Club members have a list of breeding dates and potential lambing dates. Based on those dates and these photos I ask people to tell me which of the ewes pictured will lamb first. Tie-breaker 1: The exact date. Tie-breaker 2: How many lambs? Tie-breaker 3: What time on your chosen date? There will be a prize—I just don’t know what yet. I chose to post these photos here so that I don’t fill up the FC members’ emails with lots of photos. Besides maybe the rest of you will be interested to find out what happens. Remember that lambing isn’t due to start until 2/26, but as in people, due dates aren’t exact.

I took photos for this game a couple of days ago and before I could get them posted, this ewe, Zinnia lambed—6 days early. So these lambs are 2 days old already. The rest of the photos in this post were taken this morning.

Anise. I’ll also say here that I just wandered around taking photos of sheep that seem to be bagging up. I did not find all the 15 ewes that are due by March 1 and some of these have dates for after that. Hey, it’s just a game!

Fandango

Alice.

Dimitri

Ginger.

Dilly.

Hilda.

Ears.

Jade

Raquel.

So that’s it for this first game of the season. Now you know what I do when I go out looking at sheep…like I’m going to do now for the 11 p.m. check.

Colusa Wildlife Refuge

On Monday we drove to Yuba City (an hour away) where I had been able to schedule a COVID vaccine appointment at the CVS pharmacy. We made the most of the day be combining the appointment with a visit to the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge. I have driven past the wildlife refuges along I-5 for years but have never stopped and now I want to make sure that we go visit all of them. These can be mini-road-trips in a year when we may not be able to take a real road trip.

I wish I’d had my camera nearby for the whole drive. I think we passed up a lot of interesting views, but I had my camera ready when we drove past this barn.

There are five refuges in the Sacramento National Wildife Refuge system (dark green on this map) and there is also a state refuge which is not shown here. Maybe we’ll make it to another when we go back to CVS for our second vaccination.

The first bird we saw was a Greater White-fronted Goose.

There is a 3-mile auto tour and a short walking trail. We started with the walk, some of which was blocked off.

You aren’t supposed to get out of the car on the auto tour route, but there is a parking lot and observation platform at the beginning of it. There seemed to be a greater density of birds at this location than later on.

I had to do most of my bird ID after I got home and could look at my photos with my bird books in hand. Feel free to correct my IDs if they are wrong.

Snow Goose or Ross’ Goose? We couldn’t decide if the brownish face on many of the white geese was the natural coloring or staining from poking around in the mud. But one of my bird books shows that tan face on the Snow Goose photo.

On the other hand the book described the Ross’ Goose with a smaller pink bill. Is that what I see here?

It’s a challenge to identify birds when this is the view.

Or this view.

I figured out that the last one was a Northern Pintail after I identified the bird in this photo.

Northern Shoveler.

Greater White-fronted Goose.

American Coot.

I had a hard time matching this one up to what is in my books. The curved bill and coloring have me leaning toward the White-face Ibis, but I don’t see a white face. Maybe some other Ibis?

Great Blue Heron.

I was surprised to see the crowd of birds roosting.

I finally figured out that they are Black-crowned Night Herons. The description in the books fit as does the statement that they roost in trees during the day.

I look forward to getting the second vaccine for more than one reason. Hopefully we can fit in a trip to another refuge before we start to feel any disagreeable side effects from the vaccine.

What's Keeping Me Busy

This is a post with no theme other than the snippets (is that a word?) of all the stuff I’ve been doing.

I got my second batch of the 2020 Jacob fiber back as yarn. The first batch of 2020 wool was spun at Valley Oak Mill and is listed here. This batch is from Mendocino Wool Mill and is listed here. It always take me a little while to figure out how to best present it for sale. I had some put on cones and some in skeins. The yarn on the cones appears to be so much finer than the skeined yarn but it’s the same yarn—it is just under more tension when wound on a cone. I wondered how much the skeined yarn would bloom when washed. That information is important to know when you are planning a project. Whether you are going to knit, crochet, or weave with the yarn you need to know what will happen to the piece when it is washed.

I washed a white and a black skein to see what would happen. In this case washing just means soaking in hot water and then hanging to dry. This is four skeins of yarn. Can you tell the difference in the yarns on the outside and in the middle? The middle ones have not had any treatment. The outside skeins have been washed and the character is very different.

One way to measure the change is by looking at wraps per inch (wpi) before and after. In this case the black yarn measured 14 wpi before washing and 10 wpi after. If you don’t allow for this post-washing change then you may be surprised at how the finished piece looks and behaves. I will wash all the skeins before labeling them.

Another test before selling the yarn is how it actually works in use. I wove scarves of each batch of yarn to compare them and to determine the best sett (spacing of the yarns on the loom). I tried each at 8 epi (ends per inch) and 10 epi.

I photographed these so that the light was behind and you can kind of see the spaces between the yarns. Those spaces are nothing like when the scarves were still on the loom with the yarn under tension. When you cut the piece off the loom the yarns relax and they further relax and “bloom” when fulled in hot water. This photo shows 2 scarves from each batch of yarn at 2 setts each. All four turned out great and even though the yarns appear different, it’s hard to tell the difference in these finished pieces. I look forward to using these yarns in some much larger projects next.

By the way I put these scarves on three different websites—here on my own, on the Fibershed Marketplace and the Artery webstore, all the while carefully keeping track of which one is where so I don’t take a chance on double-selling them.

Another project I’m working on is recording some videos for the Learn to Weave class using the rigid heddle loom. I am going to teach this on Zoom next week and I want videos for students to refer to when we’re not on Zoom. I warped the rigid heddle loom with all four of those new Jacob colors and wove a short scarf while recording most of it. I haven’t wet finished the scarf yet, or edited the videos. (Thanks for reminding me.)

I also finished another v-shawl. This is another thing on my list of things to do. I want to put together a kit for this shawl and give options for the stripe design. I’ve woven several. I just need to get the instructions put together and figure out the best way to present it. I just added this shawl to the Artery web store along with one of the pinwheel scarves.

I still have a barn full of fleeces. I spent some time yesterday working on those. I only have two full fleeces listed on the website so far, but I have listed several 1-pound batches for people who would like to start with raw wool but not start out with a whole fleece. I am skirting, sorting, and photographing. Raw wool is listed here.

Here is another example. In the meantime I want to get my hands in this and start working with it myself. There are some really gorgeous fleeces here.

I said this was a bunch of random photos. So far it is all about wool and weaving and the things I need to do. So let’s get random. Dan saw me weaving and my weaving slippers reminded him of the Bernie mittens that have been popping up all over the internet.

How about springtime flowers? It’s not spring yet, but the daffodils are here.

So are the almond flowers.

I don’t usually have the patience to scour the wool in locks even though it would save a lot of time at the other end of processing. I pulled out some locks that had more VM (vegetable matter) than I would like. I’m going to see how clean I can get them with flicking after washing. That will go much faster if they are already organized.

How about some goats? These are mothers with last year’s daughters. That’s Ellie and her daughter on the left and Amelia with hers on the right. Amelia is pregnant again.

One last random photo. The redbud is going to bloom soon. Hope springs eternal! And we’re getting our Covid vaccines Monday—have to drive an hour for it but I finally tracked it down.

Ginny in Pink

I was throwing the ball for Ginny a few days ago. She yelped and ran for the house, getting caught on a gate as she went around it. I still don’t know what happened to cause her to yelp—maybe she jumped and landed wrong—something made her run for the house. But it was when she got caught on the gate that she injured herself. I didn’t that she was injured until the next night because her long hair covered the wound.

That was two nights ago that I was petting Ginny and discovered an injury that I knew should have had stitches the day before.

This is a not-very-good photo of the gate that was the problem. The tips of those horizontal pieces stuck out and inch or so longer than they are now. Dan cut them off so they don’t extend beyond the pipe border now.

We took Ginny to the vet and left her for the day. When I picked her up she was wearing a cone.

The actual wound stops about half way down that shaved area and there was a flap of skin and tissue about 2” in diameter near the top.. The bottom part of the red part is drainage from the wound. The vet had to trim away the edges of the wound so that there was fresh tissue to heal together. Now it is stapled and Ginny has to wear the cone so she doesn’t lick the wound. She started to scratch it with her hind foot so I covered it with a t-shirt.

I cut about an inch off the outside edge of the cone because I didn’t think it needed to be quite so big. Now she can reach the floor and her food dish.

Ginny was a bit distraught last night—probably still from the effects of the drugs she had, but also not happy with the cone. Today she seems to have bounced right back. While we were working in the barn she was right there wanting someone to throw a ball.

No running or jumping for 10 days? That may be a problem.

Shearing Day 2021 - Part 2

I wrote a post about Shearing Day a couple of days ago but there was more!

There were photos of Ginny and Oakley (the shearer’s dog) in the last post. Rusty even wanted to play. Not bad for an almost 15 year old dog.

The last post ended up with a lunch break. (Too bad we couldn’t have the fabulous potluck that has happened in other years.) I had brought a friend’s sheep here to dry out and stay dry so they could also be shorn. They were the after-lunch group.

We were amused by this sheep’s fluffy hairdo.

I watched this sheep butt others with her horns and she must have been doing that earlier to come in with this look.

Farm Club members helped clean the barn after we finished shearing, and they valiantly braved the lake to dump the wheelbarrow loads.. This is what happens after only 2” of rain.

They also spent time looking through fleeces.

After finishing with all the sheep I like to take some photos of how they look without fleece.

This is Sheila.

Meridian Axle.

Ruby Peak Tamarisk, on the left, is the sheep I picked up this summer in Oregon (blog post here). Meridian Jasper is on the right.

Rocky is a wether whose only job is to be a buddy sheep when I need to move someone else (usually a ram) into separate quarters.

Peyton is the BFL ram who weighed in that morning at 281 pounds!

Farm Club members took some of the fleeces but there are still a lot left.

Shearing Day 2021 - Part 1

Shearing Day was 5 days ago on 1/29. I can’t believe that I haven’t shared photos yet. I often think in terms of photos and blog posts, but they don’t always make it to the computer. The first post I meant to write was about getting ready for Shearing Day.

Tuesday night the area was hit with a wild storm and huge winds. On Wednesday we drove to a friend’s farm about 5 miles away to bring her sheep to our place so they would be dry for shearing. We now know how many sheep we can put in our trailer—that would be 20 in full fleece. The sheep were soaked but by bringing them here they had a chance to dry out and our shearer added them on after shearing our sheep..

Tuesday night our power went out and stayed out for almost 24 hours and we were luckier than many to be out of only that long, especially since I didn’t think John would want to hand shear 88 sheep.

Wednesday morning I got the barn organized for shearing. I found the plywood we save for shearing next to the stack of straw. It looks as though last year someone labeled it so that it wouldn’t be cut up and used for something else before this year. Good idea.

We started with the rams. This is 2 year old Jasper.

Shearing Day is usually an Open House and we have a lot of visitors and fleece buyers. This pandemic year was an exception, but I was glad that some Farm Club members could come and help. In fact they did most of the work of moving sheep and handing them off to John.

Sheep-eye-view of the holding pen.

The whole day went so smoothly. Everyone had a job and knew what to do. The few brand new Farm Club members jumped right in as well and the “old-timers” showed them what to do and talked about handling sheep.

John sheared 8 rams and wethers and then moved onto the ewes.

Mary scooped the fleeces off the shearing board and her husband, Russ, held the bag open for the fleece.

Kathleen was happy to do her regular job of weighing fleeces.

As usual Ginny entertained herself with the ball. This time she put the ball through the fence where John was shearing, hoping that someone would throw it for her. This time John’s dog, Oakley, picked it up and they both ran off.

Later Oakley found a piece of horn which I think he liked better than the ball.

John sheared all 68 of our sheep and then took a break before shearing the my friend’s 20 sheep.

While John ate lunch we held a raffle that was open to those members who had renewed their membership. We raffled off the shawls that our Meridian Jacobs teams had woven at 2019 Black Sheep Gathering and 2020 Lambtown Sheep-to-Shawl contests. It was fitting that Marina won the shawl woven by the team she was on in 2019. Two other members who couldn’t be at shearing will pick up the Lambtown shawl and another that I wove as a sample before the Lambtown competition.

The ram lamb (almost a year), Rambler and his wether buddy in the background. Remember this look—you’ll never see him this white again.

Stay tuned for more shearing photos tomorrow!