Sheep Notes

3 AM in the barn

2012-02-16T08:58:00.000-08:00

The 3 AM barn check is the hardest part of lambing. We put off doing it until the first lamb is born and then continue with it until the last lamb is born. At 3 AM, we feed any moms in jugs, replenish their water buckets, check to make sure all the new lambs are well fed, and check for even newer lambs – moms in labor or just delivered.

All this makes sense after the lambs start coming, but for the last week we have been doing the 3 AM barn check with no new lambs, and lately, with no lambs or moms in jugs. We get up in the middle of the night and stagger bleary eyed out to the barn on the off chance that there will be new babies.

One week ago, 12 hours after our first lambs were born, I jumped out of bed when the alarm went off, slipped easily into my clothes and went striding out to the barn, awake and excited to see the babies again and hopefully find new ones. The ewe’s eyes glowed at me from the back of the barn. Everyone was calm, no new babies disturbed their rest. The next night, I didn’t wake quite as easily, I couldn’t find the sleeve hole of my sweatshirt and my feet went between my long underwear and my jeans when I tried to pull them on all together. Obviously, I needed to nap during the day if I was to be at my best at 3 AM. The next two nights, with a couple of naps under my belt, I was functional, if not really awake. But all those nights, I woke, dressed and walked to the barn for no reason.

I don’t remember waking at night when our kids were little. Dave says he got up with them. I nursed them, so I know that I did wake, but I have no memory of it. Our daughters, Amber and Laurel, have just spent the past year waking at night to the hungry voices of their sons, and not just at 3 AM, sometimes at 11 and 3 and 5. How do they do it and still function the next day?

Once Dave got home from work, he took over the 3 AM barn check because he frequently works nights and thus is theoretically better adapted to it. I don’t complain too hard, I just sleep right through the alarm at 3 AM when he is home and thank him in the morning.

The Gift

2012-02-12T08:13:00.001-08:00

On the first day that lambing could possibly begin, 56 yellow presented me with a pre-birthday gift - two healthy, white ram lambs. I was not as overjoyed as I should have been.

Usually, the ewes don’t get pregnant the first day the ram is introduced. Usually, we have two or three days, sometimes even a week of “lambing” before the first baby is born. That’s why this year, Dave planned to work at the ER the first four nights of lambing. That’s why I hadn’t bought new ear tags or replenished my colostrum supply. That’s why I had four meetings scheduled in the next four days. It wasn’t why I was still finishing Valentine’s gifts and our holiday letters (that was just slowness on my part). Whatever the reason, I wasn’t ready for lambing. But that didn’t matter, the lambs were here.

Dave clipped their umbilical cords, dunked the cord ends in iodine, and stripped milk from their mother’s teats at 2 PM. When I came back from my first meeting, one of the lambs looked kind of hungry. He didn’t stretch or shake when I set him on his feet; his skin was sort of wrinkly, not smooth like his sibling’s; and he baaad. I checked his mom’s teats. Plenty of milk in the left one, only a drop from the right. And her udder was hot and hard on the right. I gave her an antibiotic and would keep watching her.

By my 3 AM check, the wrinkly lamb’s wrinkles were more pronounced. That could be due to dehydration, or the fact that he was part merino, a breed with very wrinkly skin. But he seemed hungry and I hadn’t replenished my colostrum supply! I vaguely recalled a small container of powdered colostrum in one of the garage freezers. I trudged back to the garage and dug through the freezer until I found it. I measured the colostrum and warmed water and mixed them until the colostrum dissolved. Then I scoured the house for a plastic pop bottle. We don’t drink pop, but someone must have left one at some point. Nothing in the recycling. Nothing in the fridge. In a back corner of the pantry I found a bottle of iced tea. It didn’t have quite the right threads for the nipple I used, but it would work.

I tried to feed the wrinkly lamb. He wasn’t very interested. In fact, I couldn’t get him to drink at all. His belly felt flat, not concave, so he probably was nursing on his mom. I decided to stop worrying and look at him with more rested eyes at my 7 AM barn check.

Three days later, the wind across my face was no longer balmy. When I breathed, the cold caught at the back of my throat on each breath. The setting sun stained the western sky a beautiful orange that silhouetted the trees in our woods. Both lambs and number 56 were doing well. My Valentine’s gifts and holiday letters were finished. I only had one easy meeting left. Dave was due home in 24 hours.

As I walked back to the house and a nap on the sofa with a good book, I felt relaxed. I could lie around and read or sleep for three hours and not feel guilty. There were no problems in the barn, and no “to do” list in the house. For the next month, our responsibilities were to watch over the sheep and do what needed to be done to feed and clothe ourselves and sleep. This is the gift of lambing, the gift of simplicity.

20 orange

2012-02-09T21:21:00.000-08:00

We sheared two weeks ago - 41 sheep and 10 volunteers. At times I felt like Tom Sawyer; these people were all here because they wanted to experience the adventure of shearing sheep. They wanted, if just for a day, to live on the farm.

It was a perfect day for it, not too cold, not too warm. The sheep behaved admirably. The fleeces were nearly all perfect. The company was convivial. We had great conversations both in the barn and in the house over lunch.

Tom, the shearer, finished in 3 ½ hours, a new record. We weren’t quite done skirting fleeces yet, so the women insisted that we return to the barn after lunch and finish. They hauled the new fleeces to my storage shed and then bedded the barn with fresh straw. The sheep came in out of the cold, snuggled down into the straw and relaxed.

All except for 20 orange, a young white sheep who lay down next to the hay feeder instead of eating and didn’t want to move into the barn. I noticed a slight discharge from her vagina. Ooh, watch this ewe, I thought.

Sunday, she came slowly when Dave called her to eat. She didn’t seem a part of the flock. By Monday, she was back with the other sheep, seemingly fine. But a week later, she still had a slight bloody discharge.

Our sheep were a good week away from lambing; she’s not very big, and she doesn’t have much of an udder. I worry that she might have twisted her uterus when we sheared her. If we’re lucky, it twisted back and she and her baby will be fine. If the lamb isn’t lucky, she’ll lose the lamb. If we’re really unlucky, we could lose the ewe.

My books talk about reversing a uterine torsion by laying the ewe on her back, inserting your hand into her vagina so that you can feel when the torsion is reversed, and then rolling the ewe from side to side until the twist untwists. We won’t be able to tell what has happened until she goes into labor. I think we’ll get a second opinion then. This sounds like the kind of situation where I really wish I could use the Tom Sawyer technique and have someone else do the job.

For Love of Wool

2012-02-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

One of the side effects of raising sheep and playing with fibers is that wool tends to become a decorative accent in your home whether you plan it or not. I have a beautiful basket of my natural colored yarns – creamy crystal, frost white, subtle, variegated oatmeal, light gray silver, medium gray smoke, dark gray charcoal, warm brown chai, dark gray brown chocolate, and my newest yarn, almost black coffee. Those are my yarn samples and I display them because I love the natural colors. In the entry way, we have another basket of yarns in blues and greens, because I love blue. In our bedroom, I have three large baskets of wool yarn and roving that doesn’t fit in my yarn dresser, the suitcases full of yarn piled decoratively in Laurel’s old bedroom or in the thirty odd plastic bins in the basement. Actually, that’s not fair, the bins in the basement are yarns to sell; the rest are my yarns to knit or crochet or weave.

Right now, I also have twenty bags of white fleece from 2011 in my entryway. I bring in a bag from the wool shed, skirt off the grungy bits, measure the fiber length, weigh it and set it in the pile to be spun into bulky yarn or the pile to be carded into batts for felting or mattress pads.

With all this wool in the house, Newton is in heaven. When he’s not sleeping, he’s snuffling for wool, enjoying either the tangy scent and flavor of lanolin and manure in the fleece, or the incredible mouth feel (I do not know this from personal experience!) of the clean, carded or spun fibers. If I can’t find Newton, chances are he’s head first in a fleece or a basket of wool, completely in love.

Permanence

2012-01-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Mostly, I write with a pen – I’ve used pencil, marker, even crayon (in the middle of the night when I was about 17 – a great piece of poetry I still remember.), but pen is my standard.

Somehow, pen seems more permanent than pencil, and as a writer, I want my words to resonate across the decades, to last forever. My notebooks were page after page of my blue or black scrawls until Athena, the publisher of my book, From Sheep to Shawl, persuaded me to reward myself with a brightly colored pen. Her favorite was hot pink. It took me a couple of years, but now I buy colored pens fairly often. My favorites are purple and teal.
I use the brightly colored pens for writing , but they also work really well for editing. You can’t ignore a purple comment or correction on a page of black lines.

Many writers do their composition right on the computer; I still use paper for my first and second drafts. My mind works better when it can use circles and arrows and carets on paper as a part of the editing process. Only then can I type the third draft, or if I’m skillful, the final draft, into my computer.

I like colored pens for writing except when I’m in the barn. I used to keep all my barn records in pen, for permanence you know, until the day we were giving shops and I spilled a bottle of rubbing alcohol onto my barn notebook. The ink is permanent, but my words weren’t. The alcohol dissolved the ink and spread it until it precipitated out at the edges of the pages in beautiful clouds of purple, green, blue and black, all content gone.

Now, I write with pencil in the barn, I keep my writing notebooks away from alcohol, and I try to remind myself that nothing is permanent.

Eating

2011-12-31T13:02:00.001-08:00

At this time of the year, our ewes eat and sleep, eat and gestate, and eat. Their growing fetuses are taking up more and more space, to the point where the sheep can’t eat enough hay to fulfill their nutritional requirements. That’s why, about six weeks before the first lamb is due, we begin feeding corn.

The first week of corn, we feed one half bucket divided into sixteen feeders. It doesn’t look like much extra food for 50 animals. Every Sunday after that, well into lambing, we increase the corn by half a bucket until we are feeding six to eight buckets of corn daily.

The sheep love the corn. When they hear the first patter of corn kernels hit the surface of their plastic feeders, they maaa and rush around the barn to gather at the gate into the feed area. When we open the gate, they swarm in, claim a feeder (which they must share with three other sheep), and eat as fast as they can (because of the three other sheep).

Within minutes, the corn is gone and the sheep wander back to the hay feeders which we filled while they were eating corn. This morning, all but three animals stuck their heads into the hay feeders to continue eating – Kaylie the alpaca, the cashmere/ angora cross goat who wasn’t bred, and a single brown ewe who I suspect isn’t pregnant. I’ll watch that ewe during lambing, perhaps in the future we could use hunger as a pregnancy test.
Of course Cedar, my niece Leah’s pet goat, is the most ravenous eater of all, and although he looks it, he’ll never be pregnant; he just keeps eating.

Brown yarn

2011-12-19T10:02:00.000-08:00

Last winter I sent off two batches of wool, 50# of light brown and 50 # of dark brown, to be spun into a variegated yarn, one ply of light and one ply of dark. In my head, it was a beautiful yarn.
When four big boxes arrived at my door ten months later I was disappointed. I opened the first box. The yarn wasn’t variegated. Even worse, it wasn’t very brown. The light wool with sun browned tips and the dark chocolate brown fibers had somehow blended to yield a yarn very similar to my silver gray yarn, with just a hint of milky brown, a little like a good cup of chai. I was so disappointed that I didn’t open any more boxes.
When I finally opened the last two boxes a month and a half later, I realized that my imagination hadn’t been playing tricks on me. The last two boxes held a dark brown yarn. The spinnery hadn’t understood my directions. I now had 120 skeins of chai colored yarn and 120 skeins of dark brown yarn, but not the variegated light and dark brown yarn I had imagined.
Fortunately, I don’t have to depend on a spinnery. I pulled a ball of warm brown alpaca roving and a ball of crimpy dark gray wool roving from my stash and began to spin. Sometimes you just have to do things yourself.

Business of agriculture

2011-12-11T09:12:00.000-08:00

Of course agriculture is a business. We raise sheep and alfalfa to produce lambs and wool and money. On good years we do all three. We always have great fleeces and we usually have a healthy crop of lambs, but more often than we’d like, the farm only breaks even. Unfortunately, not all years are good. Lots of farmers work out and farm, or their wives work out. In many cases, it takes more than farming to keep a farm alive. Some years our health insurance payments gobble up our entire farming profit. A veterinary crisis, a broken piece of machinery or a failed hay crop can each jeopardize our profitability. I don’t know very many shepherds anymore. Glen, a friend who got out of farming half a dozen years ago, survived entirely on his farm profits. He owned his land and worked with old machines which he repaired himself. He fished and trapped and gardened to supplement his meals. He didn’t buy new clothes or new cars and didn’t travel much. He just farmed.
Dave works out. I struggle to find ways to increase the income from our farm. Marketing wool is my biggest problem. Our lambs sell themselves; the customers seem to know almost immediately when we begin selling lamb in June. Word of mouth is all the marketing I need for lamb. If each ewe has twins and I can sell each lamb for more than $100, I make a small profit. We coat our sheep so we can sell their fleeces for $10 per pound instead of $1 per pound. I send unsold fleeces off to be carded into roving or spun into yarn. I dye the roving and the yarn so that each piece is unique and thus more saleable, and saleable at a higher price. My dyed yarn sells better than the natural colors and that’s fine with me, I love the dyeing process.
But producing beautiful, crimpy, clean wool in dyed and natural colors is not enough; I have to sell it. To help with the sales, I have two fiber days at the farm each year where people come to play with wool, talk with old friends and make new friends, and buy wool. I also teach felting classes to publicize our wool. I had one of the first websites for wool sales many years ago and my fleeces sold as fast as I listed them on the site. But as the internet grew my site got lost and sales dropped way off. Three years ago, my friend Jim persuaded me to write a blog about being a shepherd and that piqued some interest. Last winter I created a new website (www.northcroftwool.net) to advertize my wool. Gretchen, the student who helped me do the groundwork for my web site, persuaded me to join Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org) and Minnesota Grown (www3.mda.state.mn.us/mngrown) to try to put our name out there in the ether. Jesse, my son-in-law, is also helping me with marketing. He coaches me on using twitter, an uphill job at best, but it has brought new people to my website and so is worthwhile in the long run. Finally, I need to add ecommerce to my web site so that people can order and pay for my fleeces, roving, and yarn online.
This summer, I joined a limited liability partnership with twenty-two members. The Mercantile on Main gives me a chance to sell our unique dyed yarns and roving year round in a situation where people can touch them and see the colors face to face.
Publicity progresses slowly, but for right now, my wool shed is full of fleeces and it’s time to begin dyeing wool for roving and packaging a batch of white fleeces to be spun into bulky yarn.

Inspiration

2011-12-05T12:12:00.000-08:00

Somehow, I’ve created a life for myself that is overly full, scheduled more finely than the divisions on my daily planner. I love being busy, love the creative excursions I take while working on projects for the Library or the Multicultural Committee or the school. I love the physical exertion and the problem solving involved in raising sheep, and the creativity that is necessary for using their fiber, whether I felt, or spin my own yarn, or dye and knit my yarn after it has been commercially spun.
However, because my schedule is so full, I don’t take the time for much continuing education. I didn’t even realize that I was missing the education part of life until Athena, the publisher of my third book, From Sheep to Shawl: stories and patterns for fiber lovers, forced me to sell and autograph books at a fiber festival last summer. I sold and publicized my books – the point of the day- but more importantly for me, the other vendors at the festival opened my eyes to new fiber ideas. I admired beautifully felted people and animals, scarves knit out of wool roving instead of yarn, and dyed silk hankies to knit directly into scarves.
A silk hankie is an individual silk worm cocoon opened out into a thin sheet of silk fibers. Many, many silk hankies are piled on top of each other and then the sandwich is dyed a combination of shimmering colors. My immediate response to the dyed silk hankies was to want to go home and dye some myself. A few minutes serious consideration of my schedule persuaded me to buy several pre-dyed piles of hankies. The silk was lovely, one a square of gold and green, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, the second, like a window onto a watery world of blues and greens. They would be so fun to work with; but I would have liked to dye them myself. Dyeing really is my favorite part of fiber work and it had been a long time since I had done any experimental dyeing or even any dyeing for fun. I seem to have let other things creep into my fiber time. On the way home, I brainstormed ways to free up more time for dyeing, surfing fiber sites, trips to fiber festivals and shows, and especially time spent with other fiber people, gleaning new ideas and new techniques from them –inspiration for my imagination.

Chaos

2011-12-01T11:16:00.000-08:00

I sat at the breakfast table, one dog leashed to one ankle and the other dog on a down stay beside me, Jasper in the high chair to my left and Kieran in a booster seat to my right. Each boy had a banana to devour or mash, depending on their inclination. I fed them cereal spoonful by spoonful alternating from boy to boy. The dogs kept checking for spills. The boys chattered unintelligibly and I grinned as I answered them, extemporizing on recognizable sounds.
We are so fortunate to be raising sheep that need only to be fed once a day at this time of year, rather than dairy cattle that must be milked twice daily. We are also fortunate to know Emily, a high school senior who cares for our sheep while we are gone. If I had to choose between spending time with Jasper and Kieran, my grandsons, and owning sheep, the grandsons would win hands down, even at a 6:30 a.m. breakfast with two whining dogs, two shouting boys, with bananas and cereal in everyone’s hair, and knowing that the next adventure with the boys will be just as chaotic.

Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T12:15:00.000-08:00

When our kids were little we always had Thanksgiving at our house. Extended family members could join us; but that was our holiday not to travel. We pretended to be pilgrims. We cooked potatoes and cranberries and dried bread for stuffing over the wood stove. We didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio; we made our own music and our own entertainment. We used candles and lanterns when the sun went down instead of electric lights. Of course we used the electric stove for baking the pies and roasting the chicken, but we’d grown the apples and the pumpkins and chicken, so we felt that we were as close to pilgrims as we could get.
The fun thing about those Thanksgivings was not that we were playing pilgrim, but that we were working together to do something that we didn’t ordinarily do. When the kids got fussy, we smushed pumpkin for pie or put on warm jackets and boots to tromp through the snow to gather dried weeds for a table decoration. Everybody helped with the cooking; everybody helped entertain the kids. We were a family.
Our kids are grown with kids of their own, and we gathered this year in St Louis for Thanksgiving. No wood stove, no snow, no home grown chicken or pumpkin or potatoes. But everybody still helps with the cooking (even Kieran and Jasper), everybody still entertains the kids(even Kieran and Jasper), and if we use electricity for cooking and music and light, it’s okay. It’s the family together for which we give thanks.

Training a puppy

2011-11-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

We began training Newton by reading the book Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson and enrolling ourselves in a puppy class that uses positive reinforcement for training.

Attitudes and techniques have changed so much since we trained Schwartz, our first dog, forty years ago. Schwartz learned well, but wore a choke chain all the time. Twenty years later, a choke chain wasn’t enough to catch the attention of Strider, our independent and enthusiastic Bouvier. We used a pinch collar on him. He wore it day and night for eleven years. I threw it away the day he died.

We are training Newton with a harness and a handful of cheese, using techniques originally developed by dolphin trainers. It is so much more fun, both for the dog and for us, to be rewarding positives with happy voices and food, rather than jerks and speaking forcefully to correct negatives. Newton has learned to “sit” and “lie down”, to “watch” us and “touch” our hand, to hand signals. We’re looking forward to “come” and “stay”. Some day in the future we hope to teach him “go out” and “come by,” the phrases necessary to herding the sheep.

But whether or not Newton becomes the sheep dog he was supposed to be, he has helped us learn more about positive reinforcement and training. “Yes! Good dog!” we say to Newton when he touches our outstretched hand with his nose. “Yes!” I say to Dave when he offers to stop at the grocery store on his way home from the lumber yard. “Yes! Good husband.” I think to myself.

Prairie

2011-11-10T07:02:00.001-08:00

Last spring we planted eleven acres to prairie. We hired the elevator to spray our fields to kill the thistles and dandelions and then paid a custom seeder to plant prairie grasses and forbs. Two weeks later, Dave said “you know, that field doesn’t look like its been sprayed.” He called the elevator and learned that it hadn’t. The spray truck driver had tried to cross our ditch at the wrong place, broken his equipment and given up – without telling us.

We crossed our fingers and asked them to spray immediately. We had over one thousand dollars worth of seed planted. If it had already germinated, the spray would kill it. But if we didn’t spray, the thistles and dandelions would choke out the new seedlings. The elevator agreed to reimburse us the cost of seed and seeding the field if the prairie plants didn’t survive.

By late July we were really discouraged. The only plant we could see in our newly planted prairie was pigeon grass – not one of the varieties we had planted and not one that we wanted. In fact, pigeon grass is a terrible weed whose seeds work their way into fleeces and need to be cut out.

Last month, when we took our new puppy out exploring, I suddenly lost track of him. When I heard a whimper, I turned back. He was completely immobilized by pigeon grass. His legs, chest, belly and head were wrapped in grass stems and held fast by seed heads. He literally couldn’t move. We broke the stems, carried him home, and spent the next hour and a half combing seeds out of his fur.

Last week we talked to Doug, a friend who specializes in prairies for the DNR. He told us that they often spray for weeds within ten days of planting prairie seed. “Go out and look,” he said. “You should see prairie grasses now.”

When we walked out into the prairie, at first all we saw was pigeon grass, but then I spied a small sunflower plant and then side oats gramma and switch grass and Canada wild rye. We do have a prairie!

Soybeans

2011-11-03T15:58:00.000-07:00

The soybeans have been harvested. All that is left on our fields is a scattering of green dandelion plants, a few drifts of cream colored soybeans where the combine missed the truck, and the shredded remains of the soybean plants. Almost nothing.

Experts recommend leaving 30% of the soil surface covered with vegetable matter over the winter. Our fields look much barer than that and they haven’t been tilled. The seed was drilled in last spring, disturbing the soil as little as possible. But soybeans as a crop leave so little behind that we may run into problems with wind erosion this winter until we get snow cover, and we may get water erosion in the spring from snow melt. Of course, we won’t get nearly as much erosion as if we’d actually broken the ground this fall.

The Land Stewardship Newsletter reports experiments showing erosion of no-till soybean fields on a slope in Iowa. Because of heavy rains, the farmer lost 11 tons of topsoil per acre in 2008. When he planted 10% of the field to strips of native prairie grass, his loss of topsoil dropped to hundreds of pounds per acre.

Our fields are all hills. This summer’s experiment with soybeans reminded me of why we try to keep them in pasture and alfalfa. We’ve planted two small fields to native prairie grasses, but in the future, we may look at planting strips of prairie in our other fields. And for the present, we’ll hope for early snow cover to slow wind erosion and a gradual melt in the spring to slow water erosion.

Make new friends

2011-10-07T19:36:00.000-07:00

The first thing that Newton did upon arriving at the farm (after getting his ears taped so that he grows up to have proper Bouvier ears) was to look for a friend. The first animal he met was BC, the barn cat.

A few sniffs, a few exploratory mouthings and a reprimanding swat or two...
and now they both watch for each other, firm friends.

Wearing wool

2011-10-03T06:45:00.001-07:00

Sock models (from left to right) Dawn, Alice, Becca, Dave, Glen

I just finished reading Sheepish a wonderful book by Catherine Friend. She writes about all the wonderful qualities of wool; things I have known but forgotten. Qualities like the fact that wet wool still keeps you warm, in fact, wet wool fibers actually give off heat. And the fact that the bacteria that make cotton, nylon and polyester clothing stink after a single days wear, don’t survive in wool. Or the fact that some wools, like Merino, can be spun and knit into undergarments as fine and easy to wear as cotton or the man-made fibers.

On our annual canoe trip this fall, I wore a wool tshirt. After four days of paddling and portaging, it still didn’t smell bad, unlike the cotton long sleeved shirt that I wore over it. I had to wash the cotton shirt twice in the lake. The merino shirt won’t last forever like a polyester one, but it feels much better against my skin and doesn’t smell.

I wore my wool socks under sandals. We portaged five or six times on most days, jumping out of the canoe, clambering through the shallows to shore, carrying our gear across the portage and then stepping into the water again to reload the canoe. My feet and socks were wet most of the time, but my feet were only cold when I took my socks off.

Catherine found several American companies that use American wool and I found several more. Try Ramblers Way Farm, Wigwam Socks, Pendelton, Smartwool and Ibex, or even better, knit something yourself.

Shepherds

2011-10-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

When our daughters, Amber and Laurel, were young, we sent them out to check the flock, to make sure that none of the ewes had their heads stuck in the fence and that the waterers were full. We asked their help when moving the sheep from one pasture to another, or when, heaven forbid, the flock escaped from their pasture to explore the hayfield or the road to town.

Once the kids graduated and left home, herding the sheep became more of a challenge. I have insanely frustrating memories of trying to coach neighbor kids how to herd sheep as we were herding the sheep, or even worse, to coach them over the phone from 600 miles away. “Stand here and don’t let any sheep past you,” we’d say. Or after the flock had flowed around them, “stand here and wave your arms and shout when they come toward you.” Or even “walk down the drive way and try to look as if you are as fat as the driveway.”

We talked for years about getting a herd dog. Most of the herd dogs I’ve watched take their owners directions much better than Dave takes mine (or, for that matter, than I take his). We even tried to teach Strider, our dog before Carly, how to herd. He should have been able to learn, his breed herds – cattle especially. But we failed. It was undoubtedly our fault, as he was an intelligent dog. We did teach him to pull hay bales on a sled to the next pasture, but he decided it was too much work and finally just lay down in the snow. (See, I said he was an intelligent dog.)

Now we have another chance. After a dogless year we bought a puppy, a cute, fuzzy Bouvier de Flandres. We have pledged to each other that we will train this dog, both in normal dog skills like not biting, not eating the furniture (or wool), and urinating and defecating outdoors, and in the extra skill of sheep herding.

So far, we are batting zero for four. But our grandsons, Kieran and Jasper, haven’t learned to herd sheep yet either. We’ll give all three of them a little more time and a lot more training. I fully expect to have three wonderful sheep herders by next summer.

WInthrop in detention

2011-09-19T13:41:00.000-07:00

I drove four hours to Windom Minnesota to pick up Winthrop, our new ram, and four hours back. Dave had to work that day, but it was the only day that I had free and Winthrop’s owner had free that week and I wanted the ram at our farm so I could observe him for awhile before putting him in with the ewes on October 1, thus my solitary trip, with MPR as my only company– fortunately it was a good day for MPR. I learned about the uses and misuses of suspension and detention in the public schools.

Winthrop’s’ home pastures in Windom had been dry and closely cropped; we had stockpiled forage in the ram pasture for him to eat during his enforced solitude or detention, so he jumped out of the pickup happily to begin grazing.

Within an hour of arriving home we realized that there would be no solitude and no enforcing. Winthrop didn’t believe in detention. He jumped right over the 6 foot high fence dividing the ram pasture from the home pasture, then cleverly found the almost open gate from the home pasture to the south central pasture, and was tracking ewes as they grazed back and forth in the south central pasture - one flimsy fence between them. It was dusk. Winthrop had just jumped our tallest fence. We were leaving soon to visit Kieran, our grandson, and his mom and dad, as well as pick up a new puppy. There was no way in the world that Emily, our animal sitter, would be able to corral the ewes, separate Winthrop, then move him to a new pasture, and detain him if he went over the fence again.

Dave and I looked at each other and shrugged. Like the experts had said on MPR, detention just doesn’t work. We decided right then to introduce Winthrop to his new ewes immediately instead of in two weeks and as a result, begin lambing two weeks earlier in 2012.

When we let Winthrop into the ewe’s pasture, he immediately began sniffing ewes, trying to figure out who was the most receptive, who was ready to breed. The next morning, all the ewes were lying down, not quite ready to submit to Winthrop’s affections, but he was not discouraged and continued to stride from ewe to ewe, sniffing and pawing – behavior that he would continue until every ewe was pregnant and he could lay down at rest, actually looking forward to his enforced solitude and detention.

Luck

2011-09-17T11:20:00.000-07:00

Last March, as lamb after lamb died practically in our arms, Dave and I struggled to find a cause. Not the hay, not the corn, not lead based paint in our unpainted barn, not a metabolic problem or an infection. Finally, after veterinary examinations and an autopsy, we were left with only two possible reasons for the loss of 20 lambs – either bad luck or bad genes.

Luck we could do nothing about; but bad genes compounded by inbreeding, we could rectify. We’d been using the same rams for four years. Most of our ewes were young – daughters, grand-daughters or even great grand-daughters of those rams. Several years of faulty ear tags that either fell out or broke meant that we no longer knew the exact parentage and thus genetic background of each ewe. We could easily have been breeding them to their fathers, grand-fathers, even great grand-fathers. Most small farmers don’t worry about inbreeding. It can yield an equal number of outstanding animals or defective animals and most of the young show no effects.

However, I wasn’t willing to take the chance again. I couldn’t sell what I wouldn’t use myself, so in August we trucked our rams to the butcher. Our butcher created four varieties of “Bad Dad” sausage from those animals, enough to fill our freezers and keep all our friends and relations in sausage for the next year.

Then I searched the internet for a new ram – one that was a twin, who had a fine crimpy fleece, and who was mature enough to impregnate fifty ewes in three weeks. We found him at the Thiesen Farm, a two year old Columbia ram with a proven track record. With Winthrop's new blood in our flock, if we’re lucky, lambing next spring will be easier, more joyous, and all good.

Gourmet tomatoes

2011-09-12T11:42:00.000-07:00

Little orange grape tomatoes grow fantastically in our garden. We eat them for lunch and supper. I even snack on their bright sweetness when I walk through the garden or the kitchen

I don’t can those tomatoes, I save them for drying. Sliced in half and arranged on the circular trays of our dehydrator, it takes about 36 hours to turn three or four quarts of plump, juicy tomatoes into thin golden wafers – essence of tomato.

On our yearly canoe trip to the Boundary Waters or Quetico in Canda, the dried tomatoes provide vitamin C and bright flavor to our camping meals – an assortment of rice or noodles with variously flavored cheese sauces – alfredo, parmesan, and American, all selected not for their taste, but because they are light in weight, prepackaged, and only need to be boiled in water for 7 to 10 minutes to produce a filling meal. Our camp cooking isn’t gourmet until we add those dried tomatoes.

The long view

2011-08-29T08:47:00.001-07:00

Last week, Dave cut down the cotoneaster hedge on the west edge of our yard, as well as three young box elder trees sharing the space. We can now see across our driveway, the barnyard, three pastures and into the state “waterfowl protected area” land beyond. We can see the sheep in four of their nine pastures, grazing quietly against the hills and ponds of Otter Tail County. It’s a beautiful view that we have missed out on for thirty years because of that hedge.

We have spent the last several weeks discussing the purchase of ten goats. We bought all of our hay this year, so we know exactly how much it will cost to feed an animal over the winter - $150 for hay and $25 for corn. That means if each doe has two kids, we have to sell each kid for at least $90 to break even assuming we have no other expenses. Worming medications and vaccinations will cost about $5 per doe. And the kids will eat creep, need ear tags and vaccinations themselves.

Hashi, our student, isn’t sure that the Somalis he knows will pay that much for a 100# kid, and we don’t know how fast our kids will gain weight. When will they reach 100#s?

Once we figured out these statistics, we realized that they fit our own flock as well. I’ve always justified our low lamb prices because we also shear a fleece off of each ewe and that is eventually added income. But most of the fleeces need further processing before they can be sold, so the wool is a part of our long range planning. Each ewe should also produce two babies.

This year, for the first time we have made over $100 for each lamb sold. We are learning to value our work. Perhaps taking the long view will mean that we can actually make a reasonable amount of money off the flock

Mutton busting (Fair kept eating)

2011-08-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

I first heard about mutton busting, a sport where kids ride or attempt to ride sheep in a rodeo type atmosphere, a week or so ago on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”. I first tried it myself a good twenty-five years ago. I wrote about it in my first published book, Shepherdess: Notes from the Field. That experience taught me to leave sheep riding to the kids. Fortunately, there are no photographs to comemorat6e that event.

“From a distance, Fair’s udder looked unusual. One half seemed very large and dark. Fair was a friendly and hungry ewe. She was always ready to eat, which is why she weighed more than 200 pounds. I walked into the pasture with a bucket of grain. “Hay, ewes” I called, to let her know I was there. Fair’s big head rose. I rattled the grain bucket. Fair started into a lumbering run, her ears flapping out to the side. If she didn’t weigh so much, she could fly with those ears.

I dumped the corn onto the ground. Fair gobbled as fast as she could, completely unconcerned about what I was doing. I was trying to take her down. I knelt beside her, reached under her body with both hands and grabbed the legs on the far side. Fair kept eating. I pushed my shoulder against Fair’s shoulder and pulled on her far legs. Fair kept eating, but nothing else happened. I needed more leverage. Still holding Fair’s legs, I climbed from my knees to a squat. This time, when I pulled on her legs and pushed on her shoulder, she crashed to the ground. Hurriedly, I lay down on her body to keep her from getting up again. Fair stretched her neck toward the corn and kept eating.

I lay facing Fair’s head. Everything I needed to do was at the other end, so I carefully and slowly swung my body around until I was facing her rear end. I felt her udder. Half was hot and hard. Definitely mastitis. Twelve cc of penicillin intramuscularly first. I pulled the syringe out of my pocket and slid my body forward until I could brace my arms on her pelvis. I stabbed the needle into the big muscle of her thigh. Then I slowly injected the drug. Penicillin stings as it goes in and I didn’t know how Fair would react. My muscles were tensed, ready to counteract any move she made. Fair kept eating.

I pulled the needle out and laid the syringe on the ground beside me. Next I needed to milk Fair to empty all the parts of her udder where the bacteria might be growing. I slid closer to her tail and reached around her hind legs. I began massaging her udder, first the top, then the middle, then the bottom. Fair kept eating. I couldn’t reach the top of the udder as well as I ‘d like, so I sat up and slid closer, my legs going around her body. Finally I pulled my fingers down her teat, milk squirting out. The udder was noticeably softer by my third pass.

Suddenly, I felt Fair’s muscles tense. I grabbed her back and her hind leg and thought heavy thoughts. Her muscles heaved and she struggled to her feet. I was still on her back, legs dangling six inches off the ground on either side. My hands dug into her wool, fingers clenched. Just as I shifted my body to slide off, Fair lumbered forward and then broke into a run. We passed the empty bucket at a gallop.

My fingers were saying “Hold on, hold on!” My feet were saying “Get off, get off!” And my mind was gibbering. I pressed my head against Fair’s back and watched the fence stream by. At that rate, she would have soon been in the woods and I’d be scraped off on a tree. That thought did it. My fingers relaxed and I threw my body to the left. Fair ran right out from under me. I hit the ground with my knees and elbows, sliding to a stop. I lay on the hard ground, tears of pain and frustration starting in my eyes. Suddenly, I heard whuffle. I opened my eyes. Fair’s ears blocked out the sun as she began munching the grass in front of my face. I got painfully to my feet and limped out of the pasture. Fair kept eating.”

from pp 36 – 39, Shepherdess: notes from the Field.

Mentoring

2011-08-03T07:16:00.001-07:00

This summer, Dave and I are mentoring a young man who is part of the sustainable food production program at the local college in Fergus Falls. Hashi lived the first twelve years of his life as a nomadic goat herder in Somalia. The next fifteen he spent in a refugee camp in Kenya. His dream is to manage a farm. Right now, he lives in an apartment with his wife and four children and works part time for us when he isn’t in school.

Hashi’s memories of goat herding in Somalia include searching for water, leading the goats to food, and protecting them from lions, tigers and hyenas. In Pelican Rapids, he has learned to repair gates, kill thistles, drive a tractor and haybine, and perhaps most importantly in a garden on our farm, has learned what plants grow well in west central Minnesota. His children don’t like the lettuce that has grown so spectacularly this summer. He’s not sure what to do with the broccoli, romanesco, and cauliflower even though I’ve given him recipes, because his wife has never cooked from written recipes. They are really looking forward to the tomatoes and the melons and squash in the fall.

About the time he harvests his first American squash, we will add ten South African Boer goats to our flock, and next summer, Hashi will help us sell kids to Somalis as well as lambs to the Bosnians as he teaches us how to be goatherds.

Compost to cantaloupe

2011-07-31T13:04:00.000-07:00

We compost our garden waste, our kitchen waste and our barnyard waste. We have two twenty foot long compost piles. Each year we spread the oldest one on the fields and start that pile over again.

Every weekend all summer, when each lamb buyer is done, we clean up after them – salt the skins and throw the lungs, feet, and sometimes stomachs and intestines onto the compost pile. Then we cover the remains with some of the manure pack from the barn and let nature take its course, converting the remnants of dead animals to wonderful, rich compost that looks amazingly like the potting soil you buy at the store (except for the occasional leg bone or ear tag).

Gourds frequently grow on the compost pile, but this year, a melon plant is blooming there. If we can keep the lambs off the pile, we should have a big crop of delicious cantaloupe in about a month.

Farming on shares

2011-07-28T19:11:00.001-07:00

This spring we decided that our hay field needed to be replanted. We have never invested in planting equipment or in harvesting equipment for anything besides hay. We contacted local farmers to see if anyone was interested in planting our fields on shares. Planting on shares means that we invest the land and some other farmer invests time, seed, fuel for his tractor, fertilizer and herbicide if necessary. Then we share the crop.

We had hoped to plant oats or wheat, feed that we could use for our sheep during lambing, but only one farmer had the time or the interest in our land, and he only wanted soybeans. Roundup ready soybeans, drilled into the ground and sprayed with Roundup to control weeds. Roundup Ready soybeans have had a gene added to their chromosomes that makes them resistant to the herbicide Roundup (glyphosate).

We needed the weed control badly, but we had not imagined using a genetically modified seed to do it. The first time our share farmer sprayed for weeds, Dave had marked the edges of the field, but we still lost lilacs, raspberries, walnuts, several apple trees, an apricot tree, and part of our lawn. Last week he sprayed again. The soybean plants were six to twelve inches high and a lush green before the spraying. They were still lush green after the Roundup application, but the weeds in the rows between the bean plants rapidly turned brown and shriveled.

In 2010, the Land Stewardship Newsletter ran an article about Roundup Ready crops that was very disturbing. Glyphosate has been considered safer for the environment than the pre-emergent herbicides that it replaces, based on the belief that it is chemically unstable and only remains in the environment for a short while, not long enough to create human or environmental problems.

Now research implies that the herbicide glyphosate may make the soil itself unhealthy for growing plants. In a summary research paper, Don Huber, a plant pathologist from Purdue University reports that glyphosate changes the nutrient availability and plant efficiency, either directly through toxic effects or by changing soil organisms.

One of the indirect effects of glyphosate use is that it ties up the micronutrients in the soil necessary for healthy plants. The plants seem to mature earlier, thus not gathering as much energy as possible before they shut down. Huber feels that glyphosate does build up in the soil and will continue to cause problems long after it has been applied. He cites research that shows that fields which have been sprayed with glyphosate for ten years yielded 46% less wheat than a field where glyphosate had been used for only one year.

We have found a different farmer to plant shares with for next year. He wants oats or wheat for his animals and will till the soil to control weeds rather than spraying with Roundup. It will be nice to share with a farmer whose agricultural philosophy is closer to ours.

Sound of rain

2011-07-14T06:45:00.001-07:00

Sound of rain all night long. The sky is overcast and the air is moist and cool. A perfect summer day for gardening.

Our vegetable garden is burgeoning. I’ve harvested four big heads of broccoli in the last four days. Dave had sprayed the plants with bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) at just the right times this year and there isn’t a cabbage worm to be seen. The spinach and leaf lettuce are also at their peak. So we’ll have broccoli and home made bread for supper one night and a chef salad the next for as long as the greens last.

The cucumbers are climbing the arch and although they aren’t blooming yet, they look healthy, as do the squash and the corn. The weeds have been hoed and intimidated for the time being.

My flower garden has not done as well. Somehow, between my weeding in early May, and mid July, the grasses took over. They now tower over everything. Dave and I attack the garden with shovels for an hour or two every day and are pleased to find bare ground when the grass is removed. Yesterday I bought a pickup truck load of wood chips to spread over the bare ground. The mulch will give our gardens a more formal look than I like, but I think four inches of mulch will slow down the grass and that will save my sanity.

Today, with the breeze from the east and the sun hidden behind a solid blanket of clouds, is the perfect day to dig grass and then spread mulch. I’ll download an audio-book and get to work.

Milkweed

2011-07-12T14:45:00.000-07:00

Many years ago, following one of Euell Gibbons books and advice from a wild foods friend, I harvested a lot of milkweed buds along the side of our gravel road. I boiled them in three changes of water and served them with salt and pepper.

The soggy, dull, gray-green clumps neither looked, nor tasted appetizing. Even the surface texture was a little odd, sort of suede-like. By popular demand, I didn’t pick anymore milkweed.

However, the milkweed moved from the roadside to my garden and I love seeing it there. The buds change from a light moss green to a greeny pink as they swell. A tiny cross appears in the surface, and then the tiny pale pink flowers appear, hanging almost like droops on their heavy stems. I delight in the Monarch butterflies that rest on the blossoms, build their gold tipped chrysalis’ on the underside of the leaves and then, as caterpillars, feed on the plant.

The story of the monarchs fascinates me. How in the fall, the insects gather in huge masses on trees and then fly south across the United States, across the Gulf of Mexico and into the highlands of Central America where they hibernate over the winter. The next spring, it takes several generations of butterflies to get back to the milkweed plants on our farm.

The milkweed beside the road are cut by the township as part of their weed control effort. But I save the milkweed at the sides of our fields and in my gardens for the monarchs. And I now savor them also.

For the last two years, I’ve been a part of a collaboration by the Friends of the Pelican Rapids Library, the Pelican Rapids Multicultural Committee and the Pelican Rapids School District to create a book of stories and recipes. In that time, over 100 people contributed recipes to the project. The recipes came from farmers, hunters, fishermen, young people and old people, new immigrants and old immigrants. We collected recipes from 25 countries. We interviewed the recipe contributors and wrote stories about them for the book. Finally we tested all the recipes.

One of those recipes was for a milkweed bud gratin. That recipe is delicious! The buds, although cooked three times, are bright green and beautiful, the gratin is smooth and cheesy, and the taste experience is wonderful.

All the recipes in the book Many Cultures, One Community; a book of stories and recipes, are delicious, and the stories are as moving as the story of a monarch butterfly migrating across a continent and an ocean to find a new home.

Scent of peony

2011-07-04T05:55:00.000-07:00

Every nice weekend during the summer, we sell lambs. This Fourth of July weekend, morning two men came. “White lambs,” they said.

“The white lambs are small,” I explained. “They cost $105 if they weigh less than 70#. The black lambs are a better deal because they weight more.”

The youngest buyer climbed into the pen and began feeling hips and spines. “What about that one,” he said, pointing to the largest lamb in the pen. I explained that the one with two tags was already sold. He continued checking lambs. “Too skinny,” he said, “you should feed corn.”

“I don’t like to feed corn,” I told them. “I don’t think it’s as good as grass for the lamb.” I could also have said that the price of corn right now would force up the price of my lamb, or that feeding corn might increase the number of nasty bacteria in the lamb’s gut, or that most of my buyers told me that they liked the taste of pasture fed lamb better.

They finally chose the biggest white lamb without two tags. “Aren’t you going to weigh it?”

I shook my head. “The biggest white lamb weighted 65 pounds yesterday and I sold that one. I know this one is smaller.” I went into the house to write up a receipt. When I got back, the lamb was dead. “$105,” I said.

“I already pay you,” the younger man said with a grin, looking up from the body of the lamb.

“You did not!” I said, hands on hips. He shook his head and handed me the money.

The next day, the young man came back with three friends. We put the lambs in the barn. “You can’t buy the lamb with two tags,” I reminded him as I left to find my weighing bag. When I got back, the younger man pointed. “That lamb is bleeding,” he said, “Can I buy it?”

That lamb had had two tags yesterday. It was bleeding today because it had either gotten its tag stuck in the fence and pulled itself free, or someone had torn a tag from its ear. “No,” I said. "That’s the lamb with two tags. I already sold it.” After a bit more discussion in Bosnian, they chose three white lambs. When they were done butchering, they honked their horn to call me back to the barn yard.

“Now, a lamb for me,” the younger man said. “Your husband promise me $85 because I bring you so much business.”

“No, he didn’t!” I said, by now quietly furious. “$105 for any white lamb that is left except the one with the torn ear.”

He shrugged and selected a white lamb. “What about a flower for my wife? Your husband promised,” he said as we carried the lamb out to the barn yard.

“I’m pretty angry at you right now,” I told him.

“Why? What I do?”

“You tore that tag out of my lamb’s ear,” I said.

“No I didn’t. It was like that when we got there.” He looked at the other three men. They shook their heads. “No, he didn’t. “He didn’t” “No.”

"I hope that’s true,” I said, as I left the barnyard, “I didn’t want to believe that of you.”

Dave had asked me about the peony several weeks ago when the younger man had last bought lambs. They had been in full bloom then, their fragrance filling the yard. Now they were done blooming. The flowers dried and brown, still clung to the ends of their stems. I don’t like digging up flowers, but it seemed unfriendly to refuse. And if the lamb really had torn out the tag on its own, I felt guilty of accusing him of the deed. I dug up a small peony with its rhizome and potted it for him, leaving it next to the driver side door of his car. When they left, they left the potted peony beside my peony bed.

‘I hate selling lamb to the Roma, the Gypsies,’ I thought. But my mind ran a self check. I knew some Roma who I trusted to pick out their own lambs, weigh them, and leave the money, even when I wasn’t home. I was characterizing an entire culture based on the actions of one man.

‘Okay, I hate selling lambs to the Bosnians,’ my mind muttered. But I have lots of Bosnian friends, so I can’t generalize like that either.

‘It’s the refugees,’ I thought, ‘I can’t communicate with them.’ And yet, some refugees seem to communicate quite well with their hands and their smiles. The young man who had started my thought train communicated with sly grins and mis-truths, an entirely different thing.

‘No, it’s the immigrants. They do things differently.’ It’s true, the immigrants do have different cultures than Americans, but they are gradually adapting to us as we adapt to them. Without the immigrants, I would be hauling lambs to the stockyards in West Fargo, a process I gladly gave up sixteen years ago when we began selling lambs to the immigrants. Now, our lambs are killed quickly and humanely in my barn yard, no sales barns and hot pens in the merciless sun, no frightened animals and manure bedded feed lots, no assembly line into the abattoir. Just a quick catch, a short carry and a quick death.

It’s not the immigrants, the refugees, the Bosnians or the Roma that I hate, it’s the selling. I’m not a good salesman; I just don’t enjoy it. But if I’m going to have the joy and wonder of baby lambs, it is my responsibility to see to their deaths, and that means selling lambs. And occasionally, replanting a peony

Home again

2011-06-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

Dave and I arrived home to find the gate lying on the ground and the ram pasture empty. Rats! Escaped animals always meant forging through the poison ivy, circling the pasture fences and when we finally found the sheep, patiently encouraging them through the woods and around the perimeter of the pastures until they reached a gate.

At least this time we were only missing the three rams, not 50 ewes and half a hundred lambs. Dave walked south and I walked north up through the woods, just like we have done many times over the years. But the big difference this time was that we both had our cell phones. I had just trudged through the first poison ivy patch when my phone rang.

“I’ve got ‘em.” Dave said. “We’re heading north toward the gate to the home pasture.”

I ran back to the house. If I stood smack in the middle of the drive way, the rams might turn left when they came out of the woods, onto the path to the home pasture, instead of continuing on up the driveway.

They ambled into view, placidly turned left and continued into the home pasture where they immediately began grazing. Perhaps they were just as glad to be home as we were to have them home.

Lines of communication

2011-06-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Our regional electric cooperative hires a forester to help protect the power lines from tree damage, thus cutting off the flow of electricity. I think it’s a great idea. I always assumed that it was just some guy who decided to rip up the trees along a power line, without regard to the effects. I was glad to hear that a professional forester was in charge.

Our area of the cooperative was due for cleanup this summer. Dave talked with the forester, walked through our woods from the road to the house with her and discussed the best ways to do things. They could either trim branches, remove branches or cut down trees that directly affected the power line. Trimming branches meant they’d have to come back in a few years to trim branches again. Removing branches gave them a slightly longer time span before repeating the process. Cutting down the individual trees made the most sense from the point of view of the power company. Since none of the trees they would cut were landscape trees and most were box elder, a soft maple that isn’t a particularly nice wood for carpentry or carving, removing the trees seemed the best path to us too.

They began with one truck and a small grove of trees in the middle of our hayfield. It would be a relief to have those trees out of the way. I always dreaded driving the tractor-baler- hay wagon procession around the clump. I frequently lost bales to the low hanging branches and dreaded the day I would lose one of our employees. And furthermore, it was hard to judge how close I should be to the trees to meet up with the proper row of cut hay on the other side of the grove.

Next day we were vaccinating lambs in the barn. I heard the growl of machinery all morning, but was still stunned to see an white and yellow cherry picker bucket up at the top of one of the trees behind our house. As I watched, the man in the bucket raised his chain saw one handed over his head, made a slice, and grabbed the branch with the other hand to guide it’s path to the forest floor. The bucket lowered slightly and he repeated the gesture. It was mesmerizing.

After six or ten branches, he lowered his bucket to the ground. That was when I noticed the other vehicles in our woods. There were two cherry pickers, a chopper and at least one miscellaneous truck. This was not the one man with a chainsaw carefully pruning the trees in our woods that I had imagined. This was a crew creating a superhighway through our property.

What were they doing? Why? I walked down into the trees, trying to control my anxiety. It’s okay, I told myself, Dave okayed this, I thought. Would they stop cutting before they reached our plum tree, the one that had never produced fruit in thirty years, but still every year I hoped for white flowers and small purple plums? I was almost too full of emotion to speak.

I knew that the trees were a problem for the power line, but couldn’t they have talked to us about laying underground lines down our driveway before they ravaged the woods? If you have big machinery, you use big machinery. My vision of the single man with a chain saw was due to my lack of imagination, not their attempt to mislead me. They couldn’t imagine taking down a tree with a single man and a chainsaw. I couldn’t imagine driving four large vehicles through our woods.

To the background roar of the chopper and two chainsaws, I talked to a man in a yellow hard hat with a clip board. He put me at ease. First, they were chopping the branches and spreading the mulch on the forest floor - a really good idea. Not only would it decompose back into the forest, building up the topsoil and returning the nutrients to the earth, but it covered up the old strands of barbed wire fence that had lain on the ground since long before we bought the property. Second, they were stacking the logs they cut so that we could burn them in the wood stoves next winter. Box elder isn’t one of the long burning, high energy woods, but it would be great for spring and fall when we didn’t need quite as much heat. Finally, I realized that they had built their superhighway through the scruffiest part of our woods. Only the violets bloomed there in the spring, none of the other wild flowers that I had found or carefully transplanted to bring back the ecological richness and diversity to a woods that had been lumbered over one hundred years ago and then grazed by cattle for many years. My wild ginger, bluebells, trilliums, wood anemone and rue anemone, Dutchmen’s britches and showy orchis were safe.

I had thought I knew what was happening to our woods and they thought we knew. It was no one’s fault that even though we were talking, we really weren’t communicating. It was a good lesson for me on how what one hopes doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with reality, and also on watching and listening a little longer before I say something. The woods will recover. The apple trees in our yard are no longer overshadowed by the box elder trees in the woods behind them. The extra light in that section of the woods may bring new spring flowers. We have some wood cut for winter and it is only the beginning of June. The actual outcome is exactly what I would have imagined, if the lines of communication had included telepathy.

In my peony bed

2011-05-25T08:49:00.000-07:00

a shriveled phlox
in my peony bed
herbicide drift

This is a lawn

2011-05-24T17:32:00.001-07:00

We have an unusual lawn. We use a human powered push mower to cut it, so our yard isn’t very big, but it is lovely and functional. The forget-me-not seeds blew off the tables at our daughter Laurel’s wedding seven years ago. The lamium grew beyond the edges of our shade garden. The dandelions volunteered from the hayfield to add yellow accents.

The dandelions will be dug. The lamium and forget-me-nots will be mowed. As will the grass. As the summer progresses, a few more forget-me-nots will bloom and the lamium will creep further into the lawn. But I don’t care; I’ve never had such a beautiful lawn!

After we mow it, the lawn works fine for walking on, for picnics, for kub and whip darts and blowing bubbles. What more can you ask of a lawn?

Fields of dandelions

2011-05-22T11:34:00.001-07:00

I never expected that the result of twenty-seven years of carefully tending our farm would be a field full of dandelions. Somewhere, we went wrong. We aren’t alone with the problem, I’ve heard others bemoaning their dandelions, but we are on the extreme edge. One of the problems of limiting spraying with herbicides and keeping our fields in alfalfa as long as possible is that weeds do have a chance to become established. The dandelions are way beyond established, they are close to dominant.

This spring we decided that we had to dig the fields and replant the alfalfa. With our dandelion situation, we didn’t see any way to only replant half of our acreage. The blooming dandelions on the unplanted field would easily re-infect the clean fields.

Unfortunately, you can’t replant alfalfa in a field in which alfalfa has been growing. It is auto toxic, meaning that the old alfalfa plants left a toxin in the soil that inhibits alfalfa seed. It makes no sense to me, but may account for past crop failures. So we will plant something else this year and alfalfa next year. Our first choice as a crop for this summer was oats. We used to feed oats to our sheep, but we can’t buy them any more – hardly anybody plants oats because they can make so much more money on soybeans and corn.

We have a tractor, a haybine for cutting hay, a baler for baling hay, a disc for lightly scraping the fields and a rotary mower for cutting pastures. We’ve never bought equipment for seeding or harvesting grains. We don’t intend to. Our land is hilly and our fields are small. It isn’t good land for growing grains. June rains wash the seedlings and the topsoil down the hills. The big new planters and combines are too big for our steep hills and sharp curves.

So we have to find someone else to plant and harvest our grains. They will take most of the crop in trade for their work. No one would plant oats for us, but a neighbor offered to plant Roundup Ready soybeans. These genetically modified soybeans can be sprayed with the herbicide Roundup and not be hurt. The soybeans have the advantage of allowing us to spray the hell out of the dandelions on our land and still get a crop this year.

It has the disadvantage of going against everything we’ve been trying to do on our farm. Yes, Roundup is one of the less horrendous herbicides, even useable on organic crops, but I am not happy with the research I’ve read lately about how using Roundup changes the soil and decreases yields over time. If we use it just this once, and then not for ten years perhaps we will be doing as little damage as possible for the best outcome. I just wish there was a clear cut, unambiguous solution to the problem of fields of dandelions.

A flash of color

2011-05-14T15:52:00.000-07:00

photo by Alice Ellison

I saw a flash of yellow in the woods. Of course, it moved too fast for me to locate it again, but once I started looking, there was color everywhere.

A scarlet tanager paused on a branch high above and then was gone. A hummingbird hovered over a purple ground ivy flower – guess that noxious weed is good for something. A pair of shocking orange and black orioles argued over the oranges Dave set out for them.

Now, when our eyes are tired of the subdued tones of winter, just as the leaves are beginning to open, we are so grateful for variety; everything is intense. The colors of summer can never be as brilliant as these spring displays. Or perhaps it is the juxtaposition of black and color, the sharp demarcation between wing and back feathers that delights our eyes. Whatever it is, that flash of color in the woods is like water to the thirsty, or food to the hungry. That flash of color sings in our hearts like the birds or the spring peepers – joy, joy, joy.

From Sheep to Shawl

2011-05-10T04:50:00.001-07:00

My newest book has been released!

Fiber people occasionally have contests during which a group of women (usually) begin with a sheep and end up with a beautiful shawl. A shearer shears the sheep; spinners spin the wool into yarn; weavers weave the yarn into fabric, and by the end of the day, the group has produced a beautiful woven shawl - from sheep to shawl in one day.

My book was twelve years in the making. It tells the stories of sheep, of shepherds, of spinners and weavers and knitters and felters and crocheters, of fiber people in general. The book is a slice through the life of a fiber person, a peek into my brain as I move through life.

I only entered one sheep to shawl contest, back when I was a beginning spinner and mostly only knew beginning spinners. Our shawl was dreadful - lumpy and heavy. The folks we were competing against spun and wove a beautiful lace piece. The day was spoiled for me by the competition (and I guess by the fact that we lost.) In general, I love the fact that fiber folks support each other, help each other learn, the exact opposite of competing to see who is best. But still the concept of "sheep to shawl", encapsulating the entire process in a single day, is attractive.

And so I present From Sheep to Shawl: stories and patterns for fiber lovers, encapsulating the entire process in a book.

For more information or to order the book, contact the publisher, Athena Gracyk at www.wanderingminstrelpress.com

A perfect day

2011-04-24T17:59:00.000-07:00

Today was a perfect day in the sugar bush. It didn’t matter that the sap wasn’t really running. This Easter Sunday, like nearly every Easter Sunday for the past 26 years, we spent our day in Budd and Marguerite Andrew’s sugarbush.

The sun glistened off the waters of Grandrud Lake. The call of the loon echoed through the woods. Drifts of pelicans glided just beyond the trees, to settle on the lake. The air was full of the sound of people laughing and talking and making music.

We hung intricately decorated eggs in trees. We found bright wire baskets holding plainer eggs in trees. We hid eggs in hollows in trees, under logs, and around corners. Kids and adults ran or strolled from one bright spot of color to the next, adding eggs to their baskets. When they had found all the eggs that they could, they rehid some of their eggs for the next group of hunters.

We ate ham and fresh bread, strawberries and jicama, hot cross buns and peeps, hummus and vegetables, and of course, eggs – chocolate, malted milk, deviled, and just plain hard boiled.

It was a sweet day.
It was a bittersweet day.

Today was our last day in the sugarbush on the shore of Grandrud Lake. Next year, we will be in a new sugarbush on another piece of property. We will begin to learn new paths through a new woods. We will discover the biggest maples and where the wild leeks grow. We will explore a whole new ecosystem for signs of beaver, coon, otter, fisher and squirrel. We will learn where the bloodroot blooms, and the crimson cap fungus first appears in the spring. We will search for sumac to carve into spiles and pussy willows to harvest. We will locate new sources of grape vine and bittersweet for baskets. We will begin to name the trees. There will never be another Lacey, that huge, gnarled old maple whose branches are dying, but who is still one of the best sap producers in the woods, but we’ll find another tree to begin building legends around.

In a new sugar bush we won’t have to scavenge as far as we’ve had to the last few years for dead trees; there will be lots of wood for burning where-ever we set up our sugar camp. On the other hand, we will have to build a new shed to store our gear and find a new place to hang the kitchen cupboard. But maybe, we’ll finally build the roof over the fires that we’ve always dreamed of, so that even on rainy days people will be comfortable out in the woods. And then, as we stand around the fires, splitting wood, toasting bread or making pudgy pies in pie irons, we will tell the stories of the years in the old sugar bush, and begin creating new legends.

A shepherd's blessing

2011-04-22T16:09:00.001-07:00

Bottle lambs find a special place in our hearts. They learn to recognize the sight of our coveralls and the sound of our voices. They come running when the gate rattles and butt our legs, vying with each other for the most advantageous spot to be first at the nipple. With three bottles lambs and only two hands to hold bottles, it is a bit chaotic when the lambs try to force each other off the nipple.

When Amber’s sister’s in law, Avalon and Jianna, came to visit, their big brother taught them how to bottle feed the lambs. Avalon fell in love with #62 and named him Max. She fed him, carried him around, and hugged him as often as possible during the five days of their visit. When they left, Avalon cried. She won’t see Max again; we don’t keep any of our own ram lambs for our flock. But her memories of a loving white lamb will remain with her forever.

I just wish that Max had been a girl. I love to keep bottle lambs. It isn’t smart. They might be bottle lambs because their mom couldn’t figure out how to be a good mom, or because she couldn’t feed as many lambs as she had – neither of which is a very good trait to add to the flock. But in general, if we have a bottle lamb that we bond with who also has a nice fleece, we keep her. Dave and I make the same connections with bottle lambs that Avalon did. We recognize their bleats. We can locate them in the center of the flock. We scratch their fuzzy heads and when they are small, we hold them next to our hearts to feed them. We don’t forget bottle lambs either.

A good blessing for a shepherd might be ‘May all your bottle lambs be girls.’

Signs of spring

2011-04-17T18:13:00.000-07:00

There are so many signs of spring. Today, five grabbed me and shook me, shouting ‘Look at us! We are spring!’

Crocus flowers have opened in all their purple and golden glory – bright splotches of color in the still brown gardens.

Today we heard the echoing laugh of the first loon.

The odor of a skunk passing by lingers in the air long after his body has disappeared from the neighborhood.

Wild leeks appear, bright green in the brown woods, their pungent flavor just perfect for potato soup.

Pussy willows bloom soft and fuzzy under my fingertips.

Nine lives

2011-04-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

The lamb with the broken leg died yesterday morning. His injuries were more severe than I imagined.

This morning when I went out to the barn I saw through the window, a black ewe lying on her back. I dashed around the barn, heart pounding. It was Christmas! She had been there awhile; a small pile of sheep pellets lay behind her. I turned her over and she staggered to her feet. Her lambs immediately started trying to nurse.

I knew that the lamb with the broken leg was facing an uphill struggle, that there was a good chance he would die. I know that Christmas is old and weaker than the younger ewes. I know that one of these days I will go out to the pasture to feed the sheep or to move them to a new pasture and Christmas will not follow.

In my head I know these hard facts of raising animals. But in my heart, in my bones, I wish the animals I care for to be ageless. When the lamb died, I felt grief and relief. One of his best case outcomes would have been to only lose his leg. As sick as he was, I would have been gavaging him with lamb milk replacer 4 or 5 times a day to keep him nourished and he still might have died of a bone infection or gangrene. When she was pregnant, Christmas ruptured the ligaments that hold her uterus up. I will not be able to breed her again. If I was a shepherdess with her eye on the bottom line, I would not feed Christmas through another winter. But my heart speaks much louder than my bottom line. As long as she survives she is a part of my flock and I will feed her, care for her.

I just wish it didn’t hurt so much to lose animals I care for.

After I was sure that Christmas was doing all right, I climbed up into the barn. BC (that is, Barn Cat), greeted me, purring and winding back and forth between my legs. She loves us almost as much as the bottle lambs do. More actually. BC purrs and asks to be petted even when her food dish is full. I sat down beside her and began running my hand across her back, across her head. Just sitting and petting, letting my mind run free. In that five minutes of sitting and petting, my mind slid away from grief, slid out from under my lists of things to do. I just sat and petted, enjoying the feel of sleek fur under my fingers, enjoying the quiet in the hay mow, the sounds of sheep and lambs eating just outside. I just sat and loved BC. She is a gift from the world. She came to us in the middle of the winter and Dave tamed her. She is a friends, uncomplicated. I can love her without restraint. It’s nice to bond with an animal that has 9 lives.

The mist hangs heavy

2011-04-06T05:58:00.000-07:00

The mist hangs heavy in the air. It froze last night and the temperatures is predicted to reach the 40's today. A perfect day for the sap to run in the sugar bush. I should be happy.

I have a sick lamb in the barn. He broke his leg last week and Dave and I set it. He followed his mother just fine and was practically running with the rest of the lambs. Then he got his splint caught in a feeder and in struggling to get free, broke his leg in a second place. This was a bad break, a compound fracture with 3" of bone sticking out. Way beyond my area of expertise. Dr. Magnusson cleaned up the bone and the tissue and set the break. But the possibility of infection is high, and the blood vessels and nerves for that leg were badly damaged. When I took the lamb home, I knew it was an iffy proposition.

I set up the group pen again and bedded it with clean straw and laid the lamb under the heat lamp. His mom wasn't actively looking for him and wouldn't come unless he baaed, which he wasn't up to doing right then, but she would search out his sister if she called.

So I caught his sister and set her next to him in the group pen. She baaed and mom came running. This morning, mom and sister are quietly eating hay. The lamb with the broken leg hasn't moved. He won't drink from a bottle. I fed him milk replacer by gavage last night, but this morning, I can't get the tube into his esophagous, it keeps going into his trachea. He coughs and I pull the tube out.

He's only had 6 ounces of milk since I brought him home from the vet. I have to figure out a way to keep him nourished. I am not optimistic. My heart is heavy.

From here to there and back again

2011-04-04T08:54:00.000-07:00

If they were fish, we'd call it schooling. If they were birds, we'd call it flocking. With lambs, Dave calls it a lampede. They're not frightened, in a panic, or going anywhere in particular; they are just full of energy and joy.

The lambs have to be old enough to hang out with each other instead of their mothers. We don't have grass in the pastures yet so they aren't running toward food. The lambs need to be full and warm. They don't often run like this on cold rainy days, but any sunny day will find up to 30 or 40 lambs running. Other lambs join them as they pass, pronking with all four feet off the ground - another sign of joy.

Both Dave and I walk out to the barnyard and lean on the gate just to watch the lambs run from here to there and back again.

Surprise!

2011-03-23T18:01:00.001-07:00

The wind was roaring through the trees when I walked out for the 7 a.m. lamb feeding yesterday. I stepped around the Nankin cherry bush at the edge of our driveway and saw what looked like a fur hat riffling in the wind on top of the garbage can. It took me a few seconds for the image of fur hat, black and white fur hat at that, to rearrange itself in my mind to SKUNK!

I backed quietly toward the house. By the time I returned with Dave, the fur hat was gone.

Later that morning, when Dave fed the ewes, he noticed that one of the ewes didn’t come up for corn. She was pawing at the hay in the field. That’s not normal behavior for a sheep at this time of year. They’d rather eat corn than hay. When he went down to investigate, he found she was in labor. Ten days after our last set of lambs and we have new babies in the barn!

Two surprises in one day; almost more than a person can stand. Nobody got sprayed and nobody died. The best kind of surprises.

Lights glowing in the night

2011-03-21T06:21:00.000-07:00

Dave and I were first introduced to headlamps on a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area last summer. Jesse, our son-in-law, used a head lamp to navigate us across a lake at night in a storm. He found us a campsite and avoided all the rocks in the way. It was amazing! When we got home, we ordered one for each of us to use during lambing.

Lambing checks at night can be a spooky proposition. The flashlight only shows a small area of ground at a time, so we have to sweep it back and forth. Also, most of our flashlights are constantly in need of new batteries. And if you want to work with a flashlight, you have to stick it in your mouth to leave your hands free. And if you set that flashlight down in the barnyard before you stick it in your mouth...

Several years ago I gave up on regular flashlights and bought some hand crank flashlights to save on batteries and to always have a flashlight that worked. But, as Gautam, our other son-in-law says, hand cranked flashlights only work in theory. The light beam they shed isn’t very bright and you do have to crank fairly often, which you can’t do with your mouth if you need to free up your hands.

So, the Petzl headlamps looked to be a wonderful improvement with hands free operation, and a good, bright light over the exact field of view of our eyes.

The first night I went out with my headlamp, it was snowing. Everywhere I looked, the air was filled with glittering crystals. It was so beautiful, I stood there entranced. Then I stepped into the pasture. Dozens of pairs of little green lights glowed in the distance. Most of the sheep were out enjoying a nice winter evening. Their eyes glowed green in reflection. When I stepped into the barn, dozens more green lights looked back at me. The headlamp had completely changed our grubby, late winter, manure – covered barnyard into a fairyland at night. My light woke the sparrows nesting in the barn, which fluttered around in the rafters, until one hovered in front of me, tail feathers spread, wings spread, staring into the beam of my headlamp. A fairyland indeed.

Last night, when Dave went out to feed the bottle lambs, he noticed a pair of glowing green lights beyond the barnyard fence in the south pasture, watching the barn yard. Dave walked toward the lights, expecting them to disappear. They continued to glow, steady, watching him now. Those eyes didn’t belong to sheep, they were in the wrong pasture. They didn’t belong to deer or any of the other animals that are afraid of people. They could have been dog or coyote. Either was bad news for the flock. Dave shut all the animals in the barn and closed the gate into the next pasture. By the time he was done, the glowing eyes were gone. But where had they gone?

Predators are always of concern on a farm. This morning, Dave checked the snow beyond the gate. No tracks. Whatever had been watching the barnyard hadn’t tried to come any closer to the barn. We will leave that gate closed until we have a chance to check our south fence lines. There can be a dark side to fairyland.

Freedom's just another word for...

2011-03-17T13:15:00.000-07:00

Today we let the last set of lambs and ewes out of the group pen. For the ewes, the open door meant freedom and they rushed out. For the lambs, the open door meant nothing, but they rushed out all the same just because everybody else was rushing out.
The lambs immediately realized that they were someplace strange and called for their mothers. Most of the ewes realized almost immediately, that their babies were missing and came back to the barn to find them, maaing. Some ewes expected their babies to come find them. Those moms and babies called from opposite sides of the barnyard and never seem to get any closer.

For an hour or so in our barnyard, freedom's just another word for cacophony.

Eventually, all the moms and babies find each other and only call periodically when they can't actively see each other. They call, for example, if they are on the other side of the barn from each other, or if one is inside and one is out, or if they are standing next to each other, but one is facing north and one is facing south.

There are good reasons why sheep are thought to be dumb animals. Of course, I can also remember my kids and I doing the same thing - we just used more complicated sounds to call each other.

Clip, dip, strip

2011-03-15T09:14:00.001-07:00

Clip, Dip, Strip is a mnemonic that we use in the barn to make sure we remember to clip every lamb’s umbilical cord, to dip the stub of the cord into iodine and to strip the first milk from the ewe’s teats. I think most shepherds use something similar. Those first actions go a long way toward ensuring a new lamb’s survival.

We clip the umbilical cord to shorten it so it’s less apt to trail in the manure of the barn floor and pick up bacteria. We dip the stump to help it dry up faster and further protect the lamb from nasty bacteria. Lamb’s don’t start making their own antibodies for several weeks; they depend on the antibodies they receive through their mom’s milk. If they don’t have enough antibodies, or if the number of bacteria to which they are exposed are high enough, young lambs can develop fatal cases of diarrhea. And finally, we strip the ewe’s teats to make sure she has milk and to expel a plug of dried milk that might make nursing harder for the lamb.

All three of those actions help ensure a new lamb’s survival. With the mnemonic, they all get done even if the shepherd isn’t thinking in top form at all hours of the day and night. And we don’t, think in top form that is.

One night, before his 3 a.m. barn check, Dave sat on the edge of the bed for an embarrassing length of time, trying to figure out which opening of his sweatshirt he should put his right leg through. Sunday morning, I lay in bed telling myself that because it was daylight savings time, I could wait until 8 a.m. to do my 7 a.m. barn check. My reasoning made perfect sense. We were supposed to move our clocks one hour forward, so from seven to eight, and I hadn’t changed mine yet. The fact that I had been out in the barn until 2 a.m. with an old ewe and two new babies might explain why my brain wasn’t working quite right.

Last night, I was disappointed to find several sheep and a lamb outside at the feeders because I had hoped to lock them into the barn again. But it was really quite a mild night so I set aside the idea of herding them into the barn in the dark. As I headed back down the hill, the lamb followed me, crying. I picked it up and checked its number. 61. Hmm, that lamb should be still in a pen. But a ewe at the feeder called and the lamb responded. Then another ewe called and the lamb responded. Okay, I reconsidered, that was a 16 not a 61. I set the lamb down and he ran off towards the calling ewes.

I went to bed. This morning, I noticed that the lamb sleeping curled in the corner next to the waterer (a favorite place because the water heater warms that corner), was white instead of black number 45, the usual inhabitant. I checked to make sure it wasn’t 29, our sometimes bottle lamb, but the number showing on the tag was a one. So I went on with my barn chores, giving the penned moms fresh water and hay. I also checked to make sure that every baby in every pen stretched. When I got to 24 red’s pen, I paused, there was only one lamb where I expected to see two and the one lamb was tagged with the number 60.

My heart sank; I ran for the barn records. Yes, 24 red should have had two lambs, number 60 and number 61. I picked up number 61 from his spot next to the heater and put him in his mother’s pen. She sniffed him; he headed for breakfast. When I checked his belly a few minutes later, it was round and full.

If we can just think of mnemonics for the all the rest of our lambing actions – like “can” means “check all numbers”, or “slot” means “short leg openings = tshirt” we would have perfect lambings.

The storm

2011-03-13T15:45:00.001-07:00

Friday night when I did my 11 p.m. check, all the sheep were in the barn. The wind howled as I rounded the corner and faced into the wind; tiny pellets of snow cut at my face – ‘not a fit night for man nor beast’. I pulled the barn door shut and trapped all the animals in the relative warmth of the barn – at least they were out of the wind. By morning, it would be degrees warmer inside than outside.

Orange number five had not been able to adopt a new lamb. She licked it, but when we tried to move her away from her dead lamb, she left the new lamb for the dead one. We didn’t want to have her lick the new lamb and completely change its odor, and then abandon it, so we returned the live lamb to its real mother who was birthing her third. I guess Dave and I really aren’t risk takers. Fifty yellow, the mother of the triplets is a good mother, they will all thrive under her care.

When I opened the door at 7 a.m., four more ewes had lambed. I was grateful that we hadn’t had to search for those babies in the storm.

The first thing

2011-03-11T08:37:00.001-08:00

The first thing I found when I walked out to the barn this morning, was a cold lamb, lying at her mother’s feet on the ice. I ran back to the house, filled a bucket with warm water, grabbed some clean towels and went back to the barn.

The second thing I saw when I walked out to the barn this morning, was the mother of the cold lamb and a black ewe both sniffing another little white lamb lying in the straw. Which ewe did that lamb belong to? I set the cold lamb in the bucket and figured out how to prop its head on the side of the bucket. Until the lamb warmed a little and started to struggle, she should be safe. I needed to figure out which ewe the new lamb belonged to and get the pair penned so they could bond in peace. I headed toward the back of the barn and our last two open jugs.

The third thing I saw this morning before I got to the back of the barn, was a white ewe and the black and white spotted baby thief arguing over two big black lambs who still had their tails – obviously newborn.

I spread fresh straw in the jugs and turned on the heat lamps. The white lamb was nursing on the black ewe. The cold lamb hadn’t moved in the bucket of warm water. I picked up the two black lambs and backed down the barn. The baby thief and the white ewe both followed, the baby thief inserting her body between the babies and the white ewe, no matter how I twisted and turned. I set the babies down in front of their pen and looked carefully at both ewes. The white ewe had a few bloody splotches on her udder; the baby thief’s udder and legs were clean. I wrestled her out of the way, opened the jug panel and slipped the babies onto the straw under the heat lamp. The white ewe pushed in after them. I closed the panel and the baby thief threw herself against it. I tied it tightly and then did a quick pelvic exam on the white ewe to make sure these really were her babies. Her nipples had milk and her uterus had mucous. Even though the babies were black and she was white, I was fairly certain that I had guessed correctly.

When I went back to the cold lamb, she was dead.

Now I had to figure out which ewe the live white lamb belonged to and it was more important than ever. If I gave a lamb to a pregnant ewe, she might not be able to nurse it yet and it would die. Both ewes had amniotic fluid shining on their udders. The white ewe had blood staining her udder, her vulva, and her legs. I had seen her licking the cold lamb. Both ewes were licking the live lamb. But the lamb was trying to nurse again on the black ewe, I chose her as the mother and carried the lamb to the last open pen. Both ewes followed, but the white ewe circled back to her dead baby when I closed the pen on the black ewe and the lamb. I checked the black ewe for milk and mucous in her vagina. She had definitely lambed recently and in spite of the fact that I had two black lambs with a white ewe, and one white lamb with a black ewe, I felt comfortable with my decision. It didn’t matter in the long run, because I had no record of the genetic history of either mother.

A fourth ewe was going into labor. She was a big ewe. If she had more than one baby, I could maybe graft her second baby onto the mother whose baby had died. If we laid the live baby next to the dead baby, maybe she would transfer her interest.

The last thing I saw when I left the barn this morning for a quick, late breakfast, was ewe number 5 orange licking her dead baby.

Eye of the storm?

2011-03-10T09:13:00.001-08:00

We’ve gone 24 hours without a new lamb. This must be the eye of the hurricane, or the lull before the storm, or the quiet on the eve of the battle. Whatever you call it, we often get a few days of quiet during every lambing. We really appreciate the break, and maybe the sheep do too.. Dave and I catch up on projects, update our record keeping and take naps. The sheep sleep in the sun, gaze at their navels and out over their world.

It has been a hard lambing so far. In the ten days since the first lamb was born we have had 25 ewes lamb, 50 babies born, and 8 babies die. That last statistic breaks my heart. Eight beautiful, big lambs who should have been able to stand, should of been able to maintain their body temperature, but for some reason, couldn’t.

After the third or fourth death, my emotions sort of shut down. I can’t keep grieving with each new baby who can’t stand. There isn’t room in my heart for that much grief. After we had considered every medical possibility in every sheep book we owned, talked to our friend Glen, a retired shepherd, and consulted with our veterinarian, there was nothing more to do. As I drove back from the diagnostic lab at NDSU, I felt as if the burden of these lamb deaths was now on someone else’s shoulders.

Of course we keep trying to figure out the problem. Right now, our thoughts are running along genetic lines. For several years, we used ear tags to identify our animals which turned out to be defective. Most of the ewes tagged in those years lost their tags and their identity in my record books. For the last three years, I may have been breeding ewes to their fathers. I had no way of knowing. In retrospect, I should have replaced my rams the year we lost so many tags, but it didn’t occur to me. I know that inbreeding can be dangerous, resulting in babies with mild to severe problems, but it can also give you some outstanding individuals. It just never occurred to me that the negative side would be so overwhelming. Some animal breeders may use inbreeding to improve their strain, but I will never consciously do so again, whether that turns out to be our problem or not.

And so we wait, impatiently, for the results from the diagnostic lab. We have gone 48 hours without a lamb death. It is unlikely that the dying is done, but in this little pause, I appreciate going out to the barn not to worry about a dying lamb, but to celebrate the joyous pronking of the lambs just released from the group pen, and to savor the quiet contentment of a mother and her baby or the patience of ewes waiting to lamb.

Mother and baby

2011-03-08T13:23:00.000-08:00

Christmas' presents

2011-03-06T15:24:00.001-08:00

Christmas was born on a long ago Christmas Eve (see blog entry for December 23, 2010), as Dave and I and the girls were rushing off to celebrate the season with our family in the Twin Cities.

Christmas(the lamb, that is) has been a delight ever since she was born. Her mother couldn't feed her, so Christmas became a bottle baby. She was cute and little and everyone loved her.

Because everyone loved her, Christmas loves everyone. She has no hesitation about walking up to people and nuzzling their hands, looking for Cheerios or graham crackers.

This year, with lamb after lamb dying in the barn we could barely stand to do another barn check. But this afternoon, we went out to the barn to find Christmas in labor. She delivered three little white lambs, just as cute as she is. We've already named the girl New Years. Christmas has given us so many gifts.

Problems

2011-03-05T16:21:00.000-08:00

I carry the problems of my animals with me at all times. Like a gray veil that sweeps from the top of my head to the ground, darkening the sunlight, draining joy from my days. Wednesday afternoon, a second lamb was born who had to be helped to breathe, who couldn’t maintain her body temperature, who couldn’t stand or nurse.

We warmed her and fed her and injected her with selenium. She lived, but she still couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk, couldn’t nurse.

Dave and I searched through our sheep books and the internet looking for solutions to a problem we could barely describe, that still seemed like a selenium deficiency, but that didn’t improve when we injected selenium.

Selenium is an essential nutrient for sheep. It protects muscles from the toxic effects of peroxides which accumulate in the body from food or exercise. In the absence of selenium, the peroxides eventually kill muscle cells. However, selenium itself can also be toxic. If you give selenium to an animal who is not deficient, you may poison them.

Finally I called Dr Weckwerth, our veterinarian. We discussed the symptoms of this lamb and the dead lamb and the two lambs who had died with the same symptoms in 2009. His suggestion was to first determine if our ewes were selenium deficient, and if they were, to inject every ewe, hoping to give each one enough selenium to share with her lambs through her blood. He found out what university to send the blood sample to and stopped at his office to pick up a vacutainer tube for the blood sample.

Dave and I talked about retrieving the dead lamb from the compost pile for an autopsy. Selenium deficiency is also called white muscle disease and is distinctive on autopsy for the unusual pale – white color it imparts to muscles. But by now, this lambs breathing was getting faster, an echo of the first’s lambs deterioration before it’s death.

The question became what to do next. Do we let this lamb die of starvation, of hypoxia because it can’t get enough oxygen, or of heart failure because it has to work so hard to breathe? Or do we kill this lamb and take it’s newly dead body to the Veterinary Diagnostics Laboratory at NDSU for an autopsy and test, hoping that they can trace the clues that we could not.

I learned several years ago that I can’t kill a lamb no matter how much it would help that lamb to die. Dave had struggled so hard to keep this lamb alive, I couldn’t ask him to kill her. So we determined to pay Dr Weckwerth to examine the lamb, record his findings and then euthanize her for us. I would take the lamb to NDSU and hopefully we would know more.

“We’re sacrificing this lamb for knowledge to help the flock,” Dave said.

“This lamb is dying,” I responded. “This way, she won’t suffer. And yes, hopefully we will know more as a result of her death.”

Dave and Dr Weckwerth examined the lamb, discussed options and possibilities, marveled over her severe entropion, the inward turning of the eyelids. This lamb had the worst entropion I had ever seen. Even when we everted her eyelids, hardly any eye was visible. “She already has scarring on her cornea from the eye lashes,” he said. “It must hurt a lot.”

Then he injected the drug and ran his hands over her shoulders and head as she drifted away. Suddenly, I noticed that her eyelids were open. She wasn’t in pain anymore.

When I walked in from the barn that evening, all the lambs were healthy and nursing, even the sibling of that first dead lamb who had seemed on the edge of death herself. The air was crisp and clear, tree branches finely cut against the darkening sky. I could see clearly now and and my heart was light. All was well in the barn

Of birth and death

2011-03-04T11:42:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, Dave noticed that the ewe with the prolapse hadn’t come down for corn. He walked around the barn and there she was, a little white hoof sticking out of her sewn shut vulva.

I had meetings all morning, so Dave was on his own. Unfazed, he herded the ewe into the barn, cornered her with a hog panel, and then took her down in an adaptation of a well remembered high school wrestling move. He pulled a hoof shears from his pocket, slid it under a stitch in the suture around her vulva, and cut the suture.

The he pulled the lamb out. She was beautiful! He moved mother and baby into a jug, clipped the baby’s umbilical cord, dipped it into iodine and then stripped milk from each of the ewe’s nipples. No second baby yet.

He fed the mom, filled a bucket with water, and registered the birth in our barn records. Still no signs of a second baby. Dave fed six bales of hay to the rest of the ewes and carried a bale down to the rams. He fed and watered the rest of the ewes in jugs. Finally a hoof showed at the new mom’s vulva.

Dave helped ease the second lamb into the world. It was not a healthy baby. He struggled to get it to breathe, rubbed it’s little body with a towel, blew into it’s mouth and nose, dropped it onto the straw covered floor. Finally the lamb took a shuddery breath and began to breathe shallowly. But this lamb was still in trouble. It didn’t struggle to get to its feet. It didn’t raise it’s head. It lay there.

When Dave returned in an hour, the lamb was shivering. It’s temperature was below 98˚. It couldn’t maintain its body temperature. Dave warmed the lamb in a bucket of hot water. He expressed milk from the mom and fed the lamb with a gavage tube into its stomach. The lamb just lay there, thrashing when he tried to get it to stand.

The beautiful lamb didn’t look very good either. I remembered that we had used an injection of selenium in a similar situation several years ago. We gave both lambs selenium and fed them both by gavage.

The selenium hadn’t saved the lambs the last time we tried it. But I couldn’t find any explanation for a spastic lamb other than white muscle disease. For awhile at least we would treat them as if they had white muscle disease and give them selenium.

Twelve hours later, the second lamb was breathing impossibly fast. It couldn’t stand or raise it’s head. We had warmed it twice now and injected it with more selenium; we knew of nothing more to do. It was dead when Dave did the 3 am barn check.

The second lamb is hanging in there. She doesn’t look healthy; her head droops, but she can maintain her body temperature. She is learning to nurse on her Mom, and she isn’t spastic. She isn’t actively dying. Maybe we will come out of this with one live lamb.

Early morning

2011-03-02T06:47:00.000-08:00

Mist hangs in the air. The gate, when I climb over it, glitters. The tree tips are frosted in white. Kaylie the alpaca and Lady, our last angora goat, meet me at the barn door. Either the barn is too warm for them or they don’t need as much sleep as their pregnant comrades.

Almost all the sheep in the barn are asleep or at least resting. Only Christmas and the two new Moms are standing. I imagine Christmas stands because her belly, swollen with pregnancy, has displaced many internal organs. I think she probably breathes better when she is standing. The two new moms stand over their babies who are nursing, one lamb on each side of an udder. Twins are perfect: their mom has a nipple and usually enough milk for each baby, and when I sell the lambs, if I haven’t had to feed them milk replacer or buy hay, one lamb will pay for his mom’s upkeep and the second one will be profit.

No one is lambing right now; no one is ill. I walk out of the barn, content. Behind the frosted trees, a red sun glows. It is going to be a beautiful day.

lambs!

2011-02-28T07:05:00.000-08:00

Saturday afternoon I stepped into the barn to find three ewes clustered around two little black babies. One of the ewes I recognized from past lambings as the “spotted black baby thief.” She had been interested in every baby born for many years, and had never had a lamb herself. Although she was the only black ewe there, she probably wasn’t the mother. Of the remaining two, number 56 had an amniotic sack trailing down her legs. The other ewe had a clean, dry vulva. When I picked up the babies and started moving them down the barn toward a jug, only Prima, number 56, followed me.

I dried the lambs and turned on the heat lamp. Then I ran back to the house to find a bottle of iodine for their umbilical cords, and Dave. New lambs just need to be shared.

Again

2011-02-25T09:56:00.000-08:00

Dave went off for his last work stretch before lambing and the next morning I went out to feed the sheep. The prolapse was back!

‘I’m sure I’ve handled one of these by myself,’ I thought. ‘Dave did two weeks ago. I don’t have to call the vet just because Dave isn’t home.’ I set the hog panels up in the barn to funnel the sheep into one end and then herded the flock around the barn and in the door. They moved beautifully. Then I closed a gate on them and tried to decide what to do next. The prolapse was dark red and huge; it had been out for awhile. I was going to have to catch the ewe, take her down on her side, sit on her, wash her vagina and the push it back inside before tightening the twines that were supposed to be keeping the prolapse in.

I went to the house for a bucket of warm antiseptic water. But as I was filling the bucket I realized that the chances of me catching the ewe and taking her down anywhere near the bucket were slim and the chances of having the bucket remain upright and full of clean water during the process were infinitesimal. I poured some of the hot water into Dave’s coffee thermos and stuffed it inside my coveralls. I was actually able to walk up to my sheep, but as I grabbed her harness, she darted away, dragging me behind her. My chest was pressed up against her hind end and I cringed at the thought of the damage I could be doing to her exposed vagina. Finally, she darted into a corner, I grabbed at the hog panel netting with my free hand, and we stopped moving forward. I moved carefully until I was sitting astride her body, facing back. I pulled the thermos out of my coverall, popped open the top and began pouring water over the exposed tissue. I brushed it gently with my hand, but didn’t feel straw or manure or anything nasty sticking to it. I slipped my engagement ring with its solitaire aquamarine off my finger and onto my silver bracelet and zipped them both in a pocket. I have learned from experience that those items don’t belong in sheep’s vaginas or uterus’.

I spread my left hand across the prolapsed tissue and pushed slowly. I could get about half the grapefruit sized mass back in, but from my position near her waist, there was no way I would have the leverage to do any better. Suddenly, I felt relieved. I was perfectly justified in calling the vet even if it would be an expensive visit that I probably wouldn’t have had to request if I had help. This was more than a job for me, alone.

Several hours later when Dr Weckwerth completed his clinic visits, he drove into the barnyard. he filled a bucket of lukewarm water and antiseptic – didn’t need a thermos with two of us working, grabbed his bag and a calf halter and we approached the flock. She let me walk right up to her and grab the twine. Then Doctor Weckwerth slid the harness over her head and she dragged us to a spot in a corner against the wall. I held her head and told Dr. Weckwerth the whole story beginning several weeks ago and including all my worries about cause and effect of prolapses this early before lambing – she was at the very least a week away still.. While I talked, he slid a slender needle into the the space between two vertebrae just above her tail and injected lidocaine, an epidural so that her body wouldn’t fight against the return of her vagina to the proper place. I can’t image sliding a needle into the backbone of a standing sheep and not only finding the correct spot, but injecting enough of the drug before she jrerked the needle out of place. It was a masterful job.

Soon, he slid her vagina in easily and he tucked her cervix back where it should be. As soon as he removed his hand, she prolapsed again. “Have you had any luck with prolapse retainers?” I asked. He shook his head. “Anecdotally, nobody seems to think they work.”

He pushed the prolapse back in again. “We could sew her vagina shut,” he suggested.

I hadn’t hear good stories about that. “I’ve read that the stitches tend to tear out,” I said, a chill running up my spine at the thought.

“There is that,” He agreed. “We could use a purse string suture.” Dr Weckwerth described how the stitches would encircle her vulva, closing the opening radially, leaving no places for the tissue to rip under pressure.

“I have no experience with this,” I said. “The twine harness has always worked for us in the past, but it isn’t working at all this time. We’ll go with whatever you think is best.” He threaded a huge needle with quarter inch wide umbilical tape and carefully sewed the opening to her vagina closed, leaving only a thumb sized opening. “You’ll have to cut the suture when she is ready to lamb,” he explained. “Hopefully, one leg and the lamb’s head will engage and slide right through the vagina. The down side would be if the leg and head push the vagina in front of them.”

That would be very bad. If a foot and head came out first, we could snip the tape when we felt the foot at her vaginal opening. Otherwise we’d have to have the vet out again to do a caesarian section. “Why do you think she prolapsed?” I asked as he packed away his supplies.

“In cattle it has a genetic component,” he said. That meant that I would not be keeping this ewe as part of my breeding flock. I’d been feeling bad that she had lost her number and as a vanilla white ewe with no distinguishing characteristics beside the prolapse, I had no idea who she was. But it would be easier to send a sheep with no name to the butcher to be made into sausage than one of my special friend, And working with a sheep over a number of weeks frequently makes them friends – so does naming them..

As we walked back to his truck, I felt that sense I always have during lambing of something about to happen. Even with a ewe who was probably going to require a caesarean, most likely in the middle of the night (because that’s when they happen inevitably), that feeling was positive, calm, expectant. Perhaps that’s why pregnant women are said to be expecting.

Prolapse!

2011-02-20T12:33:00.000-08:00

The midwinter weeks leading up to lambing are usually pretty relaxed. We feed the sheep. They eat and gestate. We go snowshoeing, skirt fleeces, catch up on projects, and enjoy the calm before the storm. They eat and gestate.

It was an unpleasant feeling to watch a ewe rush past with a pink grapefruit sized mass of tissue protruding from her vagina. Actually, it was her vagina, prolapsed. It isn’t a common condition, but old sheep, fat sheep, and sheep with lots of fetuses are all susceptible to prolapse. Old sheep have weak muscles around their pelvic floor. Fat sheep are carrying extra weight and that puts more pressure on the pelvic floor. And sheep with multiple lambs also have more internal pressure. As their pregnancy progresses and their fetuses grow, there is less and less room. For some ewes, the only space available is where there vagina should be. At a certain point, the vagina just pops right out of the body.

As horrendous as that sounds, a vaginal prolapse is usually repairable. All the shepherd has to do is to push the vagina back inside where it belongs and then prevent the ewe from pushing it back out again. If the prolapse is new, it just needs gentle pressure to return it to the proper place. But if the vagina has been out for awhile, it may need to be cleaned. If it has been out so long that it has swollen, it will need to be shrunk. The longer the prolapse continues the harder it is to fix.

Once the prolapse is back in place, we have to find a way to keep it there. The best technique we’ve found involves four pieces of baling twine and some fancy knot work. First, we restrain the ewe, to keep her from wandering off. Then we tie the baling twine pieces together, center them on her shoulders at the back of her neck, cross them across her breastbone, run the two ends under her armpits, cross them again over her back, run the ends under her hind leg pits, along side her tail, and along her spine to tie tightly to the original twine across her shoulders. The twine needs to be tight enough to keep her back slightly arched so that she can’t use her abdominal muscles to push. Then we tie short pieces of twine above and below her vaginal opening to keep the prolapse in place.

Amazingly, ewes with prolapses generally lamb just fine, producing healthy babies. The ewe who prolapsed last week is young, slender, and probably only has a single fetus. Why does she have a prolapse? And why three weeks before she could possibly lamb?

When he found her, Dave reinserted her vagina and trussed her up with twine. When we sheared, we removed the twine and she immediately prolapsed again. We replaced the prolapse and trussed her up again. Four days later, she prolapsed through her harness. We reinserted the prolapse and tightened the twine pieces. She seems to be doing well, but in a small back corner of my mind that looks after troublesome problems that I really can’t do anything about, the questions remain – why is she does she have a prolapse and why now?

Shearing day

2011-02-16T18:21:00.001-08:00

Spinning a new tale

2011-02-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

There once was a young goatherd named Galya who lived with her six goats on the steppes of the Ural Mountains in Russia where the air was so thin and the winters so long that Galya had a hard time finding enough food to feed her goats, not to mention enough food for her family. Galya’s goats produced the only income for that family. Every April, the goats each had a baby that Galya nurtured and protected from wolves and eagles until they were old enough to sell for meat. Also, in April, Galya combed her goats and collected the ultrafine down under fiber that kept her goats warm in the deep winter. Then she spun that goat fiber into the finest yarn imaginable and knit it into huge shawls with patterns as intricate as a spider’s web. It took an entire month for her to spin two ounces of goat down and knit it into a shawl. After each shawl was finished, Galya pulled it through her mother’s wedding ring to test it for fineness.

By the end of the year, after she had finished six shawls, she traveled to Ekaterinburg to sell her work. There she met Jim, a handsome and rich American who was preparing to take a sled dog trip along a river valley. “Privyet,” he said, surprising her with his Russian even though his accent was terrible. “Kak dyela?”

Now Galya had been raised in the mountains, but she had gone to school and had learned three languages, Russian, French and English. “I’m fine,” she said. “Welcome to Ekaterinburg. Would you like to buy a shawl?”

Not very many young American men appreciate finely spun and knit shawls, and this young man was no different. But he was interested in people so he followed Galya through the town as she moved from shop to shop trying to find the best price for her work. All the shop owners shook their heads when Galya spread out her work. “It is very beautiful,” they said, but the buyers were here last month. I have no need of your shawls now. Come back next fall.”

“Why did they come so early?” asked Galya.

“In America,” Jim told her, “they start putting out Christmas decorations in October. The biggest buying day of the year is in late November. No one waits until December to buy precious gifts anymore.”

“I can’t wait until next October to sell my shawls,” Galya said. “I need the money for my family now. We will not get through the winter very well without flour and sugar, raisins and almonds."

Jim reached into his pocket. “What you need,” he said, “is a cell phone. With a cell phone, you can look on the internet and find the best price for shawls. You can lock in that price and ship the shawls. You can even take photographs.” He spread one of Galya’s shawls across her shoulders and demonstrated, “and your shawls will sell for even more, because they really are quite beautiful.” Jim typed away at his phone and in a few minutes looked up at Galya. “How much do you want to sell your shawls for? What is the most money you can imagine?”

Galya thought for a moment and then spoke. Jim typed. “Okay,” he said, a big grin on his face. “I sold five. I’ll trade you the last one for my cell phone and help you figure out how to get more minutes and keep it charged. But first we need to get you an Etsy account so you can do this on your own next year.”

When Galya returned to the steppes, she took fine silk thread to ply with her goat down yarns, she took Jim’s cell phone and a charger, as well as the numbers to her bank account in Ekaterinburg, where the money for five shawls had been deposited. Already, she had plans in her head to talk to the other goatherds. It was a whole new world out there and with her cell phone she could sell them minutes and they could all be a part of it.

Spinning old tales

2011-02-05T08:15:00.001-08:00

The old folk tales do not do well by spinners. I mean, there’s Sleeping Beauty, who first time she encounters a spinning wheel manages to prick her finger on the spindle (which has a point about the size of a Magic Marker tip) and falls asleep for one hundred years. I know, I know, it was a magic spindle or a poisoned spindle, but the story still doesn’t leave one with a good feeling about spinning wheels.
And then there is Rumpelstiltskin, a spinner who was a disgrace to the profession. So what if he could spin straw into gold, silk makes a much more beautiful yarn, and it’s hard to spin. Spinning straw into silk would be a much more useful skill. But then he turns out to be a real creepy person. Of course the miller’s daughter makes some really bad life choices, and her father lies, but you come away from that story remembering spinning as a really bad deal.
And finally there is the tale of the three ugly spinsters, one with an elongated lip from licking the yarn ends, one with an elongated thumb from spreading the fibers and one with an elongated foot from treadling. Now even if their respective deformities were genetic rather than workplace related, you are once again left with the idea that spinning is a bad deal.
The only half way decent image of spinners comes from Greek or Cretan mythology, the story of the Fates, women who walked the country lanes at night, spinning the moon out of the sky on their drop spindles, making the night safe for the little nocturnal animals, and then gradually washing the moon back up into the sky as they washed their wool in a pond (story courtesy of The Moon Spinners by Mary Stewart.)
I think it is time for some new spinning tales. I want a spinner saves the day story. Homespun wool yarn can be incredibly strong and unbelievably fine – spinners compete to spin a thread fine enough to knit or crochet into a 5 to 6 foot diameter shawl that is so fine it can be passed through a wedding ring. Now that is something to tell stories about.

Designing a yarn

2011-02-01T07:59:00.001-08:00

As a hand spinner, I design yarns every time I sit down at my spinning wheel. First decision is what fiber will I spin – wool, mohair, alpaca, angora, linen, cotton, dog or synthetic? Next I determine how many plies my yarn will have – how many individual strands of yarn will be twisted together to make the final yarn. Then I need to decide how thick each ply will be. Finally, I ask myself how much twist my yarn will have, meaning how many times will I push the treadle on my wheel per foot of yarn spun. Will it be only slightly twisted or very, very twisted?
When I spun my first skein of yarn, I didn’t think beyond the question of color. The yarn I spun showed my lack of planning, but also my lack of experience. It was a lumpy, uneven skein of variegated gray yarn that was so over twisted that it looped over and over itself. The mittens I knit from that yarn were more chain mail than mitten.
My spinning has improved with practice. I now spin fat yarns and thin yarns, highly twisted and under twisted yarns, single ply and two ply yarns. I love to vary the fiber used in a yarn. One ply of wool and one of mohair dyes beautifully because the two fibers absorb the dyes differently. One ply of wool and one of angora or one of alpaca makes a wonderfully soft yarn that still has the strength and elasticity of wool.
I love to spin, but I am not a fast spinner; I probably only produce an ounce an hour. That means that a handspun, hand knit sweater takes me a long time. Spinning all fifty of our fleeces every year would be impossible. I don’t expect to spin 50 fleeces. During shearing, I pick out my favorite fleece and spin that one. The rest of those beautiful fleeces are washed and carded into roving or washed, carded and spun into yarn at commercial woolen mills. I have to design that yarn before I send the wool to the mill. Will it be all wool or a blend of different fibers? The mills require 100 pounds of unwashed fiber to spin a batch of yarn. So I have to combine between 20 and 30 fleeces. I don’t have that many sheep with the same color fleece. The heathered color of my yarns depends on how many light gray fleeces, or dark gray fleeces or brown or white fleeces I include in a batch. I have stockpiled all the brown fleeces from 2009 and 2010. After we shear in February, I’ll have enough brown wool set aside to create a soft brown yarn with one light brown ply and one dark brown ply. I can see the yarn in my head and I know when three big boxes appear on my doorstep that the subtle light to dark twists of the yarn inside those boxes will be even more beautiful than I can imagine.

Out in the cold

2011-01-24T18:21:00.001-08:00

When the temperature drops below zero, it’s cold outside! Somehow, we all seem to get along.

I don’t know how the sheep handle the cold, but they look and act just the same on warm days as they do on very cold days, so they must have good insulation and built in heaters. The angora goats do mind the cold, especially after we shear them. They are much more apt to hang out in the barn for up to a week after shearing. The sheep are ready to go outside the next morning. Only on days like we had this weekend when the wind roared through the barnyard, do the sheep hang out on the lee side of the barn. Of course, during really cold weather, Dave and I watch the animals more closely and increase their feed to give them extra energy reserves.

Dave and I handle the cold completely differently than the sheep do. We both add layers. I wear a longer coat, Dave wears lined mittens except when he’s feeding bales of hay. You just can’t get your fingers under the bale strings with mittens on; you have to wear gloves. We don’t restrict ourselves to the house on those cold days, but spend an hour or two outside. We feed the animals, load the wood boxes, and snow shoe on the windless side of the woods.

Even though we aren’t out in the cold all the time like the sheep are, our feed intake definitely goes up. I’m much more apt to make desserts in the dead of winter and we find that bits of chocolate with our coffee after lunch are an important part of the day.

This last cold stretch, I deep fat fried three times – first doughnuts, then Laotian wontons, and finally Somali sambusa (meat pies). I don’t normally deep fry foods at all, but this winter I am testing recipes for a community cookbook, and the coldest day of the year just seemed like a good time to make doughnuts. And then once I had the oil hot, I just kept frying.

It will take several trips around the woods on snow shoes and a lot of hard work out in the cold to burn off those extra calories, but it’s worth it. It will be a delicious cookbook.

Filling myself with sweetness

2011-01-20T13:04:00.001-08:00

We usually extract honey in September or October when the weather is still slightly warm. Last fall, we ran out of time and so we extracted honey last weekend; and it was a very different experience.

Some of the honey in the combs had crystalized and so running the capping knife across the surface of the frame was a much harder job. The house was cooler even with the wood stove running as hard as it could, and the honey flowed more slowly out of the cut combs and into the extractor, out of the extractor and into the strainer, and out of the strainer and into jars. And cleanup that we usually do on the back deck with a garden hose hooked up to the hot water faucet was a little messier. We still used the garden hose hooked up to the hot water, but we did it in the kitchen. It’s amazing how far a little water can travel when you least expect it.

The main advantage to extracting honey in mid January is the absence of live bees. I didn’t mis the sound of their buzzing or brushing them off the frames or vacuuming them off the ceiling.

Other than the bees though, extracting honey in January is still a celebration of the senses. Our hands and feet feel sticky for days. The light shining through drips of golden honey is always beautiful. The smell, as air sweeps up out of the extractor as the combs spin is the best fragrance in the world. And the taste...well the taste is an invitation to gluttony.

The taste is a lot like honey from the store, only much better. Extracting honey gives many, many opportunities for tasting. I grab one of the first pieces of capping as the hot knife slices the lids off the honey comb and pop it into my mouth, chewing the wax and honey mixture until all the flavor is gone. Then as the extractor spins and we watch honey droplets stream from the comb, I carefully slip a finger down the wall of the extractor and scoop up some honey to taste. When the extractor is full, we lift it up onto the counter, open the valve and watch beautiful golden liquid flow down to the strainer. I can’t resist sticking a finger into that flow to watch the changing patterns of honey on the surface of the strainer and, of course, to catch another taste. And finally, at the end of a long day of tasting. I use a spoon to scrape the last of the honey from the bottom of the strainer and put it in my mouth, savoring the pure rush of flavor.

I usually try to restrict my diet and eat appropriate amounts of appropriate foods, but the days we extract honey, whether in October or January are the days I let loose and fill my self with sweetness.

The wool shed

2011-01-13T12:07:00.001-08:00

Shearing is scheduled for February 12. That means that lambing is just around the corner and that I’d better get the wool shed cleaned out.

Every January I look at the unsold fleeces in our shed and decide what to do with them so that we’ll have room for new fleeces. Sometimes I send the year old fleeces off to be carded into roving for spinners and felters. Less often, I have enough to design a new yarn and I send the fleeces to a spinning mill to have the yarn spun. Some years all the fleeces have sold. Some years I only have questionable fleeces left – those with a few guard hairs or those with more veggies than I like in my fleeces. This year I have all of my fleeces left except for the one we used for experimental dyeing on the last fiber day at the farm.

Sales have been down lately, but I hadn’t realized that they were that far down. The last two years, people have bought very little and I’ve blamed it on the economy. Fiber artists have no more disposable income than anyone else. People also seem to have busier lives. I have seen a trend; people buy carded wool rather than raw fleece which they would have to wash and then card before they can use it. More people buy pre-spun yarn because they don’t have time to spin it themselves before they knit or crochet it into something.

I understand that perfectly. It has been many years since I’ve had the time to spin enough yarn for a project. I have a skein of a wonderful soft brown alpaca waiting beside a pile of unspun fiber. I probably only need eight more skeins to begin that sweater I’m going to knit after the one I’m working on now which I’ll get back to after I finish the baby hat.

Many spinners suffer from the same cluster of problems. Too many good ideas, too much yarn already accumulated, and too little time. Actually, many crafts people fight the same pressures. Our eyes and minds are always on the look out for new ideas, new challenges. But our life is already scheduled rigidly enough that we have to plan those projects far out in the future or resolve not to finish something we are presently working on.

Actually, that’s not true. In the seventh year of a quilt that I was supposed to be hand quilting, my daughter Amber commented that if I didn’t work on it, it wouldn’t ever get done. An obvious conclusion, but a real revelation to me. I followed her lead and worked on that quilt for half an hour most evenings and finished it! Now I just have to make the same decision about the beautiful cable sweater with lots of color variations in the pattern that has me completely intimidated, and I’ll be able to finish the sweater.

But not until I finish the hat for grandson Jasper, and certainly not before I pull all the fleeces out of my wool shed and send them off to be carded into roving or spun into yarn. With almost fifty fleeces in the shed, I have the luxury of designing another new yarn, but I’ll have to work fast, because I need room for fifty more fleeces in exactly one month.

Winter sun

2011-01-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

ten deer on a hill
coats aglow in the winter sun
dig through snow for food

twelve below zero
frost in the bright air
tickles my nose hairs

just before sunrise
in the hushed, still distance
color explodes

Snow day

2011-01-01T14:19:00.000-08:00

“I hope we’re snowed in tomorrow.” Gautam, our son-in-law from India, said last night as we stared out the windows at the snow drifting higher and higher in the yard.

More than six inches of snow accumulated over night. The major highways in this part of the state are all closed. Our driveway won’t be passable until Dave gets the tractor going this afternoon when it warms up a little.

Bad weather had been predicted, so we stocked up on food for people and animals. The Hairy woodpeckers have returned to the suet feeder. The gray squirrels and chickadees are arguing over control of the sunnies. The sheep have plenty of hay and can retreat into the barn from the worst of the wind. And we are perfectly content to spend the first day of 2011 not going anywhere or doing anything special.

Dave is baking bread. The rest of us are sleeping, reading, cooking, doing dishes and laundry, writing, eating, and playing with nine month old Kieran. From inside, the winter yard looks cold and serene, as beautiful a space as one could imagine, and yet even in the sun, the thermometer has only reached 2 degrees.. Today, we’ll enjoy our snow day from inside and be glad that we don’t have to go anywhere.

Not quite Luddites

2010-12-27T20:20:00.000-08:00

We don’t think of ourselves as Luddites, the weavers who destroyed mechanized looms in England in the early 1800’s because they had lost their jobs to mechanization. In fact, we don’t destroy machinery at all – Dave actually spends a lot of time fixing it. I guess I have been guilty of occasional destruction. The hay chopper comes to mind, (see sheepnotes.blogspot.com, June 20 2010), but that wasn’t willful, and certainly wasn’t related to fears of unemployment. I actually wanted to use it to make my job as a farmer easier.

We don’t hold technological improvements in disdain. We both did our Masters research with some of the first computers, back in the early 1970’s when a computer took up the entire floor of a building and both the programming and the data entry were done with 3” X 7” cards punched with little holes. Interestingly, the Jacquard loom was developed in 1801 and it used cards with holes punched in them to create many different weaving patterns on a single warp. This made complex weaving a job suitable for an unskilled low wage person, not just a master weaver. It is ironic that one of the looms that created the Luddite movement, is an ancestor of the computer we use so gratefully today. Dave and I have had a personal computer since the first Apple II and we both use them daily for our work.

But the newest technologies seem to proliferate and become extinct so rapidly, that we have made it a policy to buy only what we absolutely need until forced into the next step up on the technology merry –go – round. We have a desk top and a lap top and use all the programs easily. We have a land line phone and FM radio. Since the television went digital, we haven’t had television reception because we live in one of those third world rural areas that was left out. We have DSL internet access and that keeps us connected with the world and its libraries. We’ve been perfectly happy without cell phones, Ipads or touches, Facebook, texting or tweeting.

We practice old fashioned farming. We don’t do pregnancy testing or computer assisted shearing. We don’t have a video camera in the barn to check up on the sheep at night during lambing. We don’t use a GPS system to plow the fields or aerial photography to spread fertilizer or herbicides. In many ways, we farm like Dave’s Grandpa Roy farmed fifty years ago.

Finally this fall we succumbed to the cell phone craze. With a six month old grandson and a second on the way, we wanted to be able to talk to our kids and our grandkids whenever they called. I have to admit that the cell phone has turned out to be an asset. However, the learning curve was tortuous. I still announce the obvious to the world in general when my cell phone rings;. I haven’t figured out how to turn it off yet, so it rings in places it oughtn’t; and I wander around the house to find the best signal. I still feel very obvious when I answer the phone, and am pleasantly surprised when a call actually goes through.

With lambing fast approaching, I have considered going digital.. I can carry my cell phone in my coveralls pocket and if I need Dave’s help, instead of trudging back into the house, I can press menu, people, contacts, Dave and he’ll answer. Isn’t progress amazing? Guess we really aren’t Luddites at all.

Christmas miracles

2010-12-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

December 1996.

“If you get all that knitting done, it will be a miracle.” My daughter Amber said to me.
“I know, I know. I always have too many ideas and not enough time. But I only have this last pair of socks to finish. Just the foot part. If I knit the whole way down to the cities, I ought to be almost done. Why don’t you go help your dad pack the car.”

“If we get all this stuff in the car it will be a miracle.” Dave said. “How could we have so much to pack? Presents for all the aunts and uncles and cousins. Wish we had a bigger car.”

“If Claire remembers to feed the sheep during her hectic Christmas morning, it will be a miracle.” Laurel said. “Don’t worry about Claire; did you feed and water the cats?” “Yes.” “Christmas tree watered?” “Yes.” “Outside birds fed?” “Yes. Can we go now?”
“All that’s left is to check the sheep.”

Lists cycled through my head as I walked to the barn. Would the fruit for the salad freeze on the trip? Maybe I should unpack it and wrap it in blankets. The family would kill me if I started unpacking. Did I have a good enough present for everyone? Would Tyler like his truck or was he out of his truck phase? Bob was always so hard to make things for. What would he think of the vest. Wonder if the kids gave the cats enough water. Really hope Claire remembers to feed the sheep tomorrow. Hope the sunnies will last the chickadees until we get back.

I turned the lights on in the barn and the ewes surged to their feet; all but Clooney who was lying in a corner. Something was wrong! Clooney wasn’t a solitary sheep; she should be dashing about the barn with the rest of the flock. I pulled the string on the light above Clooney’s head, throwing her corner of the barn into bright relief.

Clooney lay on her side, head stretched out, lips curled back, teeth bared. Her mound of a belly was hard in contraction. As the rest of the ewes quieted, I heard her panting.

Lambs weren’t due until the end of January. Either this would be a premature birth with lots of problems, or Clooney had spent some time with the ram before I formally introduced them. Clooney relaxed and maaaed.

Baaa, a soft voice echoed her. From the shadow behind Clooney’s massive body, rose a small black lamb, long legs shaking as it stood. I dashed to the supply cabinet, grabbed towel, knife and iodine, and rushed back to Clooney’s corner. She was concentrating on another contraction. And then another. I dried her lamb, cut the umbilical cord, poured iodine on the cord, and moved the lamb to her mother’s udder. Clooney labored. I waited. The lamb nursed. Clooney labored. Kneeling behind Clooney, I lubricated my hand and slid it into the birth canal. The tips of my fingers felt the ridges and hollows of the lambs skull. It was a huge head, filling the opening between Clooney’s pelvic bones. My fingers circled the head. No front hooves.
No wonder Clooney was laboring so hard. Carefully, slowly, I pushed the lambs head back deeper into Clooney’s body. Then I eased my hand in and felt for two front hooves. There! Against the pressure of Clooney’s contractions, I teased the hooves out into the coldness of the night barn. Slowly, the head followed. When the head was free, I tugged on one leg. The lamb’s big white body twisted, hesitated and then oozed out onto the golden straw covered barn floor. Clooney turned around and sniffed her new lamb. Her tongue began licking the membrane away from the lamb as it struggled toward her mothering gurgles. When the new lamb was licked clean, I carried both lambs to a clean pen and turned on the heat lamp. I toweled the second lamb dry and trimmed his umbilical cord. Soon, both lambs had nursed well and were sleeping curled at Clooney’s side.

I stepped out of the barn. The air was cold and crisp. Stars glowed in the night black sky. I could hear the sheep muttering in the barn; they had already resettled for the night. I took a deep breathe and realized that my worries were gone. The lists had evaporated.

The socks would be finished (or they wouldn’t. I could finish them tomorrow after we opened presents.) Everything would fit in the car (or it wouldn’t. My suitcase was still in the bedroom. If it didn’t fit, I could borrow clothes from my Mom.) Claire would check the lambs and feed the sheep (she’d probably come out to see the new lambs as soon as I called her, and we’d be home tomorrow night.) The real miracle had just happened in our barn. A baby had been born. A new chance. A new beginning. A real Christmas miracle.

Since this was first published in December 1997, we’ve had countless miracles large and small. The most recent and one of the biggest was the birth of our second grandson, Jasper.

Wild turkeys

2010-12-11T11:48:00.000-08:00

photo by Roland Jordahl

7:32 a.m. Wednesday
From the kitchen sink, I watch a wild turkey skid to a snowy landing in the clearing behind the house. And then another, and another and another.

7:45 a.m. Thursday
I sit in a plastic lawn chair dressed in a white camouflage suit I made for Dave, with the long neck ribbing pulled up over my head. The only color is my face, my gloves and my camera. I hope that I look enough like a snow drift to fool the turkeys.

Several chickadees flit from branch to branch in the lilac hedge. Chickadee dee dee. I recognize their distinctive call. I can hear the turkeys waking. First a single voice, then another. As the sky lightens I see the large black mass of a turkey high up in the trees to the west of the house.

The day is crisp, with very little wind here, sheltered by the woods and the house. Wood smoke drifts languidly above me, scenting the winter air. My butt and my fingers are cooling, but the wait was worth it. Lots of turkeys are talking in the trees. Deep voices, shrill voices, complex calls, simple squawks. They drown out the chickadees.

A black shape lifts from a tree, spreads wings and tail and soars across the barnyard and onto the driveway. Another. Another. A few birds land out of sight, north of the house. The mass of the flock lower their feet and settle onto the driveway just beyond the pickup – well out of camera range. Each bird lands in front of and just beyond the previous bird, so they work their way from the pickup toward the spot where my camera is focused. Finally, two birds skid to a stop in front of me –still to far away for a good photo, but definitely not bothered by my presence.

They ruffle their feathers, the long tuft of feathers on the chest of the male birds stands out as a display. They move on the ground with a clunky, bobbing walk, as if the deep snow has broken their normal gait. Two turkeys explore the woods for a few minutes and then move back toward the rest of the birds and out of my camera range.

I stand and walk slowly toward the bulk of the flock. I am dressed in camouflage, but don’t walk in camouflage. The snow squeaks under every step. Walking turkeys can be completely silent. The crunch of my feet in the snow is distressingly loud. I round the corner of the house in time to see the turkeys flow up the driveway and into the woods, not at all clunky in their movements.

My half hour sitting outside on a winter morning has produced a crappy photograph taken from too far away of a pair of small black turkey shapes. But the process was much more important than the product. I don’t often take the time to sit outside on a winter morning and watch the sunrise fill the sky with gold. I should do it more often; watching wild turkeys, watching the sunrise, or just watching.

8:00 a.m. Saturday
The winds whipped through our yard. I want to get closer to the turkeys, but not enough to sit outside in a -9˚ wind chill. I sit down in front of my computer instead to email a friend, Roland Jordahl, asking for permission to use one of his wonderful wild turkey photos. I can hear the wind. But I also hear a scratching just outside my second story study. I look out the window. Nothing. The scratching comes again, from above me. I look up. Two large bird feet scratch at the snow on the window, struggling for balance. A crab apple falls onto the glass. A yellow turkey beak stabs through the snow and gobbles the apple. The clawed feet scratch at the window again and then disappear as the bird steps onto the roof and out of sight.

This bird was certainly close enough for a picture, but two large feet, viewed from the underside are not what I wanted either. My photos just didn’t do the wild turkey justice. I called my friend Jordy.

Big cities and small towns

2010-12-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

I like living in a small town.

Last week we went to the big city and had a great time – but also because of things that big cities have and small towns don’t. mostly because we were visiting our kids

The architecture always interests me – new housing styles, a huge office building covered with glass that reflects the sky, a green building with gardens and rank after rank of solar panels all on the roof. I love the light rail and the riverfront, the lights on a bridge at night, the Christmas decorations glittering in the rain.

We visited fabric stores, touching fabrics, matching patterns and colors, running strands of yarn through our fingers. My mind opens up in that situation and I dream of new projects – clothes to create, knitting projects to try. I love working on projects with the kids – quilting, knitting, wood working and lead abatement.

In the city we eat wonderful Chinese dim sum, authentic shrimp tempura and okonomiyaki (cabbage pancakes) and drink freshly roasted Peace coffee. But that is just the beginning of great tastes because we always make adventuresome tasty food with our kids - mud pie, bittersweet chocolate bread pudding, Indian nihari and bhendi, sweet potato turkey hash, and Sunday morning pancakes.

Our kids musical tastes have expanded beyond ours. They’ve introduced us to Rockabye Baby by Radiohead, Putamayo, and Stravinsky done live by orchestra and chorus, a chorus in which I swear I could pick out Laurel’s voice.

I love visiting big cities because of the way they tantalize my senses, take me out of the tastes, sights, sounds and smells in which I am normally surrounded and offer me new experiences, and because we spend time there with our kids. I love big cities; but I am glad to come home to my small town where I know what will happen tomorrow and who I will talk to next Tuesday at 8:30 am. Where we have comfort food left-overs in the freezer and the scent and warmth of wood smoke in the living room, and Oolong, the cat, who purrs all night long beside us in bed. And where the sheep laze in the barnyard, content in the winter sun.

Kaylie

2010-11-25T08:24:00.001-08:00

The first time I saw an alpaca I fell in love with the species. They have beautiful, soft, fuzzy looking fleeces, gentle, inquisitive faces and big golden eyes. The first time I saw an alpaca run, I was entranced. They move like liquid flowing across the ground. Their heads stretch forward and their bodies glide, apparently without effort just above the ground. The first time I saw a newly shorn alpaca, I laughed out loud. He looked exactly like a Muppet – topknot, long skinny neck, tiny body and bodacious long legs. The laughter has stayed with me. Just watching Kaylie, our alpaca, gives me joy.

I never considered buying an alpaca. They are out of sight expensive. I couldn’t make back the cost in fleece sales and I am not interested in selling breeding stock with all the showing of animals and public relations involved. But when a friend asked us to board some of his animals, I accepted without a moment’s hesitation. Just the chance to have alpacas on the farm was a good exchange for feeding them. When he sold those animals to a breeder, he gave me Kaylie in exchange for our feed and time. I’ve never had a better deal.

When I look out over the flock, Kaylie’s slender black neck and head rises above the sheep. She places herself between strangers and the flock. In fact, when Dave and I move the sheep into the barn, she tries to stand between us and the flock. When we work with the sheep in the barn, coating them, giving shots, or during shearing, Kaylie keeps up a constant humming. We’ve never figured out if the sound is reassurance for the sheep or warning to us. Perhaps it’s both. Alpacas spit with amazing accuracy and disgustingness when they are upset. They can also kick with their hind legs hard enough to seriously injure anyone unlucky enough to be standing behind them.

Kaylie acts as a guard animal for our flock. One day we took Buddy, a visiting dog, out to the barnyard to see how he responded to the sheep. Kaylie took one look at Buddy, laid back her ears, and screamed. The sheep disappeared around the corner of the barn; Kaylie stood her ground; and Buddy strained at the end of his leash, as far away from Kaylie as he could get.

When ewes lamb, Kaylie sniffs the newborns and then checks them out in their jugs as they sleep curled at their mothers’ sides. She is always aware of us, always on watch, a part of the flock, and much more.

Picky eaters

2010-11-21T15:17:00.001-08:00

Our sheep are picky eaters. If we leave them on a single small pasture for a week, they eat everything down to about 2”. That’s the ideal. If the pasture is too big, they eat the best grasses and leave the rest. If we leave them on a pasture for longer than a week, they keep eating the best grasses as they regrow, leaving the rest to go to seed. And that leaves us with pastures full of overripe grasses that don’t have very much nutritional value and taste even worse than they did before they became overripe- judging by the sheep’s refusal to eat them.

In the summer, Dave cuts the long grasses that then grow back nice and juicy and the sheep eat them. In the winter, the sheep have to make do with what they get. But so far this fall, when we’ve fed them grass hay, they’ve chosen to eat the old grass in the pastures rather than grass hay. So next we gave them oat hay, baled from our very own oat field last summer. They liked that enough to mine it for grains of oats, but not enough to eat the leaves and stems.

We only have about 700 bales of our own alfalfa hay and that won’t get the sheep through the winter. So, late this fall, we found a source of nice alfalfa hay and bought 400 bales. The farmer delivered. In order to keep the number of trips from his farm to our farm as low as possible, he loaded his wagon and his pickup with an unimaginable number of bales. The wagon listed to the right; the pickup (eleven bales high)was riding on its springs. It looked like something out of a Dr Seuss book. I was exhausted just looking at it. Then the farmer and his brother helped Dave and I put the hay in the barn so that they could take their wagons home that night. It was the best deal we’d ever had on hay and the sheep are happy too.

Hunting season

2010-11-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

The hunters have been out for the past few weeks. I’m sure they appreciate the warm weather; I know I do. I haven’t unpacked my long underwear or winter coat yet. The sheep are still grazing pastures instead of eating hay. We have had time to finish farm chores – install a drain behind the barn, spread manure, take down and store the temporary electric fencing.

But there are disadvantages to the warmth. We still have flies. Dave kills dozens a day – their black carcasses litter the windowsills. Even worse, we still have mosquitoes! Absolutely unheard of for mid November. And we still have active deer mice.

Usually by this time in the fall, Oolong the cat and Dave have accounted for all the mice that attempted to winter indoors. But this year, they haven’t gotten torporous yet and an endless stream of little tan and white mice with big eyes and ears and long soft tails finds their way into the house.

Last night, sound asleep in bed, I heard a light scritching and a metallic thump. Suddenly, I was sitting bolt upright, eyes wide open, completely awake. “Mouse!” I announced loudly enough to wake Dave. “I heard it run across our headboard and jump to our metal lamp.”

Dave padded out of the bedroom and returned with Oolong. She snuggled down beside him and then jumped to her feet, intent on the bookshelves along the wall. Dave and I drifted back to sleep as Oolong waited patiently for the mouse to venture out again. We were awakened by a short flurry of squeaks and then silence.

I’m waiting for freezing weather, for an end to mosquitoes and flies and outdoor chores for the year. Oolong is still enjoying her long, extended hunting season.

Coats on the sheep

2010-11-07T09:00:00.001-08:00

We raise wool for hand spinners. That means our fleeces have to be immaculate – no burdock burrs, no sweet cicely spines, no thistles, no tiny bits of alfalfa leaves. To meet this goal during the summer, we dig and spray the noxious plants in our fields. In the winter, we protect the fleeces by feeding small square bales of hay that the sheep can’t burrow into like they would a big round bale; and we coat our sheep. When sheep eat, they invariably take a bite of hay from the feeder and then chew it over the back of the sheep beside them. Little bits of alfalfa fall out of their mouths and drift down into the wool of the next sheep. Those little bits of alfalfa don’t wash out or card out. They are there forever to make unsightly bumps in an otherwise perfectly smooth handspun yarn.

Shepherds who sell their fleeces to commercial wool buyers don’t have to worry about weed seeds or alfalfa bits because the commercial woolen mills use an acid wash or high heat to destroy any veggies in the wool. However, those methods also change the surface of the wool fiber, making it feel scratchy and itchy.

So hand spinners are willing to pay extra money to buy clean, non-chemically altered wool that can be spun into smooth, even yarn with a people friendly texture. And for that extra money, I’m willing to spend an afternoon putting coats on my sheep. This year, it took three of us three hours. Not a bad exchange to be able to sell my fleeces for $10 per pound instead of $0.50!

Without Carly

2010-11-03T11:58:00.001-07:00

The farm is different without Carly. Dave works nights this week and the house feels very empty. Oolong the cat is still here of course, but she is bonded more closely with Dave and rarely makes contact with me. I miss the ritual of feeding Carly and letting her outside during the day. I miss having someone to talk to. I even miss her labored breathing.

The most obvious sign of Carly’s absence is the presence of wild turkeys in the yard. After the leaves fall, we frequently see the huge black birds scuttling through the woods or across the fields. They can weigh between 6 and 24 pounds - not something I’d want to tangle with. When I come down the driveway after a run, the turkeys pause in the woods, freezing into the autumn camouflage of brown, beige and gray. If I stop moving for long enough, the turkeys eventually go on their way. I saw my first turkey roosting high up in an oak tree while I was standing perfectly still, just watching.

Carly didn’t stand still and watch when she saw turkeys. She barked and ran toward them, chasing them rapidly out of range. She didn’t spend a lot of time out doors, but it must have been enough to make the yard smell like dog or in some way seem dangerous, because they never came near the house. With no dog on the property now, the turkeys are advancing.

First we saw one on the roof of the pickup truck. Next a pair strutted over the wood pile. This morning, the entire flock of eleven stood under the radiant crab right outside the living room window. They stretched their ugly, bare necks up and plucked apples from the tree. Turkeys have beautiful plumage in shades of gray and brown. I’ve found turkey feathers on the driveway. The colors on the huge pinion feathers form crisp black and white stripes. The softer, smaller down feathers are more subtle blends of brown and gray. For some reason, the feathers stop at the bottom of the turkeys neck and wrinkled gray and pink skin covers their heads. Up close, in the autumn, with their feathers sleek against their bodies, turkeys are ugly birds. Next spring, when breeding begins and the males spread their tails to reveal the iridescent bronze and blue and green feathers, the males, at least, will be beautiful. Without Carly to scare them off, we may see those magnificent displays up close.

Grandchildren and fiber

2010-10-26T18:35:00.001-07:00

Although grandchildren have a direct line to my heart, they also engage my fingers and my fibers.

“The baby’s room will have an insect theme,” my daughter, Amber, said. And so, two months before our second grandson is due, I spread a piece of rug canvas on the floor and begin to imagine. Kieran’s rug held three goldfish in a purpely blue underwater world. For our next grandson, I drew a scene from a bug’s (or a small child’s) perspective. A lady bug climbs a grass stem; a honey bee hovers over a dandelion blossom; and three stages of a monarch – caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly, inhabit this bug’s eye world.

I spread five shades of green carded roving, yellow, red, orange roving and neutral brown, gray and tan around me on the sofa. Then I slip my locker hook through the first hole on the canvas, catch a loop of dark brown alpaca roving and pull the loop through to the front of the canvas. I hook another loop through the next hole in the canvas and repeat. When I have five loops of brown on my hook, I pull the locking thread on the end of my hook through the loops and begin again.

The rows accumulate slowly, only two per hour. There are one hundred rows of canvas in my design. I will listen to lots of books on tape as I create a rug for a baby to lay on, a tired mother to stand on, and a small boy to imagine himself within.

I appreciate the rovings as they slip through my fingers. The coarse gray-brown was from Fair’s fleece, my very first sheep. The variegated sage green was naturally dyed with common mullein from our fields. The roving for the monarchs wings simmered in orange Kool Aid for half an hour to turn a brilliant orange. Memories of dyeing with friends over wood fires mingle with anticipation of a new addition to our family as I create something that has never existed before – possibly an intriguing image, hopefully a beautiful rug, certainly a gift from my heart.

What are we going to do about Carly?

2010-10-21T13:34:00.000-07:00

Carly is a people dog. When I work in my study, she lies patiently in the doorway. When I go downstairs to start supper, she follows me down. If we aren’t in the house, she lies next to the sofa awaiting our return.

Although we live on a farm, Carly really isn’t a farm dog. She certainly enjoys farm life when we leave the barnyard gate open. She slips in to eat sheep poop and scavenge the compost pile. She barks protectively when a strange car comes down the driveway, and used to enthusiastically chase squirrels. We noticed this summer that Carly wasn’t able to keep the squirrel population under control. They got all our sweet corn and nibbled almost every single squash. I know Carly would really love to chase squirrels, but this summer, her breathing didn’t allow it.

In the last two months, it has gotten worse. Even when she lies perfectly still she takes loud painful sounding inhalations and exhalations. Night times are the worst. She breathes heavily, stridorously, and then seems to stop. Seconds later, the stridor begins again. We’ve wakened half a dozen times now to her panicked movements as she wakes from an apneic spell and tries to control her body enough to rise or run away. I get up in the dark and snuggle her, stroke her head, murmur platitudes. When she calms, I return to bed, sure she’ll be dead by morning.

Carly is thirteen or fourteen years old, ancient for a Rottweiler. We took her to our vet and explained that we’d like to ease her discomfort, but not do anything heroic. Dr. Weckwerth put her on prednisolone and for a month she seemed a little better.

But now, her breathing is bad during the day too. It seems rational to have her euthanized, but when she settles beside me at meals quietly waiting for the intermittent rewards we’ve used to train her to sit quietly beside us at meals, she seems content. When she tracks me in the kitchen, hoping for a dropped tidbit, she seems herself. When she eagerly joins us for a walk, short tail wagging, she seems fine.

How can we take an alert, content dog to the vet to be euthanized?

Part of the problem is that Carly is an anxious dog. She came to us twelve years ago, in the middle of a blizzard, starving and afraid. Afraid of loud noises, raised arms, squeaky drawers, and new situations. Afraid she wouldn’t get enough to eat.

Over the years, we’ve reassured her, taught her to trust people, and to relax in her home even when it is full of activity and people. For a long time we kept her on a leash when we had company. She now runs loose even on fiber days, enjoying the activity, the crowds and the spilled plates of food.

As her breathing has worsened, so has her anxiety. She paces beside the bed as soon as Dave or I whisper in the morning. She follows us frantically around the kitchen, hoping we’ll feed her. She pants continuously, pausing only to lick nervously.

You can’t euthanize a dog because she licks her paws and pants, so Dave and I are learning to dial down our responses to Carly’s anxiety. Besides, our irritation just makes her more anxious.

But the day is coming when we’ll clip on her leash and lead her to the vet’s office. That will be the day when our estimate of her discomfort exceeds our grief at her loss. Until then we try to appreciate Carly for what she is and set aside our discomfort at the idea of euthanasia. Then we can make the decision to have Carly put to sleep. I know that’s not the proper word. I know I should say euthanize or put down. But that’s not what I want for Carly. I just want her to go to sleep, one last time.

Kieran's sweater

2010-10-12T12:29:00.001-07:00

I like to make things from scratch. We bought our first four sheep so that I would have a source of wool to spin. I planned to knit the spun yarn into scarves, hats, mittens and sweaters. I'm good at scarves, hats and mittens, but in twenty-five years I've only knit two sweaters from my hand-spun yarn. They each took about five years from shearing the sheep to blocking the finished sweater.

I knew I didn't have five years to knit a baby sweater for my grandson Kieran. The day after he was born, I found a cute pattern and scavenged some washable acrylic yarns. I don't like to use acrylics, but my wool isn't machine washable and it’s crazy to give a baby a sweater that can't be washed.

I knit three fourths of the sweater in three weeks and then quit. I hated the feel of the fiber and the color range I had found was too babyish - pale green, pale yellow, pale pink, pale blue and pale orange. My daughter, Laurel, and I went to a nice yarn store and found a colorful self-striping wool sock yarn. The sock yarns are machine washable and this one was soft. Unfortunately, the yarn was also very fine and knitting on size two needles was slow. I finished the sweater in three months, but Kieran had already grown out of it. I began again, using the six to twelve month pattern this time. I didn't sew the pieces together until I got to Kieran's house last week because I wanted to make sure it fit. Good decision. I had to add an inch in length to the body and an inch in diameter to the sleeves. The sweater now fits him perfectly at six months. His height and weight are those of a twelve month old. Maybe, he'll grow more slowly until he doesn't need the warmth of a wool sweater anymore.

When I begin making Kieran a sweater out of hand-spun yarn, I think I'll plan it for a twenty-one year old and he can help me spin the yarn over the years.

Procrastination

2010-10-08T07:09:00.001-07:00

Last week we put the last two loads of hay in the barn. It wasn’t great hay – mostly grass with a little bit of mold. We had placed an ad for hay in the newspaper, but nobody responded. So when Dave ran into a friend of a friend at the elevator who had some extra hay – we bought it.
We feed small (50#) square bales of hay to our sheep. It’s easier to keep their fleeces clean when they have to reach down to eat rather than burrow into a big round bale. But baling and feeding small square bales is labor intensive and hard work, so most farmers use the big round bales. That means if we don’t bale enough ourselves, we have a hard time finding hay to buy.
This year, we didn’t bale enough and we haven’t found enough to feed the sheep over the winter. We’re lucky this year that our pastures are still lush and green in October; we’ll probably be able to put off feeding hay until November. But even with that saving, we only have 1100 bales in the barn. One ewe will eat an average of a bale of hay every ten days. That’s 18 bales per sheep until we can put them out onto fresh pasture in May. Eighteen bales times fifty sheep is 1300 bales to get us through the winter. We’re 200 bales shy. Doesn’t seem like many, but that means shorting the sheep about 22% off a really strict diet for anyone, much less a pregnant ewe. The only option we see right now is to sell some of our ewes.
Logically, I would sell the older ewes who are more apt to have problems lambing or feeding their lambs. But those ewes are my friends. I know their names. They know me. When they lamb, their lambs aren’t afraid of us. We have two wethers, both friends, but they produce no lambs and their fleeces aren’t great. They will go to the butcher this fall. The one and two year old ewes are the ones I should be saving, but they aren’t friends yet and they still have their original ear tags, so I still know exactly what their breeding is. They will be the easiest to sell.
My spread sheet listing all the ewes, their ages, fleece characteristics, lambing records and breeding lies on the kitchen table. Every day I look at it, trying to settle on ten ewes to sell. I can’t make up my mind. Saturday, we turned the rams in with the ewes. It won’t make my decision any easier, but it might make the decision easier for a buyer.
While I debate with myself, I hope for a late, late frost so that we can keep feeding the ewes on growing pastures and fields and put off beginning on our hay for as long as possible. With enough procrastination on my part and a late enough frost, I might not have to sell any sheep at all.

Under the trees

2010-10-03T13:02:00.001-07:00

I love to gather wood in the fall in a forest full of drifting leaves. They crackle underfoot as I make trails through the trees, carrying armloads of wood. The leaves are dying, but the woods are alive. Mushrooms appear overnight, rising through the leaf duff – white, black, brown – always an interesting puzzle because I recognize so few of them.

This last weekend, our 11 year old niece, Becca, helped us gather wood. As we rounded a tree, we almost stepped on three patches of mushrooms. The first were tall, white and soft looking, like pale pronto pups. Next to them was a cluster of gray and black parasol shaped mushrooms, the black edges glistening in the sunlight. Finally there was a group of three mushrooms with tall, thin stems and tiny, flat black and slimy caps.

I know these shaggy mane or inky cap mushrooms; they frequently grow in our barnyard. The first day they push their way through the earth, white or tan, with soft scales, growing inches in twenty-four hours. The second day, the entire mushroom cap flattens out, begins to darken and the edges fray, becoming black and wet. Finally, the mushrooms deliquesce, dissolve, into slimy black spots on the ground, unrecognizable as mushrooms.

Becca had never seen anything like it; she didn’t think they could all be the same kind of mushroom. We picked one from each cluster and took them into the house to make spore prints. Becca laid each mushroom cap on a piece of white paper and set a glass over it. Then we went back to gathering fire wood, giving the spores a chance to drop from the underside of the mushroom onto the paper.

Back under the trees, our eyes saw mushrooms every where we looked. Each armload of wood included a stop to pick a new variety of mushroom for a spore printing. After we stacked the last of the wood, Becca led me back to the tree her father had just cut down. She knelt beside the stump of the trunk and pointed. Dozens of little brown mushrooms sprouted from the rotting wood. The smallest was the size and shape of a brown pearl. The biggest had a curved brown stem and a flat, slimy brown cap almost two inches across. Becca gently picked one of the bigger mushrooms and ran back to the house for a spore print.

Before she left for home, Becca lifted the glasses and then the mushroom caps from the prints. Most of the spores were white and she had to hold the paper up, for the sun to shine through it, to see the radiating lines of white on white. One rusty brown mushroom had spread a print of brown spores. And the three different stages of shaggy mane mushrooms were soaking the paper, but a dusting of black spores had settled out from each cap. Under the trees, the rest of the mushrooms would release their spores as they died, beginning the process of life all over again.

The turning of the seasons

2010-09-25T07:42:00.001-07:00

The maple tree up the road from our driveway is turning scarlet. Leaves are beginning to fall from the trees and gather in drifts on the ground. Through the thinning leaves, I see the white blades of our wind generator flashing against an autumn blue sky. So many indicators of fall – the cool crisp morning air, swallows gathered on the power lines, mice in the house. But the biggest indicators, especially for people who don’t spend a lot of time observing outdoors, or who aren’t familiar with the countryside, are the leaves.

Mohamed, a young Somali man who came as a refugee two winters ago, watched the approach of fall with horror. “Why are the trees dying?” he asked.

In late summer, the bright green colors seem to drain from many of the leaves, leaving them dull, more bronze than green. The exceptions are the brilliant golds of the birch, aspen, and tamarack, the scarlet maples, sumac and dogwood, and later the red oaks all of which seem to get brighter in autumn. I don’t know if Mohamed appreciated the color changes, but he definitely worried as more and more leaves fell from the trees.

He had already lived a year and a half in Minnesota, but perhaps the first autumn he had been overwhelmed by the process of learning how to survive in a land so different from his own to notice the slow drift of trees toward skeletal dormancy. Or perhaps, living in a city, even a small city he hadn’t noticed the trees at all. Only after helping us on the farm for a summer had he begun to see the trees, appreciate the trees, and worry as he watched them lose their leaves.

Mohamed saw the loss of leaves as a precursor of death, not understanding that in Minnesota, autumn turns to winter, spring always follows, and that green leaves will come again.

Shepherdess

2010-09-17T07:25:00.001-07:00

I usually think of myself as level headed, clear eyed, one to see almost every aspect of a plan before I begin. But this week has shown me just how fully I can participate in self deception.

Because we have decided to spray herbicides over our east hay field in preparation for reseeding it to alfalfa and prairie grasses, we can harvest the food off of it as late in the fall as we want without worrying about damaging next year’s crop. So we decided to pasture the ewes on the hayfield and save the grass in their pastures to use later in the fall.
We have used temporary electric fencing in the past to sequester sections of hayfield. We turn the sheep out onto the field, secure in the knowledge that they can’t get through the fencing, and let them graze until everything is gone – actually until just before everything is gone. If we make them stay too long, they break through the electric fencing as if it wasn’t there in search of better feed.

It takes time to set out the fencing and haul the waterer and the hoses out to the hay field so I announced that I would spend the week being a traditional shepherd, sitting out in the field with the animals and letting them graze unrestricted (or protected) by fencing. I had ten interviews to transcribe, work that could be done sitting in a lawn chair in the east hayfield as easily as at my desk in my study or curled up on the couch. Monday and Tuesday, I had too many meetings to bother herding the sheep out to the hay field if I would just have to herd them back to the fenced pastures an hour later. Wednesday, I would begin.

Wednesday dawned dark and rainy. My vision of traditional shepherds with their flocks had not included rain. I could sit out in the rain as well as anyone. I had done so on many canoe trips. I can work in the rain too – tending animals, hauling wood, collecting sap. But I couldn’t transcribe interviews in the rain. A digital recorder and a paper notebook or a lap top computer were not up to the task. I couldn’t justify sitting out in the rain all day doing nothing but being a shepherd, so I gave up the idea for Wednesday. And if, in the back of my mind, a little voice said ‘you could sit in the car and work,’ I ignored it.

Thursday did dawn beautifully. This day I would be a real shepherd. I put on boots and a jacket, but decided to leave my shepherds crook, a tool I still hadn’t mastered, behind. I began working my way across the pastures, opening gates for the sheep. First the hole cut in the fence that borders the hay field. I untangled rusty wires and pulled the gate open. It seemed smaller than I remembered, barely three feet high and four feet wide. Perhaps the fence was sagging with age. Next, the wire reinforced gate into the south pasture – a tribute to farmer ingenuity, it consisted of an old metal gate reinforced with a layer of livestock fencing on both sides. Nothing could force it’s way through this gate. The third gate, into the south woods pasture, was the exact opposite of the second. It was two practically useless metal gates tied together with rotting baling twine. Not only did it have holes big enough for most of our sheep to get through, but it weighed a ton and was hard to open and close. The sheep had already knocked down the fourth gate and were standing there in the opening, waiting patiently for me to find them some better grazing land.

I smiled to myself; look how docile and well trained my sheep were. I would be a great traditional shepherdess. “Hay ewes!” I called. The sheep streamed from their pasture and around me like a river around a rock. They separated and ran to the farthest corners of the south woods pasture. I called them. They ignored me. I circled behind them, chuckling, shouting, singing. They seem to move best to old nursery songs sung at the top of my voice. Finally Christmas saw the next open gate and darted through into the south pasture. The rest followed slowly as I chivvied them closer and closer to the gate.

The same thing happened in the south pasture. The sheep were intent on finding the best grass and couldn’t read my mind at all. I took off my jacket and kept singing. Finally Christmas saw the gate to the southeast pasture and wandered through. I encouraged the rest of the flock, dropping back for stragglers, outflanking the more conservative who kept turning back, until every sheep was in the south pasture.

I only had to get them through that tiny little opening and out onto the hayfield. By now, on this 45˚ morning, sweat was running down my face and the older sheep were panting. They didn’t seem to recognize the gate as an opening in the fence. Time after time I chased them up to the opening, but not through. Once again, Christmas recognized it by some dim memory of a past autumn. Kali the alpaca wandered back and forth in front of the opening, but finally ducked her head, bent her knees and stepped through, determined to stay with her flock.

The sheep stopped moving as soon as they hit the hayfield. Even as sparse as our hayfield had become over the last few years, it was still more interesting to graze than the pastures. I looked at the little cluster of sheep in the fifteen acres of field. They would be fine.

I thought back to my hour of herding independent sheep across three pastures. Would I be able to force these sheep back through that little gate come evening? Could I leave them on their own long enough to go get my recorder and notebook? Could I leave them long enough to make lunch?

Finally, my rational brain stepped in. Of course I’d get them through the gate come evening – I always had before. But did I want to be herding sheep in the dark with no help? Of course I could take the time to run back to the house for my recorder and notebook, but did I want the sheep to wander into the slough and fill their fleeces with burrs while I was gone? Of course I could take the time out for lunch, but the mosquitoes were already feeding on me.

I ran back to the yard, loaded the car, and drove back to the hayfield. The sheep were still quietly grazing in the same spot, but I was taking no chances. I was going to be a traditional shepherdess in a twenty-first century sort of way. I set up the electric fencing.

Bees!

2010-09-14T12:32:00.000-07:00

The sun is shining, there is no wind. Flowers still bloom in my garden and we are still picking cucumbers, melons, and peppers. After the frost we will dig potatoes and harvest squash. Yesterday, we harvested our honey crop

In slightly more honest terms – yesterday, we stole the honey from our bees. And all we have to show for it is a few dozen frames of honey, three stings and a lot of really angry bees.

We always dress as comprehensively as possible to steal honey. We wear coveralls over our clothes. We wear bee hats and veils. We pull boots up over our coverall legs to keep the bees from crawling under the cuffs and we pull arm length gloves over our hands.

At first, the bee yard is an idyllic sort of place – plants, trees, two hives, bees. The air was full of bees in that lyrical sort of ‘the air was soft and warm and full of the buzzing of the bees as they flitted from flower to flower’ sort of full.

Then using his hive tool, Dave cracked the wax seal between the lid of the hive and the top super. He lifted off the lid. The entire surface of the super was covered with bees.
And suddenly, the air was full of bees in a real, meaningful, one bee every six inches all around us sort of full.

Relax, I told myself, relax. Breathe slowly. Some bee keepers used to do this without veils. Right! myself said back. They must of been crazy. I could hear bees running into my veil – soft little thuds. I enjoyed my feeling of invulnerability for almost five minutes until the first bee found its way inside my veil. A bee inside your veil is hundreds of times worse than hundreds of bees outside.

Now this was not the first time I’d had a bee inside my veil. The first time it happened, I was working one of my father’s hives. I ripped my veil off right then and there and instead of having a bee inside my veil I had an entire swarm tangled in my hair. That time I ran screaming to the lake and stuck my head in the water. My mother knelt beside me and picked bees out of my streaming hair, squishing each one as she found it. Amazingly, neither one of us was stung.

This time, I calmly announced that I had a bee under my veil and started walking rapidly up the path, beginning to untie my veil. “Wait!” Dave said from behind me. “You have bees all over your back.” He brushed at my back as we walked. When we reached the house, I ripped off my veil and Dave started looking for the bee. I could hear it, but he couldn’t see it. Finally I pulled the clasp out of my hair and shook my head. Mistake. I could still hear the bee, but now my hair was much messier. Finally, he found it when it settled to sting my head.

We put our veils back on and duct taped them to our coveralls. Then we pulled on our gloves and went back to the bee yard. Dave lifted a frame from the hive, brushed it off with his brush and handed it to me. I set it into a super on our cart and covered it to keep the bees out. Relax, I told myself. Think like a tree. It didn’t work. Soon I had another bee inside my veil. We repeated the bee clearing process without my being stung this time.

Back at the hives, the bees were really upset. I could feel their little bodies vibrating when they crawled around on my gloves. Bees clustered on the open boxes, on the honey comb exposed to the air, on the leaves and bushes beside the trail, and on our bodies.
Relax. I told myself. Relax.

Dave handed me the last frame and began restacking the supers. “I’ve got a bee in my pants,” he said, hurrying to the cart. “Let’s get out of here.” Dave had also had a bee in his pants before and had learned, like I did that panicking and removing your protective gear was not a good idea. Its really hard to run with your pants down around your ankles.

We wrapped each harvested super in a plastic bag, sucked all the air out with our vacuum and then filled the bags with carbon dioxide to kill any remaining bees. Next month, when friends come north with their honey, we’ll get out our extractor and finish stealing the honey from our bees.

Mist

2010-09-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

after days of gray
sunlight breaking through the mist
cranes cry overhead

mist fills the valley
silvers grasses with dew drops
soaks into my socks

Birth and death

2010-09-01T08:09:00.001-07:00

I think of summer as an easy time for farming. We aren’t fighting the cold and lamb death by starvation. We aren’t fighting the risks of pregnancy, labor and delivery. We aren’t constantly on the watch for metabolic diseases or worms and other parasites. If we’ve been good shepherds, the only animal deaths we face during the summer months are those we impose on the animals. Deaths we choose for them.

What kind of a disconnect exists in the brains of farmers that allows us to nurture a cute, cuddly lamb for three months and then sell it for slaughter. I could say we sell that lamb for meat, but that sanitizes the process. If I am to be completely honest, we sell it for slaughter. That’s why meat processing facilities used to be called slaughter houses.

Jiana, a young friend of ours, dissected a chicken wing at school. She came home that night and said to her parents “Do you know where that chicken came from? The grocery store!” Jiana became a vegetarian that day.

When our girls were little and we only had a few lambs each year, they always named the lambs, even the boys that we knew we wouldn’t add to the flock, and I only served “meat” not lamb or beef or heaven forbid “White Boy.” They both eventually became vegetarians for awhile. Dave and I eat very little meat, more for nutritional reasons than for ethical reasons. The girls and their families have moved back to more omnivorous life styles.

But I am always aware of the fate of our lambs. When we have a buyer, we bring the lambs in from the pasture. They circle the barn and trot through the door into the barn where it has always found warmth, security, and safety. We pen them in a corner and a Bosnian or Somali man steps forward to make his selection. We weigh the lamb and agree on a price. Then Dave helps carry the lamb to the corner of the barn yard where it’s new owner cuts the lamb’s throat.

The lamb looses consciousness in seconds bleeds to death in a minute or two. The fifteen minute process between pasture and death is much shorter than any meat processing facility can provide. Selling the lamb to a meat buyer away from my home involves herding, trucking, herding, selling, trucking, and a final herding into the abattoir.

Scientist, Temple Grandin, has worked her entire career to improve the conditions of animals at processing facilities, redesigning the building, the handling equipment, even sound and light control to keep the animals calm.

Our goal is to shorten the end of life process to minutes, to not subject our animals to the stress of transportation and to sell them from the security of their own barn yard, their own barn. Our technique assuages my guilt, but doesn’t eradicate it. I am, after all, responsible for seventy-five lamb deaths this summer, way more than would happen by those natural causes that I fight so hard against in winter and spring.

I once knew a farmer who shifted from raising beef cattle to raising strawberries. “I’d lie awake nights before taking my cattle to market,” he said. “I don’t lie awake for strawberries.” I could never raise strawberries; I don’t like weeding well enough. But I don’t like killing animals either. It is good that we sell lambs in the summer, right up until the time we put the rams and the ewes together for breeding because then the death of lambs is vivid in my mind as we begin planning for the birth of lambs.

Thoroughly wet with the rain

2010-08-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

"As soon as I was thoroughly wet through on the way home,
I became one with the weather and would not have changed the day.
It is only when one is dry that one is out of sympathy with the rain.
When one is wet through, one minds it no more than the trees do,
Having become a part of the day itself."
Sir Edward Grey

Some times we can put off working in the rain and sometimes, we can’t. Last Sunday, lamb buyers arrived with the rain clouds.

We have eleven fenced pastures. We rotate the animals through the pastures, hoping they eat the grasses down in each pasture in about a week. We return the animals to the same pasture about six weeks after they leave, giving the pasture grasses time to re-grow.

A six week rotation is our goal, but right now we have three groups of sheep rotating – fifty ewes, thirty-five lambs, and four rams. Obviously, four rams eat a lot less than fifty ewes or thirty-five lambs. So the rams usually rotate back and forth between our smallest pasture (the ram pasture) and the woods pasture that has so many trees that not much grass grows there.

The lambs go into each pasture first, to eat all the young, tasty blades of grass. After a week, we move the lambs to a new pasture and let the ewes into the pasture the lambs have just vacated to eat up the cheese plant and amaranth – species that the lambs won’t touch. Usually our rotation scheme works quite well. However, right now, the ewes are in the barn yard, the rams are in the next pasture and the lambs are in the third pasture out.

To sell a lamb, we have to put the lambs into the barn so the buyer can make a selection. First we have to move the ewes into a side pasture, move the rams into a different side pasture, and finally herd the lambs into the barnyard.

The ewes move easily, always hoping to move onto young, tasty grass. At this time of the year, just before breeding, the rams want to move anywhere that puts them closer to the ewes. They pace the fence line, anxious for the day we open the gate and allow them to mingle. The lambs, on the other hand, have not yet learned to herd on their own. They followed their mothers with no problem, but no single lamb has stepped forward as a leader. Last year, we kept Kali, the alpaca, with the lambs. But she didn’t like it when we sold a lamb and carried it off to be butchered. Unhappy alpacas can be quite vicious. Other years, Cedar the goat led the lambs (bringing to life the phrase ‘Judas goat’). But Cedar is old and struggles to keep up with the flock. We couldn’t ask him to lead the lambs to the barnyard on a daily basis. So this year, Dave and I move them without the help of a leader. On a hot day, it can be exhausting, on a cool, rainy morning, it is good exercise

Last Sunday, as we ran back and forth, circling the flock, herding the lambs closer and closer to the gate into the barnyard, it began to rain. The droplets cooled my face, saturated my windbreaker until the nylon fabric clung to my arms, and finally drenched my hair. I tasted salt and mosquito spray when I licked my lips. And yet, I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I was a wet Joanie, instead of a dry Joanie. I didn’t try to stay dry. I didn’t rush from one dry place to another dry place, hoping to avoid damp clothing, shoes, or hair. I had become a part of the rain itself, just as the sheep were..

Bad mother jerky

2010-08-27T18:58:00.001-07:00

Before we breed the sheep for next years lamb crop, we need to cull the flock. I have never been good at culling – setting aside ewes that are not good mothers or that have aged enough to have problems lambing in the spring. I can set them aside, but I have trouble with that next step - getting rid of them.

When an animal has lived beyond her useful life, we really have only four options: 1) sell her as a cull ewe to the stock yard, 2) take her to the butcher ourselves, 3) let her continue to live on the farm, but don’t breed her, 4) do nothing.

Many years we do nothing. It’s easier at the time than making any of the other three decisions. We just don’t remember the hard part until we watch that ewe staggering slowly after the rest of the flock when they change pastures or until we see how pregnancy and lambing are almost more than she can stand and we end up with a sick mom and babies that need to be bottle fed. Doing nothing in the fall means a lot more work for the shepherds during lambing.

Sometimes I choose not to breed an especially good ewe, one with a beautiful fleece or an engaging personality. We just allow her to die in her home pasture at her own time. It is like watching a beloved pet die, an exercise in patience and repeated self questioning. Is this the best thing for her?

If we have a ewe who is a bad mother, the decision is much easier. Bad mothers abandon lambs, they don’t produce enough milk and they cause problems for the shepherd. We load bad mothers into the pickup and transport them half and hour to the best butcher I’ve found. He turns old ewes into summer sausage, Italian sausage and wonderful jerky. It’s a relatively rapid, painless and delicious end to a productive life. When I allow the lambs to be born, part of the agreement I make with myself is that I will also give them a good life and a good death.

And that is why I never use option four – taking the old ewe to the stockyard. The trip is long and the end is out of my control. Even a bad mother deserves a better end than that.

Tomorrow, we will take three animals to the butcher; two have had mastitis and can no longer feed lambs adequately, and one a ewe who has had several lambs with physical problems. I will thank those ewes for their lives when we load them into the pickup. We will give thanks again when their meat appears at the dinner table. And when we lamb this winter, I will give thanks a third time for having had the wisdom to pick bad mother jerky instead of bad mothers.

Golden days

2010-08-23T09:10:00.001-07:00

By late summer, the golden rod are a glorious golden yellow, the sumac are beginning to turn a deep russet and the southern most leaves of the maples are shifting from green to orange. Intellectually, I know that fall is still a month away, but I am not ready for it. I am ready to be done weeding and done watching the grass grow faster than Dave can cut it. I am ready for the mosquitoes to be gone. But I am not ready for the end of summer. I need some more of those lazy days that are almost too hot for work, days that beg you to go swimming, days when an ice cream cone with a scoop of coffee ice cream seems right next to paradise. Days when my book calls to me much louder than the weed whacker, the lawn mower or the chain saw.

I remember those days from childhood. Summer recreation was over. No more bike trips to school to make craft projects. Swimming lessons were over; so we could swim during the hot time of the day instead of in the cold mornings and we often took a picnic lunch or dinner out to the lake with our swim suits and towels. But best of all, we could read. Weekly or at the least biweekly trips to the library kept us well supplied with books. I read Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Follow My Leader. I found new authors – Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Stewart, Alistair MacLean, Andre Norton.

As an adult, I know that we still need to find more hay for the sheep. We need to put up fire wood for this winter and that means cutting lots of small, very dead trees whose wood is absolutely dry. We need to can tomatoes, freeze broccoli, and harvest squash and potatoes. I need to look at the farmers market for more of those gigantic onions grown just across the fields from us and store them in the cellar along with the cans of tomatoes and honey and syrup.

As an adult, I know we need to do all those things before the temperatures drop and the cold winds blow, but the golden days of summer have caught me in their hold, and for this afternoon, I lay back with an old Alistair MacLean book and relax.

Hawks and gophers

2010-08-12T13:37:00.001-07:00

Photo by J.R. Douglas, from www.weforanimals.com

For the last few days, a red tailed hawk has been screaming as it soars over our pastures. I really didn’t think that a hawk could carry off a seventy pound lamb, but we have a few closer to fifty pounds, so I was worried. Turns out that the hawks eat squirrels, gophers, and mice - never something as a large as a lamb, not even a baby lamb. So I can listen to their screams with enjoyment. I can watch them soar over the pastures and know that they are using their extraordinary vision to spot chipmunks, squirrels and gophers, their favorite foods.

Anything that eats gophers is fine with me. We struggle with pocket gopher mounds in all our fields. Gophers especially like alfalfa roots, so our hayfields are a perfect habitat. Gophers dig holes and leave the dirt outside the hole on the surface of the ground. When we drive over the field in our haybine, the triangular cutting blades cut into anything they encounter – alfalfa plants, thistles, and piles of dirt left by the gophers. But the dirt dulls the blades, shortening their useful lifetime. After cutting dirt, Dave has to replace broken or dull cutting blades – a real waste of time.

Most farmers trap or poison their gophers because of the amount of damage one animal can do to a field and a haybine. We used to poison ours, but weren’t very successful at it. Now we hire a retired farmer to do the job. He sections our field in a four wheeler right after we finish baling hay. When he finds a gopher mound, he digs a hole in it and inserts a trap.

The township still pays a bounty for gophers. Trappers catch the animal and then have to save a piece to prove that they have trapped it. One year it will be right ears, another year, left front feet. The Pelican Township board meets at the Pelican Rapids Public Library. One day, I made coffee for a program in the meeting room. I opened the coffee can off the top shelf, and found it full of mummified gopher feet. Someone had been working hard and brought his gopher feet into the Town Board for the bounty. You can’t get rich trapping gophers, but you can earn the undying gratitude of a farmer or give fodder for nightmares to a group of people waiting for a cup of coffee.

One of the exciting things about planting prairie grasses instead of alfalfa is that pocket gophers don’t like grass roots as well as alfalfa roots, so maybe we’ll have fewer gophers. Another exciting aspect is that bull snakes like prairies and they like pocket gophers. If we plant some of our hay fields to prairie grasses, we may be able to control the pocket gophers with bull snakes waiting patiently on gopher mounds and red tailed hawks screaming overhead.

Another kind of beauty

2010-08-03T15:21:00.001-07:00

I walked across the pastures, my eyes searching for flowers. Bumble bees visited the fat red clover blossoms with their tiny pools of nectar at the base of each petal. Small spheres of white clover were almost hidden by the grass, their leaves the three leafed clovers of legend. In the distance, feathery stems of deep purple alfalfa shifted in the wind. I stepped through the gate from high grass to the freshly cropped turf of the pasture the sheep were presently grazing. There it was, a small, star-shaped vertebra blooming in the grass, it’s central hole dark against the bleached white bone. A few steps beyond it lay a leg bone, long and thin, knobby cartilaginous ends gnawed away by whatever animal had dragged the bones from their resting place in the woods. Beyond the leg bone, two ribs nestled in the grass, curved slivers of white in the verdant green.
I gathered the bones as I walked. These bones were from a lamb - small, almost dainty, beautiful in their color, in their sculptural form. Not so much parts of a dead animal as pieces of art, waiting to be recognized. Art that had lived beneath the wool, the skin, the muscle of a bouncing, cuddly lamb. A lamb who had died, for some reason, lack of attention by the shepherdess most likely, but a lamb who was not wasted. Worm food, fox food, fertilizer. And finally, simple beauty. Flowers of a different kind.

Bats in the bedroom

2010-07-28T18:04:00.001-07:00

I woke from a deep sleep to the distinctive shush, shush of a bat circling our bedroom. If I was home alone, I would open the window and wait, watching through the almost non-existent light, until the bat flew out the window. But Dave was home, and so I allowed my instincts to take over. I didn’t actually cover my head with the sheet and shriek, but I did wake him.

“We’ve got a bat.” Dave immediately reached over our head and opened the skylight. Then he turned on the bedside light. Sure enough, we had a bat. It swooped through our bedroom, missing the hanging plants and the beams up near the ceiling. It seemed to be just above my head, circling, circling, but never noticing the open window.

Our bedroom ceiling is full of odd planes and angles. The skylight, although large, opens only six inches. You would have to approach it at just the right angle for your sonar to fade into open air rather than bounce back off of glass or wood or sheetrock. “Maybe it can’t find the opening, ” I said after several more circuits. My eyes were focused on the skylight.

Then suddenly, it was gone. Dave turned out the light and climbed back into bed. I saw the flicker of a bat outside, beyond our window. “Is that it?” Dave asked. I shook my head in the darkness, virtually certain that the bat had not gone out the window.

After a few minutes of silence, the shush, shush of bat wings resumed. “I don’t think it likes the light, and I don’t think it can hear the open skylight.” I said. “Maybe we should leave the lights off and open a regular window.”

Dave turned the light back on. “I can’t see in the dark,’ he said, just as the bat threw itself against a screen and dropped to the floor, motionless. “Get me a pair of leather gloves.”

I slid out of bed and crouched to cross the room. When I returned, the bedroom door was closed, light streamed from the crack under the door. I opened the door a sliver and passed the gloves through, the bat was back to circling.

If Dave wouldn’t listen to my ideas, I didn’t have to feel bad about retreating from the scene. Feigned disinterest was much easier than standing in the bedroom waiting for the bat to tangle itself in my hair. I know intellectually that a bat would be unlikely to find my hair either attractive or a possible exit from the room, but the stories of bats in people’s hair still linger at the bottom of my mind, chittering like little demons, draining my courage.

Two minutes later, Dave emerged from the bedroom and closed the door behind himself. “Bat’s gone, room’s full of mosquitoes.” he muttered, “I opened a regular window.”

We gathered clean sheets from the linen closet and bedded down in the guest room. No mosquitoes, no bats. Only the problem of how the bat got into the house in the first place kept me from sleeping. But that was a problem for tomorrow. Bats in the house wasn’t nearly as urgent a problem as bats in the bedroom.

Single white male

2010-07-27T12:02:00.001-07:00

Single white male looking for doe eyed female.
Hair: long, white, lustrous.
Horns: magnificent.
Hobbies: long walks in the woods, Emily Dickenson and Nora Roberts (paperbacks taste best), and head banging.

Sir PeesaLot is a six year old angora buck. He has a beautiful lustrous, white fleece, wonderful swooping horns, and an übermale personality. His favorite activity really is crashing head on into trees.

We bought him from a farm in southern Minnesota because of his marvelous fleece. We carried him home in a dog kennel in the back of our station wagon. Even with towels on the kennel floor, we ended up with quite a lot of goat urine in our old car – thus his name.

After six years, I am no longer breeding my old angora ewes, and it is unfair for Sir PeesaLot to wait around all year for no reward. No wonder he crashes into trees. So we’re looking for a home for a horny, horned, angora buck. If you can use him, all you have to do is transport him to your farm. For a good time, you can contact the farm at wwnojd@gmail.com.

What is a farm?

2010-07-22T09:41:00.000-07:00

What is a farm? An obvious definition might be a place where you grow food (animals, vegetables, grains) with a lot of hard work and luck. But not everyone agrees with that.

A year ago, we received a letter from a government office, the Farm Service Agency, saying that since we hadn’t registered our crops for several years, they were declaring us not a farm. We actually had only registered our crops once, about fifteen years ago, when we applied for an incentive payment for having such high quality fleeces that we could sell them for $6 per pound when the wool pool was only paying $0.25 per pound.

Turns out that every year we have to make an appointment to go into the Farm Service Agency office and draw a map of our crops or the FSA won’t consider us a farm. I wonder if drawing on the map is the only criterium they require for being a farm.

The IRS has different criteria. One is that they require us to make a profit three years out of five to be a working farm. We struggle most years to meet that goal. If our lambs and fleeces sell well, and if we don’t have to buy hay, and if we don’t have any veterinary bills, we can make a profit. But if any of those things are not optimum, we don’t make a profit and we risk being audited, meaning that we have to prove to the IRS that we are a farm, receipt by receipt.

And then there is the government office that determines our property tax. If we can prove we are farming, we pay agricultural homestead rates on our land. If not, we pay for a suburban house with an eighty acre yard.

The most aggravating definition of a farm was the Federal grant program that insisted we had to be a big farm before they would help us improve our energy efficiency, before they would help us become greener. I don’t necessarily think that the government should be in the business of handing out grants to farmers, but if they do, it should be applied to any size farm, not just to the farms that are so large and successful that fifty percent of the farmer’s gross income comes from the farm.

The year we received an incentive payment for our high quality fleeces was financially the most successful year in the history of our farm. The year we raised seventy-five lambs out of thirty-five ewes was emotionally the most fulfilling year – we had surpassed all the farming goals set out by the books on how to raise sheep. The year our daughters and their boy friends and my nephew all worked for us was the most fun year in the history of our farm. Each year was best for different reasons.

So what is my definition of a farm? It’s the place where we enjoy what we’re doing, where we are emotionally fulfilled, where we raise food without degrading the land or the atmosphere, and in a good year, where we earn more money than we spend.

Farm improvements

2010-07-20T14:55:00.000-07:00

Dave discovered two federal grant programs for farmers – one to help pay to improve the energy efficiency of your operation and the other to help pay for installation of solar, wind or geothermal systems on the farm. We were especially interested in the energy efficiency grant because we want to shift from raising alfalfa hay to raising prairie grasses hay. The alfalfa needs to be fertilized yearly or at least biennially, and needs to be replanted about every five years. To replant alfalfa, we either have to spray the fields with herbicides and no till drill the seed into the ground, or we have to plow, drag, fertilize, plant a grain, harvest, plow, fertilize, plant alfalfa. The prairie grasses, once established, should grow well indefinitely with only mowing and occasional weed control. It doesn’t need fertilizing or spraying for weeds once the crop is established.

The prairie grass seems like an environmentally good option for our farm. It will require no ongoing applications of herbicide, use less diesel fuel and cause less soil compaction. With the ground continuously covered by grasses and forbs, there will be little or no wind or water erosion and then the black top soil will improve year after year. Instead of releasing tons of carbon into the atmosphere by making fertilizer and herbicides and burning diesel the prairie will sequester several tons per acre each year

The second program is also interesting. We already have a wind generator that produces as much electricity as we consume. We also have solar hot water. We’ve been considering setting up a ground source system for heating and cooling our house. Right now we heat with wood and cool with natural breezes. Some day, Dave and I may not be able to cut and split six cords of wood a year, which makes ground source energy a possible alternative.

Ground source heating and cooling is not without problems. I worry about the long term heating of the ground and the pump and dump systems that remove water from a lake or from a deep underground aquifer and then just dump the warmed or cooled water . Dave worries about the necessity of using electrical back up heating, a really inefficient way to heat a house.

But our hopes and concerns are irrelevant for these two grants. The first qualification a farmer must have for either grant is that you must receive 50% of your gross income from your farm. We know a lot of farmers, and only two are the sole wage earner of their family and work as full time farmers. These grants are not meant for folks like us.

Animal babies

2010-07-12T13:41:00.001-07:00

Photo by Jennifer Ellison

My lambs are all getting big. They don’t look like babies anymore. In fact, some of them are bigger than their mothers and they can all take care of themselves. They just eat grass and drink water from the water tank, safe within the confines of our pastures, protected by a four foot stock fence and three strands of barbed wire.

Today I was reminded that there are still young animals on our farm, just outside the pastures and the barnyard. My lunch was interrupted by a rhythmic tapping just outside the door. I pressed my face to the screen and waited. A three inch high woodpecker hopped into view, tested the aluminum door frame for bugs, and, disappointed, moved on to try the siding on the other side of the door. I had never seen such a small woodpecker. The red on the top of his head was no bigger than my fingernail.

I glimpsed more babies on our quarter mile driveway. Three turkeys scuttled across the road, followed by three little, dull gray pullets. They immediately blended into the underbrush at the side of the road. Just as I moved out of the trees, a young deer bounded across the drive in front of me and then ran along side the field, its golden brown coat thick and healthy looking. At the top of the driveway, a young kit fox trotted out of the high grass and crossed the road, its bushy russet tail streaming out behind it.

If I had a day job, I would have missed those babies. I am so lucky to work at home and have a flexible schedule. Because of that flexible schedule, I can take the time to visit Kieran, my grandson, the animal baby closest to my heart.

Day lilies blooming in July

2010-07-10T06:23:00.001-07:00

Some things just happen, like day lilies blooming in July. I don’t weed the day lilies; I don’t water them. But they come up year after year and bloom ferociously, each flower open for only a single day.

Some farm activities are like that. The grass grows, the alfalfa blossoms, the rains come and the sun shines – all without my help. But most of the rest of farming takes work and planning on our part. This year, the exception has been finding strong bodies to help with baling.

Over the years, we’ve taught dozens of young people how to bale hay. First they learn to stand on a moving hay wagon without falling. Next they learn to use a hay hook to pull the bales off the baler and onto the wagon. Finally, they learn to stack the bales in alternating layers on the wagon. We pay them for their work, and they work hard. Everyone is glad when we finish baling.

For the past few years, our balers have been young Somali men, high school and junior high students. When the hay is cut and the sun shines, we begin to get calls “Are you baling today?” They’re willing, eager to work, and appear, just like day lilies blooming in July. It’s nice to have things just happen.

Laurel's birth day

2010-07-05T14:51:00.001-07:00

Thirty years ago My daughter Laurel was born on the hottest day of the summer. Dave brought me three books to read while I was in the hospital – all about raising sheep.

We had moved to a five acre piece of land in the country in March. We tapped maple trees for syrup, and were raising baby chicks. We toyed with the idea of becoming farmers. Our land had a house, three old chicken coops, a small feed shed, a quarter mile of driveway, four acres of woods and a small square acre of grass where a barn and barnyard used to stand.

The store where I bought wool for spinning had just closed. We could buy a few sheep and raise wool so that I would no longer need to buy it at a store. The idea fit right in with our deelusions of self sufficiency.

That summer we bought a Rototiller for the gardens and for that acre of grassland. The next spring we planted a quarter acre of alfalfa, a quarter acre of pasture grass, a quarter acre of oats and a quarter acre of field corn. The tilling took several passes to break up the grass. Dave planted the oats, grass and alfalfa seed with a hand powered seeder we found at an auction. We planted the corn using the traditional stick a stick in the ground, drop in a seed, cover the hole technique. It seemed to take forever.

No matter how fast we weeded, the weeds faster, big, lush, voracious. The only thing that grew more rapidly than the weeds, were the mosquitoes, especially in the corn. By the time the corn was chest high, the weeds were definitely winning. We called in reinforcements. A high school student accepted our offer of a job. I took him out to the corn patch, showed him the difference between corn and weed and took my place weeding several rows away from him. At lunch time, he declined our offer of a chef salad with home grown lettuce, went home for lunch, and never returned.

We stopped raising our own field corn in part because I don’t like the idea of spraying our farm with an herbicide. I’ve let my shade gardens naturalize themselves because I can’t keep the ground ivy, the dame’s rocket, and the European bellflower under control. Only in the vegetable garden and my sun garden do we still continue the battle. The vegetable garden is set out in rows, which means we can use the tiller to accomplish a lot. Weeding is hard work. I know if I could just for once get ahead of it, I could pull them all, but somehow, it never happens. Even the places that look like I’ve pulled all the weeds are six inches deep in grass, thistle, lambs quarters or pig weed in another three weeks. It’s a never ending battle.

The sun garden, which I planted for Laurel’s wedding and expanded for Amber’s, is not tillable. So summer after summer, we pull grasses, daisies and thistles. There aren’t nearly as many thistles now as there were in that first field of corn, so we must be making progress. But the grasses and daisies are all descendents of the first grasses and daisies, growing from the extensive root systems that I never completely eradicate, or from the millions of seeds that somehow escape my weeding.

Laurel’s birth was the beginning of sheep in the barn and alfalfa in the field. Her wedding was one of the reasons I planted a sun garden. As I weed, early in coolness of the morning on the anniversary of her birth, I can blame her for my presence in the garden on my hands and knees pulling grasses, but I also have to thank her for my presence there when a humming bird buzzes me and then pauses to sip from a brilliant red monarda flower

Sound of the wind

2010-07-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was hot! During the night, the wind cooled everything back down. When the wind rushes through the trees for more than a few hours, my mind sort of loses interest in it and I don’t even notice the sound.

After we put up our wind generator, one of my friends complained that it had ruined his view. When I went to his house to check, I could see the generator on a distant hill. It had, in fact, changed his view. When we planned to put the generator on the highest hill on our property, we hadn’t even considered that it would have an effect on other people. We couldn’t see it from our house, a copse of trees hid it from view.

We didn’t usually hear the generator from our house either, until the Christmas Eve night in a blizzard that a bolt on the generator mount broke. Suddenly it sounded like a freight train was roaring down the hill, headed straight for our house. The lights flickered and the upstairs lights went out.

What was happening? Amber and I bundled up and struggled up the hill against the wind. We kept our bodies low, unconsciously hoping to be missed if the tower fell. I tried tightening the brakes on the generator, but the blades were spinning so fast that sparks flew out from the motor casing. We ran back to the house, called the power company and the generator repair man.

The power company man came on a snowmobile, escorted by two of our neighbors at whose homes the road became impassable. He disconnected the generator from the electrical system. The repair man called from his Christmas dinner and told us to put on the brakes. The night returned to normal, lights on in the house and only the sound of the blizzard rushing through the trees.

When the generator was repaired, the only sound of the electricity we were generating for ourselves and the other members of our electrical co-op was a soft hum.

Then, last month, another neighbor caught me at the grocery store. “I’m real sorry to say this, I really like it that you make green energy, ” he said, “but the sound of your wind generator is driving me crazy.” For the past six months, the generator had been noisier. A bearing was going and the repair man hadn’t had time to replace it yet. But when Dave and I heard the drone, it was just a reminder that we needed to get a hold of the repair man again.

I knew what our neighbor meant. Once you identify something as an irritant, it can become impossibly obnoxious. To us, the sound of the generator, even with a faulty bearing, meant pennies in the bank and the tons of coal that aren’t being dug out of the ground in North Dakota, converted to carbon dioxide by the electrical plants and released to the environment. To our neighbor, it was just an irritant. We called the repairman again and shut down the machine. We want to be good neighbors.

Last week, my friend who had first complained about the wind mill in the view from his living room window stopped me to ask about the generator. “Why isn’t it running?” he asked. Another friend mentioned that she used our generator to tell how windy a day it was and what direction the wind was coming from.

I miss the gentle hum of the wind generator, the feeling that I can use as much electricity as I want on windy days and not hurt the environment. As soon as the repairman replaces the bearing, we’ll let off the brake and start up the generator again. It will be nice to hear the wind blow and think of the green energy flowing from our hill top out into Otter Tail County

When the wind blows

2010-06-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

The wind in the country is an amazing thing. A good wind is the best way to dry forty acres of hay or drive off the mosquitoes that make working in the garden so impossible,
but it can destroy a barn.

Sometimes the wind doesn’t do what you’d expect. A friend with a very old barn on his property called his brothers the day after our fifty mile an hour winds. “I have some bad news,” he told them. “You know that big wind we had, well it didn’t take down the barn.” That job was still ahead of them on their schedule for the summer. But on our barn, it tore off shingles for the third year in a row.

That wind left our peonies in full glorious bloom, but blackened and withered the leaves on the clematis. It knocked over tomato plants but didn’t bother the potatoes growing in the next row. We’ve seen entire field of sweet corn lying sideways after the wind. When we propped the stalks back up, they recovered. That same wind dried an entire field of alfalfa in twenty-four hours, a new record on our farm at least.

When the wind blows, clouds scud across the sky and I lie on my back and watch, hypnotized by the motion. When the wind blows, the birds can stand still in the sky. When the wind blows, we generate enough electricity to completely power our house and farm. All in all, it is a good day on our farm when the wind blows.

Beyond alfalfa hay

2010-06-23T06:14:00.001-07:00

After who knows how many years of harvesting well washed hay in Juune, Dave and I are considering other options. All month we worry about the hay. Should we cut now? Dave has to go to work in three weeks, two weeks, one week. But it keeps raining every day, every other day, every third day. Should we cut now? Should we turn the hay that has been beaten into the ground by rain? Should we turn it again?

We once read that you should cut the hay at the best time for protein, 10% bloom, and not worry about a little rain. But in this part of Minnesota, a little rain always seems to be followed by a little more and then a little more.

This year Dave took the first three week of June off from work so that we would be sure to be done with haying by the time he had to leave. We cut the last field June 17 and put the last bale in the barn June 19, 33 hours before he left for work.

There must be a better way to do it.

So, we are exploring the idea of prairie hay. Prairie grasses have deep roots, better to with stand hot dry summers and cold dry winters. They sequester carbon dioxide, one of the major green house gasses. They hold the soil extremely well to both wind and water erosion. It seems like planting our hayfields to prairie grasses might be a good idea.

But we don’t know enough. We don’t know when the grasses are best harvested for hay, how palatable that hay is to sheep, or how nutritious it is. We don’t even know that our old hay fields are fertile enough for prairie grasses to grow well.

So today we began our research. Dave started studying palatability and nutritional quality. I looked for seed sources and prices ($1200 per acre at one site). And this evening, we walked the restored prairie in the waterfowl production area south of our farm, in some places, I was neck deep in grass. The sun was low on the horizon, setting the tiny yellow flowers of one of the grasses aglow. Big swaths of sweet yellow clover frosted the hillsides with a light yellow haze. A turkey scuttled away , moving surprisingly rapidly for such a big bodied bird. A yellow and black meadowlark sang its heart out on a nearby willow. We picked flowers and grasses to take home for identification.

After we got home I spent an hour bent over samples and identification guides.
We found big bluestem, only about a foot tall, and Gray’s sedge in bloom. We found white campion and crown vetch and tall meadow rue, all blooming. The wild rose, the Showy Goldenrod and the Joe Pye weed aren’t even budding yet. We will have to walk this piece of land again and again this summer, learning the plants that thrive there and when they bloom. We will talk to hay experts and prairie experts and sustainable farming experts. Only then will we have some idea of the possibilities that prairie hay presents to us.

Content

2010-06-21T16:40:00.001-07:00

We finished baling last night at 10:00.

The moon was half a silver disc glowing behind the clouds. We watched it grow brighter and brighter through the barn window as evening turned into night.

It was a wonderful night. We have finally gotten this poor rained on crop of hay into the barn. The Dairy Queen, which provides our end of haying meal stayed open an extra five minutes to feed our hungry crew. I saw a fox kit dash across the road on my way into town for burgers. And I saw my first firefly of the summer on my way back home, the car full of the mouth watering scent of hamburgers and French fries.

Dave and I laid our exhausted bodies into bed at 10:30, completely at peace with the world. No bothers at all. If it rained, we would be fine.

Tomorrow, other chores will rear their horny heads, other thorny problems will erupt, but for now, we are content.