Cold lamb

"I always slow down when I get to the barn door," I explained to Abi as we walked toward the barn. "If the ewe is a first time Mom and is frightened or if she's have a hard delivery and she's anxious, I don't want to scare her out of the barn. It's much easier on her babies to be in the barn in this cold."

21 orange was neither frightened nor anxious. She stood just inside the door, a gangly white lamb standing beside her. 21 orange licked her lamb. The lamb shuddered.

Cold lamb! Not surprising, it was still below zero outside.

I grabbed a couple of towels from the cabinet and handed them to Abi,  then  hung a heat lamp over a pen and turned on the light. I untied the corner ties on the front panel of the pen and fluffed up the straw on the floor. Then I picked up the new lamb and carried it to the pen. I walked slowly, backwards, holding the lamb down for 21 orange to sniff and follow. "Come on Mom," I murmured. "We'll get you into a nice warm pen."

21 orange is an old ewe; she knew the routine. When I set her baby down and moved away, she walked right into the pen and began licking him again. I gestured Abi in after him. "Dry him off with the towel." Once the lamb was dry, I cut his umbilical cord and dipped it in iodine. Then I stripped milk from his mother's teats. Abi filled a bucket with water and hung it on the pen wall. I added a slice of hay.The lamb was still shivering, so we hung a second heat lamp.

When we returned with the barn to introduce Dave to our newest addition, the lamb was still shivering.  I ran back to the house for a thermometer and a lamb bottle. Dave milked 21 orange into a jar while I took the lamb's temperature. Normal. The shivering was probably due to the cold, not to an inability to keep his temperature up, a problem that has haunted us for several years. If we could get him nursing, he'd be fine.

Dave put the lamb onto his mother's nipple, holding mom in place with his shoulder and the lamb in place with his hands and knees. The lamb sucked a little, but got distracted easily. Finally, Abi poured the fresh milk into the bottle and held the lamb while I fed him. He nursed well. When we left the barn his shivers were almost gone.

Waiting for lambs - learning to dye

Abi, a high school senior, loves knitting and wool. She came to stay at the farm this week to learn about raising sheep. It should have been a perfect time-  one week into lambing, the barn should have been full of new babies. We should be cutting umbilical cords, checking for third lambs in mother's uterus', feeding lambs and their moms in their pens. We might even have had a bottle lamb to feed. We should be busy. Very busy.

This week, however, no one has lambed. We have no bottle lambs. In fact, no lambs have been born since February 7. All we have to do is check the sheep every three hours and that doesn't fill up much of a day. So Abby and I have been playing with wool. We skirted and washed a couple of fleeces on Sunday. On Monday, we dyed a fleece navy blue and began experimenting with space dyed yarns.

Most yarns are dyed before they are spun. Color variations are a part of the spinning process. But space dyed yarns have two or more color variations that are created by adding color after the yarn is spun. Sometimes the variations are simple but regular and produce a regular pattern in the knitted garment.

Sometimes the variations are complex and regular, but the knitted garment doesn't necessarily reflect that regularity. The regularity makes it easier to reproduce the pattern again and again on different skeins of yarn.

Sometimes the dye patterns are very complex. Abi introduced me to Koigu yarns on the Internet. They have absolutely wonderful color variations. We decided that reproducing those yarns would be fun. I got out my old space dyeing experiments for examples, but I'd never tried any space dyeing with such complex patterns.  We spent the entire day adding six or eight different colors to a skein of yarn. Then we steamed the yarn to set the color, let it cool enough that we could judge what we had created to learn what worked well and what didn't, and then began on the next skein. In spite of short breaks to check the sheep and eat, we only finished three skeins. Time flew.

 Space dyeing yarns is addictive. We wanted to do more. The knitting that Abby had seen from Koigu yarns had each stitch a different color. Those yarns come in dyelots of 22 skeins. That means that they only guarantee that 22 skeins will knit up in exactly the same collection of colors. They must have found some way to make their seemingly random color choices reproducible.

Dave helped us design a  machine to make our space dyeing more repeatable. We finished it last night. Today we'll try to create a repeatable pattern in lots of colors, while we wait for lambs.

Surprise!

                                           photo by Amber Walker

Saturday morning, I woke to my grandson Jasper's shouts.
"Grandma, there are two babies in the barn!"

I had just been out there, four hours earlier, and decided that no one looked ready to lamb. No one even looked as if they would lamb before Jasper and Amber had to go home on Sunday. Even thirty years of lambing isn't enough to allow me to recognize a ewe about to go into labor. You'd think I'd have learned something after all those years.

Of course, after the first ewe lambed, I expect new babies every time I go out to the barn. I look for ewes  with sunken areas in front of their hip bones. We have three old ewes who look like that, but I'm pretty sure one of them isn't even pregnant and none of them has lambed in the last six days. I look for ewes who are reluctant to get up when I open the barn door in the morning. Lots of them exhibit that behavior, but so do I when Dave turns on the light to dress in the morning, and I'm certainly not pregnant. I look for really big, obviously pregnant  sheep, but most of them are in that state.

That's why we check the sheep every three to four hours, because we can't predict when a ewe will go into labor. It seems, like Jasper, I'll just be surprised when I find new babies in the barn.

Connecting people with the land

I was at a workshop for women farmers when someone asked "How do we show people how important prairies, grasslands and farms are?" The answer was to find ways to connect people to the land.

We did that when we invited people to come help shear our sheep. For years we have had volunteers help catch sheep, trim hooves, vaccinate sheep, and shirt fleeces. They always make the day interesting and easier. We've gone through a lot of volunteers in thirty years. We've all aged, some have moved away and others have lost interest. This year, I sent out a call for volunteers on the Northcroft Farm Facebook page and also to my fiber email list. We were astounded by the response.

Twenty people embraced the idea of spending a day wrestling sheep and playing with wool. The temperature peaked at eight degrees outside, but most of us skirted fleeces without gloves. The wool was still warm and our fingers softened with lanolin as we sorted the dirty bits from the clean.

                                           photo by Kate Andrews

By 3 P.M. all the sheep had their vaccinations, their hooves trimmed, and their fleeces removed. All the fleeces had been weighed, skirted and hauled to the wool shed. The sheep had been fed and the barn bedded with fresh straw. The volunteers returned home, some with beautiful fleeces, all with red cheeks and a better appreciation of a flock of sheep and their farm.

Why are they important?

                                                          Goldenrod in our new prairie

Why is a prairie important? A grassland? A woodland? A small family farm?

They don't gross a lot of money. They don't employ a  lot of people. They don't spend money on advertising or lobbying.

Prairies, grasslands, woodlands, and small to medium size family farms are some of the wealthiest, most important pieces of land in the state. They are major reasons Minnesota is such a beautiful, healthy state. Healthy in terms of blue waters, tall trees, rolling prairies. That base, in healthy water, woods and grasslands ensures diversity in plants, birds, mammals, insects and even beneficial bacteria.

Small to medium farms with windbreaks of trees and shrubs not only provide food and shelter for a vast diversity of birds and other animals; they also decrease wind erosion and water run off into streams and lakes, restocking the water in natural underground reservoirs. The big  farms plow their fields from fence row to fence row, leaving no habitat for animals and no barriers to erosion.

Natural areas allow for great diversity of plant species that invites great diversity of animal life. This diversity is a sure sign of a healthy ecosystem. This diversity doesn't occur in cities, suburbs or on big farms. In cities and suburbs, there isn't enough open ground to absorb rain and snow melt.  Cities and suburbs select for a few hundred different species of plants, limiting the number of animals in the area. Large farms have plenty of open ground, but nothing to slow and trap the water.

Perhaps the major difference between small and large farms is that the large farms are corporations and behave as such.  The decision makers are separated from the results of their actions on the land. Most aren't actually farmers, and many don't even live on the land for which they are responsible.

In 2014, there were 3800 dairy farms in Minnesota. Ninety two percent of those farms had fewer than 200 cows. A corporation is hoping to build an 8800 cow dairy in Stevens County. It is projected to use 100 million gallons of water yearly and to produce 75 million gallons of liquid manure. The neighbors are upset.

 Small and medium size farmers live and work with their neighbors on a daily basis. They have history with their land. They have to care for the land. It is what has sustained them in the past and will continue to sustain them in the future. They keep water and wealth and healthy land in the community. If a farmer abuses his land, it will no longer produce the crops from which he earns a living. If a corporation abuses their land to the point where it does not produce as well, they sell it. Corporate farms concentrate the wealth into the hands of a few individuals. They suck water and wealth and healthy land out of a community.

The small to medium farms, the grasslands, the woodlands and the prairies keep Minnesota beautiful and healthy in all senses of the word.

Potential

By the end of January, our sheep are very pregnant. They spend most of their time laying around and eating. When I look at them, I see potential.

I spend the last weeks before shearing skirting and washing fleeces. The wool shed must be mostly empty so that we can store  35 garbage bags full of newly shorn fleeces there.

Last years unsold fleeces will go to the woolen mill to be transformed into yarn. This year, I'll combine gray and white fleeces to produce  a light gray two ply 100% wool yarn.  I spread each fleece out on my skirting table and reassess it. Is the fleece clean or is it full of tiny bits of alfalfa or weed seeds? Does it have a lot of little short pieces of wool, the second cuts that the shearer makes to clean up how the sheep looks when he's done with her? Is it full of manure tags or fine dirt from a windy day last fall?

I can't fix any of those flaws for last year's fleeces. By the time we reach shearing day, I can really only change the way we skirt this years fleeces. I just hope that we coated the sheep early enough in the fall so that their fleeces aren't full of little bits of veggies, that we kept the pastures weed free, that we had no dust storms, and that Tom, our shearer, remembers that we don't care about bits of extra wool on our sheep but that we do care about those second cuts in our fleeces.

Next Saturday, we'll shear our sheep, releasing all that potential. Shearing day is sort of like my birthday crossed with the days when we were kids and our report cards came out. The clean fleeces without seeds or veggies or manure or dust give me such pleasure. The dirty fleeces remind me that next year I can do better.

As Tom runs his shears across a ewes belly, down her legs, and around to her backbone, I watch breathless for the minute he steps aside, shoos the sheep to her feet and out of the way. Her fleece lies on the floor, inside out,  glistening in the shadowed light of the barn, beautiful, fragrant and full of possibilities.

Our connection to Nature

                                                                                    photo by Morning Bray Farm

Dave and I listen to the Thomas Jefferson Hour on North Dakota Public Radio. It is a weekly conversation with President Thomas Jefferson and then a conversation with Clay Jenkinson, the Jeffersonian scholar who channels Jefferson. It is always a fascinating program, either for the history we learn or for the political questions discussed.

Yesterday morning, Thomas Jefferson told the story of a Christmas when as a young man  he slept in the attic of a friend's house. Water dripped through the roof and ruined his pocket watch and the rats carried off his garters and some sheet music. Jefferson commented that although it was unfortunate that those things happened, they weren't unusual, the people of that time were closely connected to Nature.

Today, most urban and suburban people have lost that connection to nature, but in some ways, rural people haven't.  We certainly don't have leaks in the ceiling of our bedroom or rats carrying off articles of clothing. But we do interact with nature on a daily basis. Someone has to feed and water the sheep no matter what the temperature or wind chill. The radio announcers have been warning against going outside all day because of dangerous cold, but we walked the dog and went for a run. This evening, because there was a full moon and the sky was clear, we dressed in our warmest clothes, took a thermos of cocoa adulterated with Grand Marnier, and sat out in the yard to watch the moon rise over the hills and the trees.

We set a timer to remind ourselves to go outside because even in the midst of nature, we often don't really see what's happening beyond the walls of the house. As we sat, just around the corner from the bite of the wind, we relaxed, sipped cocoa and chatted. We discussed possibilities for the section of field that has been too wet the last few summers. We tried to figure out exactly where the moon would show through the trees, and we appreciated the light mist in the air - a low, fast traveling cloud that dissipated just as the moon rose. Then we admired the view -  the golden globe of the moon shining through stark, black trees, and were thankful for our connection to Nature.