Fallen leaves

The walnut leaves turned from green to gold, and after the freeze, lost their connection to the branch and vanished on the wind. The walnut fruits themselves are rotting in a bucket of water on the back deck. Next week, I’ll simmer them for a couple of hours and strain the dye liquor from the nuts.

Walnut is a substantive dye. That means I can dye wool with only the dye liquor, no added mordant. I usually get a pale brown color when I dye with walnuts, but my friend Kate discovered that she can get a beautiful deep brown color by soaking the walnut fruit in water for a long time. I’m perfectly willing to wait until next week for a deep brown dye bath. After all, I’ve waited all summer, since the leaves first appeared, for the trees to produce nuts. What’s another week after the leaves have fallen?

In the dark

photo by Dave Ellison

It’s dark when we take Newton for his last walk of the day. I like to walk in the dark. We leave the house lights behind us and head up the drive way, feeling the path through our feet. Eventually, an area of paler dark appears at the edge of the woods, arched over by branches. Next the stars appear through the trees. Newton is a pale blur on the road, I locate him by the sound of his dog tags. One night last week, a coyote howled, and then a second. It sounded as if they were right outside our pasture fence.

Our sheep were all in the far pasture, the one without a top wire of barbed wire. I had just talked to a friend who lost nine lambs to coyotes. “I’ll get the head lights,” Dave said and turned back toward the house.I finished walking Newton and then headed out into the pastures. I could see Dave’s head light bobbing in the south central pasture, but I couldn’t see the sheep. I followed the fence lines down and met him at the gate. The ewes followed him, puzzled but not worried. They circled around, confused by the lights. I went wide, trying to get behind the sheep without spooking them and a few turned to follow me. This could be the beginning of a mass exodus back to the pasture from which they had just come. “Call them!” I shouted to Dave.

“Hay ewes.” The stragglers turned and followed him through the next gate. I continued on out to the far pasture, sweeping my head from side to side as I walked, trying to shed light on every section of the field, checking to make sure that no lambs or ewes had been left behind. Finally, satisfied that all the sheep had followed Dave into the barnyard, I turned around, turned off my head lamp and headed home.

Behind me in the distance, the warm glow of Pelican Rapids filled the western sky. Ahead of me, to the north, a pale patch of peach drifted in the heavens. Another patch to the east, further south than I had seen the aurora for a very long time. I stood and watched the charged particles shimmer in the sky and then begin to fade.

“Joanie!”

“Did you see it,” I shouted. “Was it the aurora?”

“I don’t know what else it could have been,” Dave said as I joined him. “It was beautiful.” We walked side by side through the barnyard , listening to the sound of sheep eating grass, smelling the ripe scent of fresh manure, and feeling the dew soak into our socks, content in the dark.

Dakota Fiber Mill - almost local

When I walked into Dakota Fiber Mill, I knew that my wool had come to a good place.

Chris Armbrust, the owner, had four huge sinks for washing fleeces, rack after rack of drying fleeces, and in the center of the building a carding machine, gradually spilling out a rope of beautiful brown roving. Her carding machine was at least four times the size of mine. It self- fed the picked wool into the cards and fed the carded wool through a small hole to create the roving automatically. It was magical.

After she’s washed and carded a fleece, Chris consolidates three batches of carded wool into one. Then she runs the carded fiber up over a pipe near the ceiling and down into the spinning machine. The back half of the Mill was an amazing spinning machine that reached from floor to ceiling. “It’s only a part of the original,” Chris said. “I couldn’t afford the entire machine and didn’t have room for it either.”

Chris has an unbelievable turn-around time. Her carded roving is beautiful and her three ply sock yarn was spun tightly enough so that it should wear really well. After years of frustration with slow turn-around times at mills and mixed up orders, it is a delight to work with a person who checks in by email if she has a question, is flexible and willing to try new techniques, and who works fast. The best part for me is that the Dakota Fiber Mill is only an hour’s drive away. I love to do things “locally”.

Sugar, fat, salt...

I just finished reading Sugar, Fat, Salt: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss and it pissed me off. It also amazed me to learn how much sugar, fat or salt, or all three are in most processed foods.

It’s not really a problem for Dave and me. We both enjoy cooking. Dave bakes our whole wheat bread and granola, and ferments our yogurt, wine and beer. I create dinners and salads from fruits and vegetables we harvest fresh from the garden for two to four months of the year and and from fruit and vegetables home canned or frozen the rest of the year. We eat meat that we raise ourselves. We steal honey from our bees and concentrate maple syrup from our trees. I buy staples - eggs, flour, cheese and milk, but rarely anything processed.

Most people don’t have the luxury of living on a farm. Many people have jobs that restrict their free time and energy and thus limit the amount of creative cooking that they do. However, I’m not a fancy cook and most of our evening meals take me half an hour or less to prepare.

Moss accuses the major food corporations of carefully adjusting the amounts of sugar, fat, and salt to make their processed foods close to addictive, and then using subtle and not so subtle advertising to persuade people into not only eating the processed food, but also eating more than our bodies need or than is healthy. Dave and I don’t watch much television and so miss out on that seductive advertising.

Moss puts the blame for the growing obesity epidemic in America on the food companies. Dave and I are fortunate that we have access to real, healthy food, an interest in preparing it, and time set aside in our days to cook and thus control the amount of sugar, fat and salt that we consume.

Directions

Dave spent a lot of time in the last ten days using a compass to figure out what direction we were going so that he could navigate through the lakes and rivers, bays and islands of Quetico Provincial Park, Canada. Our yearly canoe trip helps us reset our internal compasses, and figure out what’s important in our lives.

We come out of the wilderness a little behind on our to-do lists (we have been gone for 10 days after all) but clearer on the direction we want our lives to be moving. We talk about personal goals, about personal time commitments. We talk about how one person’s time commitments can interfere with the other person’s goals, and vice versa. We talk about needs and wants.

The waters of the lakes through which we paddle are much more lucid than our conversations, but in the end, after depending on each other for everything, we find our understanding of each other clearer and the directions we anticipate our lives taking in the coming year more closely aligned.

Fences

Our fences are old. Some of them are thirty years old, some only twenty and a few interior fences, dividing one pasture into two, are only ten years old. But our fences are failing.

All but one of our exterior fences are woven wire stock fencing stapled onto wooden fence posts. The woven wire is designed with smaller openings on the bottom (2” high by 6” wide) and larger openings on the top (up to 6” by 6”). This clever design is to keep animals from sticking their heads through the fence and getting stuck and in the process destroying the fence. This clever design works really well for sheep, but not so well for goats. The goats put a lot of pressure on our fences.
We practice rotational grazing which means that the animals are restricted to one small pasture until they have cleaned it up and then are moved to another small pasture, repeating this schedule all summer long. This means that the best tasting grass is always in the next pasture and the goats are smart enough to know that, so they stick their heads through the fences to eat the fresh grass on the other side.

Over the years we’ve repaired a lot of holes in fences.

We also have one strand of barbed wire at the base of each exterior fence and two strands at the top, to keep dogs and coyotes out of our pastures and our animals in. Our interior fences don’t have barbed wire anywhere. They were made by stretching four foot high woven wire stock fencing onto metal fence posts designed for the purpose. Those metal posts worked well for about twenty years and then we began to run into problems.

After awhile, the wire began to sag. The four foot high fence became a three foot high fence in the middle between some posts. The sheep don’t often jump a fence; the goats reliably do. Every time a goat jumped a fence, she dragged a little on the woven wire. The fence got even lower. The sag combined with the patched holes meant that the fence was no longer stretched. It became increasingly easier for goats to force holes in the fence with their heads, then their shoulders and finally their entire bodies. Once the goats had made holes, the lambs followed. A good mother will follow her lamb anywhere, so the ewes followed the lambs.

Some of our fences are completely porous to animals. It’s been a hassle, but not a catastrophe on the interior fences until Bucklet, the cute, tiny ,bottle kid we added to our flock last year, became sexually mature. Yesterday we moved Bucklet and Winthrop the ram to the farthest pasture from the ewes and the goats and the lambs. By the time Dave had walked back across three pastures to the lamb pasture, Bucklet and Winthrop had rejoined him. We collected our fencing supplies and moved the two males back to their pasture. Then we wove wire and stapled until we were sure the hole was closed.

They rejoined us five minutes later. We led them back to their pasture and spent half an hour actually inspecting the fence and checking for all possible holes. The males were back with the lambs by lunch time. We left them there. The lambs are too small to get pregnant yet, and the ewes are still two pastures away in a well fenced pasture and we need a little breathing room to figure out what to do next.

We have walked every foot of our fence line in the last month. It looks thirty years old. We were thirty something when we first learned how to fence. Now at sixty something it seems a much bigger job. Maybe that’s why farmers retire, they can’t bear the thought of refencing.

Nine vultures

photo from en.wikipedia.com

Nine vultures circled our pastures. Something bad had happened. I wasn’t surprised that there might be a dead animal out there. Lamb #59 had been getting weaker and all the intestinal wormers, coccidiostats and antibiotics had made no difference. We could see his backbones and his pelvic bones. He looked and acted like he was starving.

Nine vultures seemed a little extreme for one tiny lamb. It wasn’t just lamb #59; six lambs were dead.

Vultures are scavengers, not predators. We did not lose six animals to vultures, the vultures were benefiting from our losses. Why were lambs dying? The animals were in four different pastures. They all had access to fresh water, to shade for part of each day, to grass. We thought we had a basically healthy flock on luxuriant pastures. This was supposed to be the easy time of the year for the sheep.

However, a fair number of lambs had diarrhea. We took a fecal sample in to the vet. They found lots of round worms, a high enough concentration of which can kill lambs. We had wormed our lambs three weeks previously, they should have been protected for several months. Why hadn’t we had this problem before? What was the difference?

One month seemed to be the difference. Normally our lambs are born in February and March. We feed them creep feed for the next month or two and they are ready to wean and turn out on fresh pasture by the end of May. This year, our lambs were born in April and we didn’t wean them until the end of June so they’d have two months of creep feeding. They spent an extra month in the home pasture, a place where intestinal worm cysts had been collecting all winter. They had eaten so many worm cysts, that a single worming was not enough. I should have realized that diarrhea meant there was a problem. The first lamb I lost twenty-nine years ago was infected with Haemonchus contortus, the barberpole worm. I thought I had learned that lesson forever, but this year, my mind was somewhere else when I watched lambs with continuing diarrhea. . The diarrhea dehydrates the lamb. The worm also causes irritation in the gut lining and protein leaks from the cells of the lining, starving the lamb. My lambs didn’t have a chance. They depend on their shepherd to make the right decision and this year, I hadn’t.

We wormed our lambs again. Fewer have diarrhea, but we’ve lost another lamb and two more still look like they are starving. They are on fresh pasture and hopefully will recover. I am ashamed that it took nine vultures to alert me to a problem that I should have recognized immediately. The next time we change anything about the way we lamb, we will try to keep our brains engaged.