Shearing Day was a week ago now. What a great day! The sun was out and a lot of people came to watch and buy fleeces. I sold 28 of the 60 fleeces we sheared! I started to worry that I wouldn’t have enough left for me!
Here is a photo of Judd shearing Houdini.
Judd doesn’t mind a crowd of people watching.
A couple of friends (Joan in purple and Toni in black) helped all day at the skirting table.
Freshly shorn ewes.
Donkey, Amaryllis, is now out with the sheep full-time.
My mom died on Monday. This is not as tragic as you may think. After all, she was 92. The tragedy is that she spent the last several years in the haze of Alzheimer’s. She lived here until, after breaking a hip and losing a lot more mental capacity, I couldn’t care for her. For the last year and a half she lived at a place called Summerfield House in Vacaville. The following is part of a thank you letter that I wrote to the care-givers at Summerfield. I thought I’d share it before I go on with the usual ramblings of my blog.
I wish that you could have known Mom before she moved to Summerfield. She was one of the first women in the Army—the WAC’s—during WWII. She was always very proud of that service. After she moved to Summerfield I found letters that she wrote to her parents while in the service and letters to her from her Mom. My daughter and I have been transcribing them because they are a fascinating insight into what was going on in the lives of everyday people back then. I think they are worthy of a book.
Mom married a University of California professor, my Dad, was divorced when that was quite a difficult situation for a woman to be in, and raised my brother and me. We moved to a couple of acres in Sonoma County and my brother and I raised a variety of animals—horse, cows, sheep, pigs, etc—thanks go to Mom for letting us venture in to all of that when she had absolutely no experience with any of it. She developed her skill at pottery, taught pottery classes, and sold pottery at her Pot Shop on the property. She had quite a following of potters and other crafts-people.
Mom retired from pottery when Dave and I went to college and she moved to Healdsburg. She took up spinning and weaving (she had always been a wonderful knitter) and finally had time to tackle all the old family papers and photos that we had stored for years. She wrote three books about her ancestors, researching additional documentation of all the names and dates and places. Mom’s great grandparents were pioneers who settled in the Stockton area and her grandmother was born in a log cabin on banks of the Stanislaus River so there is a lot of interesting history. Mom meant to write a fourth book to finish up the stories of all her ancestors, but Alzheimer’s overtook her before she could work on that.
Mom was a 2nd Lieutenant in the WACs during WW2.
This photo is of the same field that is in the last post, but it’s taken in the other direction. See that tower on top of the barn? That’s where I was when I took the other photo. This 5-acre pasture is divided into 8 vertical strips with high-tensile electric wire. I subdivide those strips with electric net fence and it’s that fence that I move when I put the sheep on fresh feed every day or two. In the photo below the sheep see me on the other side of the fence and they are waiting for me to let them in. In the photo you can’t really see the green grass and clover because the dry grass is taller, but it’s there.
This is a not-so-flattering photo of Ranger waiting with the ewes.
As I open up the net fence the sheep go rushing through.
I spend time just watching sheep eat! I like to see what they go for first.
Are you going to get tired of reading my pasture observations? Hey, it’s what I do. When you raise livestock on the land then you are really a grass farmer first…or should be. My first observation this morning was the dew on the grass that I have learned is called yellow foxtail. It is one of the late summer grasses that is NOT desirable. The sheep don’t like to eat it which is why you see so much in the field. But it did look pretty this morning.
Another observation is what has happened to our crop circle. Our crop circle is not like the ones you may have read about. If you see our place from above (which we can do even in the flat Sacramento Valley now that my husband has built a 2 story barn with an additional tower) then you see this area in the middle of the pasture that is a different type of plant. It is some kind of reed, another undesirable plant and one that indicates poor drainage.
Do you see that darker area in the middle of the pasture? That’s the reed. But do you also see the bright green part of it on the right? That’s new annual grass that is outgrowing anything else in the pasture right now. This summer my brother built a prototype shade structure that I could move around to various parts of the pasture. That is where I had the shade while the sheep were in that part of the pasture. A few days of trampling that reed opened that area up to allow grass to grow now that it has started to rain. Here is a closeup.
I have more observations, but I’m going to put them in another post. The last couple of times that I included a lot of photos it fouled up the format of not only those posts but all the previous ones too.
