Random Farm Photos - June

I found myself wildflower hunting in my own pasture.

These aren’t your traditional wildflowers but they are still pretty.

Salsify.

As I walked in the pasture a bird startled me when she flew up out of the vegetation between the fence and the road. Do you see that depression in the lower center of the photo?

It happened so quickly when the bird flew up and into the tree I thought she was a turkey. But now I’m wondering if she was a pheasant. It seems more likely that a single pheasant would be nesting here. I’ll have to go back and check.

After I set up the electric fence I tested it and there was hardly any charge. That meant I had to track down the reason that the fence was grounding out. I found this one, but fixing that didn’t change the charge on the fence.

Then I found this one—a branch holding the wire on the ground.

Here the tree has grown so much since putting in the fence that there are multiple insulators to keep the wires off the trunk. Eventually we found that a gadget with a plastic handle that connects the fence at the west side of the pasture to the fence near the barn was grounding out on a metal gate. This fence goes all the way around the pasture and the paddocks so it is important that it is working.

In the barn. Hen in a barrel. The chickens lay eggs all over the place.

Jepson Prairie

Jepson Prairie Preserve is a unique ecosystem on the western edge of the Sacramento Valley, managed by Solano Land Trust. It features claypan vernal pools and the associated plants and aquatic life that have evolved to survive in that ecosystem. Vernal pools form from rainwater but dry up in the Central Valley hot dry summer.

I like to visit Jepson Prairie once each year during the wildflower season, but it is worth more than one visit. I visited a couple of weeks ago when there was a docent-led tour and enjoyed it immensely. It was an informal tour but great fun to have an expert there to identify plants and relate more info.

When you see masses of flowers like these Goldfields it is stunning, but when you look more closely you see so much more.

Sometimes that means getting on hands and knees. It was fun to walk around with people who were interested enough to look closely like this.

White hyacinth.

Baker’s Navarretia.

Vernal Pool Popcornflower, endemic to California vernal pools. Flowers are only 1/4” across.

This flower is only showy when it is in fruit. What looks like white petals are the pappus at the top of each seed. The green objects in the lower right corner are Blow Wives flowers—the small yellow flowers are inside the green part.

There are several species of Downingia at Jepson Prairie and it sometimes takes close observation to tell them apart. Cupped Downingia has long anthers and the bees that pollinate the flowers have to hang upside down to gather pollen.

Vernal Pool Goldfields.

You can see Popcorn Flower and Navarretia here, but do you notice that round pale green plant? Those are flowers called Woolly Marbles. I read that later the leaves fully enclose the flower and it really does resemble a woolly marble.

Another Downingia flower that looks a lot like Cupped Downingia, but is a paler flower

Yellow Mariposa Lily (Calochortus luteus).

Downingia, Goldfields, Navarretia, and Brass Buttons.

At the time of this visit many flowers had dried out, but the goldfields were still striking. As the water in the lake evaporates, different flowers bloom.

Jepson Prairie is home to more than pretty flowers. At the start of the tour one of the docent volunteers shared creatures he had dipped from Olcott Lake (to be put back after the tour). This is the immature California Tiger Salamander. These salamanders spend most of the year underground in rodent burrows.

I enjoyed my time here so much that I went back on the next Sunday (a week ago). Stay tuned for more photos.

Sheep Portraits

I was taking photos today so that I could update the lamb pages on my website. I found myself taking portraits as well.

The ewe lambs have the white ear tags in the left ear. All the colored tags are color-coded by sire. It’s sometimes useful to be able to sort by sire, but it is also very helpful to look for one of five colors when trying to find one particular lamb out of 90. This is ewe lamb 2223 (Meridian Silverado x Meridian Cashew).

Ewe lamb 2234 is a triplet (Ruby Peak Tamarisk x Meridian Betty).

Ram lamb 2243 is a triplet (Meridian Rambler x Meridian Raquel. Notice that he has five horns. There isn’t much room for all those horns on his right. He won’t be kept as a registered ram due to the way the horns are developing.

Ram lamb 2265 looks promising, but it’s too soon to tell if his horns will continue to grow as wide as they look now. (Ruby Peak Tamarisk x bide a wee Trista). An advantage of this ram is that he is unrelated to most of the other sheep in the flock.

Ewe lamb 2281 (Meridian Rambler x Meridian Quora).

Ewe lamb 2291 (Hillside Gabby’s Barrett x Meridian Columbine) was the last lamb born this year. She is the only one with a name so far—April.

This is April’s dam, Meridian Columbine.

Another ewe with nice-looking four horns. This is Meridian Janna.

This ewe has one of the nicest set of four horns here. She is a yearling that I got last summer. Patchwork Bettylou.

This is Patchwork Townes, a 2-year old lilac ram that came from the same Georgia farm as Bettylou. He came only a couple of months ago so he isn’t the sire of any of this year’s lambs. He’ll get his chance this October.

Here is another ram unrelated to the flock, Hillside Gabby’s Barrett. He is just a year old now but has lambs that were born in March.

Meridian Axis is another ram who just turned a year old. He also has lambs in the flock this year. He is a lilac ram. Lilac is the color variation in Jacob sheep that is not black, but a brown-gray shade.

Shearing at Timm Ranch - part 1

Every year I get wool from the Timm Ranch, about five miles from here, and have it made into a really great yarn. I sell the yarn in skeins and on cones and I use a lot of it for my own woven products. I could probably substitute blog posts from previous years for this one and you wouldn’t know the difference. Same place. Same sheep. However some of the Farm Club people have changed. So here is the 2022 Shearing Day last week.

The Timm Ranch sheep are what I like to call a ranch blend of Polypay, Rambouillet, and Targhee. That means that those are the original breeds in the flock but over the years, as the Timms have raised their own replacements, the individual breeds aren’t so recognizable. The sheep have traits of all, but most of what we are happy to see is the fine wool traits of those original breeds.

The sheep moved into the lane on the north side of the barn.

Last year there we tried to keep up with two shearers. This year there was only one and we were able to keep pace with him.

The shearer is known as Junior and this logo is a new one.

Several Farm Club members came to help evaluate and skirt fleeces.

We worked at two skirting tables.

The goal was to check the fleece for soundness (most were fine in that respect) and then skirt. Skirting is to remove the parts of the fleece that are of lesser quality—wool at the edge of the belly and that with excess VM (vegetable matter). The timing was just right for shearing and there was very little VM in the fleeces. All waste was bagged for a friend with a project in which she will make a product from wool that will otherwise be discarded. That will be a blog topic later on.

We kept a running tally of the weight so that I could make sure I reached my 200 pound minimum and I could figure out how much to pay for the wool. The skirted fleeces varied from 4.5 lb to 9.5 lb. and I ended up with 222 pounds in one pile and 50 pounds in the other.The wool will go to two different mills.

Some of the sheep after shearing.

The sheep were in two groups. The largest group had fall lambs, but there was one group with lambs born more recently—including the previous night (although that pair was still in a lambing pen). At one point Susan and I walked over to the group with young lambs and they followed her to the barn.

These are locks from some of the fleeces we chose. The yellow paper is 5” wide so you get an idea of the fleece length. There were a handful of extra long fleeces. One was from a sheep that was missed last year so that was a two year fleece—too long to combine with this batch. Some of the other long ones were from replacement ewes born in the fall of 2020 and not shorn last spring. We tried to sort by length and most of the 200+ pound batch is about 3 to 4 inches. The longer ones are mostly in the other batch of wool.

Stay tuned for another post with more photos.

More Lambing

Yesterday’s post ended with Lamb #38. As of this evening we’re at #60. I’ll fill in a few of the others here.

In the last post I said that Betty rejected one of her lambs after it got on the other side of a gate. I’d rather have lambs raised by a ewe than bottle feed them. Ruth lambed at around 1:30 a.m. the following day and one lamb died right at birth. I repeated the process I did with Terri’s lamb the previous day, although this time I used the dead lamb to cover Betty’s lamb with membranes and slime. Ruth thought that it smelled right and she started cleaning the new lamb. Success!

Meanwhile, Raquel lambed with triplets.

Aphrodite had a BFL X lamb that weighed 13.4 lbs!

The following day three Farm Club members came to help with lamb tasks. That was much appreciated. By this time there were ewes and lambs in overflow pens everywhere so we were able to start moving some and cleaning pens. Before moving we give each lamb a BOSE (selenium) injection, ear tag it, and band the tail. We had to pay attention to the lamb numbers since we had moved rejected lambs to other ewes and needed to make sure we could correctly identify the biological mother of those lambs.

I had discovered that morning that one of Raquel’s triplets didn’t look so good. I thought that they had all nursed, but now I realize that with all that was going on (another story) I hadn’t paid close enough attention. At this point he was weak and cold. We tried bottle feeding him, but that didn’t work. I ended up tube feeding that lamb twice and after that he was able to get up and nurse on his own.

I set up a heat lamp and all three lambs cuddled up under it.

During the night Patsy (the ewe in the last post who lambed with 4 and 8 pound lambs) died. I had seen that she wasn’t feeling well and started her on antibiotics at the advice of the vet but it was too late. We took her for a necropsy and I’m still waiting for the final report. (Preliminary report shows infection and uterine tear.) Her death leaves two more bottle babies so Farm Club members helped feed them.

They also were there to watch another birth.

Hazel and Jade are still our friendliest sheep.

The next morning Belle lambed. Belle is owned by my 7-year-old granddaughter who lives in Texas. This blog post from 2019 tells the story of Kirby showing Belle as a lamb and has one of my favorite photos of her with Belle and the pink ribbon she won. But back to the present. Since Belle is registered to Kirby, the lambs are also hers. She named Belle’s 2021 lamb Beauty and she is still in the flock. I texted photos of these lambs to Kirby and she asked if she could name them. She wants to name the ram Beast and the ewe Rose. Do you catch the theme?

This is the ewe lamb, Rose.

These are Patsy’s lambs that are now bottle fed.

I have started taking photos of lambs to have them for the website. The crossbred ones aren’t listed on the site, but they sure are photogenic.