Heller Heaven for Sheep?

It is sheep-shearing day at the Heller farm down the road. I love seeing this annual very agrarian rite of spring. Here is a before and after shot.

“I don’t know if I am going to like this..."

The shearing of  the sheep is done assembly-line style. Mattsen gets the next sheep ready to shear

while the shearer  gives the current sheep a haircut. All of my photos of the shearer are pretty much a blur.  It only takes him a couple minutes to shear an entire sheep, he works so fast. Yet, gently - with very few nicks.  Fewer than I would get if I were shaving my legs.

Don puts the shorn fleece into the “Hicky-Do,” kind of a simple baler which compresses the fleece into a bag so they don’t take up so much space.

Fuzzy sheep waiting their turn.

Velvety sheep feeling much thinner, lighter and a bit chillier.

The black sheep, brown and multi-colored sheep are done last  so their wool can be kept separate.

Some of the lambs wait outside the barn gate bleating for their moms.

Darling lambs!  Born in February, so big and sturdy already.

Lambs in the spotlight.

Bah, Humbug! Baa, Hum.

Earlier today I was all set to write a grumpy post  about how  my day was going.
Since the blizzard last week, our snowblower has not worked, except for (thankfully!) creating one very narrow car path down our driveway so Rog can get to work. The snow is pretty densely packed and back-breaking to shovel, so Rog has been focusing his efforts on getting the snowblower to work, to no avail. I have been pretty much stuck on the farm for a week and cabin fever is setting in.  I decided to shovel out the truck and risk driving it; the roads are still very bad and this truck does not have the greatest traction. But I had a good incentive--the snowplow had plowed over our mailbox and buried it in unshovelable snow. Our mailman will not  deliver mail unless the mailbox is at the precise, convenient height to insert mail from his car, so we have not gotten mail since last Wednesday, thanks to the blizzerd and the plow. I decided to drive to the post office and pick up our mail -there might be something important in it (like chick or seed catalogs!)

I shoveled most of the snow that was on top of the truck into the back of the truck, to add weight for better traction, north woods style (I already have three 75-lb tubes of sand in there). The doors were frozen shut, but I finally got the passenger side unstuck so I could clamber in to warm it up.The windshield washer spray nozzles were also  frozen and wouldn’t spray to clean off the thick ice coating the windshield,  but I was  smug because I had recently purchased some fancy windshield fluid that  is supposed to melt ice fast.

But darn! The new jug of windshield washer fluid was on the table, buried under this casualty of the blizzard. Last night I heard a tremendous crashing sound--I opened the door and discovered that our lovely, new patio gazebo had collapsed from the snow. (Another thing making me cranky. Yes, we should have taken it apart last fall but we didn’t get to it in time.)  I was so busy worrying about the weight of the snow on the tree branches, I didn’t even think of the gazebo. Grrrr.

So, finally I got  the truck shoveled out, the doors unfrozen, truck started and unstuck from its parking spot, and had it warming up while I went inside to call the post office. But the post office informed me  I could NOT pick up the mail AND they would not deliver it until the mailbox was fixed.  I asked how are we going to fix it when the post is broken off and the snow is packed hard, four feet deep, and the ground is frozen? She said I should call the  township and they must repair it if the plow knocked it over. I managed to get them to agree to have the mailman drive into the driveway and honk and I will run out and get the mail from his car.  (I am going to give him a dozen fresh eggs as a thank you; maybe he will consider doing it again.) Then I called the township and requested a mailbox repair. I have no idea how they will manage it - could be interesting.

Since I had the truck ready to go, I drove (slowly and carefully) over to the Heller farm to see their newborn lamb, the first  2014 addition to the flock.

I love the  animal characters of their   farm. One of their horses had discovered a broken window in the barn where he can pull out hay for a between- meal snack. The sheep and donkey gather around to eat the hay he spills. I was tickled to see a row of birds perched on the horse’s neck.

One of these sheep is not like the others...it is either Ranger or Bear, one of the two sweet Great Pyrenees dogs that protect the sheep.

Like us, Don and Betsy also have a few intractable chickens that hang out in the hay.

Don created a big birthing room  inside the barn to encourage the pregnant ewes to have their lambs inside. It’s forecast to be darn cold all week- you can see the sheep’s breath.

Here’s the new baby!  She was born last night.  Don had to assist with the birth - her feet were folded back underneath her with just her head emerging and she was stuck. When that happens fluid builds up in the lamb’s head, so it is still a bit swollen. The new lambs and their moms get to stay in cozy little pens with heat lamps.

Don took a photo of me holding the first lamb of spring. Baby lambs are a good remedy for crabbiness. The world has looked brighter all afternoon. (And, happily,  the mailman just now drove up and he did deliver both a chick catalog and a seed catalog... as well as a stack o’bills.)

A Teeny Bit Sheepish

Our beloved neighbors, Betsy and Don, are away tonight for Don's son's graduation. It is a tricky time to be away, because a whole bunch of lambs are due to be born any moment. They hired Cadence to  farm-sit while they are gone and she and I got a crash course in lambing.
It is predicted to be a rainy, stormy, muddy night, so of course it is highly likely that a bunch of lambs will elect to be born tonight. I went over to help with the evening chores and we were met by this darling lamb outside the fence (he was born a month ago, a result of the ram jumping over the fence before his scheduled rendezvous date.) It's ok of he gets through the fence- he won't stray far from his mom.

Aha! We spied a new lamb, apparently born just minutes before we arrived, still wet. We were relieved to see it up on its feet, looking strong and healthy.

Cadence decided we should do all the other chores first then try to get the lamb and ewe into the barn. The other sheep were hungry and we wouldn't have to contend with their demands if they were distracted by eating.

Cadence and Israel fed the sheep, donkeys, horses, chickens, and dogs while I prepared bottles for the lambs.

When we returned our attention to the newborn lamb, we discovered a second lamb! It must have been born while we did the chores. We  followed Betsy's clever strategy of  putting the lamb into a sled (two lambs and two sleds in this case) and dragging them slowly to the barn as the moms followed. Easier said than done, however; my hour-or-so-old lamb kept jumping out of the sled.

Don has built a nursery in the barn with a dozen small pens where the lambs can become securely bonded with their moms - no risk of getting confused with the wrong ewe. Weaker lambs will get extra attention and supplemental bottle feeding. The  blue pvc pipe down the middle is a watering system.

We bottle-fed a couple of lambs whose moms were not adequately nourishing them.

This lamb was born  last night in the rain and when Don found him this morning, he thought he was dead until he saw him wiggle a bit. He was a very large lamb and had been stuck for a while during birth so fluid had built up in his head, which was very swollen. Don said he didn't have a very good chance of surviving, but showed me how to tube-feed him this afternoon. Don had put the lamb under a heat lamp, but he was shivering and if you put your finger inside his mouth, it was cool, not warm like the internal temp should be. Tonight I put my finger in his mouth and his temperature was considerably warmer than this afternoon.  It also looked like the swelling of his head had gone down a bit, but he was still lying motionless beneath the heat lamp, his mom curled around him. I was really nervous about tube-feeding him.  If you accidentally slide the tube into his lungs rather than his stomach, that will kill him. But the tube slid in easily and I fed him a whole bottle of milk while Cadence held him. As we fed him he wagged his tail and then he pooped on her boot, both of which seemed like good signs! I hope this baby is standing tomorrow!

Kind of nerve-wracking, but I like these sheep!
If you want to know more about Don and Betsy's sheep, you can listen to my very first episode Prairie Air, my new radio show on the COBB Radio.com, where I interviewed  Don about sheep-shearing and lambing season.

Overdue Post-age on Blog

Long time no posting.  So I will try to catch up a bit with recent farm goings-on.
I had to a start with this photo because this lamb is so heart-meltingly adorable!  It is one of  Don and Betsy's (our neighbors) two surprise early lambs -- a ram jumped the fence.

Here are both the ewes and lambs. Although these sheep don't really relate to our farm, they sort of relate to one of my recent endeavors. I have become a radio host for a show  called "Prairie Air" on the COBB Radio, a fledgling, streaming, grassroots radio station in Rochester. (They put out a call for people interested in hosting a radio show and I offered  to interview farmers and artists -when else am I ever going to get to be a radio host?!)

So here's the connection--Don was my very first radio interview, about raising and shearing sheep. You can actually hear my shows via podcast at http://thecobbradio.com/programs/prairie-air/  - click on "most recent Podcasts" on the right.  Be kind - I am a total novice!  Garrison Keillor and Terry Gross can breathe easy for a while.  But the interviewees are great!

We are also still collecting and boiling maple sap like crazy. We thought the season was all over when it warmed up to 60 degrees one day, but thankfully (just kidding) it got cold again and the sap started running again.  We only have silver maples on our farm, for which 60 gallons of sap boil down to make one gallon of syrup. But it turns out Don and Betsy have several mature sugar maples which they offered to let us tap - sugar maple sap is twice as sweet, so 30 gallons of sap make a gallon of syrup; it will save us much time and  fuel.

On a cold and windy day we set up our sap cooking operation on the dock of  the fish gazebo  (a little greenhouse we built over our  silo pond of our future aquaponics operation.)  It smells so wonderful in there now, sort of like vanilla and marshmallows.

 Cadence and Israel have been playing son jarocho music all over the place -- they are pictured here with their awesome percussionist,  Martial, after performing at the World Festival. This weekend they will be the musicians at the opening reception for the Rochester International Film Festival.  They are gaining quite a following, but Rog and I are surely their biggest fans, trying to catch all their performances.

All the flats of seed starts in my office  are getting  huge and want desperately to be planted in the garden , but it has been too cold and snowy and wet. I put the brassicas and onions out in the high tunnel, though, to get hardened off and to free up a bit more space in my office for the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. I am really proud of the tomatoes --they look so strong and healthy, with thick stems. I leave the lights on  a 24 hours per day and run a fan on them a bit each day so they  don't get wimpy. My poor peanuts and artichokes (experiments, not your usual Minnesota crops) seem to be languishing a bit, however.
It is supposed to start to get warm and springlike tomorrow!!!!!!!!!  However, it is extraordinarily muddy in our heavy, saturated, clay soil, and will be a while before we can till or plant. or even walk in the garden.

See what I mean? This is the middle pasture between the  barn and loafing shed a few days ago, not at its worst (which is probably today.) Yesterday, I was taking the cows their hay and sank down in the mud deeper than the top of my mid-calf muck boots, resulting in very muddy socks.  Just now, I went out in the pouring rain to herd the goose and ducks (who were happily playing in the puddles) into the coop for the night and I put Rog's muck boots on because they are taller than mine, knee-high. Bad idea! It was like wearing huge suction cups -- both boots got stuck in the mud and I ended up accidentally stepping out of them entirely, ankle deep in mud, and had to extricate my feet by sticking my hands down, wrist -deep, in the muck.  It was not pretty!

Last night, I tried to  assist the drainage of the pasture by doing some unCivil Engineering, carving channels with a garden hoe from hoof-print-puddle to hoof-print-puddle down the slope. It worked!  A little, anyway. But now it is pouring rain, and the cows have created many new deep hoofprints, so I am dreading walking out there tomorrow.

There is a Paul Bunyan legend that explains that Minnesota's 15,000 lakes were created by Babe the Blue Ox's hoofprints. I now clearly understand how that legend arose!

My bees arrived today, so I have been busy preparing the hives, we are partnering with a young couple on the aquaponics system,  I am still working ceaselessly on the  Mega Upholstery Project, and we have a few more  exciting ventures in the works --  I will post about all of these soon!

Wordless Wednesday: Shearing Day at the Heller Farm

Wooly Booly

Yesterday my friend and neighbor Virginia invited me to check out the Sheep Farm & Fiber Tour.  We only had time to visit two farms, so  we headed to the two closest sites. First up was Barn Quilt Farm, which has lovely barn quilts on each of its buildings.  This one was my favorite - with maple leaves which honored the owner's Canadian roots.

Barn Quilt Farm is unusual because it is a  10.5 acre farm  completely within the heart of the city of Rochester.  Developments sprouted up around it, but it has continuously operated as a farm so farming has been grandfathered in.

A delightful family purchased the farm last winter and is diving into their farm dream.  They have their own llamas and also board llamas for other people.

They also have a few alpacas --this is Zipster.  He is so  cute!! I am smitten --now I really want an alpaca...

The new family added chickens - and built the most beautiful chicken coop!  Look at these fancy nesting boxes!  The newly-laid egg rolls out  the back of the box for easy collection by the farmers.

The colorful barn quilt on the Chicken Coop.

Here is Virginia with one of the huge fluffy, Angora rabbits. Barn Quilt  Farm has  diverse fiber  livestock.

Their pride and joy seems to be the  sheep, a small flock of Romeldale CVM (California Variegated Mutant) sheep, an extremely rare breed with wool that is  excellent for hand spinners.  I just loved these stocky, wooly, badger-faced sheep.
We had so much fun meeting this family and  exploring their  beautiful farm!

Next we went to the Ellison Sheep Farm in Zumbrota. Nancy Ellison is  sort of a legend among regional textile artists. The farm is very old and she has installed a tiny fiber arts gallery in the barn silo - this is the view looking up inside the silo.

In addition to raising Godtland and Icelandic sheep,  goats, and geese. Nancy teaches spinning and weaving and sells many kinds of spinning wheels and looms from her  barn shop. Virginia tested out a wheel - and is now re-inspired to take up spinning again.

Nancy's talented daughter Elsa Jo creates charming felted characters and animals.  The faces are amazing. I love this felted Santa with a raccoon on his back!

I purchased this darling felted black-faced sheep with a crescent moon blanket.

Our final stop was a new shop in Zumbrota, Bee-lighted, which sells  textile art supplies and sells the work of local textile artists. I succumbed to buying this cute felted hat, garnished with vintage trims, made by an artist in Chatfield.   Something tells me this hat will be my signature look this winter.

It was so much fun visiting these farms with Virginia. Now I have a rekindled yen to acquire some sheep...or goats...or maybe an alpaca...and learn to spin and dye and felt and knit!