Oak Run Sheep & LandCrafts

It is the full Seventh Moon! It is also hot. The garden is teeming with life. I gotta hand it to all of these critters who go along as if it wasn't the hottest summer on record..... Instead of talking about the hot weather some more, I thought I'd share this:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
~Wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things

New Seventh Moon 2024. By the end of the sixth moon cycle I realized that we should call it the Bug Moon. I have never been so aware of the diversity of insects that we have around us here on the farm. I wish I knew all about the little creatures' life history, what niche they occupy in the landscape, how they help us keep this all in balance, or if they offer redundancy with other species and thus resilience for the system overall.

An example of resilience that I think we may have experienced recently is with an infestation of a small grasshopper that has been plaguing the area. We indeed had thousands of these critters all over the pasture and gardens, but they did not decimate any of our crops. Perhaps it was predatory wasps that ate some of them up, or the free-range chickens that gobbled enough of the grasshoppers to keep them in check. Maybe we were just lucky!

We are feeling lucky in general even as we move into a tough time of the year: extreme heat advisories, fire weather, lower water in the ditch are all things we are starting to experience now. There is still a lot of harvesting, fiber prep, soap-making, marketing, and general shepherding that needs to happen despite the ghastly heat, and I am looking forward to working on all of it as the Summer continues.

This next moon cycle is called the Buck Moon, and oddly last year this time we had three fine bucks visit our pasture, then move on. Recently, I have been noticing bucks in the forest as we travel around; the velvet on their antlers is thick. We'll see if we get another trio of bucks, this year with new points on their rack.

It is rare to have the Summer Solstice occur close to a full moon, but this year has been exceptional in so many other ways, so why not this?! Apparently, a solstice and a full moon coincide about every 20 years, so the 2024 Sixth Moon rising within 30 hours of the Summer Solstice is pretty cool.

We have been feeling the teeming buzz of Spring’s final days in Oak Run. It is the time when there is so much life around us, we have to duck and weave just to avoid getting smacked by an insect on its path of important business. Sometimes when we open the front door, a chorus frog hops in over the threshold. We’ve recently removed mice from our otherwise dormant fireplace and re-homed a family of ground squirrels from under the barn foundation. Life is everywhere! Ack!

As the temperatures rise this summer my focus is less on wool and more on plants. I was able to harvest some self-heal (Prunella vulgaris) and St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) from our and a neighbor’s woods, and I set the fresh flowering tops to steep in olive oil for a “healing hard-working hands” tallow soap I intend to make soon. I am starting to harvest marigold about every other day and drying the blossoms.

Aaaaaand, we got a puppy. She came with the name Luna. Considering my preoccupation with the moon, this name is going to stay and I am not going to read anything more into this coincidence…..We hope she settles into our farm and can be a great partner with Marsh.

All of our 2024 wool is at the mills and I expect it to be back just before October. I have only 3lbs of white Churro wool roving left from the 2023 clip, which amazingly means that people from all over the country are now using almost 20 lbs of Oak Run wool in their hand-crafted projects. I like being a part of this amazing cycle.

We are now in the 6th moon cycle of 2024, wow. The last cycle did seem like the Flower Moon for us, with many of the pasture plants blooming, going to seed and finally dying back within the last two weeks. For forage, we now rely on the grasses and herbs that can grow and function in the crazy heat of the summer. These are the "warm season" grasses that don't shut down photosynthesis in high temperatures. I think I am like the cool season grasses--my body wants to go into a torpor during the 100 degree weather, so I have to dunk myself in cold water regularly to keep going.

The sheep seem to tolerate the weather just fine, and I am happy to see the ewes looking healthy and recovered from lambing season. Some of the lambs are growing horns, and yet they are all still nursing! We won't wean them from their moms, we'll just let it happen naturally to keep everyone more calm.

Something that calms me is spinning our wool, and I have been doing a ton of this recently. I can't say I've reached Nirvana yet, but I do notice how the preparation of the fiber --whether it is combed into top or carded into roving--make a huge difference in the ease of spinning and consistency of the yarn. I really like combed top, as many spinners do, and that's why I am trying out a mill in Wyoming that may be able to make combed top with Navajo Churro wool. They said they might not be able to achieve this particular preparation because Churro fiber is so long and strong, so I am crossing my fingers that this experiment with pan out. Otherwise the rest of our clip will go to Valley Oak Mill in California and I will even have another batch of mohairxChurro carded into pin drafted roving.

This next moon cycle is called by some the Strawberry Moon. The ground squirrels have snacked on all of our strawberries, so we'll just have to keep making observations about what is going on with the irrigated pasture and our little nook of the northern California foothill woodlands to put a name to the 6th moon in Oak Run.

Full Flower Moon!

This is another beautiful time of year in Oak Run. Not only is everything in bloom, but our water is flowing to keep it all alive. Even the grasses are in full bloom, as those with seasonal allergies are well aware. The pasture is in its peak nutritional state, with amazing plant diversity and everything just about to move from flowering to fruiting stage. We are having such a good year that I was tempted to bring in more animals to munch it down. But, instead I decided to do a small experiment by mowing down some thick patches of Medusa head grass. Medusa head is pervasive, invasive and the sheep don't like eating it. If I can break it's flowering cycle, perhaps less seeds will set and there will be less of it next year. We have the luxury of cutting back grass this year since there is so much forage for the sheep elsewhere in the pasture.

As of mother's day all of the dye plants and herbs are snug in their growing beds in the garden! Madder, indigo, coreopsis, marigold are in one bed. Comfrey, self-heal, cinquefoil, calendula, chamomile, holy basil are in another. There are also scattered patches of mugwort, peppermint, white sage, and nettles. The quail have been pecking at the seedlings so I have to cover everything, those cute little stinkers.

During the second half of this moon cycle we will see many of the wild plants going to seed and dying back as we approach the summer solstice. I think things will slow down outside a little bit, but that doesn't mean our work is over! I sold out of another mohairxChurro wool and am still spinning almost every day for Etsy orders or for practice. I still have to get the spring shearing wool to the mills very soon so I will have more fiber to sell by Thanksgiving!

I would love to see pictures of your Flower Moon blossoms!

This is the second day into the fifth moon cycle of 2024. We made it through the Pink moon and are moving into the Flower moon. However, for us as people who raise grazing animals, one huge interest of ours is how the grass is growing. Last moon cycle we saw the grass transition from short sprouts to tall, luscious waves of green nutrition for our sheep.

It is an incredible thing that plants turn carbon dioxide, water, and light into food and oxygen!!!!! I am really feeling the magic of photosynthesis right now!

6CO2 + 6H2O →sunlight→ C6H12O6 + 6O2

That is:

what we exhale + water + sunshine = what we eat + what we breathe

We focus on the grass because it is what keeps the sheep full and healthy. But in order to keep the grass growing in Oak Run we need to run irrigation, so that will be our constant work from now basically until October. We cleared the earthen ditch that runs through the woods near us and have released water from the local creek into the ditch. In the next few days we will prime our pump system and the sprinklers will run non-stop to keep the pasture grass green all summer.

Meanwhile, I am just about officially signed up to be a small vendor at a sheep fair in October in Dixon, CA. I will be hustling and running to get all the LandCrafts products ready and branded for this big event.

So much more has happened over the last two weeks, but I need to stop somewhere. Suffice it to say that we are so thankful for the abundance of this Spring!

Green Grass Growth. These are the glorious days of Spring. Wildflowers and butterflies, need I say more?

Well, I will say a bit more: We had shearing day last week! I am so excited about the fleeces that came off our animals, and I guess that the sheep are happy to have them off. Three salt+pepper grey, two white, one black and one that can only be described as a golden fleece.

I also got a crazy bad case of the flu for the last 8 days, so I do not have a lot of pictures for this post; I will try to add more soon. Fortunately I already had help lined up to manage the explosive growth of the grass wherever the sheep don't graze, so things are only moderately out of control right now.

The pasture forage is looking amazing, and I am dying to set up smaller paddocks with electric netting in our 12 acre pasture so that we can start intensive rotational grazing soon. Legend, and I guess also science, says that if you do this style of grazing you can sequester carbon, increase forage production, reduce parasite load, improve soil structure, increase soil biodiversity and basically save the planet and go straight to heaven. So, I'm in.

Happy full moon. These are the glorious days of Spring.

Weaving a scarf with our NavajoChurro lambswool x kid mohair blend with Leno+bead detail.

A solar eclipse happened on the same day as the fourth new moon today. Coincidence? I don't believe that it is, but I haven't researched anything to explain it yet. Regardless, being able to see, indirectly, the moon block out 25% of the sun today was super cool. I hastily rigged up a bino-viewer, somehow managing to avoid pulling out the duct tape. I got some very cool pictures, shared here, and quickly moved on to mowing.

As much as I love the idea of working WITH nature instead of against it, and hope that I am clever enough to harness the rhythms and power of natural cycles to harvest sustenance, right now I do have the thought, "The battle has begun." The sun and warm days mean grass, growth, life. Everything living thing seems to be competing for sunlight, space, and nutrients, scrambling over each other to claim their place before the hot days set in. I am right there in the mele, pulling weeds from the garden and hacking back the grass.

The sheep do their part by munching, munching, munching. This is the best way we harness the sun's power: we fence a pasture, put some sheep out there and turn sunlight into more sheep. We managed to get 16 lambs out of this arrangement this year, the last lamb being born as a single about 10 days ago and oh so cute.

This next moon cycle is called by some the Pink Moon, referring to a plant family called the pinks, carnations, or Caryophyllaceae. The only plants coming up in the pink family here are some mouse-ears (Cerastium); we get many more from this family later in the season. Instead we have a small smattering of wildflowers coming up: red maids, fiddle neck, redbud, ceanothus. This moon cycle will definitely host the emergence of many amazing and beautiful flowers, and I can't wait to see them and share them with everyone here, along with the results of our upcoming wool shearing day.

The third full moon of 2024 will rise over our land this evening, marking the end of a very intense, vivid 2 week period of life and death on the farm. We welcomed another 6 lambs from our mamas, with twins or triplets from all of the DorperxKatahdin moms. Unfortunately, one lamb from a set of triplets did not make it through the birthing process. After discovering this loss we found our beloved livestock guardian dog Mellow died in his sleep in the pasture at 5yrs old. We are not sure what happened - there were no signs of struggle - but RIP Mellow.

Nathan’s uncle says that death comes in threes, and we almost had that come true. One beautiful Navajo Churro mama developed a postpartum fever with associated mastitis and was very weak. She wouldn't eat or drink, but her 10 day old baby was doing ok. We took both of them to a vet, who recommended a shot of antibiotics for mom. With that medicine and amazing vigilance by Nathan administering water and nutrients, the ewe turned a corner and is back in the pasture. She's a little ragged but finally nibbling the grass. We narrowly avoided living up to Uncle Joe’s legend.

That ewe's fleece may develop a “break,” or a weak spot along the fiber length reflecting her hard time. But we have a shearer scheduled to come in a couple weeks and I am hoping that if there is a break the shearing will be timed well to preserve this and the next fleece from problems.

Otherwise, the land right now seems to be once again waking up, once again being reborn. I step outside and can actually smell how the creatures in the soil are starting to work their magic-- you know that earthy smell, right? Wildflowers coming up now are shooting star (Dodecatheon), buttercups (Ranunculus) and purple sanicle (Sanicula), among others. There's more wildlife moving in, too, like....frogs! those darned ground squirrels.....and of course the eponymous earthworm of this magnificent Worm Moon.

We are a couple days into the third moon of 2024, and in Oak Run we are moving into a world filled with all of the themes of Springtime and Easter: green shoots emerging from the bare earth, lambs frolicking in the pasture, chickens starting to lay more eggs. We are so happy to welcome five more lambs to our flock, including a group of triplets!! This DorperxKatahdin mama has her hands (hoofs?) full, but she seems strong and up to the challenge. It helps that the clover and grass is growing fast in the pasture to support her as she provides her milk to all three of her ram lambs.

All of our 9 lambs so far have been male except one. This mean we will have a lot of boxed lamb to sell next year just before Easter, and we will be bark-tanning the pelts. It is a tough way of looking at these adorable, frisky, precious beings, but we will be caring for them all year and showing respect throughout their lives in thanksgiving for the healthy food and beautiful pelts they will provide us in a year.

We are also scheduling the shearer to come in a few weeks, and I am so excited because I am running low on some of my fiber! I sold out of the kid mohair x lambswool roving&yarn, understandably because it was so deliciously soft and silky. I still have brown, black, white, grey, red, and yellow fiber, though! I will take the shorn fleeces to the mill and get the processed wool back within 4-5 months in time for Christmas markets.

The seeds in the greenhouse have almost all sprouted, and I am happiest about the Japanese indigo showing its cotyledons through the potting soil. Yay! I can't wait to see this venerated plant up close, but the plan is to wild harvest the invasive dyer's woad (Isatis tinctoria) as my source of blue dye this year.

Things that I am looking forward to during the waxing third moon: Spring bursting forth, more lambs, the solar eclipse*, transplanting nettles (ouch!), and more spinning!

*Ok the solar eclipse is on the first day of the 4th moon cycle, but I am still looking forward to it. 🌑☀️

Tonight is the second full moon of the year! It is really the Almond Blossom Moon for us, as the almond trees are blooming here and across California's Central and San Joaquin valleys as well. Rather than being a moment of snowy crystal clean & quiet, color and sound and lovely floral smells slowly emerge around us. Frogs in the pond and raptors overhead call to their prospective mates. Bright daffodils and fragrant daphne are in the garden while manzanita bloom in the forest. Pretty nice.
We had another lamb born since the new moon. The light brown ram lamb comes from our Navajo-Churro ewe who grows the most beautiful fleece of the flock. This mama's fleece is basically golden; light yellow/beige and so lustrous. It was her fleece that was used to blend with shiny kid mohair to make a lamb's wool x mohair blend. I am currently working on an order for 2 pounds of hand spun yarn from this beautiful blend!
Also since my last post on the New Almond Blossom Moon, the greenhouse has started to get hopping. The madder and nettles that overwintered there had a major growth spurt and need to go into the garden soon. There are now about 20 different seeds nestled in potting soil and my fingers are crossed that everything will germinate in the next few weeks. I have natural dyeing plants indigo, marigold and madder (blue, yellow and red, respectively); tea herbs peppermint, tulsi, and chamomile; herbs for skincare cinquefoil, comfrey, and white sage; and finally bug control with pyrethrum. I am really excited that I started some milkweed seeds collected from the wild last year. I also collected a lot of native grass seeds from our property last Fall, and a whole tray of Bromus carinatus has sprouted.
Despite all of the above, it was sort of a slow and quiet two weeks on the farm. Usually things are a little more out of control...but I'm sure that will change soon....Spring is coming in less than a month and there is much to prepare.

It is the beginning of the second moon cycle of 2024, sometimes called the Snow Moon. Today is the last day of the Chinese Lunar Year; tomorrow begins the Year of the Dragon, which I am seeing as auspicious for this Oak Run Sheep & LandCrafts business venture. See my "PS" at the end of this post for more musings on the moon.

Well, dragons and moons aside, on our little farm we have had rain and big hefty pregnant ewes. Who......are.....still....pregnant. Actually we had one adorable ram lamb born in the last 2 weeks and we are very happy to welcome him to the fold. But, despite having had a dream in which we got three sets of twins, in reality we currently have just two singleton lambs. This is what happens when we let Nature take its course--uncertainty, surprises, and lots of opportunities to learn and develop patience.

While "patiently" waiting I have been doing a lot of spinning and weaving. I have really been enjoying working with the lambswool x kid mohair blend; it is so shiny and soft. I have sold several center-pull balls of this hand-spun yarn in Pokeberry to a very crafty and kind relative who will be using it to knit a scarf. I did not do any plant or veg-dying these last two weeks as I am trying to build up a stash of spun wool rather than dye with roving. But, when I do get a handful of skeins I am so excited to practice a natural indigo dye vat, and to continue dying with Pokeberry, onion skins and lichen.

Any new offering will be placed on my Etsy page, which, by the way, is really fun and growing slowly and steadily. I recently became a member of The Livestock Conservancy and Fibershed to market my Navajo-Churro wool. Links to these cool things are included below.

The violets are in full bloom right now, so I harvested a batch and set the blossoms in warm olive oil. The oil extract will be used in a face soap I will make later in the year. Also, it is time to start seeds in the greenhouse before the full moon. The plants I will start are for natural dying, herbal livestock care, and soapmaking: marigold, pyrethrum, white sage, tulsi, to name a few.

The robins have flown in, the bluebirds are flashing their indigo wings, sandhill cranes are flying northward and the peach trees are budding up. Everything seems to be on the cusp of Spring, but we may in fact get a few inches of snow in the next 2 weeks, making this moon live up to it's name.

Here are some links to interesting info I mentioned above:

https://livestockconservancy.org/heritage-breeds/heritage-breeds-list/navajo-churro-sheep/

https://fibershed.org/

https://oakrunlandcrafts.etsy.com

PS: Did you know that the new moon rises and sets with the sun? So, we can't see the moon during the new moon phase because the earth is positioned between the sun and the moon, thus blocking any light from reaching the moon's surface. But we wouldn't be able to see the moon anyway because it rises during the day, so the sunlight (basically) overpowers the visibility of the moon. Curious...

Today is the first full moon of 2024. The Wolf Moon, the Stick Moon, the Rain Moon. At our place in Oak Run, we've had almost nothing but rain, plus a little snow, until today. Our area was "socked in" with fog the other day, and just down the road on the way to school we saw the local herd of elk emerge out of the mist. About 35 elk live near us! So cool.

I am very grateful for the rain; I am collecting it from the roof to use for natural dying because our well water has high levels of iron, which can "sadden" the colors I am trying to make. I spent some time recently dying with the pokeberries I collected at the end of last summer and I am SO psyched about the results. Brilliant reds and adorable pinks on the mohair/Churro and mohair/targhee roving. This wool, spun or in roving, will be up on my Etsy shop soon.

Speaking of the Etsy shop, I am also so excited that I have made some sales there, woo-hoo! Folks from Michigan and New Jersey, thank you!

We still just have one all-black ewe lamb, but the paddock below the barn is like a maternity ward. The ladies are just sitting around grunting and groaning, probably feeling very large. Having been 9-months pregnant, I can relate. I am so hoping to share more about a successful lambing season at the beginning of the next moon cycle 2 weeks from now.

Today is the first day of the first moon cycle of 2024. I've chosen this day to start posting little updates on Facebook every two or four weeks, on the new moon and/or full moon. I will cover what is happening on our farm as the seasons progress and as the moon moves through its cycles.

In some cultures the first moon cycle after the Winter solstice is called the Wolf Moon. Right now we might call it the Bare Branch or Ice Moon. It is cold and icy here, but amazingly our 11 ewes are getting ready to have their lambs. In fact, our only black sheep had her single ewe lamb on Saturday. We are keeping everyone close to the barn, feeding them a little extra organic grain, alfalfa and hay as they work through their energy-intensive last days of pregnancy.

I am also spending a lot of time in front of the spinning wheel and loom during the dark mornings and evenings right now. I am working with the wool that was shorn earlier last year, and spinning it up as fast as I can so that I can move on to dying it with pokeberries, lichen, and onion skins. Meanwhile I am putting up roving and hand spun yarn on my teeny tiny Etsy shop. https://oakrunlandcrafts.etsy.com

On my calendar of farm tasks, the first moon cycle starts with a lot of indoor stuff like spinning, taxes, planning, etc. This year it will also be busy with lambing, although in the future we will shoot for lambing at the Spring equinox or fourth moon.