Oak Knoll Farm

This

By in Home Front, Island, Musing, Oak Knoll Farm, Uncategorized No Comments

I discovered a languishing draft post and read it through this morning.

March 2016
AJbarnEaster16

Photo by my mother-in-law — thanks, Alice!

… is exactly what I’m after: for this pair to hang on a barn gate and watch the sheep, to sweep the hayloft, to kick manure piles*. They’re getting perfectly filthy, and we’ve still to learn how to skirt fleeces. Goodness, our city life is clean and pampered. In the words of Pongo (and how often I have listened to the words of Pongo in the past few months — Dodie Smith’s The 101 Dalmatians is Ada’s very favorite book, and if you’re someone who reads with kids you should definitely hunt up a copy), “Pampering does good dogs no harm, provided they don’t come to depend on it. If they do, they become old before their time. We should never lose our liking for adventure.”

The scale of the adventure in muckling onto a sheep who’d rather not have a haircut or in assaulting the encroaching blackberries and hawthorn with a brush mower is, perhaps, modest. We are only just starting to hone our country sense and strengthen our country muscles for the work this farm represents. This work will humble us. Fencing — and oh, there is a lot of it that needs to be rebuilt from scratch — is probably going to make me cry. Just putting one meal after another on the table without easy recourse to take-out when the tank of cooking mojo has run dry and everyone is exhausted and grumpy will require leaning in. (Luckily our house came with this amazing old edition of The French Chef Cookbook, so we can at least find plenty of humor in the black-and-white photographs of Julia cheerfully and athletically preparing to bludgeon an unsuspecting future dinner.) But really, these daily challenges shape our natures more than the grand adventures that make it into the family photo album, don’t you think? We’re choosing this farm because we want it to mold us.

* For you urbanites, this is not just because we lack superior entertainment options out here in the sticks. Heaps of horse puckey kill the grass and provide nurseries for undesirable larvae.

 April 2018

Skirting fleeces: check. We’ve done it for our own flock three times now and we’ve helped friends as well. I now feel competent to train others, so that I can be Chief Sheep Nabber on shearing day while deputizing my parents and other willing friends to shake out second cuts and pull off the daggy bits for composting. I have a seven-year-old who can write sheep’s names (if sometimes with inventive spelling: “Mod,” “Daphinae,” “Pershephune”) on the plastic bags receiving their fleeces and can run to fetch the bottle of CDT vaccine from the refrigerator or the sharper pair of seccateurs from the drawer in the tack room. This year we hosted new acquaintances who brought their four little Black Welsh Mountain ewe lambs in the back of their station wagon; we taught them how to skirt and how to trim hooves, too. We leveled up the adventure by tackling the llama’s first shearing in many years. He was really pretty decent about it all, but he does not enjoy oral dewormer and my poor dad, sitting on the fence ten feet away, was caught within the spray radius. Nor does he suffer injections lightly. I think I managed to deliver half his vaccine dose before just dodging a lightning hoof strike. Oh well, Chico, I tried. Here’s hoping we can break the natural parasite cycles by rotational grazing this season.

I talk and think about things like parasite cycles and rotational grazing quite a lot nowadays. I remember joking with my husband, soon after we’d had our first baby, that we couldn’t remember what we used to talk about before we were parents. Now I hardly know what we talked about before we were farmers. We’re terribly fortunate to have made friends with another farming family as nerdy as we’ve become about forage samples and manure; I’m not sure who’d be brave enough to come to dinner anymore otherwise. But it’s not isolating, this farm life. It’s connective. We’ve met so many helpful mentors and likeminded folks who care about growing things and solving rural problems and keeping these islands vital through agriculture and community building. It’s a new lens on a place I’ve known and loved my whole life, and it’s fresh soil for experimenting with different ideas about how to live and work and devote ourselves to a place and its inhabitants.

Farm life is never dull, either. The chore list never gets any shorter, but the jobs are varied and the work is real and there’s plenty to laugh about, too. You realize you’ve shifted into a different mode of living when you’re picking bits of baling twine out of your lacy undergarments, or when your husband accidentally slingshots you in the eye with a foam ear plug while shaking out the laundry. You have to appreciate the comedy in casually hanging about on the fenceline with binoculars trying to get a good look at a ewe’s lady tackle to see if she’s getting near lambing, or in racing to town for school pick-up with water still sloshing in one boot because you lost track of time trying to shampoo a sheep in a water trough before the breed association’s national show. There’s a stimulating power in building the creativity to lay track in front of the train when the breeding ewes you were leading to the ram’s pasture take fright and bolt back toward the barn with the eager baby-daddy out the gate after them in a flash and your enticing grain bucket now of interest to nobody.

Do we still miss Portland? We do. We have unbreakable ties to people and to ways of being that we developed during our years there. We did a lot of living in that little red house on 48th Avenue, and I’m still wistful about that home (particularly the kitchen). Did we do right to make this leap? Absolutely. And now I’m off to go move some electric fencing and then pick bits of nature out of another fleece while the sun is shining.

Fiber flock

By in Crossbreds, Lambs, Oak Knoll Farm, OKF Flock, Sheep Diversity No Comments

We’re starting the new year with some very exciting (to me) additions to Oak Knoll Farm: wool sheep! If your knowledge of sheep is pretty general purpose, you’re probably not aware of the remarkable range of wool these critters can grow. But think about the variety of dog hair from poodle curls to husky fluff and you’ll begin to get the gist. Our North Country Cheviots grow a solid middle-of-the-road fleece, softer than people expect but more durable than famous breeds like Merinos, medium in length, unglossy and pure white when it’s clean. This wool takes color very well and can make a lovely sweater yarn. It’s largely overlooked by North Country breeders in the USA, who are more interested in the rapid growth, muscular body type, hardihood, and independent nature of these sheep. I’m keenly interested in producing and knitting yarn made of nothing but North Country wool.

Back in November I attended Deb Robson’s spinning retreat here on the island, and the focus this time was on crossbred fleeces. Sheep of mixed parentage can grow utterly gorgeous wool that blend the qualities of their purebred ancestors in unique and intriguing ways. They can also grow crap wool that’s the worst of everything, but therein lies the allure of trying to hone a particular type of fleece in a whole flock over many generations. You can get gold or garbage or anything in between. One woman who really did succeed at crossbreeding a handspinning flock with distinctive characteristics was Sally Bill on neighboring Lopez Island. The Sally Bill Specials are few in number now, but we got to sample a little of their wool at Deb’s retreat. (I think we all fell a little in love with a ewe called Mumsy.) Deb had more wool from Lopez sheep, too, and the fleece that immediately piqued my interest was a Blue-Faced Leicester x North Country/Coopworth cross. I could feel the North Country in it immediately, but the Coopworth and BFL made it sing a new song. I had to find out where it had come from, and I had to start thinking seriously about running a little crossbred flock of my own to see what I might achieve by way of variation on a North Country theme.

My Lopez contacts confirmed my hunch that the fleece was from Lucky Ewe farm. And it just so happened that friends of ours were already arranging to buy some ewe lambs from Lucky Ewe to cross with their Romney ram. I decided we’d better tag along. So we all dropped our kids at school and hopped the interisland ferry with the trailer in tow. Grown-up field trip! A long meander through the wooded country lanes of Lopez brought us to the field where the ewe lambs were waiting for us. Our friends picked out their five and then we loaded up half a dozen more to form the foundation of the Oak Knoll Fiber Flock.

They’re all from a BFL ram, and their mothers are a mix of Romney, Coopworth, East Friesian, and yes, North Country Cheviot. I’ve been in touch with the shepherd who tended the Lucky Ewe flock in its previous incarnation and he confirmed that he did indeed bring over rams from Oak Knoll Farm. We have two sets of twin sisters amongst our six, and from sheep to sheep there’s a lot of variety in their characteristics. Some look more like Romneys, some like BFLs, some like neither. One has suggestions of North Country in her Roman nose and clean, strong head — not to mention her tendency to watch our every move and dash for freedom if we approach — but her fleece is nearly black. All these girls have long, crimpy locks. It’s a treat to bury your hands in their wool.

I’ve named them after great queens of history. Eleanor is their leader, the only one bold and calm enough to approach us and nibble offerings from the children’s hands. Her sister Cleopatra is dubbed Patch for the white spot on her nose. Victoria is the short white one with North Country ears, and Maud has the noble BFL profile and wild eyes. Theodora is Vicky’s brown sister with splotches of white on one cheek. Zenobia is the dark chocolate girl I can’t wait to shear.

They’re separated from the North Countries while they acclimate to their new home, so I built them a covered hay feeder. It’s small and lightweight so that Adam and I can easily carry it about for mobstocking, but I’m proud to report it withstood yesterday’s gale without damage. The little queens seem to think it’s just right, too.

So here they are, back at the farm where their great-grandfather, perhaps, was born. My plans for them are wide open — half to our friend’s Romney and half to a North Country ram with a good fleece, perhaps? I’d like to add more Coopworth somewhere down the road if I could find a ram nearby. For now we’ll take it slow, get to know them, and eagerly await their first clip in March!

Full circle

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I hated The Giving Tree. I don’t lightly second-guess Ursula Nordstrom—you have her to thank for the phenomenon of children’s books that actually appeal to children’s imaginations, and to me she’s something of a personal hero—but even as a tot I was horrified at this story of a boy’s increasingly rapacious relationship with an apple tree. This is probably just the reaction my parents were hoping to cultivate. I learnt to chant “Boycott GE!” at a tender age; we were still punishing the company for their pollution of the Hudson and the Housatonic. We carved a linoleum block with a spotted owl for our Christmas cards one year. My parents owned a lumber store, but I grew up knowing exactly where we stood on indiscriminate logging.

During the summer my husband ordered boards to rebuild our paddock fence, which is forty years old and falling apart. I thought I’d patched all the holes in the wire, but it was so rusty that the sheep simply shoved their heads through to form new ones wherever there were likely comestibles on the other side. One of the lambs was found to be freely scampering back and forth through such a hole. There’s no point in replacing the wire until we replace the rotten posts, so another big farm project is on.

The new wood is locally milled into fine stout boards that will do for horses as well as sheep, and it was delivered earlier this week. As we unloaded and restacked the lumber in the ewes’ field, Adam asked Jay where he typically gets the timber he mills. Construction sites? Harvesting on private land? “This lot came from back in Hidden Meadows,” he told us. Remember that game where you make yourself an alternate identity using the name of your first pet and the name of the street you grew up on? I’m here to tell you that Hidden Meadows makes a rather poor surname. And I knew instantly where this wood had come from.

My parents sold our Hidden Meadows house last summer. A few months later we heard that the new owner had felled a number of large trees to improve his view of the pond, including the cluster of big Doug firs in which we’d had a treehouse and a zip line. We laid our pets to rest amongst their roots. I’ve managed not to be too sentimental about losing the house of my childhood—my sense of home is imbued in the island itself—but I was sorry to think of those trees gone. It was a queer sensation indeed to find myself standing over the boards milled from their mighty trunks.

In the next few weeks we’ll start pulling out the old fence and setting the new posts. We’ll offset these sixteen-foot boards over spans of three posts for a sturdy fence a horse can rub her bum against. With any luck, I’ll be an old woman by the time we need to build it again. Shel Silverstein cannot convince me the trees are happy, and I wish they were still wriggling their roots toward the pond and offering their whippy tops to the breezes, but I am touched and appreciative that they’ve followed me.

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