June 2025

What a busy Spring it has been. Hay is seeded and growing, trees have been started and the garden is beginning to take shape. Thrilled to say we have sold our first plants and starts this Spring. With gardening and growing being one of my greatest passions, it is a delight to have this part of the farm beginning to come together.

We travelled to Southern Oregon last month to visit our Aberdeen bull and purchased several pregnant cow-calf pairs of registered Aberdeen Angus. For those who don't know, Aberdeen are the corgies of the Angus breed (according to my eldest daughter), an amazing combination of the Angus beauty and production in a shorter stature, making them excellent for production on smaller farms, or for people like me who don't love 1500 lb cattle tramping on fields and leaning on fences. They are wonderful mothers and generally calve with ease. We are very excited to have them, and it's particularly sweet for me as the heifer calves are out of the Aberdeen bull that Dad and I purchased together. We had hoped to eventually develop a nice little herd of registered Aberdeen Angus ourselves, but with Dad's death in 2021, I didn't have the heart or the energy until now. I think he would be thrilled to see them back here now and it gives me a little surge of pleasure each time I see them munching happily in the field.

This Spring we also welcomed our first baby lamb from our ewe Cleo, a black Romney mix who is the diaper-baby shown in some of the site photos from a few years ago. Her baby, Angel as I have been calling her, is an absolute joy. If you've never seen a lamb frolicking, do yourself a favor and google it--these guys can jump and twist and romp in the most adorable ways. You can't possibly feel anything but sheer love watching the action. Angel is a Romney BFL cross and already her fleece is so incredibly soft and different from the other sheep. I have purchased lamb coats for the lot of them and hope to get everyone suited up in the coming weeks.

Speaking of fleece, we are entering three fleeces in the upcoming Black Sheep Gathering wool judging in late June. The hope is to get a better understanding of the quality of these fleeces as we begin thinking about next year's breeding options. As a child of cattle ranchers, I had absolutely zero experience with sheep until two springs ago when a neighbor offered three bottle-babies to us and we jumped at the chance. One steep learning curve later, we had our little flock of weed eaters and it has been great.

Sheep are such amazingly useful creatures. They are great at removing grass and weeds of course, but can also produce the most lovely fiber and meat. Having never experienced working with farm animals toward the goal of anything but meat production, I am finding the growing of fleece to be an exciting venture. I am nowhere hear knowing a darn thing still, but I am in love with the idea that I can raise an animal from birth and keep it around for a lifetime, harvesting fleece and continuing to enjoy it, without always facing the sad (but necessary) business of slaughter.

The hens are going strong and egg sales are steady. We hope to bring in some Novagen hens just as soon as the pullet market gets back to normal, and our meat birds are arriving in a couple of weeks as well. Oh the joys of the farm! Now off to work...