Sunrise Haven Farm

No lambs yet, though I expect them any moment. I am waiting very impatiently, checking for signs every two hours. The moms don’t seem terribly happy either at this point, they are HUGE and this hot weather is not making them any happier.  It’s supposed to hit 90 today, the weather has gone so screwy this year! On the plus side, the sheep have very light coats now since they were sheared just a few weeks ago.

So while I’m waiting, in an attempt to get my mind off of the pacing (yes I am very truly horribly impatient),  I have been trying my hand at dyeing!  I wanted to use natural dyes - not Kool Aid (yes it does work very well as a permanent dye) or synthetic dyes - so my first tries were done with native central/south american dyestuff: cochineal (a type of beetle) and logwood (tree’s heartwood).  Dyeing is a long process, 24 hours or more, but there’s not really a lot of work involved. I started the night before I planned to dye, by preparing the yarn and the dyestuff.  For the cochineal, preparation involves grinding up the dried beetles into a fine powder with a mortar and pestle, then putting the ground dyestuff into a jar with some vinegar to soak/dissolve overnight.  Logwood needs to be fermented to oxidize it and release/activate the dye. I bought some logwood shavings that had been fermented and dried, and put them into a jar with water to soak overnight, to add more oxygen.  I also started soaking yarn, as you want to put the material you wish to dye into the dyebath thoroughly wet and saturated, so that the dye will uptake into the fiber evenly.

The next morning I got up bright and early to start dyeing!  The dye process involves a lot of waiting - and some STRONG smells - there is a good reason for doing this in a well-ventilated area, even if you are using natural and non-toxic materials!  I began by taking the dyestuff I had been pre-preparing the night before and mixing them into large pots of water, then simmering them for an hour or so.  Next the fibers come out of the soaking bath and go into the dyebaths, and simmer for another hour or so.  Then the pots are removed from the heat, and put outside in the shade to cool down naturally.  After a few hours of cooling I took the fibers out of the dyebaths, rinsed them thoroughly with cold water until the fibers drip clear water, and hung them to dry.  I did second and third dyebaths in the same day - the second ones using the same dyebaths as the first to produce a lighter shade of the same color, and the third combining the remains of the two original dyebaths and re-adding and boiling the logwood I had used originally to extract more color from it.

I spent a full twelve hour day dyeing these skeins of yarn,  plus the time the night before doing prep work.  Started heating the dye pots at 7am and took down the dry skeins (it was a wonderfully warm sunny day, they dried fast!) at 7pm. I must say, I LOVE the results of these experiments, and had a wonderful time doing it.  I am looking forward to trying other colors and materials now that I understand the basic process.

The sheep were sheared on Saturday, in the miserably damp dreariness.  The fleeces are lovely! They don’t seem to be as dirty as I thought they were either. Here they are, unwashed and freshly shorn:

The four yearlings fleeces - this was their first shearing.

Roscoe’s fleece, lots of honey gold color in it (some of that is dirt and sweat that will wash out too).

A closeup of Valerie’s fleece - she is the whitest of the yearlings, with beautiful rosy highlights.
Three more weeks to lambs!

I raise sheep. I feed them, provide them with shelter, care for them when they’re sick, and protect them from predators. I stay up nights during lambing season, checking on the ewes, pacing and hoping labor and delivery will go smoothly. I name all of the baby lambs. I love and nurture their growth and recognize each individual in the flock.

And yes, I eat them. These are my food.

“How do you DO that?” I’m often asked. This is my attempt to answer that question. I am proud of what I do, and it bothers me that nearly every person who asks me “do you eat them?” does it in a whisper. Why are we so ashamed of being meat eaters? And if it’s so awful, why do we do it?  I don’t know, and I often wonder why we as a society act as we do. But this is my (first) attempt to answer why I personally have made the choice to raise my own animals (and vegetables and fruits and nuts and whatever else I can!) for food.

I was a vegetarian for quite a while when I was young(er). When I first realized that those packages in the freezer, and those delicious meals, were produced by killing animals, I was shocked. I thought eating cute and cuddly animals was evil, and that farmers who raised such animals with the intent of eating them must be cruel heartless monsters. But still, deep down it always seemed to me that eating meat was a normal and natural thing that humans were supposed to do, much like other animals that naturally eat meat. It would seem unnatural, to me, to put my dog or cat on a vegetarian diet! While being a vegetarian eased my conscience, it still didn’t seem right to me.

So I investigated our food production system to find out how these nicely shrink wrapped packages wound up on the shelves of the supermarket. I learned all about the sickening and abhorrent large scale factory farming techniques that are used to feed our unsustainably large human population. I was thoroughly disgusted. What ever happened to “Little House on the Prairie,” I thought? It’s not supposed to be this way! What happened to the happy image of the family cow grazing while chickens scratch around the yard and the pig relaxes in his mudbath, all framed by the big red barn and the waving corn and wheat fields in the background? That’s where meat and milk and eggs and FOOD is supposed to come from! But who does that these days? I’d never seen such a thing, except in books, television, and the field trip to the local historical re-enactment village.

My childhood was spent in what I would now call suburbia. I wasn’t a city girl, and I wasn’t a country girl. I didn’t know much about either urban life or rural life. I was poised to be an average American. Today, this thought completely horrifies me. Television, and most media, disgust me almost as much as the horrible large scale farming practices do. Our modern lives are filled with violent blood and guts images, whether broadcast as news or entertainment. Wars, gangs, crime, human-to-human evils, and even human-to-animal cruelties, are shown to anyone who wants to look, in the name of “keeping it real.” But try to show people how the meats that they eat every day are raised and processed - REALITY - and they are shocked and disgusted. And I’m not even talking about the methods used on the big factory farms, which I find personally disgusting, and which I think everyone SHOULD see! Witnessing ‘a day in the life’ of those shrink wrapped packages of meat you get at the grocery store would be an eye-opener for many.

Large scale meat factories are sickening to me. The thought of buying that slick generic package of ‘93% lean ground beef’ in the grocery store really grosses me out these days, when I KNOW that it could contain bits of meat from as many as 400 different cows. And who knows what those cows were fed or how they were cared for during their lives! I want to know all of my food, not just my vegetable garden. The amount and type of nutrients and care that go into my animals - my meat - is just as important to me as the amount and type of nutrients and care that go into my vegetable garden, and my fruit and nut trees. And ultimately into me and my family.

But it seems most people don’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss. I think it is tremendously sad that most meat-eating people would object to seeing how small farmers raise and process their animals into meat products for human consumption, broadcast on their television. We’ve raised a generation (generations?) of people that are disgusted at the image of the mundane, needed task of preparing their food. Take a domestically raised animal - raised from birth to be food for humans - and show it being humanely killed and processed into food and other products we use every day - and the fact that this is truly REAL does not seem to matter. People are disgusted. But they will still go buy their shrink wrapped meat products and happily consume them while doing their best to remain ignorant of how that package got to that shelf. And so factory farming thrives, and the smaller, holistic farmers disappear.

I always dreamed of someday finding that little idyllic farm, producing my own food and living in harmony with the land. All I needed to do was two things: find a nice chunk of land that I could afford, and get rid of the television. And I did. The idyllic vision is not quite realized yet, and probably never will be quite so idyllic. That’s reality. Life never quite happens the way we plan for it to happen, but to me, life has been blissful ever since those first two things were accomplished - even when it’s a struggle. I have a beautiful flock of sheep. I love them, and yes I eat them. I’ve had chickens and goats and llamas, vegetables and fruits and nuts, and years of happiness on my little farmstead. Every day I learn a little bit more, and every day I am thankful to be here, living this reality.

Between my annual vacation, and the annual illness that always immediately follows it, I have not updated this site in a while.  The sheep are doing well, fairly oblivious to the insane weather fluctuations we’ve been experiencing.  They graze happily during pouring rain, whipping winds, and blizzard-like snow - and look awfully silly with white puffy piles of snow atop their heads too.  At seemingly random times they will wander into the shelter.  I’m not sure what drives them inside, if anything.  The weather at least does not seem to be a factor that they consider when deciding where to be.

Meanwhile, I have been trying to stay warm by the fire in dreary depressing January (particularly while ill). This lends itself nicely to working on warm wooly tasks like carding, spinning and knitting. There is not much nicer than curling up in front of a hot woodfire with a steaming cup of cocoa and a big pile of wool.  OK, maybe I would prefer Caribbean sunshine and a beach, but until then…

Update! A selection of my products will be available THIS WEEKEND ONLY at the Leesburg Farmers Market.  This batch will include some of my handmade braided wool rugs and bags, carved horn buttons, and my lovely California Red sheep’s wool yarn. I may even have some knitted items and stained glass pieces available! Please stop by if you’re in the area.

I am learning to spin - and loving it! I had a lesson from Linda Brown of Graustark Llamas, borrowed a wheel, and have really been enjoying practicing this new skill.  This white yarn is the first bobbin of wool I spun, using roving from Linda’s sheep:

and of my practice at home - some pink blended Romney roving I had lying around, pre-spinning and on the
wheel:

You can tell I’ve overspun the fibers on the wheel, by the way it’s twisting going onto the bobbin. But still not bad for a beginner I think, and I am enjoying practicing so I’m bound to get better as time goes by. I’m looking forward to choosing my own wheel and trying out the fibers from my sheep. Each breed is so different! Another one of the joys of shepherding.

Roscoe is a happy boy. I let him in with the ewes to start breeding last Sunday. Which means a new crop of lambs in April. The weather is getting colder but the happy sheep have fleeces that are 3 or 4 inches long now so they don’t seem to mind at all.

I am off to help teach the braided roving rug workshop at the Shenandoah Valley Fiber Festival tomorrow and throughout the weekend.  I’ll also be helping the Loudoun Valley Sheep Producers Association with sales at their Wool Shop (where my yarn, buttons and rugs are for sale).  The LVSPA is also selling its hot lamb sausage products at the festival this year so I may help out with that too. Busy fall, and not much posting online. Lots of work done today… divided the ewe lambs from the adult ewes and started feeding the adults a bit of grain in preparation for breeding, cleaned all of the waterers and feeders, and cleaned the last remnants of our little fall festival out of the yard. I’ll be flushing the ewes for the next couple of weeks, then let Roscoe in with them… anticipating more April lambs!

Fall is creeping in, with its chilly foggy mornings and falling leaves. It’s new year’s day today, by the Hebrew calendar, and the weather here on the farm is absolutely ideal for my liking.  Bright and sunny, but not too hot to work outside digging in the dirt. As a matter of fact, I just finished trimming and mulching the apple trees.

The pits of those “peaches” that I tried last month really did contain something that looked like an immature almond, but as it looked immature I wasn’t going to try eating it.  Maybe next year.

The sheep are doing well, grazing happily. I’ll be selling undyed wool yarn spun from our California Red sheep, and buttons that I carved from Boer goat horn, at the Bluemont Fair tomorrow. If you’re in the area, come on by!

I harvested my first peaches last week! Strangely enough, they are growing on my almond tree…

I planted a variety called Halls Hardy Almond a few years ago.  One tree was eaten and destroyed and the other was severly beaten up by our local deer, but the second tree has been hanging on and growing.  It bloomed this spring, and last week I harvested fruit from it!  They look like peaches… and they taste like peaches… so I’m guessing my almond tree is growing peaches.  I did a little research online and it seems that this particular variety is a peach and almond crossbreed.  After eating the fruit, I tried to crack open the nuts (peach pits?) and it broke my old rusty nutcracker.  I am anxious to find out if there is actually an almond inside - maybe I’ll get both fruit AND nuts from this tree going forward!  I might just plant a few more.  The fruit was yummy!  Now to invest in a new nutcracker.