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The breeding groups have been together for a week at this point. By our calculations, the ewes should begin to cycle one week from now if Noah (the teaser wether) had any effect on them. We will see….certainly all is peaceful in the groups right now.

In the meantime, I am fantasizing about spring lambs from just the right crosses. But in choosing the 4 rams this year, I had to chip away at several rigid opinions; I guess letting go of prejudices is good for one’s moral fiber!

Here are the rams…I will post ewe photos later on.

Cedar Haven Maximillian is a lamb.

We have always felt that it is better not to breed with ram-lambs. We have in the past, but it wasn’t long ago that we decided never to do it again…and Brook would rather not do it this year. There are so many things that one can’t know about by the first autumn. But this time, there were 3 patterned ewes that we wanted to cross with a solid no-pattern ram. And Max has rather spectacular horns, a luscious light moorit fleece, great conformation, and a sweet temperatment….and he appears to carry the modifier.

Cairn Farm Nicolas has tight horns, but the finest, softest, most exquisite fleece in our flock.

Nicolas has a stunning single coated emsket fleece with good length. Despite these qualities, we have only used him in a very limited way so far, because I don’t want to have to agonize over horn development. This is Nickel’s last breeding season (he has 4 ewes this year), and at lambing, we will have his fleece genetics secured in a few different lines. We hope to get another ram of Centaurus’s quality.

Sheltering Pines Constantine is 50% UK breeding

I never ever thought that we would have an F1 AI sheep, but here he stands! I have long (and loudly) maintained that all the patterns and fleece types could be obtained without resorting to modern UK genetics. Then Constantine stole my heart just a year ago with I saw him at Stephen Rouse’s farm. His personality is so very sweet, and his long silky wool is soft and fine, not at all “primitive”, and I am smitten by the gulmoget smile. I love the fact that he doesn’t have the short crimpy fleece that is so typical of UK lines (hmmm-are my biases showing?) Ironic that this is likely the only reason that Stephen ever considered parting with him, but I am immensely grateful that he did! Constantine has 7 ewes this fall, all of which are solid, or carry solid. We should have some lovely gulmogets in the spring.

Stonehaven Willym is the one choice that didn’t require me to give up some long held belief.

Willym has it all…a soft fine fleece, great conformation, amazing horns and a sweet friendly personality. And even though he is a “light badgerface”, he has maintained his katmoget markings well. He is being bred to 3 girls with lustrous silky fleeces that should be perfect crosses for him.

Off to dream of beautiful lambs!

We got back to our from a longish visit to the West side of Oregon on Wednesday night…tired from our travels, behind in a zillion things, but still smiling from the events of the weekend.

Our son and his sweetheart got married on Saturday in the gardens in Portland.

Ben and Erin have been best friends for 5 years now, and they know that they want to spend their lives together. What joy for Brook and me to see these two special souls vowing to love and care for each other for the rest of their lives….may they be as happy as we have been.

Now we are blessed to have a son AND a daughter. Ben has always been our “sun”….we are so very proud of the wise and gentle man that he has grown up to be. And we have come to love Erin as a daughter…the words daughter-in-law seem so inappropriate to express how we feel about her. The french name for the woman that is married to one’s son seems much closer to describing it. She is our “belle-fille”….our beautiful daughter.

This year the wether chosen as the “teaser” for the breeding ewes is Noah. He is such a handsome fellow, with a gorgeous emsket fleece, but horns that were too close for comfort. His big dense fleece sells so quickly each year; it is sad that he didn’t get to pass that on.

Today we put him in with the ewes that are on the “2007 short-list” (only about 2/3 of these will be bred this year), and with this year’s ewe-lambs. Noah was mobbed, and for a while, he wasn’t so sure that he was up to being the most popular fellow on the farm!

He was all decked out with little sachets of heavily scented ram tag-wool, tied to his horns with yarn. The contents were gladly donated by 4 of the boys, all of whom sure that THEY will get to meet the girls later on….maybe yes, maybe no. We will see….

The ewe-lambs especially found Noah interesting, but they won’t be in breeding groups, and we hope that they don’t get too too fascinated by the pseudo-ram. On the other hand, we want the breeding ewes to start cycling now, and be ready for the real items when they appear around the 18th.

A few of the older ewes swooned over Noah, and followed him around for a while. And after initial disinterest, Noah actually began to act like a courting ram…but didn’t know what came after the sniffing and pawing. That is fine with us.

When we lived in New England, I could have the illusion that we humans were more or less in control of our environement. But now in Eastern Oregon, where we two-legs are far outnumbered by four-legs (there are even more horses in our valley than people!), I am constantly aware that we live in THEIR world, not the inverse.

This spring, I meant to plant sunflowers, but never got it done…I would wait until next year. Then when we did a second planting of something or other, the seed box got sorted through, and somehow the sunflower seeds were left in the sprinkler’s path…ugh!

So I planted them. WAY too late for them to make it to flowering. I have been watching and waiting and hoping as the plants grew and the blossoms formed. Although there have been frosts, the sunflowers seemed unscathed.

But look who else has been watching them!

Still I can’t complain too too much. They have eaten the leaves and left the flowers for me….

This summer, for the first time, blackbirds ate our sweet corn, voraciously!….the ears of the first crop were half gone by the time we picked them. Brook did some research and found this balloon (which we hung over the garden) and there were no more problems! We wondered if, being intellogent birds, the blackbirds would figure it out, but they didn’t. All the corn was ours!

Yesterday I found a lady blackbird caught in some prickly weeds in the orchard, so I released her. She was quiet and unafraid, but she seemed injured, and was unable to stand up or fly. Nothing was obviously broken, but she couldn’t keep her balance. She was bright and healthy looking, not ill at all. Uncertain how long she had been there, I offered her some water, but she wasn’t interested. She tilted her head up each time I talked to her, and seemed so wise.

I put her down in the grass, and she tried valiantly to walk, but fell each time she tried. Whenever I set her upright again, she took my finger gently in her beak, as though asking me to let her do this herself.

But feeling that she might be weak and hungry, I did the obvious thing: I went to the corn patch and picked a little ear for her!

I sat down, supporting her in my lap. She ate and ate, undisturbed by the Border Collies’ fascination, or Brook’s coming up to see her. I was afraid that our cats would find her, (surprised that they hadn’t already), and so I made her a bed of straw and fresh grass, and brought her and her corn cob into the back bedroom.

I checked on her during the evening and she seemed quiet, almost content, sitting against the wall of the rubber water tub that I had her in; I put her near the corn, since it was hard for her to move.

This morning I found her resting there against the corn cob, her eyes closed. She had left her body behind…..and at the last, this beautiful soul had eaten the forbidden corn to her heart’s content.

Since I have been home from OFFF, the weather has taken a turn for the better…autumn-wise that is:

We have had rain and a couple of decent frosts…not hard ones, but enough to hustle us into processing veggies from the garden. We began with processing the corn for corn pudding.This is the special Sandy Spring version of “Corn Pudding” from Brook’s family…frozen now, but brought out and baked in the oven for special treats during the year. Just corn and salt and butter…it turns into a pudding because the corn has been allowed to mature toward starch before it is processed. So sweet and SO GOOD!

Brook picked from the second planting (the first had been dealt with a while ago):

We ended up with around 12 quarts from a little over half the second crop…we always plant more than we can eat “on the cob”, and when it has gone by, and is too mature to eat any longer, we have something even more wonderful to make from it…a winter’s worth of corn pudding!