Eldon Has a Hot Date

Meanwhile, back on the farm, the calendar pages are rolling along. It’s that season when the ram makes it known he’s ready for some action. As his mood dictates, he tests the bounds of courtesy by banging his headgear on fence posts, or makes soft commentary directed to the ladies.

in the paddock. This is fair Dorothy, one of the ewes soon to be courted.

Our Jacob sheep differ from modern breeds in a number of ways. One of them is the manner of their sex lives. In some breeds, the ewes are fertile year round. Primitive sheep like Jacobs are known as short-day breeders. The ewes (and the ram to a certain extent) are sensitive to the ratio of daylight hours to dark. The shortened daylight period triggers the release of hormones that give the ewe an estrus cycle, or heat.

So… as dusk is falling earlier and earlier each day, and the ram is communicating his desires, the ewes are readying themselves, too, for a romantic encounter with him. I needed to get to work, and undertake some sheepy housekeeping.

Note: it’s hard to get a good picture of yourself doing this job. But there is probably no flattering view of the matter anyway. What accumulates through the summer must be moved out in the fall.

Once their house is neatened up, the ewes can be run in for an afternoon of shots, drenches and clips. Shots, you probably know about. Like school children and pet dogs, livestock get their shots. The sheep will get their CD&T shots today (just think of CD&T as like a tetanus shot; there is more in it than that, but that will do for the short explanation). Drench is not as damp as it sounds. It means a liquid medication given to an animal. Although sometimes the shepherd can come away a little drenched herself, that’s not really the intent of the term. The sheep are fairly easy to manage with a drench. You tip their chins up, push a big measured syringe into their mouths, and push the plunger. With their heads up, they don’t have much choice but to swallow. And the clip: We want the ram to have as clear a target as we can give him. The girls all get a tail end haircut. It’s called crutching among sheep people. There is nothing very appealing about the back end of a sheep. They get fairly nasty with dags of stained wool and rattling castanets of dried feces, so we trim it off with shears. Let’s not dwell on it.

Eldon, our new ram, is still “unproven.” A ram proves himself by performance. In about five months time, he’ll have the results of his test. He doesn’t seem nervous about it.

In fact, there is little instruction required. Good sheep know what to do, when to do it, and how to behave in the course of courtship. An animal that will cheerfully knock you down if you’re not watching him will be completely charming to his women. He trots behind them, sniffing their delightful parts, curling his lips up in pleasure, and asking by way of tender bumps if he might join with them in the creation of a new generation. When they at last reach an agreement about it, the event is so quickly consummated it’s easy to miss. The first year we had sheep, I hid in the woods and tried to catch them in the act, and never did succeed. Five months later, however, ample evidence appeared that everyone had performed as needed.

A ram’s physical attributes are impressive. Relative to his body weight, his testicles are larger than the baggage of any other farm species. A mature ram can breed better than 50 ewes in a season. Poor Eldon. He has a harem of 6 on whom he can bestow his treasure. Still, it seems they are lovely enough to please him, and he is valiant enough for their admiration.

Catch that glint in his eye?

Oh, handsome fellow.

Funstuff: Ukulele Gallery

I haven’t given much space here to praise of the ukulele, though it’s made an appearance a couple of times. It’s time to give it a moment on stage. It’s time to say, you really cannot feel too bad, no matter how far Down the Dow goes, how deep the winter, how dark the dawn, if you can make some music. And the little ukulele is humble enough to go with you anywhere, sweet enough to please you even if you’re not so great at it, capable enough that if you want it to, it can make lots and lots of music. You just cannot hold a ukulele and feel glum anymore.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. (Click any of these images to make them bigger.)

Some uke players are stylish:

Some are formal:

This is a banjo ukulele. The other instrument is, I think, a mandolin.

Some are shy:

Some are bold:

Some uke players start young:

Some keep on playing til they’re old:

From time to time a person just has to kick on back and feel good.

Construction Report: Building Blocks

I promised you all some further comment on Faswall, the masonry system we’re using to build the earth-sheltered walls of the house. A person might wonder how big a deal it can be, the kind of masonry you use to build a wall that’s going to be hidden in the hillside when it’s done. It’s a great big deal. No end of reconsideration and negotiation has gone into the choices for these walls: we weighed cost, structural attributes, cost, delivery mechanisms, cost, insulative qualities, cost, availability, cost, and… cost.

So, here they are, freshly delivered, a house in a bag, more or less,

like a giant kit of Legos.

Getting them delivered was no small thing. One morning I stepped around the corner of the barn to see a semi with a 48-foot trailer easing itself over the hill. The driver, who must have been 80 years old if he was a day, got out and sauntered over to the excavation site. He peered down the driveway, hung his thumbs in his suspenders, and said, “That trailer ain’t goin’ in there.” And that was about the end of the discussion. Having it explained that if he drove around the hill and came down to us from above, sliding into the driveway would be easy, made no difference. He was arrived as far as he was driving. The fact that a crane was standing by ready to pick the pallets off the trailer and swing them into the excavation, if the load could get close enough, didn’t help. The fact he had driven 100 miles to deliver wasn’t persuasive. He pointed out he was on “detention time” and the more he waited for someone to figure it out, the more was the detention bill. Somebody just better work out how to get the blocks off the trailer. In the end, he conceded to drive down the road (refusing still to back down, which meant he had to back out later on, onto the road where cars come around the bend at 50 miles and hour). The crane moved the pallet loads off the trailer and stacked them on the roadway. And there they rested, waiting for the hands of strong men to move them, old-style in wheel barrows and on hand trucks, onto ramps for sliding down into the pit.

They look like cement blocks, so what’s Green about them?

Faswall blocks are 85% wood chips (the remainder is Portland cement and fly ash). Here’s a close look at one:

The wood chips, or any other cellulose fibers, are bonded to the cement in a process they call “mineralization,” which means the sugars in the cellulose are no longer available to rot-causing organisms.

Standing among the blocks stacked in the site and looming above his head, one of the masons looked up and said, “I’m wondering where the cheese is.” It was a maze of blocks, and a man could disappear among them.

They are indeed like a bunch of great Lego blocks, with keyholes to fit them together, and channels for the rebar.

The blocks carry a 4-hour fire rating, are sound resistant and pest resistant, are suitable for seismic areas, and can be cut with carpenter’s tools. Here’s one that’s had a hole cut through one side using a carbide holesaw.

They breathe and are hydroscopic (air and moisture move in and out of the blocks), do not outgas fumes, and insulate with R values of 18-23. They require half the concrete fill of conventional blocks, and are made with locally available recycled or waste wood.

And, it’s manufactured in Philomath, Oregon, less than 100 miles from us.

It sounds like the perfect building material, and a person now wonders why, if as the ShelterWorks (Faswall) website says, “After World War II amidst the rubble and destruction a way was discovered to take the huge volumes of wood waste, grind it into chips, mineralize the chips to neutralize the natural sugars that cause rot, and bond them to cement to form a building block,” … WHY AREN’T WE USING IT MORE? My goodness, that’s been, what? 60 years!

So, here is a view of the progress on our post-war house.

That girder you can see running around the perimeter of the walls just below the top is the level of the second floor. It’s comin’ along!

Construction Update: Something to Stand on

Or, Something upon Which to Stand. That avoids an uncapitalized preposition in the last position of the title, which looks odd to me. Such fussing. Gentlemen, the last post was pretty clearly a distaff interest item, so here is one for the boys: Big machines and heavy things.

Now that we’ve finished tearing down and digging down, it’s time to start filling that hole we’ve had made.

It seems a pity, a great deal of work goes into making parts of the house that will never be seen after their one day in the sun. Here, below, is a view of the foundation forms under construction. All this fine-looking woodwork will be taken away once the forms are filled with cement.

I wonder if those guys ever wish their work was above ground where it could be admired. On the other hand, I suppose every standing house is a testimonial to their skill.

In addition to the forms for pouring, you can see a row of rebar sticking up at the back of the excavation. Here’s a view of the forms and the rebar from the other side of the hole:

The rebar will support the Faswall block construction of the north wall of the house. More on Faswall in a later post.

You can see a lot of little orange caps on the tops of the spikes of rebar. How cute, I thought, hardhats for the steel. But then it came to me what they’re for, and it seemed less whimsical.

You know how a sewing thimble works. It keeps the needle out of your finger. Imagine how the man with his feet on the ladder (see the ladder right there) would skewer himself if he slipped. Ew. Here’s to the inventor of thimble. (Bart, the carpenter, says, “It’s great. It just breaks your back instead of stabbing you.”)

The men who do this job work hard. They’re constantly out in whatever the weather is; they’re lifting, toting, hauling; they climb and bend and reach and crouch; they punch stuff to make it go where it should, they hammer and dig and kick things sometimes. And they fall down. One fellow slipped off the edge of the form and flopped down to land between the rebar thimbles and the form, and he got up and slam-hammered the pieces he meant to go into place. It was such an obvious channeling of pain and anger. We’ve all done it. If you’re alone and you hurt yourself, you bellow in rage. If folks are looking on… you’re OK. WHAM! Really, it’s OK. SLAM! It was nothing. WHAPPO!

But finally, when they’ve finished hammering and slamming things into place, the cement trucks pull in, five of them, one after the other, and the guys make walls where they’ve built forms.

They spend half their working day bent double. Here, above and below, is cement being guided through a hose into the form.

And finally, the next day, they came and stripped off all the wooden forms and carted them away to be re-used at the next job. See the revealed concrete footings below.

Now, I really do not understand the logic in the next bit. After all the forming and pouring and making concrete, then they set to breaking some of it out so they could create channels for the ventilation tubes that will run out of the earth north of the house to provide cooling air inside. I mean… OK, I’m only a woman and probably don’t understand all this, but I’d have made a form for the channels and skipped all the whacking out of set concrete:

They made those guys dig under the rebar! We were just slightly concerned for a few hours here. Those channels run mighty close to Big John and PissPot where they are spending the next part of eternity. We were pretty certain we’d hear about it if anyone nicked into a skull or horn in their shovel work. By rough estimate, we think they missed PissPot by about two inches.

Here they are muscling the ventilation tubes into place:

Next up: another big vehicle, this one bringing rocks to throw on top of everything that’s been done so far:

I know you can’t see it very well in this picture, but that truck is spitting rock into the foundation, and with a pretty good aim. From across the hole they aimed it right into the corners and far reaches. So at last, that’s it: poured footings filled with gravel, and that crew of sturdy fellows gone away.

Now, women, if you’re still with me, you might have noticed some little thing for us here. I tried to create  the least little bit of a thematic line in the presentation.

If needed, images can be clicked for bigger display.

Tending Toward Fall

You can’t always rely on the calendar to tell you when the season is changing, but when you live in farm country, the signs of summer’s passing are all around. The days are shorter and suddenly morning feeding comes at dawn when the night’s work by full-bellied spiders is strung between every two branches along the path to the paddocks. A face full of web in the morning is a clear indication of the season. The air has a scent of maturity — berries over-ripe in the thickets, apples preparing to drop into the grass, tomato vines shedding that incomparable perfume onto my wrists as I feel in the foliage for fruits. Down the way, the field of pumpkins has been harvested:

These are ready to be shipped out to markets where they'll wait for the artist in a child to recognize the perfect one for her Hallowe'en carving.

And, of course, we see the gathering of shepherds for fall fiber festivals. Last weekend was the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival in Canby. It’s our biggest northern valley event, chock full of sheep, llamas, goats, and sometimes the odd dromedary or yak. You will see folks of all sizes and ages, vendors, hopeful breeders with their finest animals on display, shepherds visiting over the matter of foot rot or fly strike or worming schedules (no shepherd can resist a discussion of disasters), and the results of 3 days of classes instructing in wool, silk or cotton handwork, weaving, knitting, crochet, fiber blending, spinning, carding, dyework… You name it, if hands can do it and it involves strings, it will be there.

Here is itinerant sheep judge and writer Ian Stewart having a look at an array of Shetland sheep.

Did you ever see a finer row of sheep butts?

As I sat in my vendor’s booth, visiting, selling, and watching the shoppers make their way among the skeins and books and spinning wheels, I had to appreciate the display of fine handwork that passed through the building. Here are handbags,

hats,

wraps,

and sweaters.

Ahem… sweaters:

(Click any of these thumbnails for larger views.)

The fact that the temperatures those three days reached the high F 80’s didn’t seem to discourage any of the display of woolen works. One might have thought fall had settled in and folks were dressed for the season. And in fact, now, the weather has turned toward the autumnal, and we lit a first fire in the woodstove at home. It was a pleasure to come home to the whiff of woodsmoke in the house.

It’s a pleasure, overall, to see the year moving on from summer.