June 28, 2007 What a cheese day.  Thank you to the couple from Washington DC who went to Steve's Cheese in Portland looking for the Black Sheep Creamery.  (I called my sister to see if it was you, Elaine, but did not get through to her).  Thank you, because Steve called us up on Tuesday and asked what we had available.  I took samples to him on Wednesday, on my way to my Portland area Market, and he was  interested.  And, since I "just happened to have a round of our Mopsy's Best and the Saint Helens with me",  they have been purchased by Steve's Cheese in Portland and are now available.  I am sorry if the couple is now out of the area and unable to get back there....(if it is Elaine, I hope to see you when my sister comes, or sooner, give a call!)  Well that was only the beginning as I took my order of our fresh cheeses to Market of Choice.  They have 5 stores now that will be carrying our fresh cheeses, Portland to Ashland!  Terri, at the West Linn store receives it for me.  Since I had some of the St. Helens  samples in my cooler she expressed interest in St. Helens and purchased the other round I "just happened" to have available!  Then onto the Moreland Market where Steve Jones of Steve's Cheese was able to visit with his wife and young son.  He also liked the Muenster and I hope to get a round to him my next trip to Portland.  Thank you all.  We are not a big creamery.  We still are very new at this.  We do have a seasonal cycle to our sales.  It is just fun to see how selling cheese can fun and come home to tell Brad how well folks like his cheese.  The Muenster we make is a fairly quick cheese.  It is nice to make at the beginning of the season since our other cheeses need to age much longer.  The Muenster makes it possible to have cheese for the first few weeks of market.  This batch of Muenster is quite good, tangy and very creamy!  I hope that trend continues, it was delicious yesterday!  I probably sample Muenster the most since it is a name people recognize.  We have names we have made up for our other cheeses as they came with no identification, or the cheese is a registered cheese, made only from a certain breed of animal, in a certain area of the world between this date and that.  I am so amazed at some of the most lovely cheeses in this world and how or when they are made.  The book French Cheese, I think from DK press, gives an amazing description of many cheeses that people make all over France and perhaps only 8 rounds of it in a year!  Sometimes in sampling it is easier to go for what is familiar.  I am the same.  Then we try other things a branch out.  Some people just go for the strongest, or the mildest, or what is the simplest so they can taste the underlying milk flavors. It is all good, and all fun!  I have my favorites and so do my customers.  I have tissues available if it is just too unpleasant for the sampler.  It makes me happy just to be out there peddling this product we make right here and, I think, are improving each year.

June 25, 2007 Well summer is here but we had rain, rain, rain this weekend and more to come.  So much for getting the hay in.  Maybe we will wait till our nephew comes out and happen to do it at that time.....hmmmm.   The sheep were let into the lower field this past week.  We have a fenced pasture out back and then there is other acreage that has tall, tall grass.  The pasture is pretty well eaten down but being fenced it is somewhat protected against predators.  We have lost quite a few animals to coyotes in the past years.  Brutus, the guard dog, is doing well for us!  Brutus is doing so well Brad has been letting the ewes into the tall field for some extra good eats.  They usually graze along the edges and then come up to the pasture if they feel threatened at all.  Typically at the end of the day they are all up at the gate waiting to come in for grain.  Sunday in the midst of the rain the ewes came up from the field by themselves.  They will find a way through the fence or or around that lower gate if they are scared or startled, or sometimes if they get too wet.  It was a wet day.  But when Brad went out to milk there was only about half of them out there.  I went down to see where the rest were, assuming they were in the field and, not having been startled or wet enough, had not challenged the gate.  Down the path I went, no sheep.  Out into the field I went, no sheep.  Over the lower field I looked, no sheep.  Oh my, did they go into the scrub by the river, have they wandered into the slough, prime coyote nesting grounds, did a big truck drive in and collect them all like in Babe?????? (my how my mind goes when I don't see what I expect)  I walked into the tall grass field.  Brad had mowed a ring around it so I walked the perimeter calling and calling.  Silence.  I got all the way around to the back side and there in a small clearing of trampled hay I see some ears poking out.  This grass is over my head and my license says I am 5' 6".  There in this pocket of grass I see about 25-30 ewes lounging chewing their cud.  What a wave of relief swept over me.  They were not in the Lorry that stole the sheep on the movie!  I likened their habitat to a donut and they had bedded down in the hole in the center.  I don't think they could get back out.  We traipsed through the tall grass and found the edge of the road.  Once they saw a way out they took off at a run.  It was beautiful to watch them as they ran around the bend of the mowed grass trail, out of my sight, then reappeared below the gate to the pasture.  They charged through the gate, had a moments hesitation, then took off in the direction of the road to the barn.  They were going home.  I wandered around the rest of the mowed path to see if any other stragglers existed.  Then headed in myself.  I wondered if they were silent because they were satisified or scared?  They sure started making noise to me once they saw me but it was very quiet till then.  They were happy to head into the dry barn and find the grain awaiting them in the milk parlour.

June 18, 2007  Wool!  I finally was able to utilize those wool batts that Gretchen made for us at Gretchens Wool Mill.  Last weekend I got out a quilt top I had made and its backing fabric.  I layered in the wool batting and basted it together.  It was fun to use the wool.  It will take some practice to use the wool batt.  I realized I have some areas where there is more filling and some that is less.  When I become more comfortable with the fiber I will no doubt be more comfortable pulling and changing the wool.  It can be "felted" together by messing with the fibers.  Felted wool is wool that has become matted together through friction.  If I were to aggressively manipulate the batt I think I would have had more success with my high and low spots.  I am a hand quilter.  I enjoy making as fine a stitch as I can muster with the quilt, batt, and back I am using.  I can tell I will totally enjoy quilting on this project.  It has a softness unparalleled by other batts.  It is a very thin quilt.  It will be a summer quilt.  I will need to quilt it closely because of the nature of the wool.  I love to do fine quilting so for me that will be a pleasure.  My next goal is to create two shams that will go with the quilt.  I will layer these with the wool batt and bring them to market in a hoop.  Perspective customers would be welcome to try as many or as few stitches as they would like.  I think the proof will be in the trying.  I think for traditional quilt, especially if hand peiced, a traditional wool batt would be a very unique thing to do....I will know when I finish my quilt, in about 5-6 years.  I have so much time to quilt that is about my average length of time for completion,  Sigh

June 8, 2007 This is a wonderful time of the year.  The days are getting so long.  In Western Washington the sun is still evident up til 10:00 pm at summer solstice!  It is such a wonderful time to be outside and getting things done.  I think the best noise I can imagine is the voice of children calling out to each other in that dusky time of day when you can still see but can hide in shadows if you want to.  It is still warm enough to be in your t-shirt and shorts, or maybe us "old folks" don a sweatshirt, but it is a wonderful time of year.  School is almost out so even on weeknights I won't be corralling kids and  coaxing them to bed while the sun is still up.  Now this semi retired life is very amenable to that.  I do not have to put kids in the car at 7:15 in the morning to get them to daycare and school before I go to work at 8:00.  The Markets we are doing this year start at noon or later in the day.  I miss the evening hours of summertime bliss two nights a week.....but I get to drive home from market in the light of day!  Wow this is getting good

June 1, 2007  What a week!  A week of beginnings and endings.  We officially finished lambing on Monday...we weaned the last 4 lambs from their mothers.  It was noisy for a day but they are happy in the lamb pens now.  We are milking all the ewes we will milk this year.  It just feels different, we are no longer waiting till the babies hit 30 pounds they were there and we are moving on now.  The Ram lambs are in a separate pen as they, at four months, could begin to impregnate the ewes.  We have decided which ewe lambs and which ram lambs we will keep as replacement animals and will finalize selling off the others.  It has a settling effect to it decisions that have been made and plans made accordingly.

My Nursing Supervisor job has officially been handed off!!!!!  Except for a few duties I will continue until such a time that they determine who will do the vaccine count, or other things that may arise.  It was wonderful today.  I did not have to get up and wait to see if the phone rang, that someone was calling in sick.  I knew if they did I could choose to fill in if I had the ability to do so but, since I had to make cheese for the Redmond Saturday Market today I knew I could not fill in for a whole day.  It was so freeing to be done with the cheese by noon and have everything ready to put in the cooler  by 8 pm.  I did not work, off-farm, till 6 pm and then do cheese and have to get up at 4am to pack it.  I will be up early but not at 4:00!  It sort of feels like that time in our lives when we graduated from High School or College.  The whole world is out there and all we have to do is find our niche and dig in....there are a lot of niches out there for the finding.  It can be an overwhelming thought or an adventure.  I feel as if the adventure is about to begin.  We start two more Farmers Market this week.  I just delivered a load of fresh cheese to the Market of Choice on Wednesday, and have an order for the Blushing Blue Ewe to go to Curds and Whey in Portland.  We also hope to try our hand at Yogurt for those who have asked and asked...we will give it a whirl and see how she flies!  What a time in  our lives, What joy.  Stay tuned to see how it all goes.  We have two years to  make or break ourselves!  What an adventure.

May 25. 2007  Markets are so much fun.  I had some really good discussions with folks at Moreland.  How do you make cheese?   It still amazes me!  It is all the same ingredients put in a pot and as you manipulate time, tempurature, and acidity you get an amazing variety of cheeses.  That is the simplified version.  It is based on good fresh milk, we use a vegetable rennet, you add a bacterial starter, and then all the differences in how fine or large you cut the coagulated milk into curds, and what length of time and tempurature you process the curds at.  Then if you pack the molds or hang the curds you develop different products.  We have a red cave, our muenster and the new Saint Helens do well in a cave of their own.  That was another discussion.  How do you keep the red cave bacteria in the red cave?  Well we add the red bacteria to the cheese in the red cave by washing it onto the cheeses and the other cave we wipe it off the cheese so it does not have the opportunity to grow.  It is all an amazing process and the bottom line is that cheese is kind of like a living product and can develop a uniqueness all its own depending on the environment you put it in.  Our milk and our caves will develop different cheeses than the neighbors.  The PBS special called the Cheese Nun really fleshes out the differences well.  I don't know if it would fascinate others at much as us cheesemakers but it is a great documentary.  As we learn more about the cheese we make we strive to make a better and better environment for it to grow and flourish!

May 23, 2007 Pant, Pant, Pant, last week was a successful week for the Black Sheep Creamery.  We made it to all appointments and events and the sheep got milked inbetween.  Brad has made cheese the last two days and had a visit from Michael Scott of the Market of Choice, located in Oregon.  Michael has bee a huge supporter of small farmstead cheesemakers. He visits, encourages, and has loads of ideas and dreams!  He was returning from the Cheese Festival in Seattle and going back home to digest all he had seen, eaten and heard!  Last night Brad was at the end of the mop up of the frenzied week, we weighed the lambs on Tuesday instead of Sunday, he made cheese two days running, milked, and was at the point of that "vacation is over and we are all getting back to a normal schedule" and the vacuum pump went out......Sigh.  It was not an early night for him.  He had to hand milk over half of the sheep.  The good part of that is that I learned how to hand milk last night.  I "just had never gotten the hang of it"  especially working full time it just was not on ly list of things to accomplish.  Well I had a crash course.  I think I was pretty helpful too.  I milked three.  What a gal.....Off to Moreland Market in Portland!

May 19, 2007  We are having a wonderful cheesey week!  Brad went to Seattle to a Chef's Collaborative get together and met some wonderful cheesemakers from around the state of Washington and many Chefs and People interested in Cheese!!! What a fun event.  It was sampling and sharing how they make cheese.  We so enjoy hearing other people's stories and knowing we have company in this "how do you survive milking season?" saga.  Brad climbed into bed at 1:00 that night since he still had to milk when he got home at 11:00 pm!  Milking is one of the first duties I will learn when I am officially a Farmer and not a Nursing Supervisor.  Wednesday was the opening of the Moreland Farmers  Market in Portland.  It was fun to meet and greet customers from last year and, with our new location two blocks away, meet new customers as well.  As always watching people sample cheese is fun.  That may sound a bit strange but I love watching peoples reactions.  sometimes it is "Oh......WOW"  sometimes "ehhh", and then the next wave of flavor hits their tongue and their eyes get big.  Sometimes it is, "Oh, thank you"  as they move on.   We all have different tastes and treats and I am always curious to watch.  

Our Friends Gretchen Wilson of Gretchen's Wool Mill and Jodi from Bear Paw Quilts came on Thursday to pick up cheese to deliver to the vendors at the Redmond Market.  Gretchen also bought a ram lamb to use with her flock of milking sheep.  We had some new blood we brought in to spread around our milking community.  As always we talked of cheese, sheep, and cheese, and sheep.  They are wonderfully fun and Jordan the new name for the ram lamb did well on his trip back to Monroe.  Friday Brad went to the Washington State Cheesemakers Association meeting at Beechers in Seattle.  What another cheesey event!  Met more cheesemakers and as a new guild they are feeling their way into what Washington Cheesemakers need to do to promote what we have to promote!  More as that develops.  He had opportunity to visit Beechers cheesemaker himself and visit De laurentis store at Pike Place Market where this weekend the Seattle Cheese Festival is in full swing!  Another WOW.  Today though I head south the the French Prarie Gardens wine and cheese event.  We did this last September and knew we would like to return.  Today is the day.  I am packed up and ready to go to enjoy some of Oregon's beautiful farming country.  Sunday Brad returns to Seattle to be on a panel about how happy animals make good cheese.....I hope ours our happy since I believe Brad is making some good cheese!  Well, off to Oregon!

May 10, 2007  We are getting ready....Market starts May 16th in Portland OR at the Moreland Farmers Market.  I will be delivering cheese to the Redmond Saturday Market this coming saturday, the 12th.  I had hoped to deliver three ram lambs to friends in Monroe, pick up our wool that Gretchen Wilson has processed into batts, and deliver cheese today.  I did not make it.  I had to work.  I was so tired yesterday I fell asleep on the wooden picnic bench in the yard in the sun.  My youngest was home with me, the other two were at youth group.  John wanted to play.  I got up and after shaking out the cobwebs I enjoyed our game.  We were stalking sheep, trees, dogs, you name it we stalked it and attacked it.  They are boys, I sometimes don't understand the need to conquer but it was fun.  I needed that.  Time to just be, just play with a four year old.  My friends were more than understanding about waiting for the ram lambs.  They will not be in need of their services for a few months anyway. The cheese will get to Redmond by 8:30 on saturday, and I will pick up the wool batts from them in Redmond.  It all worked out and I got to play with John.  Tonight I will flavor the cheese to be delivered to market.  Tonight John's brothers will be home and he will have someone to play with.

May 8, 2007 Wow, here we are in May, lambing is over cheesing is on!!!  Idiazabul or by another name Queso de Oveja.  Spanish sheep milk cheese.  I love Idiazabul and I hope what Brad made this week is as good as it looks.  several months from now we will report on these beauties.  Brad made 12 rounds that knit together well and looked exquisite in our new cheese presses that he also made.  One hundred dollars of materials from the lumber store and we have some very creative presses that fit on the draining table made from the "Off the Wall Press" plans sold by New England Cheesemaking Supply.  It just seems like a lot of things are coming together!  Markets start next week, I hope to deliver three ram lambs to new homes this week.  They are going to homes north of Seattle, I also have to deliver cheese.  I think I will layer the back of the Subaru with a tarp and try to take them up in the car......what fun!  Farmer drives through Seattle with three lambs and an ice chest full of cheese.  I really don't want to pay for the gas in the truck for 150 pounds of lamb.   We will see.  It should be and interesting trip.  I wonder if they prefer Classical tapes, Country, or Contemporary Christian?

April 28, 2007 A slow day at work, what a blessing .  I am taking a lunch to do this on a 4 hour shift.  That is okay.  My days here are numbered.  I am excited, but scared, to leave a job I have had for four years!  Jobs can give us a lot of security if someone else is writing that paycheck.  Brad and I are ready to take a risk.  The Creamery has lost some business because Brad and I are both so busy we have not been able to follow through on contacts or orders in a timely manner.  We will take that risk for two years!  Our youngest will be in half day school for the next two school years and therfore we have a plan.  Two years full tilt then reevaluate.  Three Farmers Market Seasons and see where we go.  The herd has been built up, the cheese recipes are being fine-tuned, we have tried and succeeded with new cheeses.  It is time and it is exciting  to take that step.  I will miss my job, but won't be going too far, they can still call me to fill-in if we have a sick nurse.  One hand in one hand out....sounds doable to me.

April 27, 2007 Jordan is well fed and living in the barn now with the sheep.  she had a rocky start and had to be tube fed that first morning.  She must have gotten away from her mother during the delivery and then momma had another baby to deal with and refused to nurse Jordan.  Jordan was small and weak so she may not have tried to hard.  Now, at a week of age, she is taking 8 ounces at least three times a day.  She is living in the creep feeder.  The creep feeder is where we keep free choice grain for the lambs to snack on during the day.  The entry is small enough that the mothers cannot get in to eat the babies' grain but the babies have access at any time.  I chose to put her into the creep feeder hoping she would adopt it as home so she is out of the traffice lanes.  She seems so small to be out there without a mother to watch out for her.  In the creep feeder she will have chance to connect with the other lambs.  Sheep are a herd animal and need the company of other animals.  Jordan should do well and make new friends.  If not with the sheep I had noticed the two gaurd dogs were willing to watch over her as well.

April 26, 2007  It is hard to believe but lambing is over!  125 babies from 62 mommas.  Brad is milking 45 mommas now and will add the next 17 as we wean their babies.  We had three lambs die and have had two total bottle babies and several we supplemented as the mothers had triplets.  The yearlings did well even our pregnant teenager did okay.  We are bottling Jordan but the other baby is taking well to momma she is doing well gained 6 pounds in her first week.  What a gal...but in deciding to write a note about Jordan I realized no one had taken her noon bottle so I better go out and feed her.

April 19, 2007  Cheese, we are almost done with lambing so the focus turns to cheese.  It has been mixed media for a few weeks so both Brad and I are rummy, if you meet us on the street please excuse the drool from exhaustion.  Brad has been turning out some beautiful rounds of Feta, Tomme, Mopsy's Best, and St Helens.  He even made some pyramid shapes of the St. Helens.  Perhaps we can borrow the test tube from our son's volcano kit and let it erupt...or just place an incense stick into it to demonstrate the plume we see coming from Mount Saint Helens, to the south of us, on clear mornings.  Yesterday Brad made fresh cheese.  I will flavor it tonight and tomorrow, package it up, and take it to Bellevue on Saturday to a Farmers Market Day at the Whole Foods store.  It will be fun to have our first market day of the season.  We hope to be selling cheese in Bellevue at their Farmers Market starting in June!  We have two more mommas to lamb.  Greytail, our delinquent teenage mother, had twins Wednesday morning.  She did fine delivering but has refused to nurse one of the babies....or the baby is not exhibiting a coordinated suck.  I have been feeding her a bottle and she does not seem to know what to do with her tongue when sucking.  She looks good, lives with her mother but we will bottle feed her as she just did not seem to get the hang of nursing off her mother.  Mom stood very patiently as she tried to nurse.  Greytail is young she was not supposed to be bred last fall but twice got into the pen with the ram.  She had and 11 pound baby and then a 7 pounder.   She is doing well for being so young herself.  Now, only two more,  only two more, only two more.....

April 16, 2007 Time is flying!  Babies are still being born.  Brad is making Cheese 3 to 4 times a week, on top of milking twice a day!  Lambs are weighed each week and their food is calculated on the total weight in the lamb pen.  Yesterday we caught and weighed 2200 pounds of lamb on the hoof.  Our methods are simple.  I like to keep track of how the lambs are growing so until they are weaned I catch them in the barn and weigh them on their week birthday.  I track the growth on my index cards in the barn and transfer the information to the computer.  (you can read it if it is typed into a database, the cards have fallen off the shelf into the sink three times so far this season!)  We know which mommas produce good babies and good milk by monitering the growth of the lambs.  Now once they are weaned they are over 30 pounds and it is my shepherding skills that are being monitered.   Our scientific method of weighing these critters is to entice them into a corner of the lamb pen, close it off, and catch them one by one.  We weigh ourselves with and without a lamb, do the math and there we have it.  Brad is a good man, I noticed that yesterday he caught 7013 first .  He was only 82 pounds!  I do note that frequently the first weight post weaning shows limited growth but after that I expect them to take off and gain 3-5 pounds a week.  This is the first year we have had so many lambs and thankfully they look pretty good!  I have a few that seem to be growing slower and I plan to pull them out and put them into a separate pen with animals more their size.  That 82 pounder may be taking up more than his share of the feed.  Today I am feeling the effects of weighing 55 lambs but it will pass and next weekend we will do it again and recalculate feed requirements.   I think old 7013 will be at 90 pounds and we will forgo verifying that number.

April 3, 2007 Lots of babies on the ground at our place and lots of good cheese being made!  We are milking the majority of the mothers now and the babies are doing well in the lamb pen, running and playing.  I have been struck this week with the notion of Good Acts and Bad or Poorly Thought Out Acts.  We are not good or bad people we just sometimes don't think all the way through what fruit our actions will reap.  On the Good list, on the, "oh thank you so much" list is the woman and her husband who took a chance and stopped Sunday am at 1:30.  Our gaurd dog Brutus was touring town and they stopped to let us know that he was standing in the middle of the road in Adna, about a mile away.   He is big and not car smart so we went and fetched him home.  This woman had heard about Brutus'  mother who was hit by a car.  His mother came to us from a farm located at the end of a private road....ignorance was not to her advantage.  On the "oh, I wish you knew better" list is the kid who drives by the lamb pen yelling and honking to see the little lambs run.  Last year we had a white Ford Bronco that enjoyed making my lambs and their mommas run.  Sometimes the mommas would run right over a baby that got in her way she would be so startled by the noise.  I wish this kid would stop.  Yes, they run and they are cute, but they also will run without being scared.  I wonder if we all just took the time to enjoy what is offered us would we need to "force" fun in such a way?  If I looked at my choices and actions through the recipients eyes would I choose to continue to do some of the things I do????  I don't know.  I tell my children they are not bad children when they do the wrong thing but they do need to learn from their mistakes.  I hope I can take a bit of my own medicine and look beyond my own interests.  I hope the kid gets tired of his game or looks at the whole picture.  Perhaps on the upside the lambs, if they were to escape, would fear the road.