And later, that evening....

Its pig out time.  Currently the sheep are staying at my brother's in Ojai, while we got the deal straightened out and the fence put up.  The 2 sheep at the front of this picture are twin lambs born this summer, their mom is one of the black sheep in this picture.
       There's also some smashed up pumpkin in the foreground, I still collect pumpkins in the fall for them. While Horseweed is now the main food in their diet, I need to supplement with pumpkins, tumbleweed, squished lemons, kitchen scraps, and a few acorns.  Acorns are considered toxic to sheep, but I have found that in small quantities, like a handful a day,  they're ok.

The tree is freed

Same tree, same day, about 3 hours later!! Notice the shadow at the bottom from the horseweed a few feet to the west.  The tree has a long way to go before it a solid dark green lemon making machine, but at least et gets more sunlight and nutrients from the soil.  This was tree number 3, 97 more to go.

Lemon Tree Liberation

That is a fully grown lemon tree, completely surrounded by horseweed.  This is the 1st tree I freed all by myself.  Horseweed does not have an extensive root system, and can be easily pulled out by hand.  Well easier said than done. Its so dense, about 10 plants per square foot, that it takes a few hours for each tree.  First you clear all around it,  only to discover that the horseweed  grows right to the base of the tree and goes up thru its branches.  But I am determined!! So I drop to my hands and knees and start crawling around under the tree, pulling horseweed as I go.  I discover that, down on your knees, you dont have the leverage of your back, and its all shoulder muscle now.  And the horseweed plants under the tree are just as big and thick as the ones around.  But I am determined!!  I keep pulling, throwing out the weeds as I make it to the trunk on the "open" side.  Thats the side thats open to our initial clearing, that connects to the parking lot.  By this time I am sweating and covered in dirt and horsweed pollen.  I also have to deal with fallen lemons squishing under my knees.  Well at least those smell good!!  Now its  time to work around the truck  to where the horsweed goes on into an impenetrable forest for acres, blocking out the afternoon light, and I think I'm getting a little paranoid!  Do you remember from the comic strip "Charlie Brown" that Snoopy would get "Weed Claustrophobia"?  Its for real.
        So I crawl out, catch my breath, drink some water, and check out my progress so far.  I decide to clear more on the outside before getting under the tree again.  That means my dog Kaylee, can get in there and hit me with her tail while I am down on the ground, sweating, dirty, squishing lemons, and giving myself repetitive motion syndrome in my shoulder. But I am determined!! I dive under that tree, keep pulling and pulling till that last damn horseweed is gone from under the tree and at least 2 feet away from any outer branch. Whew!! I collapse on my pile of pulled horseweed.
       Have I mentioned how good the lemonade from these lemons taste?

Weeds to you, dinner to us

This is from the trial visit of the sheep to the ranch in September. Bob and I met with Dave and his friend Janet to watch the sheep encounter the ranch.  As there is also some mustard, tumbleweed, and dry foxtail, they nibbled on that first, but took some bites of the horseweed.  While they were roaming about and checking it out, us people filled up the back of my van with horseweed for the sheep back at Ojai. We also met with the owner of the ranch, Stan, and his family.  They were quite taken with the sheep, trying to hand feed them (unfortunately they were stuffed at this point!)
          I looked up horseweed extensively online to be sure it was ok for sheep to eat in large quantities.  Some organic wineries use sheep and goats to eat it down in the spring, before the grape vines start to bud.  Bob and I have been spending Saturdays, going off to the Lemon Ranch and picking truckloads of the stuff.  Then we truck it up to Ojai for the herd.  The herd is staying in Ojai until their enclosure is ready for them.  There's a good barn already, we are collecting fencing material and making a corral for them.
         It was on this visit that we all freed this first lemon tree completely from the weeds.   Four months laters, its visibly greener. 99 more trees to go...

Horseweed Ranch

My neighbor Dave lives down the street from me.  He has many cherry trees at the front of his property, and in the summertime a lot fall into the street.  I approached him a couple of years back about getting some of these excess cherries.  He is an avid gardener, not only cherry trees but pomegranates, grapes, and row crops in the summer.  This year I came to visit him (and get some cherries) one day, and we start talking about my sheep.  He's like, "WOW!! what a freaky coincidence!!"  He had just sent off an email to the owner of a piece of agrigultural property in Camarillo.  It used to be a lemon ranch, now it looked like the picture above.
           That is a fully grown Lemon Tree, peeking out above the weeds.  And this is a lucky tree, many trees are surrounded by weeds over 6 ft tall, that block out sunlight for the tree.  Some trees are already dead, and several are in terrible shape.  Dave's idea, to lease and rehabilitate this property and turn it into an organic farm.  As cheaply and eco-friendly as possible.  So he needs to get rid of the weeds, and I need food for the sheep throughout the fall.  Works for both of us!!
           About the weeds, 99% is Horseweed.  Horseweed is common weed all over America, and it usually grows 2 to 3 feet tall, but has been known to grow very tall in places, as tall as a horse, hence the name.  Horses dont like it much.  Horseweed is usually a nuisance plant on a farm, mixed in with other weeds, growing no taller than 3 feet.  Why is the Lemon Ranch overgrown with 7 foot tall densely packed horseweed?  Modern agricultural practices of using lots of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
         Herbicides are chemicals that selectively kills the weeds, while leaving the food crops alone.  Some of the newer herbicides can kill just about any weed.  Just about.  They cant kill Horseweed!!!  So the what happens is that the horsweed has no other weed competition, and plenty of fertilizer and water in the soil.  It grows tall and thick.  Plow it under, and it just grows right back, until the herbicide leaves the soil.
       18 acres or horseweed. About 100 lemon trees.  12 sheep.  4 people. Can we do it?

The hungry season

In Southern California, Fall is the hungry season.  Most of the wid grasses have died and blown away. My shepherd goes back to high school and cannot take them out on the hill.  It gets dark before we get off work to pick whats left along the mountain roadsides, which isn't much beside tumbleweed.   So now we have to decide on giving up on local food or let the sheep go hungry half the week. 
               Thats where Craig's List comes to the rescue.  I put a post for Used Halloween Pumpkins under "wanted", and I can get hundreds of pounds of pumpkins!!  Here's the older sheep chowing down a chopped up 300 lb pumpkin.  A family in T.O. had won this in a "guess my weight" contest at Trader Joe's.  Someone who knew them saw my ad on Craig's list and put me in touch with them.  I had to take out the back seats of my van and use a 2 by 10 as a ramp to roll it up!!
           In the lower right of the picture is a cactus pad from a prickly pear cactus, also called Nopal. The cacti are found on a lot of local hillsides.  Sheep love to eat them anytime, but we usually only pick in the fall, to conserve this native plant.  Cacti pads are great to eat if you are dieting, they add great fiber, and are believed to lower high blood sugar.  I like them in green salad.
          But as you'll read in my next post, Fall is no longer the hungry season, thanks to a neighbor's love of gardening.

Grazing the hillsides

In the spring and summer, the flock grazes our hillside and the vacant land up the road.   Our hillside is fenced and they eat it down to the dirt.  The road is a free range experience though, and can get dicey.  First there's getting the all the herd out of the gate, some of them keep forgetting where it is.  Then there's the mad dash to get away from Kaylee, our "sheep dog", who stays tied up for this part.  Finally they all congegate on the other side of the road and begin eating the wild oats and the brush.  They wander up the hill, taking bites on the way, till they get to our neighbor Mitch's place.  Its a cool plateau they like to hang out on. So, we chase them back to the road. Along the road is a lot of thistle and mustard.  There's also an oak tree with low enough branches for them to eat the leaves.  After a while of eating up here, we push them back down  the road, to the side canyon.  Here they can eat themselves silly on mustard, fescue, and holly cherry.  If we have left a bucket of water there, they will tank up.  Then they slowly wander back down the road to our hillside, run up to the side of their corral, and start chewing the bushes.  This circuit takes 2 to 4 hours, and they may be chewing their cud at this point.  Eventually they wander back into the corral, (but if they dont, Kaylee is more than happy to round them up), hit the water trough, get back into the pen, and take a nap.  The sheepherder of the day (Bob, Rick, or me) needs a bath at this point and most likely a nap too.  The road grazing circuit happens 3 to 4 times a week in the summer.  On the other days, they get a big trash bag size pile of mustard or tumbleweed from elsewhere in the neighborhood.   What the humans get out of this is exercise, a reduction in the fire hazard around our house, and the chance to talk to neighbors and their guests. And the hapless lost motorist who end up here, where they have to turn around on a one lane dirt road next to a steep hillside.  While the sheep, mistaken for horses, cows, or (my favorite) "DEMON DOGS!!!"  freak out the kiddies in the back seat.