Circle M Farm

I fancy myself an effortless and elegant multi-tasker. I think that’s why homestead farming appeals to me so much. I see myself walking from garden to pasture swinging a wire basket of brown eggs, a bundle of carrots slung in my colorful vintage apron while I inspect the fluffy white sheep on my way in to make a delicious organic supper. But truth is, I’m prone to rather splendid explosions when it comes to tending all the irons in the fire.

This morning, for instance. I’ve got bottle babies both in house and barn, so I’m spending a fair amount of time at my summer kitchen slop sink rinsing bottles and mixing up milk. I thought I might as well make good use of the time by scouring some of my stockpiled fleeces while I’m out there. The old washing machine I use for dirty wool and dying is next to the sink, so I skirted (a nice way of saying “pulled the poopy bits out of”) a lovely white fleece and put it in the filled washer to soak while I fed the morning milk.

When I came back, I washed the bottles and rinsed the wool. As I started to fill the washer for the second soak, I thought I might as well go ahead and prepare some pigment solutions while I was in there, too, so I could dye the damp wool at the noon feeding. The summer kitchen in my garage serves as my dye studio, milking parlour, CSA cooler, meat store and wool boutique. The room houses the washing machine, a stove, a freezer, a fridge, the animal pharmacy, work tables and wooden drying racks balancing window screens full of rainbow colored wool. Honestly, it’s hard to not be inspired in there.

An old washer is a wonderful tool for a woolcrafter. You don’t actually “wash” the fleece, you just soak it and rinse, but the spin cycle gets way more water out than you can by hand-squeezing. However, you must never allow the machine to enter the wash cycle after it’s done filling, because agitation will fuse the wool. And that’s where my multi-tasking broke down this morning. I was so enthralled with mixing colors that I didn’t shut the machine off as it finished filling. By the time the swishing sound of the washer agitating broke into my conciousness, it was too late. My pretty white wool fluff had turned into a big messy circle of felt. Another cat toy. (Obviously, I’ve done this before.)

I’m definitely not a novice at the “Haste Makes Waste” school of stupid time management. I had plenty of opportunities to burn dinner and boil pudding all over the stove when I was a home-schooling mother of four running various enterprises out of our Chicago apartment. But the opportunties to make waste have grown as our landholdings have expanded. We have many times ended a full day of farm work by returning to feed the cows in a back pasture and found that the hose had been overfilling their water trough since morning.

The worst is when I’m in too big of a hurry to lock the gate behind me during morning animal feeding and I come home from off-the-farm work in the evening to find all of my animals out and grazing the perennial borders. Two mornings ago I woke up to find animals peacefully gracing right up next to my bedroom window. I’d left the gate open after bottling the babies at night. These rushed missteps can sometimes have tragic consequences. Early this spring, the animals had been inadvertantly let out for a few hours, and the next morning I lost a lovely doe, Bubbles, who was due to kid. She most likely died of milk fever, a calcium deficiency that can be brought on in late pregnancy by a sudden change in diet. All that tasty new grass on the outside.
You’d think I’d be pretty vigilant about the gates after that. But I’ve already left them open three times since.