It was rainy and muddy and took a few hours to get to from Seattle, but the tour of Gary and Lois Fisher’s 15-acre Oak Harbor farm was well worth it. Disclaimer: the photos aren’t great: 1) it was raining, 2) everyone on the tour had their cameras out and I felt a bit overwhelmed by the photographic fervor… so I held back. Bonus: I learned a lot.
Jami Beintema, co-owner of Cooke Creek Sheep Farm and all around lovely lady, took a few minutes out of her busy day to answer a few questions – read on!
Do you have a favorite breed?
This is a little like asking a mother which of her children might be her favorite. Each breed is unique and has attributes different from the others that make it so. I like Texels for their calm temperament, great milking ability and how they turn grass into a fantastic carcass. You can put a Texel ram on a bunch of raggedy ugly, skinny ewes and get some really decent lambs. They stamp their muscling on crossbred lambs like no other breed I’ve experienced. I like Coopworths for their incredible mothering abilities and ease of lambing and they are long-lived and reliable and sensible ewes. They also have wonderful wool. I love the Texel/Coopworth crosses.
How big is your flock these days?
We currently have 19 ewes, 3 adult rams and 5 ram lambs growing out. We worked our way up to 50 ewes and a handful of rams until last year when we sold a large number of adult ewes and ewe lambs in our registered and crossbred flocks. We’ve always sold quite a few breeding rams every year but didn’t let go of a lot of ewes. This will probably be our last year for marketing purebred rams. In 2011, I began working off the farm again after a few years of working from a home office and it made a big impact on our collective time to deal with 80+ lambs every spring and then marketing 80+ lambs every summer after weaning. Marketing breeding stock is very time-consuming and takes lots of phone calls, emails and buyers want pictures and stats and blood testing for different things. For every sheep sold out of state, a vet inspection and health papers must be done. So, we thought we’d just sell meat lambs to the commercial buyer so we did more crossbreeding and less breeding of purebred stock for a year or so. Prices fell sharply last year for commercial lambs, so we re-prioritized and decided to downsize. My husband wanted to ride his horses more and I wanted to go to some sheepdog trials with my Border Collies and work on putting a hand-spinners flock together that I could work my dogs on and still raise enough lambs to fill our yearly direct-market customers for locker lambs. After working so hard on a really nice breeding program, it was hard to let so many wonderful ewes leave the farm but with them being in their prime, we were also fortunate that others appreciated the quality of our ewes so they sold in large groups which made us happy.
What’s your favorite part about keeping sheep?
Lambing is a blast. It’s exciting, exhausting, frustrating, exhilarating all in a 3 1/2 week span of a sleepless time-warp. Baby lambs, like puppies, have a special smell and they are so sweet and cuddly until they are too fast to catch, which takes about a week. It’s like running a maternity ward and it’s bustling around the house. There is always a load of towels washing or drying, bottles drying next to the sink and my hands are chapped from washing them over and over and we are out “checking butts” at regular intervals. If it’s really cold and windy out, there might be a lamb in the house warming up temporarily before going back out to mama.
Another favorite is shearing time and the wool clip. It’s like getting a big beautiful gift from the ewes every year. With the exception of a few purchased elsewhere, every ewe we have was born on our place and I met them within minutes of birth or may have helped them come into the world and know them well. My husband always asks me which sheep is which and I don’t understand why he can’t keep track of the individuals. I am more attached to the sheep than I’d like to admit. I know they are “livestock” and yes, we eat a lot of lamb in our house, so we are practical about why we have them, but still it’s very rewarding to be a good shepherd and provide them a good life. Humane treatment is really important to us and has been from the get-go.
Lastly, I so enjoy watching them out in the fields in the spring and summer months when it’s green and they are belly-high in fresh pastures grazing.
I have a really fantastic mother-in-law. I mean, I must have either done something wonderful or put up with something awful in a past life. How fantastic is she, you may ask? Over a month ago now, I received a text from her, asking if I would like to come out for a visit and hang with some sheep. Naturally, I said yes.
So last month, we braved some of the worst pass conditions we’ve had all winter to go play with some sheep. Wouldn’t you?
I’ve wanted to attend a farm dinner for years. Every time I saw one, beautifully photographed and presented on PBS or in a magazine, I felt a little swell of jealousy of the well-coiffed and interesting looking people noshing on beautiful food overlooking gorgeous country side. Why am I not part of this sustainable-chic crowd? I’d ask myself. I love to eat. I love farms. Mixing the two sounded like something made for me (aside from the chic part). Well, I finally got a chance to try to be a part of the cool-crowd, and to be honest, while there were a great many details I enjoyed, this dinner didn’t quite live up to my expectations.
During our trip to Sequim, I had the good fortune to pick up a flat of day-old strawberries for $10 from the Nash’s Organic Farmstand. They were a little funky looking, but not moldy and I figured, they were going to be smushed into jam anyway, so why worry? And really, for $10, I couldn’t lose. Whoa – that was an understatement!
These strawberries were so unbelievably sweet and juicy and red!
Last year I switched to making honey and white grape juice-sweetened jams. Despite always doing the low-sugar variety, I still felt like it was a little too much (the “low” variety is still about a 1:1 ratio of fruit to sugar!). The first few batches of honey and juice-sweetened jams were a little nerve wracking, as the jam doesn’t set the same way as sugared jam does before canning. This jam, however, certainly benefitted from this method of preserving – I ended up adding about ½ a cup of honey and thinking that it might have been too much – they were that sweet!
What do you do when your boss turns to you on a sunny Friday afternoon and tells you to leave early and enjoy the sunshine? You go to Carpinito Bros. in Kent and buy 60 pounds of tomatoes – that’s what!
Last year, I made the mistake of planning out damn near every weekend in August and September with social events, so all that preserving and canning had to happen, say, after dinner on a Tuesday night. No kidding – I stayed up until 3 a.m. one evening last summer and I looked so awful the next morning, my boss thought I was sick and sent me home.
Lesson learned. Keep weekends open, lest you look like the walking dead at work.
So, back to the 60 pounds of nightshade.
The Carpinito Bros. farmstand and nursery sits where their original farm used to live and now is more like a farmer’s market, selling produce from Washington State. As usual, their tomatoes were from Yakima – we just don’t get enough sustained heat on this side of the Cascades to warrant tomato farming. Carpinito Bros generally has reasonable prices, and this time around, tomatoes from Jone’s Farms in Zillah, Wash., were going for $18 for a 15 pound box. Not bad.
Conveniently located just next to the tomatoes was a monster bin of pickling cukes with all the ingredients necessary for pickling nearby… naturally I couldn’t help myself, and I picked up about eight pounds of the beauties.
Tiffany and I were feeling the need to get out of town and enjoy the lush scenery of the Olympic Peninsula last week (… er, I mean last month… yeah, this post’s taken a while), and what better excuse to do so than to visit a couple farms?
Sequim is home to a number of farms and we could easily spend a week in the area and not get to every grower and seller. Although the weather felt more like fall than summer, the produce selection at our first stop, Nash’s Organic, indicated otherwise.
I love the idea of having fresh milk delivered to my door on a regular basis. When I was in high school, there was a local dairy that did just that – and the milk even came in glass bottles with cream on the top! Sadly, that business is no more, so when we moved to Seattle and noticed all these milk boxes everywhere, I had to check it out.
Every morning my youngest son Maximus asks “Mommy, what are we doing today?” This is answered each day of the week with answers like preschool, Grandma’s house, swim lessons, and yard projects. If it’s the weekend the answer is usually more exciting, and if it’s sunny, it’s even better. My son is on the move. He is always interested in learning more and getting his hands dirty. So since it was the weekend and the weather was good, I was really excited to take him to Oxbow Farm in Carnation. It was the annual Sno-Valley Spring Sow Down which is an event at Oxbow Farm to welcome in the Spring weather and introduce the little ones to what happens on a farm during this time of year.
Maximus and I packed into the car for our first Spring Farm visit of the year. We loaded up on snacks and juice and hit the road with the windows down on an unseasonably warm Spring morning and the Muppet movie soundtrack cranked, headed towards Redmond. We arrived at Dr. Maze’s Farm to be pleasantly surprised to find the little farm geared towards toddlers.