Ash Grove Farm: How It All Began
Ash Grove Farm, established 2010, had its beginnings many years earlier as an experiment to answer the question, “How much organic food can a family grow in a small space?”
Over the years, in a wide variety of settings, my husband and I grew food whenever I could. We had vegetable gardens and planted fruit trees. We got laying hens. We bought a pair of goats, thinking to milk them, but they were Pygmy goats and not worth the effort of twice-daily milking seven days a week, 365 days a year, for the tiny quantities we got. They became pet lawnmowers and 4-H projects for the kids.
Then came the day I visited a local, grass-fed dairy farm to ask about purchasing raw milk. After an hour-long conversation, I went home with a jar of milk and a part-time job! For the next seven years, I did the 4:00 a.m. milking a few days a week, along with many other farm chores. Having been a registered nurse early in my adult life, and a home-schooling mom and freelance writer after that, I learned that I loved farming! I loved learning how to understand the cows and care for them. I decided I wanted a farm of my own, but with animals a middle-aged woman could handle on her own, please!
Being a fiber artist, I chose sheep. I liked the size, easy lambing, and hardiness of primitive breeds, so I bought a flock of 22 Navajo-Churro sheep. I found their wool to be a bit coarse, so I added a Shetland ram and adopted a couple of homeless Border-Leicester ewes with glorious results as far as wool quality and texture. The only problem was we were still trying to raise as much food as possible on a small acreage, too small to support 22 grazers who needed fresh forage every day.
Enter the community. A nearby horse farmer had a field he wasn’t using. Later, another neighbor’s riding mower broke down and she invited my sheep to mow her field. Adjacent landowners wanted four-legged mowers, too. Over the years, people moved away and their fields were no longer available to me, but some new owners were intrigued with the notion of a property that came with sheep!
Currently, there are five properties along a gravel road half a mile from my home that host the sheep throughout the grazing season. I walk there daily to move the flock to fresh forage, using electric fencing to give them only one day’s worth of feed at a time. We make a circuit around those five properties that lasts from late April through late November. The sheep spend winters—our lambing season—on our little homestead, where I can tend them as many times a day as needed.
The sun and rain makes the grass grow. Grass makes the sheep and their wool grow. By poking their sharp little hooves into the soft ground as they graze, the sheep make pockets that collect rainwater and allow it to sink into the soil instead of running off into nearby streams. Manure and dead plant parts get stomped in as well, sequestering carbon into the soil. These nutrients further help the grass to grow, drawing even more carbon out of the atmosphere.
Given my mix of breeds, each sheep in the flock produces a unique fleece ranging in color from black to white to grays and browns Some fleeces are great for weaving and felting. Others spin up into beautiful yarn. Each purchase of wool, whether raw, washed, or washed and carded, comes with a brief bio of the sheep who grew it.