Where Has August Gone?!

Rowdy says "Hay!" from the top of the hayloft.  We have about 1000 bales of hay in the barn, so he scales the bales on the floor and accesses the loft that way.  I think he is hoping to find one of the barn cats napping!

It has been over 2 weeks since I posted.  That means we've either been very busy, or been away.  In this case it is both.  Our 2 grown sons live and work at a lodge at Yosemite National Park in California and we just spent a week visiting them there.  They have been there for about 2 1/2 years, and we do not see them very often.  They are living the good life.  When not working, they enjoy hiking, backpacking, rock climbing, swimming in hidden river pools and more.  They also have a small band and were able to perform for us our first night at the lodge.  Our sons are the one in the center, Ian, and the left, Zac.  The other band member is their friend Ryan, who also works at the lodge.



We miss seeing our boys often, with them being so far away, but we are happy that they are doing what they want since they are not tied down in any way.  
We did some hiking and swimming while we were there (who could not enjoy swimming someplace that looks like this, the water really is emerald colored, and there are no other people around!):   

and then spent our last night in San Francisco, where we went out to dinner and then to a baseball game where the Giants unfortunately thoroughly beat my son's favorite team, the visiting Cincinnati Reds.





It is a great feeling to have that barn stacked to the rafters with hay, especially since Labor Day is not yet here.  Speaking of Labor Day, we are preparing the farm for our annual Labor Day party.  This will be our 12th party.  We started it the very first year we lived here and have only missed one year, which was last year, due to some health problems I have been experiencing.  This year it is back on.  We generally fill the guest house with my family members from out of town and their friends and then we invite neighbors, clients, friends and whomever we think might like to join us for Saturday afternoon.  We cook, drink, play cornhole and volleyball and just have a lot of fun.  People bring their kids and dogs and kind of come and go all afternoon and evening.  It really is a great way to make us get the place all cleaned up at least once a year!  We look forward to it.

Our garden has been taken over by our acorn and butternut squash plants!  They have engulfed the tomatoes and the basil.  They have spread well beyond the usual garden boundaries.  I have never seen the like of it before.  The good part is that we will have tons of squash to freeze, so we will be having yummy soups and squash with butter and brown sugar all winter.  Too bad the tomatoes aren't doing as well!

I also weeded out the asparagus bed again this weekend.  We have poison ivy at one end which I try really hard to avoid because I am so allergic to it.  I have a few itchy spots, but think I managed to escape too much of an outbreak.  Next spring, we should be able to enjoy plenty of asparagus.  It will be the third season since we planted it and it is doing very well.

Just before we left for our vacation, Sam and the neighbors (what would we do without them?) erected a windmill atop the picnic pavillion at the pond.  It is attached to a bubbler by a long hose and will aerate the pond with wind power.  It looks really cool, but we have not yet been able to actually view it in operation.  It must be similar to that watched pot that never boils!

There is not much going on with the alpacas at this time.  We bred 9 females last fall, so should be having 9 crias between the beginning of September and the end of October.  The gestation period for alpacas averages 11 1/2 months, but they are all different every year and can go from 11 months to a full year, or shorter or longer.  They like to keep us guessing.  So, when each pregnant female hits the 11 month mark, we start to watch her daily for signs of impending delivery.  We call this "Cria Watch".  Usually I can tell when an alpaca goes into labor by her behavior.  They often hum excessively, get up and down, roll or lie on their sides.  But, they can also exhibit any of these behaviors from the discomfort of late term pregnancy, so sometimes they fool me.  Our first girl goes on cria watch on September 5th.  This will be her first cria and she has been quite crabby the duration of her pregnancy.  We'll see when she delivers.  


I have just found out about a fiber festival in West Virginia, a couple hours away.  It is the weekend after Labor Day and is being hosted by an alpaca organization in West Virginia.  I have decided to attend it and will be taking a pen of alpacas to try to sell and also will have a vendor booth to sell my yarns, rovings and hand-made items.  The neat think is this is not just alpacas, it is for all fiber animals, so maybe it will be well attended by knitters, crocheters and spinners.  I hope so.  I will take my camera and get some photos to share.  The Festival is called the "Wild 'n' Wooly Fiber Festival" and is in Reedsville WV, near Morgantown.  Here is a link to their web page:  http://www.wvalpacafiberfest.com/
I hope to begin to do more of these kind of festivals as I get more of my fiber processed every year.  Plus, they are just a lot of fun.

It is starting to feel like fall is just around the corner, which it is.  The days are still hot, but the nights are pleasantly cool again and we sleep with the windows open and a blanket on the bed.  The weeds are in full color, which I am able to enjoy since I do not suffer from allergies.  I love the purples and yellows.  September and October are without doubt my favorite months of the year. 

Dye Day, Hay 2nd Cutting, & More

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The hibiscus is in bloom, it must be August!

The past week or so has been busy as usual here on the farm.  Sam mowed 2nd cutting hay on Sunday the 1st because the weather forecast wasn't calling for rain until after midnight on Tuesday.  I tedded it Monday, which means I drove the tractor over the cut hay with an attachment on behind that stirs the hay up and turns it over and lets it dry more thoroughly and quickly.  We planned to rake and bale Tuesday, but the rain came and it rained pretty much all day Tuesday.  Wednesday we had a very intense thunderstorm with very high winds, lots of lightning and heavy rain in the early evening and our power went out until 10 am Thursday.  So much for the hay! 

But, Sam re-tedded it on Friday and it dried out and he raked and baled it Saturday afternoon.  It won't be as nice or nutritious, but at least it is not wasted.  We also had 300 bales delivered and stacked in the loft on Sunday and will be raking and baling the last field later today. It will be good to have it all in and stacked!  It is early this year.  It seems we are usually finishing up hay right before Labor Day.  Making hay is hot, dusty, itchy work (the hay seems to make its way into every article of clothing!), but the critters have to eat each winter.

This Saturday, one of our spinning guild members, JoAnn, hosted a "Dye Day" at her beautiful farm in Kipling Ohio.  I hope that if I live on my farm for another 20 years mine could look half as nice as JoAnns' with her beautiful perennial beds.  She has a nice picnic pavilion and the dyeing paraphernalia was  set up there and she also had a big tent, where the food table was set up and anyone who brought their spinning wheels could grab a chair and spin away.

The guild provided us with silk scarves and we dyed them in a rainbow of colors.  Here is Sue applying dye.  We soaked the scarves in vinegar water for 5 minutes, crumpled them up, applied dye with squirt bottles and then microwaved, yes microwaved, them for 1 minute to set the dye.  We then rinsed them and hung them to dry: 

 Look at those colors!  What a fun and easy project.  

Each guild member also brought their own fibers to dye.  This is just a "play day", a time for us to get together and make a mess and have fun.  I brought some spun yarn, some which was 50/50 alpaca and silk and another skein which was 75/25 alpaca and wool.  I also brought some carded batts I had done up, which are a blend of alpaca and wool.  Here are some of those batts in the process of being dyed.

The batts are dyed in a way similar to the scarves: soaked in water, dye is poured on, the fiber is sprayed with vinegar, wrapped in plastic and microwaved until heated through to set the dye.  You will note that vinegar is a common "ingredient" in the dyeing process and this is because we are using "acid dyes", which means the dyes need acid to react with the fiber.  Vinegar is the acid we use.

Here are 2 more of our guild members, Bill and Karen, both dyeing skeins of yarn.  Karen is doing the proper thing and wearing gloves to protect her hands from the dyes.  While the dyes are not harmful, they will leave one with colorful hands! 

 

And of course, no meeting of the Ohio Hills Spinners and Weavers Guild would be complete without food!  Here is our food table following the whirlwind of hungry spinners and dyers!  As usual, everything was great.  Loved that corn and bean salsa, Debbie!

Once I got home with my dyed yarns and batts and scarf, I washed them with a wool wash and hung out to dry.  Turned out pretty didn't they?  I am now spinning up the batts into what will be a 3-ply yarn to be used for socks.  Watch for the finished product next week.

Since we have been putting in hay, some work has been required to get the lofts ready for this year's hay.  So, while I was moving the 70 or so bales left from last year which I am still feeding to the alpacas, I was able to get a cute photo of some of our barn residents, snoozing away during the heat of the day.  Yes, those are bats, way up in the top of the loft.  This was only a few of them, but I love how they are all lined up with their little heads showing.  

Bats cute? I think so.  We have so many types of wildlife on our farm.  Many of these critters are a nuisance, such as racoons and possums.  They invade my barn and get into my feed bins and just generally make a mess.  There are coyotes, who might possible kill crias and barn cats if Cheetah was not around to keep them from coming too close.  The bats however, are helpful wildlife.  On summer evenings, they come out of the barn and swoop around eating thousands of mosquitoes and other insects.  I love to watch them just before it gets dark.  I will admit I do not care to be up in the loft when they are waking up!

High Summer on the Farm!

Even up at the pond there is sometimes a line for the outhouse..........

But Rowdy wonders why Sam didn't make it a 
2-holer!







Summer is keeping us busy.  We have been doing "weed-control" on the pastures, which is also known as mowing them, since the alpacas are choosy about what they will eat.  Pastures usually need to be mowed 2 or 3 times a year to keep the undesirable vegetation at bay.

I also made a 480 mile round trip earlier this week to pick up female alpacas at farms where they were being bred.  In one day I saw Canton, Akron, Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh and Stuebenville.  Rowdy, my devoted companion and ride-along-dog accompanied me on my travels.

The pond has been a big hit.  We had lots of family and friends out the last couple of weeks using our guest house and playing in the pond.  A friend of my brother's who visits us every year on Labor Day sent us a big trampoline float for the pond.  Very fun!  It was a hit with my niece and nephews and their friends who were here last weekend.

 


As the photos a the top of this post show, we now have an outhouse at the pond, which has enough room in it to also act as a changing room for those who are modest.  And the picnic pavilion is also finished.  It was so nice to sit up there with my sister-in-law and her friend last weekend and watch the 5 kids wear themselves out in the water!  All we needed was a waiter to bring us Pina Coladas!


And what, you ask, do the alpacas do in 90 degree heat?  Well they spend a lot of time sitting in the barn in front of their fans 






Until someone (Me) comes out and gives them a "Hose Party"!
 Alpacas absolutely LOVE to be hosed down on a hot day.  They fight and squabble like a bunch of kindergarten kids to be right in front of the hose.  I have to stay on the other side of the fence during all this or I am likely to get stepped on, run over or kicked in the confusion!

 
Once they are nicely cooled off and wet, the next favorite thing to do is to go roll in the dust bath and then sunbathe.  Isn't that what YOU would do??

We have had our first ripe tomatoes from the garden with more to come.  I have finished canning the beets and the squash plants are taking over!  I have butternut and acorn squash planted and the vines have gone crazy.  We will have our first butternut squash soon, I think.  If only my son the chef was here to make us some more totally awesome soup.  YUM!

I have not had much time to devote to fiber the last week or so.  Between visiting family and humane society duties (I am a co-director of our local shelter, it just happened one day), but I have spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with some of that fiber.  On the 7th of August, my spinning guild is having a "Dye Day" at one of the members' farms.  We will all get together and eat and drink and dye yarns, rovings, etc.  So, I think I need to prepare some white fiber and rovings to take along and see if anyone wants to try out some alpaca! 

Meet Apache!

So, previously you met Cheetah, the livestock guard dog through this blog.  Now you will meet another long time resident of our farm, my old friend Apache, affectionately known as Patch.

As long as I can remember, I have loved horses.  As a girl growing up in the suburbs, my greatest desire was to live on a farm and have a horse.  I lived, breathed and dreamed horses.  I drew them in algebra class in 9th grade.  I drew them constantly.  I read all the requisite horse books, Black Beauty, the Black Stallion, Misty of Chincoteague and any others I could find.  My best friend in high school even gave me a horse (a poster) for my 16th birthday!  I went to horse camp.  I got on a horse any time the opportunity presented itself.  I was, in a word, horse-crazy.  

But I grew older and life came at me, along with marriage and a child and then a divorce.  Then I met Sam.  We soon married and had another child and worked and saved money and in 1991 we bought a 5+ acre piece of cornfield in central Indiana, where Sam's job in restaurant management had taken us the year before.  We had a house built, with the main floor finished and Sam spent the next winter finishing the upstairs while we lived downstairs and dealt with drywall dust and the other inconveniences of construction work.  In 1992, we were ready to start building a BARN and FENCES!  My dream of horse ownership was about to come true.

My first horse was not the best choice for a first-time horse owner and I kept her only a short while before tearfully deciding to sell her, which I did, at a local horse auction.  I then started to look for a gentle, well-mannered, well-trained horse, and Apache, an Appaloosa, came into our lives in July of 1993.  He was 8 years old, reliable, trustworthy and with a heart as big as the rest of him.  17 years later, he is still with us.   Here he is in Indiana with my two sons, shortly after he joined us.  
 And with my husband, Sam

Patch and I did a lot of trail riding together and a lot of riding on our local country roads and we even herded cattle one time at a friend's parents' farm.  THAT was fun!  Patch was one of the only horses in the group that day who did not snort and turn tail when he saw those cattle!  We also rode in a few of the local horseman's club shows, although Patch was definitely not a show horse.  Here we are in 1995 just having a good time 

We had other horses through the years, including a black Tennessee Walker and another Appaloosa, who is buried here on the farm in Ohio, but Patch has been the only constant.  I don't ride him much anymore since I don't have anyone close by to ride with.  He is pretty much a retired pasture potato and enjoys the life of a horse with about 40 acres to roam and a barn to run into when it's hot or rainy or snowy.  A couple times a year he gets saddled up for the nieces and nephews to ride and once in a while I decide I need to ride as well.  He has earned his retirement and often hangs out with his head over the fence into the alpaca pasture, probably wondering if their hay is greener than his! 

Here is the real me with Apache just this morning.  He hadn't been saddled in 6 months and I rode him bareback all over the yard with nothing but a halter and lead rope.  That's my dream horse!

 Things around the farm go on as usual.  It has been SO busy.  Last week, my mom and youngest niece arrived on Wed and stayed til Saturday so mom could leave her dog with us while she travels.  My niece is 10 and loves to visit.  She is a great kid and I look forward to her spending more time with us as she gets older.  Then my OTHER niece, who is 20 and in college arrived on Thursday and stayed til Sunday.  She needed a break form work and summer classes and social pressures and I am glad that she feels our farm is a good place for that.  This Firday, my sister-in-law and her best friend are coming with their 5 kids total to stay in the guest house until Sunday, so it has been family time this month!  

I have not been doing much knitting.  Working on a summer top in a hemp blend commercial yarn and it's not very inspiring knitting.  I hope to finish it before we go on vacation next month.  I have been spinning, though.  I have spun up 4 oz of each of the 3 alpaca rovings I hand-dyed before the weather got nice.  Here they are all spun up.  I think they are great!  Now to decide what to make with them and to find the time!!

Heat Wave, Pond Happenings and a Dose of Real Life

Yes, it has been HOT.  Rowdy has the right idea, a cooling dip in the pond!

And speaking of the pond, the picnic pavilion has been going up.  Sam got the posts set with very little help from me and then it was time to build trusses.  Once the trusses were ready, all it took was a case of beer or 2 over the 4th of July weekend and several neighbors and Sam's brother showed up to get them in place.  Fortunately no hammers were dropped on anyone's head!

I may have mentioned before that we have great neighbors, but you can't say that too many times.  We are all lucky to have such a good relationship, both for work and fun.


All we need now is the metal for the roof, which has been ordered from some local Amish.  Sam also plans to put an aerator in the pond which will be powered by a windmill which will be mounted on the roof of the pavilion.  Since our pond is sourced from run-off and not springs, the aerator should help to keep the water clearer.  Right now it is still so muddy because there are not yet any plants to keep the dirt settled.  


We have had several days of 90 + degree weather this week.  It has made getting any outdoor work done difficult to say the least.  But now we have the bush hog on the tractor and we have lots of mowing to catch up on.  I often think it would be nice to have another tractor so we could just keep the mower on it all the time.  We have pastures that need mowed, which I call "weed control", we have our walking/4-wheeler trails to mow, and just various open areas which we don't want to get totally grown over.  


I have been doing some spinning since it is so hot outside.  It's nice to sit in the air conditioning and spin.  I also canned another batch of beets this week and probably have 1 more to do next week.

Life on our farm is for the most part pleasant.  Yes, we work hard, but we enjoy the work.  It is satisfying to do a good day's work and be able to see the results at day's end.  

Sometimes the other side of life intervenes and we are faced with death.  I have had to choose to euthanize 3 dogs and a horse in the last 12 years.  Most were aged and their quality of life was compromised if not uncomfortable and I have always known I was doing what was best for them even if it hurt me. 


This past week we lost a 3 week old cria.  She was our last cria of the spring to be born.  She was the only female cria of our own that we had this spring.  She was the 9th cria from one of my 2 favorite females.  She was so healthy and full of life on Thursday, and on Friday morning, she was down and having seizures.  Within an hour of my finding her, she was gone.  Her mother, Peg, cried for her for 48 hours, gazing out the door of the barn in the direction in which she saw her baby being taken. 


I have always had the hardest time with the death of the young ones.  At least this one had a chance to enjoy life, no matter its brevity.  I feel really bad about the ones who are never healthy from the start and whose lives are a struggle until we finally lose the battle.  These critters never get to enjoy life.  Fortunately, this is a very small segment of our farm population, and most critters here live long happy lives.  I couldn't do it otherwise.

                                                  Aurora     6-11-10 to 7-2-10

A Little About Fiber Skirting (or what do you have to do to get fiber ready to spin?)

Can you find the puppy sleeping in the alpaca fiber skirtings?  
Yes, that is Rowdy, just a couple days after we got him. I was skirting fiber and he found a nice bed on the ground among the fiber I was discarding.  What is skirting?  Read on!

As we shear each alpaca, its fleece (or fiber) is sorted into 3 categories:  Prime or blanket, which is the nicest part of the fleece,  seconds, which is usable for  some items, and that which goes on the floor of the barn to be swept out the door.  The blanket and seconds are put into bags and stored in my summer kitchen until I have time to sort through, or skirt them.  Here is a day's shearing, ready to go into storage:

Before I can send my fiber off for processing into roving (ready to spin fiber) or yarn or sell it to other hand-spinners, I must sort  or skirt it to get rid of any undesirable  bits.  So, I get out my skirting table, which is very simply made from a 4' X 5' piece of cattle panel with plastic hardware cloth attached to it with zip ties.  Yes, I have seen very fancy tables at alpaca shows made with wood frames that fold up and also from stainless steel, but I love mine.  It can be stored behind the summer kitchen just leaning up against the wall until I am ready to use it and it was CHEAP!  I can prop it up on anything handy,  which as you can see, happens to be my picnic table and a patio chair.

Next, I spread a fleece out on the table and I carefully go through it .  I look for areas with excessive VM which stands for vegetable matter , also known as hay, burrs, sticks, etc.  I will discard any portions of the fleece which has a lot of this in it, as no spinner wants to deal with it and if you send it to a processor with excessive VM, you get back yarn or roving with VM in it.  Small amounts will come out in during processing, but not all of it.  Some processors will send your fleeces back to you if they are too dirty.  You may remember we vacuum our alpacas prior to shearing, but this does not remove all the debris.  It mainly removes dust and grit that dull the shear blades.  Since alpacas LOVE to roll, they pick up some pretty interesting things in their fleece.  I also remove any fiber which is not the same quality as the rest of the blanket.  Many times, especially around the edges of the fleece there are coarser areas, and this is what goes all over the ground at my feet.  The coarser fibers in the fleece are what will cause the finished yarn to be itchy or have the prickle effect.  No one wants an itchy scarf or sweater!

While I am skirting, I make notes on each fleece such as staple length, which is the average length of the fibers in each fleece.  3 to 6 inches is probably the most desirable for spinning.  If the staple length is shorter, more twist will be needed to hold the fibers together and if it is longer, it is harder to card to prepare for spinning.   I also note whether the fiber has crimp, which is the waviness you see in the photo to above.  Crimp is what gives a finished yarn elasticity and loft.  A crimpy fleece should make a yarn which stretches and then springs back when you pull and let it go.  A fleece without crimp makes a yarn that is drapey, like silk, and is wonderful for lacey scarves and shawls.  So, spinners like to know these things before they buy a fleece.

I take photos of each fleece and make a note as to the weight of the skirted fleece.  I also decide at this time which fleeces I will offer for sale as raw fleeces and which ones I will send off for processing into roving or yarn.

I sell most of my fleeces via the internet on various web sites, so all this information is helpful to prospective buyers.  I hope someday soon to have my own web site set up exclusively for the sale of fiber and yarns and finished products, but not yet.

Summer continues to roll on.  We had a very hot week or two and are now having several days of perfect weather:  sunny and mid-70's during the day and 50's at night.  Gotta love it!

Sam is working on the picnic pavilion up at the pond now that he has milled all the lumber he will need for it, so maybe next week I will have photos of that in progress.

In addition to skirting fleeces out under the big maple trees in the yard, I have done some more canning: 2 batches of wild raspberry jam and 1 batch of pickled beets, with more to come.  The garden is thriving and I am doing my best to keep ahead of the weeds, but sometimes it seems a losing battle!  We have lots of green tomatoes and our lettuce is about finished.  We have enjoyed dishes with fresh basil, though, which we love.  Wild blackberries are coming ripe and we had our first corn of the season last week (we no longer grow corn since the raccoons ate more of it than we did). Looking forward to Fourth of July festivities this weekend!

Hot, humid. Well, it's June in Ohio!

Even Rowdy, who is a firm believer in "Bigger is Better" when it comes to sticks, finds these a bit too large to bring to me.

Yes, hot, humid.  We've been blessed with a couple of mild summers recently and I think maybe we forgot what summer is really like.  I've even turned on the air conditioning in the house a few times.  The alpacas sit in the barn in front of their fans, getting up only to  eliminate, turning the barn into a giant toilet.  Can you tell how happy I am about this?  Twice a day I rake and scoop and about every other day I spread a wheel barrow load of sawdust on the mess to help with the moisture and the smell.  This time of year, especially with as much rain as we have had, not much helps.

We did finally have our last cria of the spring!  Peg, who we've had since she was 6 months old and is now 11, had a little girl last Friday (also my son Zac's birthday) at 367 days gestation.  She's a cutie.  Her sire is our male, Eclipse and keeping with the solar phenomena theme, she will be called Aurora.  Our first cria of the year, whose birth you witnessed virtually on this blog, is also by Eclipse and he is named Corona.  For those of you who think this is only the name of a mediocre beer, here is the definition:  "The upper, rarefied solar atmosphere which becomes visible around the darkened sun during a total solar eclipse."    We also finished shearing!!

As mentioned, we have had a lot of rain.  Rain gauge measurements have often been over half an inch and up to .9" in one 12 hour period.  Our little creek behind the house is usually about a foot wide, easily jumped across.  For those who wonder why we have bridges, here's the answer:

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The good thing is that the creek recedes quickly as soon as the rain lets up and all this water makes its way to the Ohio River.

Sam has been working on plans for our picnic pavilion up at the pond.  It will be 24' X 24' and will be constructed entirely of lumber cut and milled right here on the farm.  He will have to buy metal for the roof.    His first step is to cut a couple of large poplar trees.  The one Rowdy is standing on at the top of this post Sam cut 3  14' logs and 1  8' log out of.   From those 3 logs, he got approximately 60 14' 2 X 4s    and 4  8' 2 X 4s.  He will be cutting up another tree as well.  

Sam's Sawmill is a portable band mill, so it is a huge band saw that he pushes along a track.  His dad has a nice electric powered one you don't have to push, but this was a little more budget friendly and does the job.  

This project will basically be a pole construction, using locust posts (also to be cut here on the farm), which all our alpaca buildings are made with.  He will be making his own trusses for the roof, which will new for him.  Hopefully this will be done before Labor Day!

There has not been a lot of knitting or spinning time for me lately.  I have started skirting all those fleeces which are piled waist deep in my summer kitchen.  It makes it hard to get in there to get out canning jars, which I had to do just the other day to make a batch of wild raspberry jam.  Summer is just full of this kind of work which is much appreciated every time a jar of jam is opened the rest of the year.

Today I am off to visit my mom in Dayton and then she and I will be heading to Grand Rapids Michigan for the weekend to celebrate my aunt's retirement from teaching.  She is finally getting out of kindergarten after 30+ years!  It will be great to spend time with family, though I do feel bad about leaving Sam with that wonderful stinky barn.  Just a little.....