Still Waitin'.......

Rowdy's favorite snooze spot in my loom room at the office

I wonder when spring will arrive.  And then I remember that this is how March is every year.  Those little teasers of warm weather that last a day or so and then WHAM, back to highs in the lower 30's.  I think it is hard to remember from year to year that March is unpredictable because we are so anxious for spring and warm weather.  I know it will get here.  I do. As a matter of fact, it is supposed to be in the 60's within the next few days.  April arrives on Tuesday.

But really, Saturday was great here.  Not exactly warm, but warm enough that I spent most of the day outside cleaning buckets and maple taps.  I have a few buckets that are still up at the pond to do, as well as the sap pan, but other than Saturday, the weather has not been conducive to washing things outside.  What has been great is the fact that we can now walk the dogs later in the day.  Last night I got home from the office around 5:30, had a bite to eat and then the dogs and I got in a good 3 mile walk in daylight.  We explored some new to us trails on the neighbor's property which adjoins ours.  It's really cool that there are several of us whose properties all adjoin and add up to about 400 acres.  And since all the guys like to ride 4-wheelers, they make trails, as does Sam, and everyone uses them.  Including me and my dogs.  Sam and I and our dogs are the only ones who walk, though.  Speaking of dogs, I think Grover and I will be starting agility classes this coming week in Parkersburg.   http://www.parkersburgotc.org/agility.html  This is where we did obedience last year.

On the farm, not much has changed.  The alpacas are so tired of eating hay that they abandon full hay feeders in favor of picking what little green they can find.  This morning, as I opened a gate to let them on a different field:

I don't see any green out there, but they seem to. 

Last week I mentioned that the big drilling rig had been removed from the well pad up above our hayfield and it was quiet.  That did not last long.  All kinds of equipment has been moved in and the noise has escalated.  It sounds like jet engines going.  I am glad there is a hill between our house and the well site.  It helps to deaden the sound a bit. I have to say my curiousity is piqued and I would love to know exactly what is going on up there.  I need to go up by the pond with binoculars before the trees leaf out.

Sam's work on the kitchen is coming along.  He got all the drywall hung and has started the tape/mud/sand repeat...process.  He used the moisture resistant drywall which is why it is green.

 There is now insulation in those exterior walls which I hope will keep some of the flying wildlife from getting in: wasps and asian beetles.  Time will tell.

I have been keeping busy on the fiber front.  On Sunday I went to a baby shower for a family friend in Columbus with my mom.  I took a pair of handspun handknit alpaca baby booties as my gift.  I wish I had thought to take a photo, but I did not.  They were a big hit with the mother to be. 

 Here is another photo of the sweater I finished last week.  I would say Grover likes the sweater, but no, that is what he does no matter what I wear.  We need to work on that.  

I have mentioned a lace shawl I am knitting.  It is called Snow Angel http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/snow-angel-4

 This is a close up shot of the detail.  I am about a third to halfway done with it.  I thought those beads would show up a little more than they do.  

I received my next pair of socks in the mail a couple days ago.  This is round 4.  I have not finished them yet, so will photograph next week.

 
 
I have also been spinning some fawn alpaca for the big woven blanket project, for which I will be spinning for the next year I think.  I have about a pound and a half of this fawn to spin and I am less than 3 oz in.  Ugh.  Beige.  Not very inspiring.  And I still have about 10 oz of it to card!  Once I get that carded, I have a brown fleece I have to wash.  I already spun a black fleece and I have white on the wheel here at my office.  I so enjoy spinning more when it is bright, fun colors.  But this is spinning for a purpose and even it will be easier once I can do it on the back deck!
 

It's Spring: Officially, But it Doesn't Feel Like It!

 

 Rowdy and Grover were camera-shy this week, so instead you are seeing my work from last weekend, which included the last boil down of sap into pure maple syrup and canning homemade chicken stock.

We did a boil down on Saturday and got 2 gallons of syrup.  Sunday was cold and Monday was bright and sunny and fairly warm, but the sap buckets were no more than a quarter full on any of the taps, so I decided to go ahead and pull the taps Monday afternoon.  The weather has been so unpredictable, warm one day, cold the next.  We may have been able to get enough for another batch, but the sap starts to turn yellow this time of year and we want to gather enough sap in a day or 2 to run a batch, not hold it for several days.  It starts to spoil if it gets warm.  We ended up with about 7 gallons finished, which I bottled in pints and 1/2 pints and will sell at festivals.  So even though we got a late start due to weather, we didn't do too badly.  Last year we produced 10 gallons.

As I said it was cold again Sunday and we awoke to a dusting of snow again on Monday morning.  Since then it has been warm, then cold and rainy and warm and today it is just cold again.  Last week I took some pictures of these neat ice "stalactites" in the creek.  I haven't ever seen them like that

                                                                             

Things are still kind of quiet on the farm.  We are just waiting for warm weather so we can get out and start working in the garden, catch up on barn clean-up and spread a year's worth of manure.  As it is now, Sam is still cutting firewood because the wood burner is still going 24 hours a day.  I am also researching sheep breeds with the intention of eventually getting a few sheep.  I have a couple breeds in mind and hope to learn more about them.
 
Sam is also spending a lot of time on the kitchen at Mom's house down the road.  My mom does not live there, but she bought the house to stay in when she visited us and it is used as a guest house and is a great place for family to stay when they visit.  It had a lot of necessary updates shortly after purchase, but some things had to wait.  The kitchen was functional, but barely.  So 10+ years later, it is getting its "facelift".  

 All the old paneling and wall board has been removed.  The picture above is the wall facing the road where the sink used to be.  As you can see there is no insulation.  So Sam is doing some re-wiring and then insulation will be added.  Note the upperleft had corner above the window.  See the lighter colored area?  Here's another shot of that.

Not all the wall board has been removed in this shot.  There are a couple big wasp nests and whatever that nest is.  Below is a close up of it.  I've never seen anything like it.  Hornets of some kind?  Hopefully insulation and drywall will help to keep some of nature outside where it belongs.  We have always had problems with wasps in this house.

In other news, the big drilling rig which was across the road on the hilltop overlooking our hayfield for 6 months has been removed.  This means they are done with the vertical drilling into the Utica shale and the next step is hydraulic fracturing, otherwise known as "fracking".  Not sure when this will commence, but I understand it is very noisy, though not as time consuming as the drilling.  So for right now it is quiet when I step out the back door in the morning and the sky is not lit up with industrial lights.  

I posted a couple photos last month about the timber cutting on the property bordering ours.  I think they are done.  It looks like a bomb or 2 went off.  What a mess.  I hope it will look less awful when the leaves are out on the trees.

 At least then it will be harder to see.  It was so pretty down through here.  Not anymore.


I finished knitting a sweater this week.  This is a terrible photo because it is on the blocking mats.

It is just a comfy cardigan in a yarn I got on sale.  It is more of a purple red than the photo shows.  

Here also is round 3 of the sock round robin I am doing:

  
My contribution is the top part once again.  I did it in a pattern called 'Spring Forward" since we are all waiting anxiously for spring.  I have yet to receive round 4.  I expect it any day now.  

More Snow, Then a Taste of Spring

Rowdy and Grover patiently wait while I boil sap.  Grover is not quite as patient as Rowdy.  Grover absolutely loves the Honda Pioneer.  He would be a great spokesdog for them.  If he even thinks we are going to go somewhere in it, he runs out to the barn and jumps in and waits.  Then he sits upright next to whoever is driving, with his nose pointed down the road and his ears streaming back in the wind.  Sometimes he even puts a front paw up on the gear shift.  Rowdy, as you can tell, is a little more laid back about the whole thing.

I don't know how, but somehow I have lost a whole week's worth of photos.  I know I downloaded them to our office computer last week, but I cannot find them anywhere.  And of course, I delete them from my camera as I download.  I usually go in every couple weeks and back everything up to a portable flash drive, but I had not yet done that.  It's weird and disturbing.  So this will be short on photographic content, which is sad because we had another good 4" snowfall of which I had photos.

So we had snow, then we had temps that dipped down to right at zero last Wednesday.  I must say we are all tired of that.  It was way too cold for sap to run, so our syrup production was nil.  Then, on Friday, the temperatures soared up into the 50's and the weekend was nice and spring-like.  Sap started to run and we ran a long boil-down and produced a little over 2 gallons and 1 quart of syrup from Friday into Sunday.  Yesterday, it was almost 60 and I collected 9 buckets of sap (or about 27 gallons).  Today I will check the sap when I get home and if we have more, which I am not sure of since it only got down to about 40 overnight and today it will be around 60 again, I will start the fire and get the 9 buckets into the evaporator and Sam will continue in the morning.  We can do this  with our new pan, which is nice.

While we have enjoyed wonderful springlike weather, tomorrow winter is scheduled to return and they are forecasting rain in the morning turning to snow in the afternoon and a 2" accumulation.  Have I mentioned I am OVER winter?  

 Last Thursday, before the weather got nice, Scott was out in the barn lot picking up the walnut logs he cut on our place to deliver to the buyer.  He has promised Sam that he will allow him to load a log or two before he is all done.  I will make sure I stand very far back!  

Scott cut several trees that are veneer quality and will go to a different buyer and bring much more money per log.

 The two with the orange marks are walnut veneer and the center log is actually a hickory that came down in a storm and we were hoping the buyer might like it for veneer, but he did not.  It will be sold, but just not for veneer.  Ax handles maybe.  Hickory is one of my personal favorite woods.  My kitchen cabinets are hickory and we have hickory flooring in our computer room.  That wood actually came from our farm and Sam made  and installed the flooring.  It is beautiful.

We decided some of the money from the sale of the timber should be put into the guest house since it really needs a lot of updating which equals a lot of money.  Mom replaced the roof on it in 2012, and the next big wish is to update the kitchen.  It has painted paneling and ancient linoleum that is nailed to the floor.   Sam started demolition on the paneling this past week, discovering that there was not a scrap of insulation in the exterior walls and that each piece of paneling was held on by 60 or so nails with wall board underneath.  

Sam has torn out all the interior walls now except the front wall, which will require cabinets and shelves and appliances to be moved.  

Mom and I shopped for ceramic tile over the weekend.  We love the look of natural slate, but were concerned with the maintenance of it in a kitchen, so we have chosen a tile that looks like slate but will be a more even  surface and won't need to be re-sealed every couple of years.  It will be a while before tile starts to go in.  Then of course, new cabinets, counters and more will be in order.

I am still knitting on the sweater I was working on in the last post.  I have also started to spin some fawn alpaca for the blanket project for which I still have a lot of spinning to do.  I washed the fleece last fall and have just gotten around to carding it on my drum carder in the last few weeks.  I need to get some photos for next week.  I also did my Round 2 socks in the Sock Round Robin.  My contribution is the grey speckled part.  Those are already in the hands of the next knitter and I received round number 3 in Saturday's mail and I plan to work on those the next day or two and send them on by the weekend.  I am really enjoying this.  

Syrup Season?

We took a walk at dusk on Sunday.  I was hoping to get some sunset photos, but I did not go up high enough to catch it.  I did get some nice shots though.

Way up on one hill on our farm there is an old pump station. I understand it once ran at least 4 oil wells.  It is all this old iron machinery with wheels and cables and belts sitting in the weeds.  Its kind of neat.  Here is one of the huge wheels.

Grover is near what I call "the big tree".  It is the biggest tree on our place.  I imagine it would take 4 to 5 people fingertip to fingertip to encircle it.  One of these days I will test that theory.  Meanwhile, I will just admire its majesty.


We should be in the thick of maple syrup season.  We have trees tapped and have run 2 batches, but the sugar content is low, resulting in a low yield of finished syrup.  Now it has gotten too cold for the sap to run.  Ideally we need sunny days above freezing with sub-freezing temps at night.  This whole week is forecast to be well below freezing during the day with single digits to low teens at night.  

We invested in a nice new syrup pan this year and so far we have not used it enough to figure out the best system with it.  It should cook down more sap in less time.  I am afraid we will go from these cold days this week right into spring.  While I will certainly welcome that for the warmer weather, I think it will make for a grim year for syrup production.  But that's farm life.

We chose not to pay an extra $600 for our new Honda Pioneer to have the hood in camouflage.  We have camouflaged it already in true farm camo:  mud!







And speaking of ups and downs of farm life, I did get into my bee hive on Saturday when it was warm and my fears were justified.  The bees obviously froze to death.  They still had plenty of honey close by.  The cold was just too much for them.
 
 The bees were all clustered together on a couple of adjacent frames.  In this photo I have circled the queen.  She has a blue spot on her back.  This spot was put on her so that she could be more easily found in the hive.  Over to the left of the cluster is capped honey.  Within inches of them, but they were too cold to move to it.

Here's more of the cluster.  They were either on the other side of the same frame as the queen or on the frame right next to the queen.  Again, honey was so close.  

I attended a local beekeeper's meeting on Monday and it seems about 75% of the group members' hives had not survived.  I had ordered a new package of bees last month when I feared my bees had died, so in April, I will start over.  

 I've done some spinning lately, and also some knitting.  I am on a sweater kick these days and have several I plan to knit in the near future.  This one is a top down cardigan done in a commercial wool/alpaca/tweed blend.  






I am also almost done with the 2 rugs I have on my loom.  I hope to finish and get them off the loom today.  I have about  20" left to do on the 6' runner.  Very happy with them so far, but we'll see when they come off.



Here's how my world looked early Sunday morning from my back door.

 

 

Thaw!

Grover has excellent snowy woods camo.  Can you find him?

As I write this today, the sun is shining and the sound of dripping running water is everywhere.  We are experiencing a February thaw and anywhere from 8 to 12 inches of accumulated snow and ice is melting.  I love seeing the sunshine and warmer temperatures, but it sure is messy.  I was awakened at about 3:30 this morning by hail or sleet hitting the house accompanied by a couple of big crashes of thunder.  Crazy weather.  This past Saturday, we got another 2 to 3 inches of snow.  
And then it warmed up above freezing on Sunday (just barely) and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to go hiking up over our hill and onto Wayne National Forest, which I have not done in weeks because of all the snow.  I don't mind walking in 3 to 4 inches of snow, but much above that and it becomes a lot of work.  I really don't know what I was thinking.  It was such hard walking, I wore myself out.  Rowdy followed along in my tracks and of course Grover was unaffected by any of it.  My jeans were soaked almost to my knees by the time I got home.

Another wonderful side-effect of the thaw is barn clean-up.  The alpacas poop in piles.  They all go in the same piles.  So with as cold as it has been, the poop has frozen in layers.  I tried to scrape off the top layers on a daily basis, but I'm not big on scraping up frozen poop.  Well now those many days worth of layers are thawing.  What a mess.  And I must say I am NOT looking forward to the chicken coop thawing out. My chickens have never been inside for such a long period of time.  Yuck.  They actually came outside for the first time in weeks yesterday.  I shoveled an area right in front of their little door down to the icy bottom layer and spread some bread crumbs and egg shells and a little dry dog food out there for them.  I imagine today they may head for the grassy spot under the big pine tree in the yard.  

Also with the thaw, we tapped our maple trees.  Just last night at dusk.  It helped that yesterday we finally got our Christmas present to each other.  We got a nice new Honda Pioneer side-by-side!  It has been dog approved.  Sam says it will fit 8 sap buckets in the bed snugly enough not to have to tie them down.  Last night we took it up to the top of the ridge in the melting foot of snow to tap trees and made Grover run since only 3 of us fit on the seat.  He was such a muddy mess.  We also got a brand new evaporator pan which Sam is getting ready to run our first batch of sap in.  I am afraid that with as late as we are starting, the weather will get too warm too quickly for a good syrup season.  Ultimately we want sunny days above freezing (like today), and nights that drop back into the upper 20's or at least freezing.  We are 10 days behind last year.  It's hard to not want it to get warm, though.


We have also decided to sell off some trees.  Timber companies are paying big money for walnut right now, so Sam had a guy come in and cut some bigger walnut trees.  We also still have trees that came down in the derecho storm in June 2012 that need to be hauled out.  Our property has not been timbered in many years and we will only selectively cut, not like many of the properties surrounding us.  This is all walnut.

I finished up some socks I started right before the trip to Florida.  I finished one while I was there.  I need to throw them in the washer and see if they will shrink a little.  I like them, but they are a little too big.  If they don't shrink, I will gift them to someone with bigger feet than I have.

I also finished warping my loom yesterday and have a rug about 1/2  woven.  I am weaving a 2' X 3' rug and then a matching 6' runner.  Mostly chocolate brown with some stripes on the ends.  

So until next week, here is how my world looked at 8:30 this morning.

 


 

Winter Continues!

These guys don't mind the snow at all.  And it is a good thing.  Our pattern seems to have been about 3 to 6 inches on Sundays.  And it has never really melted in between.  We have had partial thaws, which only make the bottom layers of snow dense and hard to walk in, and then new snow on top.  And as for our road, the partial thaws turn to slush and then freeze solid overnight, creating inches of ice with rough areas caused by the tread of tires.  Walking on the road became downright dangerous last week, until this past Sunday's unexpected snowfall which was heavy enough to provide traction on the ice underneath.  
 
 They called for an inch or less on Sunday and we got at least 3 or 4 inches.  It just kept coming down.

   I did not post last week.  I was in Florida and got back late Tuesday and just did nto have any photos except ones I took in Florida and none of them were really post-worthy.  But while I was in Florida, the pipes in the house all thawed and burst.  As did the main water line into our office building.  Poor Sam spent Friday and Saturday replacing pipes.  Now our temperatures at night have been below zero again the last two nights and we had one frozen pipe in the kitchen, but it thawed yesterday afternoon with no breakage.  Thankfully.  However, our drain from the kitchen and downstairs bathtub and sink is frozen and so we cannot use those until we get a good thaw.  Sam rigged up the kitchen sink so that it is draining into a bucket under the sink and we just rotate buckets out as they fill up and dump them out the back door.  Spring can't come soon enough!

Oh wait, we need to have syrup season.  We had already run our first batch of syrup a year ago today in 50 degree daytime temps.  We tapped on Feb 9th, ran sap for the first time on the 11th.  We will be at least a week behind this year.  We'll see.

My poor chickens have now been "cooped" up for about 4 weeks straight.  Even with being shut inside with a heat lamp, the rooster has suffered frostbite to his comb and it turned white and now is turning black.  I had heard of chickens getting frostbite on their combs, but I guess it was never cold enough since I've had chickens for this to happen.  I feel bad for him, but there's not much I can do.  The damage is done.  A couple of the hens have some white tips on their combs as well.  I have been making them scrambled eggs with the shells in them to give them something other than dry layer ration to eat.  They have a heated water bowl as well.  Funny, there are a couple of mice living UNDER the heated water bowl.  They scurry away every morning when I pick up the bowl to empty it and refill it.  Must be warm under there.  Those mice best not let the chickens catch them!

Still no way to know how the bees have fared.  I am not optimistic.  I ordered another package of bees which will arrive in April.  If my hive survives, I will start another.  

 The dogs and I and sometimes Sam as well still manage to get out for our daily hikes.  Last weekend we came upon this sad sight.  It's hard to tell form the photo, but this is an area just adjoining our property line where they have started to cut timber.  It is right along the path we take up to our pond and we knew they were going to timber, but it is such a mess and it used to be so pretty.  They will leave all the tree tops and mess behind.  Once the leaves come out it will be less visible, but it makes me so sad.  

 I love to sit at my dining room table and knit and watch the birds at the feeder.  Here are just a few.   



And here are some more waiting their turn

 The other day the feeders were full of birds and there were jays and towhees and doves on the ground picking up scattered seeds as usual.  As I watched, a hawk swooped in and landed on a tree limb just on the other side of the creek.  Every last bird disappeared in a matter of seconds.  I don't know where they hid, but they were gone!  Once the hawk flew off they started to reappear as if by magic.

  Speaking of knitting, look what I finished.  Isn't that gorgeous?!  It is not alpaca, but a blend of merino wool and silk.  I purchased the fiber already dyed and ready to spin a little over a year ago and spun it last January.  I needed the right project to showcase the fabulous gradient dye job and I was a little disappointed that this did not use up all the colors in the yarn.  I still have about 130 yards left that goes into a kind of teal color.  But I love it.  This was dyed by 
Fiber Optic Dyeworks   I took a dye class from her in 2012 at the Great Lakes Fiber Show.  This shawl probably has a wingspan of over 5'.  A yardstick fits inside the curve easily without touching either side.

 I also did 2" of knitting on the first pair of socks I got in our sock Round Robin that I am participating in through the KnitSpinFarm podcast  I will mail these off today to the next person and I should get another pair to work on in the mail soon.

I could go on and on.  I took 130 photos this past week and have been having fun editing them.  I took a short photography class last summer at SSK (a knitting retreat) and one of the things the instructor said that I really liked was "pixels are free".  I am taking advantage of that!

Here are our 5 male alpacas enjoying the sunny but cold weather.