Thanksgivng Week

Thanksgiving means driving across Ohio to my mom's in Dayton.  We leave on Thursday morning and return home on Saturday.  Since we take our dogs with us, the day prior to Thanksgiving means it is Dog Bath Day.  Doesn't Rowdy look just thrilled? 

And doesn't he look smaller when he is all wet?  

He also hates being away from home.  He hates being on a leash, which he must tolerate while in the suburbs.  The only place he likes as much as home is the farm where we board the dogs when we are away.  He loves it there so much I am afraid one day he won't want to come home.  But on the other hand, that makes it easier for me to be away.  

He tries to make himself small and invisible when he is uncomfortable.

At least he has not had a chance to get dirty, so maybe mom won't mind him on the window seat in the kitchen with me.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  All my family is together, except my two west coast sons.  My mom.  Her sister and her 2 kids and spouses and dogs (3).  My two brothers and their spouses and kids (5).  And Sam and me and our dogs (2).  Can't forget mom's dog!  We had a lot of dogs this year.  Mom has convinced my brother, Larry, to leave his huge yellow lab, who is only 2 and rather exuberant, home.  They only live 20 minutes away, unlike the rest of us.  

I have a lot to be thankful for.  Most days I am very aware of just how fortunate I am.  

Things are about to change where we live.  I am worried about how much change there will be.  We are very remote and live on an unpaved road and I can take long walks and often do not get passed by even one vehicle.  However, big oil and gas drilling is coming into the area.  One of the first wells into the Utica shale is being drilled only 3 miles from our farm.  I can hear it as a distant roar most of the time, especially early in the morning.  The drill is huge and is lit up like a carnival ride at night.  It can be seen from the highest ridge on our farm, above the pond.  

 
I hope that the peace in our little holler will not be ruined by future well sites, but from all I hear, change is in the air.  Time will tell.

I have written in past weeks about breeding season on the farm.  Tomorrow the vet is scheduled to come and do ultrasounds. I have 10 girls to ultrasound.  All were still testing positive for pregnancy when a male was brought in, as of yesterday.  

This coming Saturday is the Christmas Festival and parade in our county seat, Woodsfield, which is where our Real Estate business is located.  They open up the courthouse and small businesses and local crafters can purchase booth space.  This way businesses who do not have shops in town can participate without being outdoors.  I have been busy using up single skeins of yarn by making small items to sell.  I will also have my hand woven rugs and my made in USA alpaca socks and yarns for sale.  I try not to sell imported alpaca items, but the teddy bears are a big hit and so I have to have those for sale.  They also make nice door prizes as they are 1 size fits all.  

 So far, I have made a pair of mittens, a headband, and 2 hats.  I made the scarf earlier this fall.  I have to admit, the green hat is NOT alpaca.  I had that skein of yarn and I am pretty sure it is wool, but I cannot for the life of me remember where the fiber came from!  I am sure it was a roving I saw and just had to buy to spin.  It sure is my colors.  The hat need buttons on it, but I am having a hard time finding the right ones.  Today I plan to start some fingerless mitts out of a skein of the very first commercial yarn I had done up.  I found it tucked away in a bag in a closet and must have put it there with a project in mind, but who knows what?

I'm looking forward to having the festival behind me so I can do some more weaving and spinning.  And of course Christmas is just around the corner.  Followed by January, which will allow for a lot of fiber-nating time!

Mid-November Already?

Trouble X 3

 

I know, I missed my blog post last week.  I came down with a cold about 2 weeks ago and it hit me really hard last week and I honestly could not motivate myself to get my brain in gear and come up with a post or even any photos.  I am still not over it, but I would say about 90% better.  

November pasture

November has been a fairly nice month so far.  We enjoyed (as well as I could with my cold) a gorgeous true Indian Summer of 70 degree days and blue skies the first week and then, while it has not been so warm, the dry weather continued until a couple days ago, when November really showed itself.   I got my garlic planted and covered it and the asparagus bed with a mulch of moldy hay and composted 'paca poo.  Took some nice walks with the dogs and Rowdy was even in the pond a couple times.  Of course, daylight savings time ended which means it is now dark by 6 pm and on the days I come to the office we no longer get our walks in.


 
We have some new additions (I know I am totally crazy) to our alpaca herd.  Some good friends are dispersing their herd and I have taken in 4.  One actually came from here and 2  of her daughters came as well, along with a simply gorgeous rose grey male.  He is just old enough to start breeding and has incredible genetics and super fine fleece, so I may use him this spring.  His name is Opus One or "Opie" for short.  I plan to clip a sample of his fleece to have tested to give us a idea of how fine it really is.  I don't really breed for grey here, so I don't know if we will keep him or sell or trade him.  There's no rush.

With the nice weather, I spent some time with the camera in the pasture one day.  To the left are our 2 fall crias, Accoyo Laci (white) and Inigo Montoya (black) along with Miracle's cria from May, Stormwatch (fawn).  Stormwatch is ready to wean from his mama, but since I just drove her 2.5 hours each way for a breeding 3 weeks ago, I haven't wanted to stress her yet by removing her  "baby".  I will likely do that this weekend.  I have some moving around of alpacas to do and Sam will be here to help. 

Ok, since Laci's mom, Kadi, is not the nicest alpaca on the farm (she will spit at me as soon as look at me) I don't feel bad about posting this totally unflattering shot of her sitting with her head in the hay feeder chewing on a mouthful of hay.  This is her favorite position in the barn.  That is the look I usually get from her, no matter what I am doing.  She hates me when I give her a shot and she hates me when I feed her.  Equal opportunity hater.  And this girl can SPIT.   I hope her daughter turns out sweeter.


I have mentioned in past posts about our male, Lightning, who we acquired last fall.  With no pregnancies from him last spring, I have been worried about his ability to got the job done.  This Monday, I did another behavior-testing on all the females he bred this fall.  It looks like he may have several offspring by this time next year.  My next step is to have the vet out to do ultrasounds for confirmation.  Females can show a false postive upon behavior-testing and even blood testing if they ovulate but the egg is not fertilized and their body does not re-cycle properly.  Ultrasound is really the only way to be sure that there is indeed a fetus present and even with ultrasound it can be difficult to verify if the pregnancy is not far enough (<30 days) or too far (>60 days) along.  I plan to make my appointment for the week following Thanksgiving.

Sam has run electricity to the chicken coop so I can use a heater for their water and have a light on if I choose in the winter to increase egg production.  We are actually kind of looking forward to getting less than a dozen eggs a day.  But with holiday baking, I am sellin' 'em as fast as the girls are layin' 'em, so no worries.  This hen spent a good bit of time in Apache's hay feeder the other day, but I never found an egg.  I wonder if  Apache has taken a liking to eggs?


Speaking of Apache, Sam and I were late coming home this past Monday and 'Pache did not get fed on time, so he went under the wire fence and helped himself to the alpaca feed over by the garage, which is kept in a plastic garbage can outside the pasture gate.  In response to this, I have plugged in the electric fencer once again.  I sure hope I don't forget I have it plugged in......I HATE that.


All the projects I have been working on lately are gift projects, so I will have to wait and post photos post gift -season.  Except I will post this photo of some beanies I made of hand-spun, hand-dyed alpaca.  I sent them off in a care package to my boys and Michelle today and was told they should arrive on Saturday.  We'll see if any of them read my blog and go check their PO box!  I made 2 of these last spring, but I wanted to make 1 for each and the weather got warm, so I figured I would make the 3rd one this fall.  I had planned to make one for another of the Those That Kill (TTK) band members, but he moved to Minnesota, so the band is no longer together.  Of course, living at the Boundary Waters in Minnesota for the winter, Ryan might need an alpaca beanie (and socks and long underwear and anything else you can make of alpaca!).  If the guys think he needs one, I will make one.


And by the way, some friends of mine (who gave me Cheetah years ago) have a Pyr about to have puppies.  Anyone want one??  They will be free to good homes.

November Brings Good Weather!

Rowdy loves a good game of "Squash Bomb" with an unripened butternut!

3 days into November and I think we have had some of the nicest weather of the fall.  It has been great for getting outside and getting things done and just enjoying the sunshine.  Rowdy and I went over to Lamping Homestead, which is part of Wayne National Forest that is about 5 miles from our house, on Tuesday and did the 3.5 mile loop trail.  It is nice to see the changes since the leaves came off the trees.  We have been getting over there about once a month.  Maybe next time there will be snow. http://www.scenicusa.net/060708.html   This is such a beautiful area and we usually have it almost to ourselves.  A true hidden treasure in the Ohio Hills.

If you have a farm, you pretty much have to have a barn.  When we bought our farm over 13 years ago, this is the barn that was here.  Of course, we have made changes:  a new roof to replace the leaky one, an overhang on one end to store equipment under, and paint.  The barn was weathered-grey when we moved here and one of our first jobs, after putting up fence and fixing up stalls to move our horses in, was a coat of paint.  

 It was nice having 2 strong sons to help out with scraping and painting.  This is older son, Ian, looking happier than I am sure he was.  

The barn has 3 parts to it.  There are 2 end areas which have hay lofts above them, and the center area, which has big doors on each side, is open clear to the roof so large equipment like tractors can go through.  You can see in the above photo that one end is for the horses (though we only have 1 now) and the other is the tack/cat room. 


I spent a good bit of time in the barn on Sunday and Monday, cleaning Apache's 2 stalls out down to the rubber mats in preparation of re-bedding them for winter.  He will spend more time indoors when the weather gets bad, so he likes a nice deep bed of sawdust.  Because of the set-up of this barn, when we moved in, we made one end into 2 stalls for the horses and to get to the second stall, you have to go through the first from outside.  There is a sliding door between the 2 stalls.  Now since it is only Apache, the sliding door is always open and he has the use of both stalls.  This barn was obviously used for milking cows at some time and the stanchions are still in the tack room end, behind a wall.  I took out the ones in the horse end.

 The ceiling is lower  in the tack end of the barn and it is somewhat smaller.  The cats can come and go through a pipe which used to allow cow manure to be hosed out of a trough in the cement floor.  

I am not sure how old this barn is.  I was told the upper part was relocated from another site and placed atop the cinder-block walls.  Unfortunately, whoever did this only set the block walls on a 6" foundation, which is resulting in the barn gradually sinking on one end, the horse end.  This has caused ever-widening cracks in the block wall and we can no long close the double doors that lead into the horse stalls.

 These cracks were not visible 13 years ago.  We had some barn experts out a a while back to give us an estimate on repair.  It seems they would have to jack up the whole building and put piers underneath it.  The cost was extravagant.  We decided we could just rebuild when this barn falls down and save money.  We hope it will stand for many more years, though.  



The door below goes from the center part of the barn into the tack room.  The screen door keeps the cats safe from Rowdy's invasions.  The drum holds diesel fuel for the tractors.  The ladders go up into the hay loft and there is another set on the other side.  I would have had SUCH fun in this barn when I was a kid.  At one point, Sam had a large wooden beam going from one loft across the center of the barn to the other loft.  He was using this to pull the motor out of an old Allis Chalmers tractor we had.  Wouldn't you know I caught my brother Larry walking across it like a balance beam on his first visit here!   
                                                                         




The former owners also put in hay on this farm and inside the center part of the barn, the tallies they kept of how many bales they put up in the loft are still there, penciled in  next to the door.   '82 was a good year.

    







  I have finished my thank you gift for my cousin's in-laws and will mail the package out today.  Here is the cowl I made for Jo, Tracey's mother in law.  I hope she likes it.  I have a couple of cowls and I wear them indoors and out all winter long.  They are so warm and soft and can go with so many things.  I am sending a pair of alpaca socks (not hand knit) for f-i-l and a pint of our homemade maple syrup they can both enjoy.

And speaking of pints, my husband outdid himself with this wild raspberry homebrew.  Look at the gorgeous color on that!  Even the foam has a reddish tint to it and let me tell you, it tastes as good as it looks!
           

Sad to See October Drawing to a Close

Happy Dog

Yes, it's hard to think November will be here in just a few days.  Our fall has been so disappointing, weather-wise.  This week the weather was all over the place.  We had sunshine and warm temps and we have had rain and I even had to scrape my windshield one morning, although we have yet to have a hard frost.  Usually we have had one by now.  Ladybugs are coming into the house, but not yet in droves.  That generally happens following the first good frost.  Maybe we will be lucky this year and they will go elsewhere.  

I have been keeping busy with trying to get some of my alpacas bred so we will have crias next year.  As mentioned before, I have been concerned about my new male's ability to get the job done consistently and next week will tell me a lot.  So far, I have used him with 7 females and 4 of those have been non-receptive to him 2 weeks in a row, which is a good sign.  If they continue to be non-receptive, they are likely pregnant and I will schedule the vet to come out to do ultrasounds.  But I need to have several girls to ultrasound in order for it to be cost-effective to have the vet come out.  

I also took one of my females, Miracle, over to MacArthur, Ohio to be bred to a very nice male on a farm over there.  His name is Electric Mayhem and I purchased a breeding to him through the "herdsire silent auction" at the Ohio Alpacafest last November.  The breeding was donated, so my fee goes to the Ohio Alapca Breeder's Association.  Here is a link to Mayhem's information
http://www.alpacanation.com/herdsires/03_viewherdsire.asp?name=30329  He is a very nice male with great fiber characteristics and rare coloring and I think he and Miracle will produce a nice cria next year.  Fingers crossed that the breeding took.  I did what is known as  a "drive by" breeding where I take my female home with me and test her receptivity or (hopefully) lack thereof with my own male.  I also took another female, Kadienne, back to my friend Becky's to re-breed to Glacier this week.  Kadi, as we call her, had a nice female cria by Glacier in late August.  I'd like to have another one just like her next fall.  Saturday, I plan to take Brooklynn, the dam of the little black male born a couple weeks ago, to another friend's farm and breed her to this nice male:  http://www.alpacanation.com/herdsires/03_viewherdsire.asp?name=39395  So, if all these breedings result in pregnancies, I will have quite a cria crop next fall.  

Here is a shot of our males in their pasture on a nice sunny evening this week as the dogs and I were finishing up our walk. 

You can see that most of the leaves are off the trees down here in our hollow.  It makes the woods a little brighter on sunny afternoons, but we have not had enough of those lately to suit me.

The other morning, Apache had his head over the fence and was communing with the dogs and alpacas.  But of course when I went out on the deck with my camera he had to turn to see what I was up to.  I think he was checking out their hay situation.  The hay on the other side of the fence is always better, you know.

My father-in-law bought this dual-fuel 15 passenger van a few months back and it barely fits into our garage re-fueling station.  I drove it to work for the first time yesterday and it actually drives very nicely.  I may need to steal it and turn it into the new 'Paca Van.  It would be much nicer for hauling 1 or 2 alpacas around than having to hook up my trailer to my gasoline powered truck which only gets about 12 mpg while towing.  But a pick-up is a pretty essential piece of equipment on a a farm, so it will have to work for now.  

I am still working on my thank you gift cowl and will get a photo of it once it is done, which should be in the next day or so.  I want to mail it off soon.  Other than that, I have not had much time for fibery stuff.  I have decided to sign up to be a vendor at another Fiber Festival in the spring.  It is in Troy Ohio and so I can stay at Mom's again and not have the expense of a hotel room.  Having to stay in a hotel for two nights really eats into any profit one might make.  I am also going to be having a booth at our local Christmas Festival again this year where we set up in the county courthouse.  It is a one day event and is good for selling socks and other finished items.  I need to knit up some hats and mittens, etc.   It is only a little over a month away!

Chicago and the Rain is Back!

Sometimes Ginger has a hard time getting up in the morning

Well we did enjoy a few days of nice weather, but we had rain and wind last night and now our temperature is only in the 40's!  So much for a lovely fall this year.  Maybe next year.

This past weekend I met my cousin Tracey in Chicago for a girls' weekend.  The weather was good, cool and windy (big surprise there, huh?) but no rain until Sunday morning which was when I was heading for the airport anyway.  We had a great view of Navy Pier from our room in the Sheraton but found Navy Pier to be disappointing.

It is likely nicer to visit in the summer.  We ate and drank well and I can recommend "Yolk" as a great breakfast destination if you want endless choices, including such things as "Red Velvet French Toast" which sounded more like dessert to me!  For a wonderful dinner, Roy's which specializes in "Hawaiian Fusion Cuisine" was excellent, but the Hawaiian Martini (vodka and a splash of pineapple juice) at $11.95 is really not worth it.  Tasty, but not $11.95 tasty. 

Once home from Chi-Town, I had Monday and Tuesday  to get some outdoors work done before the rain returned.  I admit I was able to finally get some of those holes in the barn floor filled in!  2 loader scoops of  lime screenings and 3 80 pound bags of Sackrete and lots of shoveling, raking and scooping really helped the situation.  Those 80 pound bags are about more than I can handle.  There is one bag left, but it is on the floor in the garage and I am NOT picking that sucker up!  The other 3 were stacked and I loaded them into the loader on the tractor.  Put the loader bucket directly over the wheelbarrow and open the bags and dump them in.  I love my front end loader!

 



Wednesday morning, the rain was back and there was a beautiful rainbow in the west as I did chores early in the morning.  My camera was in the house, but the rainbow  stayed around long enough for me to dash inside and get it and take some photos.  *Sigh*  you can see most of the leaves are off the trees already.

I hate to say it, but I think the southern end of this rainbow is right where they are drilling that first well into the Utica Shale about 3 miles from our place.  I know a lot of folks who are certainly hoping so.

This is Timmy, our newest barn cat.  He came into the shelter this past summer with his mama and while she was very friendly, Timmy was not.  He was basically feral and hated being handled and would hide whenever volunteers came into the shelter.  We figured he would be impossible to adopt out, so once he was old enough to be neutered, I offered to make him a barn cat.  

When I bring a new cat into the barn, they stay in a large dog crate for several days to get accustomed to the surroundings and the other cats and yet feel somewhat safe.  I figured when I let Timmy out that would be the last I would see of him.  Well honestly, he has become such a nice boy!  Every time I go out to the barn he is underfoot and up in my face, purring and wanting petted.  Maybe he just hated the shelter.  I don't know.  But he is doing great and getting along with the rest of the crew.  I'm glad.

 Here's most of the rest of the crew at morning feeding.  The black and white next to Timmy is Cami, short for Camilla, who I found eating garbage next to my burn barrel in April.  She is now sleek, fat and spayed.  Behind her is Chuck, short for Charles (we are not that formal and I didn't name him!).  He also came from the shelter.  The gorgeous grey is Grayson, also from the shelter.  Stubby is not present at this feeding.  He is an old fellow I have had for many years and he was not a youngster when I got him.  He lost part of his tail a few years ago, hence the moniker Stubby.  I think I called him Tabby prior to that.

I have been working on my lace shawl.  It doesn't photograph well at this point,  I need to pin it out and see if I can't get a decent pic.  I am putting it aside to work on a special Thank You gift, which will only take a few days.  I had to spin up some yarn for that.  I am using a lovely "rose grey" fleece, which is kind of like a grey with brown in it.  Much prettier than it sounds.  It is a very rare color of alpaca and alpacas that are this color can sometimes appear to be almost lavender in color.

 I am also spinning up some alpaca/silk blend yarn.  Unfortunately in the photo, you cannot see the shine of the silk.  I am just using some alpaca roving and adding in the combed silk as I spin it.  I plan to spin several skeins of this and then dye it.  The alpaca and silk should take the dye slightly differently and the silk will add shine.  It should be very nice.  It will be a while before I get to the dyeing stage, though.
 This is on my wheel at the office and we have not been at all busy lately due to the Utica and Margellus shale drilling craze in our county.  I have lots of spinning time.


My two sons and Michelle, Ian's girlfriend, are now residents on the south rim of the Grand Canyon.  I believe they start work today.  I would really like to visit them while they are there, but I don't know if we will get the chance.  Time will tell.
 

Wow, it Finally Stopped Raining!

Ginger, the Pied Piper

Oh and when it stopped, it got really nice!  We were due for it!  Isn't that cute how the chickens are following Ginger?  Every day when I let them out, they follow us across the bridge.  I just happened to have my camera and was able to get this shot.  The chickens have free range of the farm and they often roam quite a way from the chicken coop.  Yesterday, I was getting hay out of they hay loft and there were several chickens hanging out in the hay loft on the opposite side of the barn (the one with very little hay in it).  It had been raining and I guess they were looking for bugs in the hay.  With the nice weather this past weekend, I had been leaving my sliding glass door from the deck into the dining room open 18" or so.  We have no screen door.  I was repairing fence and came into the house for something and you guessed it, there was a chicken in the kitchen!  She was not happy and I could tell she had been trying to get out the window above the sink as she had knocked things into the sink.  I was able to pick her up and put her outside.  Silly  chick-chick!

The stretch of wonderful weather allowed for many outdoor activities.  Last Friday, I went to my friend Tari's house so we could do some dyeing using natural indigo.   Tari is the friend I went to the Wool Gathering with and she is one of the women who helped me learn to spin 11 years ago.  She is very much into natural dyeing and many other homesteading  activities.  On their farm, she and her husband grow a very large garden and can much of their year's food.  Tari has dairy goats and makes wonderful cheese as well as soap.  They have chickens and bees and sheep and Tari has border collies and trains them to herd.  

We started off with one dye bath that produces the blue indigo dye, but the plant had flowered and we were unable to get any blue dye from it.  So, we picked woad leaves and Tari made a "tea" with those and we eventually got our blue dye.  You can see the blue-green foam on the top of the dye bath.

 Once the dye bath is ready, we immerse wetted skeins of yarn into the dye for just a few minutes.  I was using white alpaca, of course, and Tari had a skein of wool she had previously dyed with golden rod for a very vibrant yellow.  

 

To the right is my alpaca in the dye pot.  It looks yellow, doesn't it?  But you can still see the blue bubbles on the surface of the solution.  With indigo, the fiber color does not turn blue until it is exposed to oxygen.  So, as you lift the skeins from the dye bath, they "magically" change color!

Here are those same 2 skeins after being lifted into the air.

 And below is Tari's yellow skein being lifted out of the pot.  If you look, you can still see the yellow at the lower part of the skein.  This skein turned out to be a beautiful lime green color.  









 



We just had a lot of fun that day, sitting on the porch spinning while our dye "tea" brewed and sampling some of Tari's wonderful chevre goat cheese and drinking freshly pressed cider.  Life doesn't get much better in my opinion!

Saturday, Sam and I had planned to go up to Medina Ohio, about 2 1/2 hours north, to attend a large alapca auction.  We have always wanted to attend this auction, but usually are busy that weekend.  Well this year, we weren't busy, so decided to attend.  But, the weather forecast for the weekend was so good that we just could not tolerate the idea of 5 hours in the car and several more hours inside  when there was so much needing done at home.  The wonderful weather was just begging for outside work and activities.


So instead of being wined and dined at an alpaca auction, I knocked a couple more items off my "to do before winter" list.  I replaced the frost free hydrant in the pasture across the road from the "guest" house and I replaced about 50' of fencing in one corner of the pasture next to the garage where we had been replacing fence a couple years ago and ran out of fencing before we ran out of fence that needed replaced.  Took me this long to get to it!  

We also took advantage of the 80 degree sunny weather to go up to the pond and haul out the trampoline float.  This of course required someone getting in the water and I just knew that "someone" would be me.  And if I was getting into 65 degree water, I was doing it in style with one last run on the zip line.  So that is what I did.

You can see how the rain has brought the pond level right up to maximum.  This time last year, the pond was down 2 feet.  This time last month it was down 14".  What gorgeous day it was!  Blue sky and colorful fall leaves.

Sam also mowed our big hay field for the third time.  It really grew with all the rain, but we still did not get a lot off it.  And we just did not have the required hours of sun to get it thoroughly dry, so we got about 34 bales of heavy hay off it.  I don't know that it will amount to anything.  It will depend on whether it molds.  If it gets moldy due to moisture in the bales, it will be no good at all.  But it was an experiment.

Tomorrow I head off to Chicago to meet up with my cousin Tracey, who lives in Grand Rapids Michigan.  We just decided we needed to get together since many years we only see each other at Thanksgiving.  We met in Chicago once before and our mothers (who are sisters) went with us.  This year, it is just us and we plan to eat and drink and walk and shop and maybe hit a museum or a show.  Not really sure yet.  I think the weather is supposed to be cool and windy.  Imagine that, wind in Chicago.  As long as there is no snow!

Here is a photo of our newest cria and his dam, Brooklynn.  I guess he is our last for the year.  I am pretty sure Elli, the last one due is not actually pregnant.  She is so large it is hard to tell, but I examined her pretty well the other day and I can feel no fetal parts through her abdomen.  Usually you can feel a bony protuberance such as a knee or elbow or something.  We will not be having any crias in spring either it seems.  The male I acquired last fall did not do his job and all the girls I bred him to last spring are still open. I am giving him another chance this fall as he is 3 years old now.  I'll know  how things stand in a couple weeks.  Keeping my fingers crossed that he was just immature and that he will now be functioning as required!

It's Fall!

I will admit, fall is my favorite time of year.  I know, it is the precursor to winter, but I still love it.  I love the warm, clear sunny days and cool nights and the colors and the scents.  I love being outdoors and comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt.  So, what has happened to this fall?  It has been dreary and rainy, rainy, rainy.  The mud around the barns is reminiscent of early spring, not fall.  It would have been a good year to re-seed pastures, had we but known....Last week, the pond went from being down 14 inches to running over the spill-way in less than 48 hours after a 3" rainfall on Monday night.  The creek was even up into the chicken yard and over top of both bridges, judging from the debris left behind.

  This bridge will need some work before I drive a truck or tractor across it again!  It amazes me how quickly the creek comes up and how quickly it recedes once the rain stops.  Thankfully.

At least the rain has allowed for some indoor projects to be done.  I finally got my upstairs bathroom painted.  It is no longer "gaggy pink".  I don't know what I was thinking when I painted it that color.  I was thinking peach.  Well, I guess peach is just pink.  Maybe I can get a photo for next week.

The last weekend in September is the Soakum Festival in Caldwell, Ohio, which I wrote about here http://straightforkfarm.blogspot.com/2010/09/fraternal-reunion-soakum-festival-rug.html
I attended on Sunday and did some spinning, some chatting and a lot of eating.

This is the little cabin on the fairgrounds where we set up on the porch.  The weather was actually very nice for the festival.  I think the rain started later Sunday night.

We had about the same group on Sunday this year as last year, with the addition of Marlene, closest to the camera.  The others are JoAnn, Sally, Bill & Don.

 I took my rugs to the festival and needed a way to display them, so I came up with a simple rack which Sam helped me to make.  It folds and fits quite nicely in the back of my CRV.  You can see it on the left in the photo above.

This past weekend, which was downright cold and rainy, I sat outside at the Bethel Harvest Festival all weekend with a couple of my alpacas and some products for sale.  I usually get some spinning done on this weekend, but it was too muddy to even get my wheel out of the truck.  Plus, my fingers were too numb to spin.  I stayed fairly warm, though, with my hand-knit alpaca socks, flannel lined jeans, hand-knit alpaca/wool sweater, hand-knit alpaca neck warmer, and hand-knit fingerless alpaca mitts.  

 Looks dreary doesn't it?  And this was Sunday, which was the BETTER day, weatherwise.  It only rained part of Sunday.  It rained ALL of Saturday.  I have done this festival for years and never has it been so unpleasant.  But, I enjoyed the local atmosphere and people.  That's why I go.

 Now I have had some time to get out and enjoy the fall weather.  The dogs and I get our walks in whenever possible, sometimes even in the drizzle.  The wet weather has made for a lot of interesting fall mushrooms, which I am not used to seeing.  Generally it is too dry for mushrooms to do well this time of year.  I found these to be particularly pretty. 

There were quite a lot of them growing among the pine trees on Wayne National Forrest.  I don't recall ever seeing such colorful fungi before.


It is also easier to see other things now that many of the leaves have fallen.  For instance, here is something I have been walking under several times a week on my walks with the dogs and I never saw it until now.  

 It is easily the size of a football or a little larger and about 12 feet up right over the road.  There seems to be no activity around it at this time, but I am sure there was earlier in the season.  


Another interesting construction I found recently in the woods is this little tiny woven basket nest.  I don't know what kind of bird makes this little nest hanging from thin tree limbs, so if anyone reads this and knows, please tell me.

 I know it is not the greatest photo, but the nest itself would only hold something about as large as a golfball. 


I also got into our beehive this past week to check on the bees.  There are SO many bees!  But I was dismayed that while I found capped brood (eggs), I did not find capped honey, which means that the bees have probably been eating their stored honey already.  Most likely due to the rainy weather and lack of pollen.  This was discussed at our local bee meeting and many beekeepers are feeding their bees.  I think I need to start doing so as well.  I need to learn more about bee-keeping than I know now.

 I am lifting out a comb that is totally covered with bees in this photo.  I was amazed at how many bees are in this hive.  I hope they are able to survive the winter.  I may get another hive before spring and if I do, I will go with the standard bee hives because that is what I am learning most about at our local meetings.  I would really like to be successful at this.  Hopefully I can find a place to take some classes this winter.  


The weather is supposed to be taking a turn for the better this week and the forecast shows  upper 70's and sun for the next week.  Gosh I hope it's right!  Sam is even planning to mow our hayfield again and try to get in a third cutting off it.  With all the rain we've had the hay has grown like crazy and if we get enough dry weather, maybe we can get another 100 bales or so.  That would be great!

The End