Month: July 2023

Alpaca shearing time

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It’s getting hot! The alpaca needed shearing about a month ago but with vacation and haying they seem to always get put off until July. I thought it was going to be easier this year. I honestly think this every year and seem surprised when it isn’t. I had three unused blades and had kept all of my used blades from last year. I figured I could use the old blades on the old alpaca as their coat is fairly thin compared to the young alpaca.

Mr Rainman and I pushed the alpaca toward the barn lot. I had picked some green apples off of the trees and had attempted to bribe them to follow me but they were not buying what I was selling. So instead we steered/chased them to the barnyard. When everyone was in the front of the gate I tossed the green apples into the barn lot and they all ran in to eat them. So I guess the apples did help just not when I wanted initial results. We had one of the alpaca from last year with a missing eye that was again starting to drain. It did not heal up over the winter. Before we let everyone out I put him down so the flies didn’t get into his head literally.

We sheared Snoop first, he is the calmest and mellowist old man. He just laid there and let me shear all his fiber off. He is so easy in every way, even when he is being antisocial toward his buddies he likes us. We have treats! We caught one of the older brown alpaca (I cannot remember his name) and sheared him, again very easy.

Then we caught Padre. Padre was not happy, he was less impressed when we held his head, turned his eyelid inside out and got the cheat grass from under his eyelid out. We then irrigated his eye and cleaned up all the gunk. He is halter trained so he did follow us into the milk shed and stood next to the shearing table. But he is huge, by far and away the largest alpaca we own, probably around 150#. It was all Mr Rainman and I could do to get him up onto the shearing table. Once he was up there he started to growl. Mr Rainman equates growling with getting spit on. He also has a weak stomach and dry heaves at everything nasty. So the more Padre growled the more Mr Rainman thought about gagging and dry heaving. I honestly think the alpaca knew what he was doing. The old blades did not work at all. Padre has very thick hair and required 1.5 blades to get his whole body cleaned off. Unfortunately, the last little bit was hard to get off with a dull blade so his hair cut did leave some questionable styling. We finally just had to be done as Padre kept getting more and more agitated. He was basically sounding like a motorcycle and jumping every time he was touched. We suspect that someone was fairly rough with him when he was younger.

Annmarie had me make some hobbles from a piece of rope that are self tightening and they worked great. We were doing pretty good on time about 20 minutes to shear Snoop and 40 minutes to shear Padre. I did cut Padre’s toenail a little too deep and made him bleed. We had to use the clotting powder which sort of worked.

Once that was done, we were done as there were no more sharp blades. I went in and printed a sharpening order and packaged the blades up and had Sarah ship them off that day. They should be back in 7-10 days. I did order some more ceramic cutters. I like the ceramic ones better than the metal ones. We then went out and fixed the fiber tumbler so it could be stretched out on its side and the leaf blower used on it to blow the loose fiber and dirt free. I even attached two eyebolts to the machine shed uprights so Annmarie could stay inside the machine shed and blow the fiber clean.

She tried this the next day and it worked great. Now she wants to be able to wash the fiber. I just need to find the skirting rack we made a few years ago. I am not having much luck with that task. I have looked everywhere now except the barn and the woodshed. I even checked in the root cellar! There were a lot of spider webs but no skirting rack. She processes the young alpaca fiber and we use the old animal fiber as matting to toss down and keep the areas weed free. It works pretty good for that.

Catch up

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Last weekend was utilized as catchup time. After being gone for a couple of weeks we still had more things to complete to get ready for summer. Annmarie went and got two huge pots for our front entrance. We have a few volunteer lavender plants coming up in our patch and wanted a place for them. We are also going to put a wooden post in the pots so we can hold open the porch gates. We really only need them closed when the sheep are in the yard. Both dogs know how to open them both ways! So they are not a deterrent to them when it comes to getting on the front porch. The planters were heavy and did not provide a great spot to grab onto when moving them.

On Friday I drove over to LaGrande and picked up our second ram (Remie). I just put the animal pickup enclosure on and he rode in that. We want the sheep to lamb in a timely fashion and believe that if there is competition then all of the ewes will get impregnated in a single cycle. So we will have 2 rams and 45 ewes. We put both rams in the corral for about 36 hours to make sure they would cohabitate nicely. There was a lot of butt sniffing but they never fought. We let them out with the ewes and they are doing just fine. I cannot see that they are doing their job but we will know in five months if they are.

Saturday was spent cleaning up around the farm. The footings for the bridge were started. They have to be dug out first then I can build the concrete wooden footings and put some metal in the hole then it can be filled with concrete. We are going to use my small electric concrete mixer when we do it. It will only mix about 200# of sackrete at a time. It’s going to take a while to get the footings poured.

The sprayer had to be cleaned out and set back up on the tractor. Mr Rainman worked on that. We had a couple of plugged nozzles from the last usage and he went through the entire setup and got it all cleaned up. He also greased and filled all tractor fluids on both tractors. Mr Flow is going to work on cutting thistles down along the back creek. It’s not glorious work but it needs to be done. Once the thistles are knocked down then he can clean out the chicken coop.

I was pretty sure we had a chicken predator as I could only find five chickens once we got back from vacation and was only getting one egg a day. So on Sunday, Mr Rainman and I worked on skirting the old house. I crawled under it first to make sure there were no dead animal carcasses. Lo and behold there was a passel of live chickens. We chased them out by me tossing rocks and Mr Rainman beating on the outside skirting. Otherwise, I would have been crawling and chasing chickens under the building. Once the chickens were out we locked them up in the coop and proceeded to skirt the building. We also built an enclosure around the laser vent fan to keep the weather off of it. Once that was done we built a rain lean to over the fan enclosure and outlet to prevent water from getting on any of it. This was supposed to happen a while ago but got put on the back burner.

I have started working on the freezer room floor. I need to cut diagonal floor supports to make the floor level. The only problem was I burned up the table saw blade and I have multiple replacements for the radial arm saw and hand skilsaw, but none for the table saw! I need to cut five more and we can then shim the floor level and get it down. This is the next big thing for the old house remodel. Once the floor is in I can slap up the wall from scrap plywood I have saved for this purpose. I can then move all three freezers and install some shelves into the room. Once that is done its onto my room! I think I have enough wood scraps for the walls to be sheeted so its pretty much installing two doors and finish the wiring and insulate two walls. I expect it to take me a year or more to finish my side. I really need to just focus on getting all of the switches and outlets installed.

Due to the heat I had to come up with a way to keep water and Gatorade cold. The front spring is 40F year round so I took an old broken bucket and placed it in the ditch and filled it with drinks. It doesn’t keep them ice cold but they are cool and easy to drink plus its free.

Lavender and bees

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Well, we missed the lavender harvest again! We really needed to harvest the food grade about ten days ago while we were on vacation. So now the lavender is feeding the honeybees and they seem to love it. Our oil lavender is just getting ready to bloom.

Annmarie and I went out this morning to refresh our lavender wreath. We have had a very nice wreath on the wall in the dining room for last 2-3 years and even dried out it was very nice but most of the smell had vanished. So we decided to try and redo it with our own lavender. I did the lavender harvesting and Annmarie did the wreath building. It took a lot longer than I anticipated to harvest the lavender. I was cutting it a single stalk at a time! The honeybees were everywhere and we just ignored each other. The hardest part of having bees is just learning to ignore them. If you ignore them they just tend to do their own thing and all is hunky dory. I had to reach out to the expert afterwards about how to harvest lavender efficiently. He said to use a hand sickle and sent me a little video on how to harvest it. This was very helpful and I have already ordered the hand harvesting tool! We persevered and harvested enough for the wreath. It is a little lopsided but we are going to keep it for a year and try again next year! We decided to mix colors in ours this time and I cut lavender from four different types of plants which I think affected the uniformity as I kept moving to different types of plants and Annmarie built the wreath as I was cutting flowers. If I had precut all of the flowers we could have mixed all of the types together initially and our uniformity issue would have been solved. It smells amazing. We have a vase of lavender in each bathroom now also.

Annmarie and I have been doing more research on farm camping hosting. We would like to do it up the creek next to the wheat field. It would be fairly primitive. Power would be 12V solar for lights only, some form of composting toilet setup (these vary dramatically so more research is needed), solar shower, canvas tent of some sort and all of it built on an elevated deck next to the rock outcropping. It would go in a place that we cannot use currently. So we would not be losing any land. This would require us to move some fencing so the animals will stay out. You would have to walk in to the site about 125 yards, no vehicle access. We would provide drinking water in 1/2 gallon glass jugs. There would be an outside kitchen with a single propane burner and propane grill. I want to put in a spot to hang two hammocks on the deck also. We are still doing a lot of planning before we do any real work. There are several projects on the farm that have to get done before we work on this.

660/900 mini round bales

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Well we survived the international flight and made it home. I was ready to be done with vacation, we saw some amazing things but home is the best, even the brown desert of Eastern Oregon. As we pulled into the driveway at 1000 there was a “dead” black colored sheep out in the orchard. It was flat, neck stretched out and belly looked a little bloated so I added carcass disposal to my list of tasks to be completed immediately.

I had to check on chickens, baby chicks, upper sheep (feeders), upper cows, bull in Alcatraz, our new bull, lower sheep (momma, babies and ram), cats, dogs, horse and alpaca. I even drove out to the orchard with the tractor to pickup the “dead” sheep and discovered that it was gone, it had been merely sunning itself. The alpaca can look dead also if you don’t really look at them carefully when they are sunbathing. No one died while we were gone!

I went out to look at the grass hay that was still on the ground. It was pretty dry but it needed to be rowed again so I could bale it early Saturday. It was way too hot to bale any hay, there needs to be some moisture or else the grass is too slick and it won’t roll up into a round bale. Of course since we were still on vacation time change a nap was required!

Saturday I went out at 0530 and baled until about 0830 when it got too hot. Another nap was required and we went to a wedding and visited friends. I am truly going to take my actual vacation this time and try and rest. Sunday, I was up at 0430 and had the rest of the field baled and ready to go by 0745. Mr Flow came over and we picked up all of the hay in the field and got it into the barn. We stacked it up and got most of the bales that were still drying out moisture checked and into the barn. We had about 15 bales that had to be turned and six that need to be fed to the bull in Alcatraz, they are never going to dry out.

We did some work picking up stuff at my mother’s house then started digging the footings for the back bridge. This was not easy as we kept hitting scrap metal pieces and rocks. Once the footings are dug I will build them up with wood so we can pour some concrete. The back creek is almost dry again. It happens every year and even as dry as it is it still has a little water in it. I suspect it will be bone dry by the end of July. We need to get the bridge in so I can make an area in the wood shed to hang all of our bee frames and store all of our extra bee boxes. This will keep them all contained to one area and easy to find.