Hay season always puts things on hold. I have not worked on the bathroom for two weeks now in an attempt to get all of the hay done. I have finally had to resort to doing my own mechanical work. I am capable but it is not my favorite thing in the world. Mostly, as soon as you tear into something you find two more things that need to be repaired. I still refuse to do any serious work on the tractors. I take them in and have the dealer do all of the real work on them. The hay equipment is from Italy, so there is no one to work on it so by default I have to do it.
I did manage to actually mow the lawn with the actual lawn mower today. I really need to get the rock wall and metal fence up before I let the sheep back into the yard.
Annmarie got rid of all of her old dirty alpaca fiber. She posted it on Facebook for free and she had someone call her within fifteen minutes and that person was out to the house 30 minutes later to pick it up. She went through it all and found one that had moths in it, we tossed it, and ended up loading up eight bags into her vehicle and driving off with all of it. It was from all over the farm, Mr Rainman and I went to three different locations to find it all. Now she is only keeping the saddle portion of the alpaca that are being sheared before the organic matter and dust is embedded into the alpaca. It think if I can find a time to do it in April it will be in the best shape. She has a new setup to wash it while standing up and then she lets it dry in a netted herb bag with five shelves and a zipper that totally encloses it. This way the fiber can air dry and no matter how much wind we get no fiber disappears. Once it is all cleaned then she has to do two more processes on it before it can be spun into yarn. She has used or given away all that she had made into yarn.
I bought some sun chokes this year to see if we can grow them. Supposedly, they will grow anywhere and can become so prolific that they are problematic. I just put them into the ground in the place we are going to add a third row of raspberries. I am unsure if they are going to survive or not but it will not be for lack of water.
We had two different sets of friends come out Friday evening and Saturday morning to feed Frank/Francine. They both have young children and wanted to see and feed him. We were showing them around the house and spotted a break in the watering system in the lavender. This was causing our strawberries to not get enough water. Hopefully, we caught it in time as the strawberries are just putting on berries now. I am going to go find some netting so we can cover the strawberries so we actually get some this year. Last year the robins ate every single red berry, so all of the strawberries and raspberries. We are hoping to get some for ourselves and freeze them for use in the wintertime.
Stewart Creek Somethings 