Linda Arrived !

It wasn’t a quick fix to get the steps on the rig so they would retract. Nothing, that $425 won’t fix. The motor that runs the steps going in and out was shot. It didn’t have very much power so it had to be replaced. They ordered the new motor on Monday and it came in on Tuesday morning. Linda also noticed that there are several cracks in the fiberglass and the RV guys said sometimes that happens in the cold winter weather. What’s with that ?!? Not happy at all about that and today I looked and there are even more from her drive out here. Not acceptable for a rig that is 28 months old ! I will be contacting Thor about that.
Linda got on the road about 11 a.m. on Tuesday and kept on driving until she arrived here a little after 10 p.m. It was so great to see her. We got the rig settled in the back parking lot and Boomer is staying over in the White Violet Center, in Tracy’s office. She has a dog bed in there and he’s happy as a clam. We go over and spend a lot of time with him in the evening and work on fiber projects.
On Tuesday, Linda jumped right into learning all sorts of stuff. She’s learned how to skirt fiber, how to felt soap, how to wind the yarn I spin and put it into a ball of yarn or make it into a skein. She’s made some felted items, using the cookie cutter molds and is getting three batts of fiber ready (which means she knows how to card fiber too) so Sister Moe can show her how to wet felt a hat.

Felting Soap

Winding Yarn

Winding a skein of yarn

She is a fast learner and says she is having lots of fun. Today we went to the barn and helped Tracy do chores. She learned how to scoop alpaca poop and feed them. I have my last morning alpaca duty tomorrow so she will work with me all morning and then we’re going on a field trip out to the guy’s farm who bought a bunch of White Violet’s alpacas. It’s time to trim their toes and give them their deworming shot. BTW we got the preliminary necropsy report and Mariah did have the meningeal worm. She also had pneumonia and something going on with her spleen. Now they know what they are dealing with as they head into springtime weather and the possibility of lots of slugs this summer. It’s scary that four alpacas here were affected by this and Tracy has heard of several other area farms who have had the same thing with some of their alpacas.

Linda’s trying to learn lots more by the end of the week and then we leave here on Saturday. Coming down the home stretch….5 more work days to go and then we’ll be hitting the road again !

Fall is in the air….

Fall is in the Indiana air and the leaves are turning. Yesterday, in the tomato patch, it was downright chilly but not quite to the point of frost. I could see my breath as I picked tomatoes and they felt like they had been kept in a walk in refrigerator all night. They are slowing down though….only picked 274# yesterday.

I keep forgetting to tell you about the neat way that the convent creates their heat for HVAC purposes and hot water. They have a tractor trailer that picks up wood chips, that local landscapers and tree cutters have dropped off. There is a collection center across the street from Sisters of Providence and the tree trimmers just dump their waste there and the truck goes over and fills up and brings it back to campus. There is a metal shed type of building where the truck backs up and dumps the load. Inside are these conveyor tracks that very slowly pulls the wood in (they take all the wood left off and put it through a wood grinder to make sure it’s uniform in size). My understanding is that it goes into a furnace that heats the rooms and water for the whole complex. There are two huge brick chimneys coming out of the building where all this happens and the building is pretty large. Reminds me of the exterior wood stoves that homes have that can do the same thing….heat the hot water that is piped through it and also send heat to your home. This is just on a gigantic scale. I’ve been told that one tractor trailer load lasts for a typical day and 1.5 – 2 in the winter.

Here are some of things we harvested this week in the garden:

Look at all that celery….it was like loading a small tree into each bag. And it was so fragrant…Yum !

Beautiful Carmen and Bell peppers.

 

 

 

Bagged Swiss Chard…looks sort of like rhubarb but with beautiful stalks of pink, yellow, whitish.

 

 

 

On Thursday we had a potluck event for the CSA members. I finished work at 3:30 and then went to work with Sister Mo so she could teach me how to card the fiber I’ve been working on. This is the next step after skirting it. You take the tufts of fiber that are long enough and it’s laid on that ledge area so it spans the width of the carder. On the far right side is a crank that makes the drums turn and draws in the fiber. The “undesirables” are picked up on the small drum and the acceptable ones are wound around the large drum. When it gets covered to the point where you can’t see the belt seam and it seems full, the “batt” is pulled off the drum. You break the batt, with a large knitting needle type of tool, right at the belt seam. You just run the needle under the batt and pull up on it, separating it from the drum. As you turn the handle you pull gently to have the batt come off in one piece. You’re shooting for it to weigh (in its final weight) 1.0 – 1.2 oz. I had to run mine through twice to get all fibers running the same direction and looking nice and it came out at 1.1 oz…perfect ! The weight is crucial because if you use this to felt a hat, the layers have to weigh the same so it’s not lopsided when you put it together. That is what I’ll be learning next….how to make a felted hat. (This morning I finally finished skirting all the fiber on my table)….hallelujah ! So I worked on the carding till 5, went back to the dorm and showered and made my dish to pass and off to the potluck I went. Long day, beautiful night, great chats with the CSA members who came.

Friday, the new high tunnel got its’ roof installed. There was about 10-12 of us out there helping get the plastic on it. Ropes were thrown over the top of the roof and tied to the plastic. The way they did that was to wrap the plastic end around a rock or clump of dirt and then tie the rope around it. The wind came up as we started to do it and I asked Sister Mo to say a little prayer for us. She asked Saint Joseph to give us some calm so we could get this done and wouldn’t you know it, once we retrieved the end flap that had folded up over the peak of the roof, it got real calm and we were able to finish it up. We only wound up with one hole in it that was easily patched. Next week David will finish up the side and ends so we can get it planted. It’s huge inside and will hold lots of plants.

Tomorrow is Alpaca Farm Days all over the country and ours is from 1 – 4. I will bounce between the kids activity area and the tomato selling table, helping out. Should be a fun day if the weather holds out. We haven’t had much rain since I’ve been here but they are calling for about a 60% chance tomorrow. Hopefully it will rain early or hold off till afterwards.

A Felting We Will Go...

Another week done....tomatoes are still prolific. We had a U-Pick night on Thursday that I worked and sadly we only had about eight groups/families come out for it. We had gotten some much needed rain Thursday morning so it may have scared some of the CSA folks off, thinking that it would be muddy in the tomato patch but it really wasn't that bad. Not like early in the week when the drip irrigation system sprang a leak or got left on....it looked like a rice paddy that day. We were walking through several inches of water in some places. Glad I had my work boots on that day. It was pretty sloppy.

I got Friday off because I had worked last Saturday for the farmer's market so I spent the day working on fiber. I'm working on Chauncay's blanket. This fiber is from the neck and leg areas so it's not the prime stuff. It's 2nds and 3rds and needs to be skirted. The 3rds have to be sorted out and the 2nds are used to do felting with.

I'm looking for fiber that is 2" long so thumb length;otherwise it goes in the can of 3rds. There is quite a bit of stretch to alpaca fiber due to the crimp so if you pull it, you'll get a little more length out it than if you didn't pull on it. Seems this whole bag of fiber is borderline in the necessary length so I'm tugging at each tuff to see if it qualifies for the 2nds bag. I also have to check for "vegetable matter" (poop, hay, foreign objects) and pull off any frizzy hairs. See how it tapers down to a point....that's the part where it was attached to the alpaca. Thank goodness for that little "handle" to gather up tufts of it to check for length. The pile on the table probably covers a 2' x 4' area...it seems really daunting and seems like the pile never gets any smaller. After I get all of this done, then Sister Mo will show me how to card it and then it can be felted. On Friday, Sister Ruth showed me how to do dry felting (she rescued me from the skirting process because they need to stock up on some items for the upcoming Alpaca Open House). I am making ornaments that can be hung on a tree or put on a keychain or whatever. There is a machine that does felting but we do it by hand. You use a felting needle that is about 4" long and has tiny little barbs on the tip of it. The fiber that has gone through the carder is used and you just take little tufts of it and place it in a mold of sorts. They look like cookie cutters but they had these made just for doing this. We place the form that we are using on top of a piece of foam. By poking the loose fiber with the needle (short strokes that don't go into the foam padding), it starts to bind the fibers together till you finally get a densely matted object. You keep turning the form over and poking each side till the object is uniform in density. If you get a weak area (like the neck on my one alpaca needed a little shoring up), you just take a little tuft of fiber and poke it into the weak area. It's really quite fun. I'm trying to help them get a bunch made for the Open House. I brought all the supplies back to my room and I've made 6 since yesterday afternoon. I work on it a little while, do some reading and then go back to it. Sister Mo does wet felting, which is used for hats, slippers and other stuff. I will learn that at some point. Sister Ruth, who taught me to do the dry felting is really artistic. She does wall hangings with the fiber, beautiful drawings on note cards and other fancy stuff. Since I don't consider myself to be an artsy person, this is something I can do and hope that there are other things I'm able to get the hang of.

Meanwhile back in the garden: In the older high tunnel, we've planted lettuce, carrots, beets and spinach for the fall CSA program. The new high tunnel is still under construction. That will be used to plant items for the winter CSA program. Fresh, local veggies all year round....Yum ! Guess that's all the news from the farm. Cooler temps are here. It was 43 degrees when I went for my walk this morning. 70 during the day. Oh yeah, I've got a new to me computer ordered. It should be here by the end of next week. My computer is doing the same thing it did before....black screen of death. It finally started for me yesterday so I could work on my project and do this post. It has to stay open 24/7 now till the new one gets here. The new one will be a Dell Business Edition. My computer guy says that the business models are built so much better to take hard use. He's got a 6 month warranty on it so if I don't like it for any reason, I can return it to him. It's a 2011 model with Windows 7 and Excel and Word installed. He said it will be fast so hoping he is right. $280 so nothing to lose at this point. I hated the thought of paying big bucks for a new laptop. Seems the price keeps going up with all the new fandangled gadgets on them. That's it from Indiana....

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