Happy Thanksgiving from the farm….

  Blessings to everyone for a great Thanksgiving with family and friends. I will be having dinner with the sisters in Providence Hall (the other dining room where the sisters live) across the street. I’m sure it will be a great meal. Every meal till Monday will be over there so they don’t have to have two staffs here over the holiday.
Peanut has her cast off ! She went to the vet on Tuesday and he         x-rayed it. Everything looked great so off it came. She is confined to quarters for a week so she doesn’t get out in the pasture and go crazy trying to run and hurt herself. I saw her Tuesday night and she was walking stiff legged but the vet said within 2-3 days she’ll be bending it and walking pretty normal. Can’t wait to see her get turned loose in the pasture once she’s let out of the barn….look out other crias. She was giving them a run for their money WITH the cast on; she’ll be a force to be reckoned with without the cast.
It was really cold yesterday morning. 15 degrees outside but with wind chill it was 1 degree…..Luckily we only had to do some watering in the greenhouse so we weren’t outside for long. We packed the CSA on Tuesday (instead of Wednesday) in case were traveling for the holiday and they could have their food sooner. This week they got Japanese turnips, from the high tunnel. These are so mild and yummy. We also dug up the purple topped ones too. Just in one week they were frozen into the ground and we had to use a fork to get them out. We use a lettuce knife (I call it a machete) to cut the tops off while we’re out in the field. I had to use the handle end to remove the huge clumps of dirt, that were frozen to the turnips. With the spaghetti and butternut squash we had in storage, they had a pretty heavy bag of food for this week’s pick-up.
We have a really serious health issue going on with four of the alpacas that are in pasture 2. Last week, Tracy noticed that several of them were really wobbly in their hind quarters and their gait was off. She called the vet and once he arrived we moved the herd around so he could watch them walk. Two of them seemed to short step with their hind legs and when they turned quickly, they’d fall down and have a hard time getting back up. He checked their temperatures and tested their hind legs. With all four, it seemed to be their rear left leg that was impacted. The vet checked the pastures, for toxic plants, because we think it’s really weird that four have come down with something at the same time. Their symptoms mimic what happens if they are infected with the meningeal worm. It’s a worm that is carried in white tail deer. The life cycle of the meningeal worm requires terrestrial snails or slugs to serve as intermediate hosts. White-tailed deer become infected with P. tenius by eating snails or slugs that contain the infective stage of the larvae. The larvae migrate through the deer's gut and eventually move into the central nervous system where they mature into adults, produce eggs, and the life cycle begins again when they excrete the eggs in their feces. However, when P. tenius-infected snails and slugs are ingested by aberrant hosts, such as small ruminants, the larvae migrate into the brain and/or spinal cord and cause various neurological problems.
In an abnormal host, the larvae do not mature into adults, but rather wander through the central nervous system causing inflammation and swelling which damages sensitive nervous tissue producing a variety of neurologic symptoms. Experimental evidence suggests that it takes approximately 10 to 14 days for the parasite to reach the brain and/or spinal cord after the animal eats the infected snail or slug. It’s a very serious disease that can be fatal for alpacas. Mariah seems to be affected the most. They’ve put her in a pen in the barn so they can keep an eye on her. She is able to get up on her own and all the animals, in that pasture, are being treated with medication. They get monthly worm medicine so we’re not sure if they got a bad batch or what happened but they’re aggressively treating it to try and reverse the affects and save the alpacas. I’m hoping that they caught it in time so they don’t lose any of the alpacas.
We’ve started some flats of seeds in the greenhouse. We have 13 of peas (we’ll harvest pea shoots from them), 10 of micro greens and 10 of lettuce mix. They get checked daily to see if they need to be watered. Depending on the outside temps, if it gets warm enough we have to vent the high tunnels. It’s been too cold lately to open them; there’s a fine line between keeping the heat in and building up too much condensation in them that they have to be watched.  
Oh, I promised a picture of my hat. Once I finished it up on Monday, I’ve been wearing it and it really keeps my head warm in all the cold weather we’ve been having. I got a bunch of positive comments from the sisters in the dining room the other day. They thought I did a really good job on it. I’m happy with it. I might try to find a small mold, from which I can make a little alpaca, and dry felt it onto the front of it. Will look for that this weekend. Lots to do on my four day weekend. Football, reading, eating, felting, working (I start to do the close of alpaca pastures starting on Sunday night) and resting…..Hope you all have equally fun weekends as well.

Wet Felting

Today was my wet felting class. What great fun. A while ago Sister Mo had asked me what type of hat I wanted to make and I said a ball cap (are you really surprised ?). They didn’t have a mold for that so I found one on-line and they ordered it for me in my size. There were three other people in the class. A mom and her son, who own alpacas as a therapy program for war vets (he’s a vet of the Afghanistan war and was injured over there) and a woman who drove 2.5 hours and is a special ed teacher and lives on a small farm with about 100 different animals (goats, chickens, Alaskan Iditarod dogs, rabbits, alpacas, etc.). A great group of people to spend the afternoon with.
So you start with a pattern. It’s just a thin piece of plastic to form the shape of any type of hat you might want to make. Then, you take carded fiber (batt of fiber) and put three thin layers of fiber down, just as if you’re putting shingles on a roof. A little bit of an overlap and you go two inches beyond the pattern on all sides. We work on a sheet tray because the whole process gets kind of messy. On each layer the fiber runs in the opposite direction. Once you have that done and it seems to be even all over (you don’t want to wind up with any holes in your hat or thin spots), you make a second tray just like the first. Then there’s hot soapy water that is applied to the fiber under the pattern, but leaving the outside area dry. With gentle massaging, folding in, and flipping you ultimately wind up with this.
The hot water opens up the fibers and the massaging and rubbing bind the fibers together. Amazing how you can take a fluffy ‘ole pile of fiber and have it come out in a solid mass like this. Once the two sides are joined together, with lots of massaging, then the plastic gets taken out from the middle. The hat gets turned inside out and worked some more. You put it on a washboard and rub the heck out of it or you can roll it inside a wooden mat to get it to tighten up and start to shrink down. Fast forward to where it gets put on the mold. Using more of the plastic screen, as if it was sand paper, you work the outside to make it toughen up even more. Remove from the mold and rinse the soap out several times and this helps the fiber to have “memory” to keep its shape.
My cap is going to stay on the mold until Monday, when we’ll check it and trim it if it looks like it’s ready.(I took this picture early on in the process – the wrinkles are all worked out now) Wet felting is very easy to work with. You can walk away, cover it with a wet towel and come back to it or if you don’t like the way it’s shaping up, take it and rewet it and mold it again. Here are the hats that other folks made in the class.

Debbie’s hat (ironing it to dry it out and make it more rigid)







Joy’s hat (she’s trimming it to match the brim size of the mold)





Tanner’s hat (still on the mold, using the screen to firm it up)






The hats that the others made would look great accessorized with a scarf, belt around the hat or flower on it. The colors are so distinctive and with alpaca fiber it will be light but very warm. I used Chauncey’s fiber and I get to watch him in the pasture near the gardens as I work. A fun day spent learning new things. I will post pictures of the final result early next week when it comes off the mold…excited to get it and wear it.

Saturday

Since the summer CSA program ended, life has been much less hectic here on the farm. We only have 20 folks in the winter CSA so it’s quicker to pack the bags on Wednesday and there’s a lot less product to pick in the garden or high tunnels. Many of the items in the winter program are greens…radishes (the greens are edible too), purple top turnips and Japanese turnips (these are very mild), mixed lettuce, kale, swiss chard and spinach. In a few weeks we’ll have green onions, broccoli and broccoli rabe. We had several days early this week where the overnight temps were around 19 degrees and we thought we’d lose the lettuce greens that were in the outside beds. Luckily they seem to have survived. I brought one of the Japanese turnips home the other day. I sliced it up, sauteed it in butter with fresh garlic (from the garden) and it was delicious. It had a really mild taste whereas the purple top turnips have a little bite to them. The winter CSA runs until Dec. 17.
Weatherman is calling for severe storms tomorrow and strong winds. It was my job to open the two high tunnels today and vent the kale bed so it was no surprise when I went back tonight to close them up that the row covers were partially blown off. Because the heat in the high tunnels creates condensation on the inside of the plastic roof, it’s important to vent the tunnel to dry out that moisture. With the raised beds, where the kale is growing we had to partially take the plastic off the hoops overtop of the bed so the kale doesn’t cook from the sun shining through the plastic. Everything is all closed up and buttoned down for any winds that come along. The night time temps are supposed to be ok for the next few nights so we don’t have to worry about freezing temps.
On the cool mornings we spend time in the fiber room, skirting the alpaca blankets. The goal is to get all of them done before the next shearing in the spring. I’m actually getting into a groove doing the skirting and liking it. The level of enjoyment depends on how short or uneven the fiber is and how dirty it is. A black blanket (what the main body of fiber is called) we skirted recently was so dirty and  had flakes of what appeared to be dandruff in it and it was horrible to get that out of it. We use little brushes like you’d brush your dog with to fluff up the fiber and get the “vegetable matter” out of it. Usually while the other interns skirt, I would card the fiber that I had skirted before but I needed a break from that. I have enough batts done to make the baseball cap I want to make. The cap mold has been ordered so it should be here for me to use on the 23rd. There is a wet felting class where everyone will work on a hat, felted soap (we take two pieces of felted material and a bar of soap is felted into the center of it…kind of like a washcloth with built-in soap) and if there’s time, possibly a vase. Should be a fun and educational day.
Peanut is doing well. My phone is acting up and won’t let me send pictures to my e-mail so I don’t have any recent pictures to post. She is up over 16# and not being hand fed too often. Her cast should come off in two weeks and she’ll be ready to go. I had to try to feed her tonight and the two new kittens in the barn came around and rubbed all over her while I was trying to feed her and she didn’t like that. She only drank about a 1/2 ounce but she is getting plenty from mom so all is well.
All of us interns met with the sister who is the General Superior (top person here). Sister Denise is a great lady and easy to talk to. We were interested in learning more about the Sisters of Providence recent decision to allow seismic testing and possible drilling for oil on their land. She explained to us that it was an extremely difficult decision and one that they (all of the sisters) deliberated over for many months and sought out the advice of a local ecology professor before they decided to proceed. If it weren’t for the fact that their funding and the sustainability of continuing with their missions and programming was in jeopardy, they would have easily said no. They were approached by an Indiana oil company, Country Mark about the possibility of drilling. Country Mark is a co-op of farmers and has an exceptional record of no spills or accidents and truly were concerned that the sisters were comfortable with the process and accepted all the stipulations that the sisters put into the lease agreement. Currently they are in the “thumping” mode, where the truck is doing a seismic test on the roadways to get an image of the formations underground. There is a 50/50 chance that they will find oil. There is no fracing involved. It’s more of a sucking out of the oil because this oil formation is part of an underground coral reef. Indiana was under water millions of years ago and apparently a coral reef exists in this region. Isn’t that cool ? I’ve never heard of that but it makes sense that there could be a petrified one down there. All of the discussions and information has been shared with the community and neighbors in an effort to be totally transparent about everything. Sister Denise was sorry that they had forgotten to invite the interns to the information meetings but shared articles with us to bring us up to speed. We had concerns because of the Land Ethic that was developed in 2012 by the Sisters and this seemed to be a total contradiction to that. Many times in life there are no easy answers and when it comes down to a matter of survival for this convent, I think they did what was necessary to continue to serve the people in this area and around the world with their missions. If they could not continue with all that they do, many people would suffer. If they find a sizable cache of oil, they hope to look at updating their facilities to be more sustainable and possibly make some changes as far as their fossil fuel needs (they have 200 cars in their fleet that the sisters use). Let’s hope that there is a good outcome for all….Mother Earth and the Sisters of Providence.

What is your Earth Mission ?

I looked at our blog today and realized it’s been several weeks since I’ve put up a post. Usually I try to post something on the weekends but my weekends have been really busy lately. About two weeks ago I attended the Alpaca 101 workshop that was held here at White Violet Center. There was a nice size group and we learned a lot about alpacas, including how to give shots, trimming hooves and body composition. The vet came and gave Peanut a plasma transfusion. It didn’t take very long and Peanut behaved as well as you’d think a baby would when they get stuck with a really big needle. All went well though.
The newest baby cria had blood drawn to have her IGG checked. I haven’t heard the results of that so I’m thinking they must have been OK. It was an interesting workshop with one person driving up from Kentucky to attend. She and her husband just purchased two alpacas and she is trying to learn all she can about them.
I rented a car and went back home to see Linda and spent a few days with her. We drove up and spent an evening with mom. When we got back to Chambersburg I helped get the RV winterized. Right before we arrived home in August, our bathroom faucet starting leaking underneath, inside the cabinet, and I tore it apart to see if the o-ring was bad or something was out of sorts. All seemed to be fine so B called Thor this week and apparently they are having issues with that particular faucet and told her to call the manufacturer and they would probably send her a new one. The rig is only two years old….guess they don’t make faucets like they used to.
So I was home from last Thursday till this Wednesday…got back in time to help with this week’s CSA. On Thursday all of the interns and most of the White Violet staff went to a conference put on by “Our Green Valley”, an organization of businesses and like minded people concerned with sustainability in the Wabash Valley area. The keynote speaker was Betsy Damon and she was outstanding.

She has devoted her life’s work to working with water; whether it be in her artwork or in communities all over the world. Positive change to try and restore water to its natural state. She says that water is not meant to be encased and confined in concrete spillways, etc. but a free flowing entity that works with nature to restore balance. She has created wetlands and bioswales that take polluted water and cleanses it by putting it through natural means. I think it was pretty cool that I just happened to have my “Water is Life” t-shirt on the day of the conference because that was what the very first slide said in her presentation.

She has worked on some fascinating projects around the world and though they may seem prestigious, she pretty much lived in poverty while pursuing her passion. That takes true courage and focus to do something at great personal cost to yourself. I’m reading a book that my daughter bought for me at the Mother Earth News Fair and it’s called ECOpreneuring and it talks about something called.. “Earth Mission”. What have we chosen as our life’s work while on this earth. I think we know what Betsy’s Earth Mission is….water. Here is the video that she started her presentation with….it is trying to make the point that we are connected to water. Since our heart is 75% water and our brains are 78% water (when you have those mornings where your brain just seems really soggy….maybe you went over the 78%) and our cells are made up of water, we are connected to the earth in more ways than we tend to think about.

I went to two other sessions at the conference. One was on Energy Programs in Indiana, where they are doing home and business energy audits and offering some pretty great rebates. The other session was on Waste Management Streams and mainly geared towards a manufacturing process to eliminate waste and save money for the company and also minimize the amount of waste products. It was really interesting.
The temps are back around 50 after a week of really chilly temps and raw winds. Trying to catch up on things this weekend. Work on my project for here and I have to go guard the chickens tonight and when I finish that I have to go give Peanut a bottle. Last night she only took about a 1/2 ounce but she is gaining weight. She’s up to 14# now. Wahoo !