Our Custom Handspinning prices are now up under the services section of the website.

I haven’t done anything with fiber today and at the rate the day is going, I’m not likely to do so. It’s disappointing, but there are a lot of aspects to keeping a farm going and sometimes they must come first.

Take this pasture I’ve been thinking is almost finished for a couple months now just as an example. When I did the drainage a while back, I made a lot of mud. This mud is under the roof, so it will be where the alpacas cush (lie down). If they lie down in the mud, their fiber will get all muddy and be that much harder to work with. To deal with the mud problem, I hauled several cart-loads of sand from where the dog pen used to be and put that over the mud. They’ll probably need more sand, but I put enough in there to get them started.

The next thing we realized is we don’t have a catch pen in this pasture. We try not to chase our alpacas all over the pasture to catch them. We gently herd them into a catch pen – a 10′ x 10′ area – when we need to work with them. It’s a lot easier for us and less stressful for the alpacas. We also feed the alpacas in the catch pen. It allows us to separate the alpacas while they’re eating to make sure everybody gets some, and the alpacas learn to associate the catch pen with food, not just shots and toenail trims. Just feeding Sindre and Drake without a catch pen makes us shudder, so I took some panels and rigged a catch pen in the new pasture.

We feed our alpacas in big plastic bins. In our larger sheds, where we have plenty of floor space out of the rain, we just toss the bins on the floor and fill them with hay. The dry floor space in the new pasture is somewhat limited. Therefore, we need to build a proper feeder mounted off the ground so they can use all the limited floor space. I spent much of today demonstrating my limited carpentry skills trying to make a feeder. I think I have one that will work, except some of the screws are too long and I’ve already gashed my thumb on one. The screws are where the humans will get gashed, not the alpacas, but we still need to come up with a better solution. The feeder isn’t square, even, or any of those things, but I doubt the alpacas will notice once I put some hay in it.

By the time I finished the feed bin and took care of the alpacas, it was time to haul in some firewood and start supper.

And I thought I got going pretty early this morning and I’d actually accomplish something today.
—–