What a month! This is going to be one that goes down into the category of “not so good”. Not that it’s all bad; we participated in the Tucson Wool Festival and had a great time. The down side to that event was we broke a record for high temperatures that day and I was sitting in the full sun doing carding demonstrations. At least I had my big floppy hat on to protect my face and neck.

On the down side of the month, Momo, our girl bred to Donny, went down late last week. One of the most difficult things to deal with when you have a sick animal, is that you can’t just ask them what’s wrong, where does it hurt. You have to start slowly eliminating causes to the problem (well, we know what it isn’t…) and as you slowly check thing off your list. You begin to realize just how many things it could still be.

Momo, presented with neurological symptoms, but it only affected her legs. No head tilt, no neck tremors. One of the options tossed out was that the cria she was carrying (she was due in six weeks) was pressing on a nerve, farfetched, but plausible. We immediately started her on vitamin B in case we were dealing with polio. But again, her appetite had been good and that usually affects animals that aren’t eating and their rumen is being compromised.

Four days in she stopped eating with her usual gusto. We could still coax her into eating a little, but not nearly enough, so we started force feeding a product called FibRevive. We mixed it up into a watery gruel and gave it to her in a turkey baster. She took it readily enough. At this point she was walking like a drunk, when she would get u at all. Several days I went to bed thinking I would find her body in the morning. We started considering if it wouldn’t be best to have her humanly put down.
Then Sunday night she perked up and started eating a little more on her own. Hope is restored!

Then Monday came. She seemed more restless in the morning, but she was still eating. I got a call at work a couple of hours later. Momo was in labor. I immediately left for home, called another breeder who lives nearby to go over and check the situation and then called our vet. Normally I wouldn’t have Linda come out just for a birth, but my gut told me we would need her. Sure enough, Pat called me a few minutes later to tell me that “the part that comes last is coming first”.

A detached placenta. Hopes of saving the cria are dashed.

Long story short, the cria had been dead for some time and her head was turned back so that Linda had to go in and get the cria out. It was a light colored little girl. She seemed fairly under developed for the gestation length, so maybe something had been going wrong for a long time and we just had signs of it at the very end.

This morning, Momo got up with the rest of the herd and came up to the barn. She even stood and let Jack nurse for a few minutes. Jack will be a year old in two weeks and really has no business nursing at all, but I just watched and let him stay as long as Momo was willing. Then she went back out to the field, found a comfortable spot and kushed. I brought hay out to her and she was eating readily enough when I left. Maybe we’ve turned the corner with her. We’ve decided we won’t breed her again, she’s had at least six pregnancies and has only two surviving cria, one of which being Jack, who is here only through heroic effort. We won’t put her through that again; she can spend her days being auntie Momo to the other crias. She’s earned it.

A quite moment, Brian and the dogs.

Adama's new trick

Pinetop Art Fest and Education

Well, Pinetop was a success. We got started right out of the gate Friday night and stayed busy enough that I didn’t notice I was freezing my a** off until the last hour of the show. The joke as we packed up for the night was that now would be a bad time to find out the heater doesn’t work in the new van (you just don’t think to test these things when it’s 110 degrees). Good news! The heater does indeed work.

The soaps where a big hit! We sold so many Friday and Saturday that we had to raid Cheryl’s stash for Sunday. Cheryl was game enough to stay up late Saturday decorating the new soaps, I wussed out and went to bed.

This past weekend was set aside for education. We attended an all day seminar on marketing farm products put on by Ellie Winslow, author of “Beyond the Sidewalk”. Ellie’s books focus on rural businesses and the unique situations we face. It was extremely informative, and hopefully I’ll be able to put some of the things I learned into practice.

Now we will turn our focus to the Tucson Wool Festival to be held Oct 17. You can find more info here: http://www.uniquedesignsbykathy.com. I really enjoyed this one last year.

Tufa pots and soap

Only days away from our first craft show of the year. We’ll be heading for Pinetop on Friday and I have to say we are both looking forward to a couple of days away from the heat. I wish the alpacas could come with us. I know they must be getting just as sick of the 100 plus temps. On the positive side, the evenings are defiantly cooling down and the animals have been responding to that by leaving the comfort of the fans and coolers early in the evening and browsing the pastures. I even caught them at quick pronk.
I’ve been trying out some new projects; felted soap and tufa pots. Tufa is a type of porous stone that is used for making planters. A fake version can be made using a cement mix. We further modified the recipe to use items available around the property and I made a couple of pots. The results were less than satisfactory. I think I made the mix too wet so the sides kept slumping down. Genius that I am, I used a big glass mason jar wrapped in plastic to keep the center open. Ever try to chisel a glass jar out of a lump of concrete? The jar survived, the pot, not so much. My second attempt I used dirt to fill the center. That one came out a bit better, but it’s still pretty ugly, a pot only a mother could love.
Not one to be easily discouraged, I’m already making plans for how I will change the next batch.
The soap came out much better, though Brian is a bit dubious about it (people are grossed out by a hair on soap, and you cover the whole thing with it???? He can be so supportive.) Even dressing them up and displaying them nicely did little to change his mind.

Men.

Pinetop-Lakeside Art show and other odds and ends

Hi again. I’ve been remiss in keeping up with the blog. It’s getting to be that busy time of year again. I’ve been spending most of my time getting all the odds and ends projects finished up for the upcoming show in Pinetop. I hadn’t realized just who many different projects I had worked on over this summer until I started trying to get them packed up. Hopefully I’ll come home with a few less, but no matter what, I’m looking forward to this show. We have several people coming to demonstrate different fiber arts. There should be at least one person spinning every day, plus we’ll have to drum carders that the public can play with and I’ll have a small frame loom if anyone wants to try their hand at weaving.
The show info from the Pinetop-Lakeside Chamber of Commerce website:
Sep 26, 2009-34th Annual Fall Artisan`s Festival 9-4 pm both days $2 admission
Located at the Mountain Meadow Recreation Complex
Contact Information: Ruth McBride @ 928-367-4290

For all the people that have been wondering, Luc has recovered from his heat stress and no longer gets his daily dip in the pool. Go Luc!

Yet another project, here is some bamboo I spun and dyed. For some reason, I ended up with just about as much dye on me as on the yarn. Apparently I was in slob mode.

heat stress, aqua-cows and the downer alpaca

Heat is something that is always on our minds in this area. Unfortunately, this year has been a bad one for the camilids and I know of four animals that have gone down to heat stress. Two of those did not survive. The other two are hanging in there, but recovery has traditionally been a very slow process.
On Friday, I got a call from my vet, who is treating one of the heat victims. She asked if we could build her an “aqua-cow”. To which I replied, of course we can; what the hell is an aqua-cow?
Basically, she needed a tank with the front open so the alpaca could be easily placed in, then water can slowly be added to the tank until the alpaca is being supported by the water. With heat stress, the animals will go down and not rise again for some times weeks. During this period the leg muscles will weaken considerable and this starts a whole host of other problems for the animals. The tank allows for hydro therapy of the leg muscles.
It took us a day, but we had an emergency test tank by Saturday evening. We brought it to Linda without knowing if it would hold water. It didn’t, but the water seeped out slower than it filled, so it works for the time being. Mean while, plans are being drawn up for the next version, when we have more time to build and find parts.
We’ve used it twice. The first time the alpaca seemed a little concerned that we were trying to drown him, but never got panicky. The second time, he was quite accepting and actually managed to maneuver his legs quite a bit. He wouldn’t support himself at all when we placed him in the tank. On the way back to his pen, he actually tried to brace his legs some. Hopefully, continued therapy will reduce healing time, and our little patient can soon rejoin his herd.

dust, dust and more dust

Monsoon finally kicked in with a vengeance. Friday night brought us our first dust storm of the season. This one was a bit unusual in that the winds kept up for hours. Normally a dust storm will have a “face”, the initial wall of dust and wind that passes pretty quick. Then if you happen to be in the actual path of the storm generating the winds, you may get rain. We didn’t get a drop. We did get some pretty hard wind, however, and we lost a power pole. We were without power for about six hours, which when it’s over 100 degrees out, can be fairly uncomfortable.
Saturday we got the second dust storm. This one behaved more typically with the initial burst of wind passing rather quickly. It stuck around longer enough to take down four more power poles (SRP is not happy) and scattered some yarn that I was dying, across the yard. I’m still trying to untangle that mess! This time we got a little bit of rain, but not much.
Sunday night’s dust storm stayed mostly to the east of us and we just got a little bit of dust.
I’m ready for the dust storms to stop now!

Lazy days of Summer

The heat is on. I always know when Summer is officially here because the girls move their poo pile to the breezeway between the barns. With their food there and the cooled water from the swamp cooler, they now never have to leave the shade at any point of the day. So for the next eight weeks or so, we all, animal and human alike, hunker down and try to minimize the amount of time we have to spend doing any kind of activity during the heat of the day. The people get up early and try to do all the heavy lifting in the early morning hours. You’d be amazed how much you can get done between the hours of six and nine.

Jacko figured out this weekend that the fences around the trees are really just suggestions, rather than commands. He got himself into one of the tree wells and started snacking on the grass growing at the base of the tree. .

When I found him, he was kushed into the cool dirt (I had just watered a few days before) enjoying the shade and a snack. For good measure, he got a nice long roll in before he got back out and ran back to the barn where everybody else was.

We also learned over the Fourth of July weekend, that alpacas enjoy water melon and the girls got to enjoy a sweet, cool treat