Pine Needle Farm

Happy New year!  2012 is going to be an interesting, fast paced year.

We are having a very mild winter so far.  Our road is pretty icy now, a couple of sections you could go ice skating on.  The scariest parts are down to the bare gravel, thank heavens!  there isn't very much snow up here at all.  The hill behind the house is bare, along with under the trees.  Where there is snow, it's only about 5 inches deep.  It's got a crust hard enough for me to walk on, and I'm no lightweight!

  The goats are all doing well.  The does are starting to look pregnant now.  Miss Astrid stuck her head through the fence again yesterday and got beat up pretty good.  She's got the goat equivalent of two black eyes.  Will she ever learn?  She is always the one to get in trouble, get in places she shouldn't be and get stuck, wherever there is trouble, there she is.  Her kids from last year, Socks and Oksana are the same way.  I'm in the process of getting all of the goats' hooves trimmed, and those two are right there getting in the way all the time.  The goats get a little treat while they are standing in the grooming stand to help keep them standing still and Socks and Oksana have discovered that, so every time a goat gets up there they try to get up on the stand with whoever is on it at the time to get at the treats.  The little piglets! lol  They are a fat little set, but they are so cute, I just have to laugh at them. 

   I am about to start dehairing all of my own cashmere now!  I am really excited to get at it again.  I did some of it for the CSA shares, but there is still about 5 shares worth of the 2010 harvest left, plus all of 2011 to do.  Then it will be time to comb the goats for this year.  Time flies!      

    Winter is here, and it sure came in fast!  We got 16 inches of snow in about 12 hours.  Spent two days digging out, then got 9 more inches!  Thank heavens most of it melted this last week, down to 5 inches.  Friday morning we had a raging blizzard that dumped 3 more inches.  I woke up at 4:30am, looked out the door and couldn't even see the deck railing, it was a white-out!  Went back to bed again, got up at 5:30am, looked out again, a deeper white-out!  When I got up again after daylight, it had let up a bit, but the wind was still howling.  We usually don't get hard winds up here, being tucked up against the south side of a hill, but it sure has been windy the last week or so.  Today was finally a still day.  Cloudy, but no wind.

  I'm almost done with dehairing outside cashmere for the year!  Then I can get mine all done finally and spend the rest of the winter spinning and crocheting nothing but cashmere.  What a life of luxury. lol !!

   I think all the does are bred now, except for Bridget.  She's going to visit Rusty on Dec 1st and stay there till the deed is done.  I've somehow missed two of her last heat cycles, so this time I'm just putting her in a few days early and hope it happens.

   Hunting season is over tomorrow!  I will be so glad to have the road to ourselves again.  No annoying road hunters creeping along, not pulling off till one honks at them.  Road hunting is illegal, too! 

Winter is coming, ready or not!  We've already had a brief dusting of snow.  I'm not ready yet! 

  Having help around here is a wonderful thing!  The goat pens are now cleaned, we are working on making some nice houses for them this week.  These goats will be living in style this winter!  Deluxe goat condos for all. ? 

   The Bucks are having a grand time with the ladies now.  All the dairy goats are bred, now it's the cashmere's turn.  There will be lots of babies come Spring if all goes well.

   Finally got the dairy goats' hay in their barn.  That is a relief!  It is a grass/alfalfa mix that is pretty stemmy, so they aren't eating the stems.  You would think that since they eat tree branches a little hay stem would be tasty, but, no, they pick through that and go for the leaves, dropping the stems on the floor.  Luckily the  mini horses like the stems, so about every other day I gather the wasted hay and take it to the horses.

   The greenhouse is still staying above freezing.  This is good since there are a lot of tomatoes still ripening and there is no room in the house to spread them out to ripen.  Cashmere has taken over the house!  It's everywhere!  Pretty soon I'll be asking dinner guests if they'd like some real food with their cashmere, or just cashmere for the main course.  It's a good thing I love working with cashmere!  Although even I draw the line at eating the stuff.

   It's hunting season now.  I haven't heard very many gun shots up in this area.  There aren't many bucks up here any more.  I haven't seen any since early July and that is rather odd.  They are always around all summer.  The mountain lions worked them over pretty heavily this last winter.  About every three days another deer out of the bunch that lives here was gone.  Better the deer than the goats!  Especially since the deer keep getting in the garden and in my flowers around the house.  I swear if I left the door open, they'd walk right in!  Brave little buggers.

  The dehairing is going well.  A slow process for sure.  I'm almost done with the last batch of cashmere, then it's on to individual fleeces!  That is my new direction with this machine.  I didn't make enough money dehairing other people's cashmere to make it worth while to do.  And, since I never intended to do a lot of other people's fiber, just my own and a few others, this is the way I'm heading now.  Dehair my own fiber and spin it and crochet with it has always been my plan.  I got pushed into doing other people's cashmere when I first got the machine and have been going that route for a year.  A learning year, for sure!  Now I know what doesn't work, so I'm ready to do what does work from now on.

   Lessons learned-- 1. shearing is a waste of money.  The amount one loses in the dehairing process is just not worth it. 2. a cashmere fleece turns out better if dehaired separately as individual fleeces, than when all combined.  Each goat has slightly different hair, just like each human has a different head of hair.  3. this is the slowest process in the whole fiber processing operation!  I love doing it, the time goes by quickly, and when it's time to quit, I look at the amount that got done, and I say to myself, this is all I got done today?

  I do still love everything about cashmere, from the goat to the finished product, it's just very labor intensive.  It's all good though! 

    

  

The cashmere I'm dehairing is starting to take over the house! Pretty soon I'll be asking my husband what he'd like for dinner with his cashmere. :-) I am really going to build a "real" dehairing room next year for sure. There will be lots of room for fiber storage in there, too. My tulip bed is amost ready to start blooming. There are going to be around 200 blooms this year! The daffodils are looking really pretty now, too. My goats are so bored having to stay in their pens now! The grass and other forage is just starting to grow well. We had a nice rain today, so if the sun comes out and it warms up, everything will really take off. I have promised the goats they get to go out on June 1st. It's not helping that we have four to seven deer that have decided to live on our place. They are eating the grass as soon as it starts to come up. The four kids are doing great. Growing fast. Astrid's two are just as full of it as she is. Always getting into something they aren't supposed to. They are the only two that go through the fence into the other pens, too. Mariah and Luna stay in the pen with their moms like good little kids. We had our first meal of asparagus the other night. Boy was that good! Yummm!!! I cheated and bought some lettuce starts, and some cabbage starts at the FM on Saturday. They are growing already, and I just planted them three days ago. I'm also going to plant some seeds in the next couple of days. We haven't eaten lettuce all winter, except at friends' houses. We like to try and eat locally grown food (mostly our own) as much as possible. So lettuce in the winter is not on the menu. The strawbale wall in the greenhouse is now stuccoed, so DH has planted his tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. He still has some work to do in there, but at least the important stuff is in the ground now. I've finally figured out a work schedule that is really working. I was trying to do a little of everything every day, and that just wasn't working very well. So now I have decided to focus only on cashmere four days a week, and do all the farm stuff the other three days. Of course the feeding is every day, twice a day. But gardening, cleaning, fencing , all that good stuff only happens on the three days away from cashmere. I'll get a lot more done on both fronts now. Well, that's it for now....

I think spring might finally be here!  The snow is almost all gone, at least here in the yard.  There is still some out in the forest, but it's going away.  It's been a long, snowy winter.  Now the Glacier Lilies are blooming, the pussy willows are budding, my tulips and daffodils are growing, the grass is turning green, life is good!

  The deer ate half my tulip bed, even though it was covered.  The deer stuck it's head under the corner and lifted the mesh up and got a corner of the one bed.  GRrrrrr!  A deer also was going inside the hayshed like it owned the place.  Grandma, as I call the biggest doe that comes around, even has the dogs afraid of her!  She looks at them, stomps her foot and they turn and run.  She has gone after them before it seems...

   There are four Cashmere kids this year.  Three girls and one boy.  The one boy is a dark brown with bright white socks that go up to his knees on the front legs.    He looks like he's wearing splints or something.  He's going to be a nice looking wether when he grows up!   The girls are all solid colored, two black and one brown one.  All very cute!  Now I'm waiting for the one dairy doe to have her kids, which should be sometime next week, then that will be all for this year. 

   It's Spring clean up time around here now that the snow is going away.  It's rather scary what is appearing as the snow melts! :-)  Lots to do around here, as usual.  There is the dehairing on top of that now.  That is going well.  Never a dull moment around here!  Happy Spring!

I had a most exciting Saturday!  I got to see a treed mountain lion just up behind our place!  I got some really good pictures of him, which if I knew how to put them on here, I would.  I do have a picture on the blog off my website.

   Hounds are quite loud when they are baying right next to you!  Cute, too.  It's chase season here, so cameras are the only weapon used.  The hunter I was with said this is a new lion, a young tom that he hasn't seen before, so that makes four different lions in this area.  They are staying away from our place, and just eating the deer that are around.  Nellie, our Great Pyrenees, is doing a wonderful job of keeping all the predators away.

   I am still waiting for Maggie, the first doe to kid this year.  She was due last Thursday, but still hasn't done anything, and doesn't look like anything will happen anytime soon.  Another sleepless night, getting up to check on her at least four times during the night.  Since this is her first one, I want to make sure she takes care of it.  I don't want to go out in the morning and find a dead kid because it didn't get the proper care right away.

  Well, off to check on her right now...

Well, it's hard to believe 2011 is here already.  2010 went by in the blink of an eye, it seems.  Lots of things happened last year.  Not the least, me getting my dream come true, a cashmere dehairing machine!

  I am out there almost every day, weather permitting, dehairing cashmere.  I have a nice little room built around the machine, but it isn't really well insulated, so if it gets below about 14 degrees outside, it's too cold to work in there, even with the Buddy heater going full blast.  We are having a real winter this year.  Lots and lots of snow, and cold temperatures.  Haven't had this much snow in years, especially this early.  

    The goats are all doing well.  I did the first-of-the-year hoof trimming and all of that good stuff on the dairy goats Sunday.  Now they are ready for the rest of the winter.  Finally got Belle bred, she didn't take the first two times I put her in with a buck.  Now she seems to be pregnant, so I hope she carries it full-term, and it's a girl this time, or girls.  She usually has twins.  I was looking back in her records, and she has had 15 kids over the years.  Dottie has had 17!  A whole herd of goats from just those two.  I don't even have any of their off-spring any more, except for Jared, Belle's kid from last year, who I kept as a buck.  But, he's a mixture of all the dairy breeds, so he's not pure-bred, so nobody wants to buy him. He's related to all the dairy does, so I'll put him in the freezer one of these days.  I should have "wetherized" him when he was little, but I wanted to see what kind of kids he'd throw.  He did throw three nice looking kids this last year.  Nice markings and conformation.  Oh well...Hopefully someone will come along and want him.... 

   

It's hard to believe it's almost Christmas already!  This year has gone by so fast.  I'm busy dehairing cashmere now.  I've been doing this for two months now.  It is literally the slowest process on the planet, but I am thoroughly enjoying doing it.  Watching a clump of cashmere go into the machine and come out the other end a nice soft cloud is really neat!

  We started out with a bang in the snow department this year.  We had almost 18 inches, then it rained hard for two days.  Now we have half as much snow and the road is ice and frozen slush.  Just lovely.  I expect we will get hard again in January.  We are supposed to get between 36 and 46 inches of snow this winter, so we have a ways to go yet.

  The goats are all doing fine.  The three does that I wanted to breed this year are now pregnant.  Everybody else gets to wait till next year.  Until I know exactly how the dehairing business is going to go, I didn't want to have a bunch of new kids to deal with in the spring.  There should be 5 or 6, which will be a good number.

    We are getting out of the turkey raising segment of our lives.  I want to concentrate on the fiber, so I don't have time to deal with all the other things around here.  Time to focus.

  Well, I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas/Holiday season!

My dream has come true after 9 years!  I have my own cashmere dehairing machine!!!  Now I can process mine and other people's cashmere into cloud ready to spin, or process further at another mill.  This has been a dream of mine ever since I got into raising these wonderful creatures.

   Since there aren't many of these machines in use in this country, and I am the only one concentrating exclusively on cashmere, that I know of anyway, I expect to be happily buried in cashmere for the rest of my life. 

  I am getting everything all set up and organized gradually.  The machine came a month early, so I don't have a building built for it, it is in the corner of the hayshed now.   I was trying to get a little loan to build a real dehairing room for it, but no one will loan me any money without collateral, so I am going to have to build walls around the machine where it sits now, dehair like crazy all winter, and get something built next year.  Not the ideal situation, but I can make it work.  I am feeding mostly round bales of hay this year, so I don't need every inch of space in the shed, I think this will be okay for this winter.  As long as I am warm and dry while working on the cashmere, that is all that matters.  It will be tight quarters, but it will work.  I am just so excited to have the machine here!

     Now that I am dehairing cashmere full-time, I won't be doing the Farmers' Market anymore.  I'll kind of miss the interaction with people.  I've met a lot of nice, interesting people through there.  But, one door closes, another one opens.  Onward and upward I go! :-)

Well, we have two new additions to the crew here.  This last week-end I went over to Spokane, WA and picked up two miniature horses!  One is a former show horse that has won everything there is to win her yearling year, and the other one is just a broodmare.  Now Rascal has some company of his own kind.  Although, he doesn't seem to be too excited about them.  He met them across the fence, and after going back and forth along the fencline for about 10 minutes, he walked away and started eating, then pretty much ignored them.  When it was time to go back to his pen, he came right up when I called him.

   I got to visit my friends and fellow cashmere raisers while I was over there.  That was fun.  It was a nice little get-away.

   I'm getting some calls on my goats that are for sale.  I might sell some of them yet.  Although I won't be too sad if none of them sell.  They are all my pets, and most of them have excellent fleece.  I just need more land to graze them on.  They have eaten our place down pretty good now.  I've been playing goatherder for a couple of hours most afternoons and taking them out into the forest to browse.  They fill up in a hurry and look like they will pop if you stick a pin in their sides.  They usually follow me around wherever I go.  Sometimes they take off on their own, and I have to follow them.  They sound like a herd of elephants out there stomping through the woods. 

   I  got some of my cashmere back from the mill, so now I can sell the cloud and also start spinning it up into yarn!  I have to hurry and get some done before the end of the Farmers' Market in October.  I'll be at the market for the next three Saturdays at least, maybe another week or two, depending on the weather, and all of that.

  Well, that's it for now.... 

  I had an interesting week-end up at the Eureka!  Fiber Festival in Eureka, MT.  They have a nice, relaxed, laid-back atmosphere up there, and it is a fun festival to go to.  There are classes on most things fiber related.  Vendors to buy lovely fibery things from, contests to enter, and even things for kids to do.  I took a "Needlefelted Pixie" class form Laurel Orthmeyer that was fun, and my "pixie" turned out pretty good.  If I knew how to upload pictures on here, I'd put one up, but I don't .  I haven't figured that out yet. :-)  I entered a skein of handspun cashmere yarn that took second place, and a farm photo of my goats that got reserve grand champion, so that was a bonus.  I got to see my fibery friends that I only see at these events.  A fun time was had by all!

   Back on the homefront, everything is going pretty good.  Just waiting for my cashmere to be dehaired so I can get to spinning it up.  I have two local stores that want to carry it now!   All my hard work is finally starting to pay off.  This is exciting!

   The goats are all doing quite well.  Their cashmere is coming in pretty good on all but the does with kids on them still.  They won't sprout their cashmere till the kids are weaned in October.  Right now I have 61 goats.  There are 18 for sale on my website.  I don't really want to part with any of them, but I can't keep them all.  I don't have enough land for that.  There are some pet quality ones, and some breeding stock ones.

   The garden is doing pretty good.  The strawberries are all but done now, the zuchini is almost ready, and the beans and other veggies are growing.    We got such a late start to the season this year, I hope we get a good harvest.

   The four or five baby chicks are growing.  I'm not getting many eggs now since there are a few broody hens that insist on setting instead of laying.  There is one guinea setting on a nest, we'll see if anything hatches out of it.  There are still 5 baby turkeys, they are growing well.  Getting into the garden and eating bugs.

  

We have a lot of predators around here these days!  A Swainson's hawk has been eyeing the poultry.  I think it got one of the baby turkeys, there are only five of them now.  The bear has shredded every stump around the perimeter of the fence and every log that I see out in the woods.  There are plenty of ants for it to eat this year.  They are everywhere!  I think the mountain lion has moved on, the deer are back.  There are two bucks that are hanging out here now.  I haven't seen or heard the fox lately, nor the coyotes.

   Spunky is now 14 days old.  He is too little to go out in the pasture with the herd to eat, so I am babysitting him for a couple of hours while his mom goes out.  I did that for three days, then decided that was getting old and now I put Molly and him in the yard to eat while the rest of the herd goes out into the big world to eat.  The bucks are still in their pens, so she has some company in sight.  Spunky has fun jumping up on the big rocks and stump that are around.

   I did well at the fiber festival held at the fairgrounds this last week-end.  The skein of cashmere-silk yarn I entered got "best in show".  That was pretty neat!  It's for sale in the local harvest store.  And no, the price did not go up. ?  The Farmers' Market was pretty good, I sold a decent amount.  There weren't that many people wandering through this week.  Too many other things going on in the Valley.  The summers are short and jam-packed these days.

That's all for now...

   Today was a day full of new babies!  This morning at around 5am, Molly had her kid.  A little buckling I named Spunky.  I missed the birth!  At 6, I went out to check on her, and there was a little kid looking at me, all cleaned off and moving around eating, etc.  Molly is a good mom, very attentive.  This is her first kid and I was worried that she wouldn't take care of it, but I was worrying for nothing.  She is keeping him in the corner of their shed, out of the way of the other goats in there.  She's got plenty of milk for him, too.

   There were 4 baby turkeys that hatched out today, too.  Hope they have a better survival rate than the last ones.  There are only 2 that have survived out of the earlier hatches.  They are cute.  They are big enough to get up on the roosting pole, so the mama hen has one baby under each wing.

   I've almost got the garden beds re-done.  The veggies are starting to come up pretty good now.  This is a late year for gardening!  Hope we get a long fall so we can get a good harvest.  The flowers are looking really nice this year.  All the rain we had really did them good!

   There is a bear in the vicinity, and a mountain lion, too.  We heard the lion growling Sunday evening two different times.  The neighbor that has a vacation cabin close by is here for a couple of weeks and he must have disturbed the mountian lion when he came in on Sunday.  Hope the cat stays away from my goats!  There are plenty of deer for it to eat, so I think my goats are safe.  Last night the dogs barked at something most of the night.  I thought I heard a bear growl when I stepped outside once to see what was happening.  It was over on the other neighbors' place.  Glad we have the dogs!  Well that's it for now... 

      

It is still raining.  We did have two nice days over the week-end, especially Saturday.  The Farmers' Market went well.  I sold a couple of cashmere scarves, goat milk soap, and met some interesting people.  Lots of people were interested in my spinning.  I take my spinning wheel so I can get some spinning done, and it really helps pass the time between customers.  It also gives people the opportunity to see a spinning wheel in action.  Very few people have actually seen someone spinning.  They read about it in books, but never see a real one.  Hopefully I've inspired at least one child to take it up at some point in their life, and also to get an adult or two back into it. 

   While the sun was shining yesterday, I got the beans planted finally.  I'm re-doing all the garden beds into Square Foot beds.  It's amazing how much one can actually get into a four foot by four foot bed!  I planted 134 onions, and 38 carrots in one bed.  Since the soil is nice and fluffy, and you don't ever step in it, or compact it in any way, the plants can be put closer together.  It's easier to weed, water and take care of.

   We have had over four inches of rain in the last week or so.  The ground is saturated now.  The goats are in a mud pie in their pen, at least around the gate.  I'm finding big flat rocks and making a pathway for them, and me, to get through the mud.  At least with all the rain, I'm not having to water anything.  I'm also getting in some good spinning time in the house, since I can't be outside doing things.

 Well, back to work..... 

It just keeps on raining.  We have an inch now, and it's still coming down.  It let up for a couple of hours this afternoon, so I let the goats out for a while. 

   Since I was inside, I did some spinning, crocheting and cheese making.  It's good to have an "inside" day to get things done.

  Yesterday I was out in the garden most of the day.  The strawberry/asparagus bed is finally completely weeded, at least for the time being.  It was pretty bad.  There was enough vegetation that came out of it to feed all the goats a good amount.  They enjoyed that!

   We are getting a good amount of asparagus this year.  It is so good.  I made my first "cream of asparagus" soup tonight.  It was okay.  Next time I'm going to make my own version, now that I know the basics. 

  We are going back to the Square Foot gardening method.  I've made six beds so far.  Got 134 onions planted in one, plus two squares of carrots.  You can get a lot of veggies in one bed!  I planted potatoes in two others.  Peas along the back of three of them.  It will be interesting to see how it all goes this year.  This spring has been slow, so the garden is just now getting planted.  Thankfully, we usually have a late autumn, so we should still get a good harvest.

  Well, that's it for now.  More as it happens.....