It's Almost Farmer's Market Time!

It's hard to believe that summer is almost over...seems like the year is flying by!  Now that I'm out of school, the end of summer isn't such a letdown.  Now that I'm a "big girl", it means cooler weather, llama shows, and of course the beginning of *my* farmer's market season!  (I specify *my* farmer's market season, because the market has actually been running since May, but I only sign up for the second half, since I figure it would be hard to sell wool hats in 80* weather!)

I've really begun to enjoy going to the farmer's market.  I wake up nice and early every Saturday, drive to Hamilton (a college town about 30 minutes north of where I live), set up, and then spin and talk to people (and hopefully sell a few things!) for 5-6 hours!  What fiber enthusiast could wish for much more?  Of course on the days when the weather is iffy it is a bit less fun, but the gorgeous fall days make up for it.

All winter my mom and I have slowly been building up my inventory of knit items to sell at the market.  I take other things like handspun yarn and insoles, but the knit accessories really steal the show.  I think I've got a great selection this year, and hopefully my future customers agree!

The market starts for me in just under 2 weeks...August 8!  Hopefully I'll have my new llama by then.  (Long story short, the original transporter changed her route so she couldn't pick up May.  I'm still searching for a new one, but I do have a promising lead!)  Can't wait!

May is Coming Home!!!

I'm pretty surprised that I haven't posted about this sooner, because I've been over the moon for the last week or so...  After almost 10 years of being away, May (aka Little May Flowers) is coming back to the farm!

May, Spring 2005.

To make a long story short (but you can read the long version here), May was the very first cria to be born on our farm, over 15 years ago!  Her mom April (Alder Crest April Showers) has always been one of my favorite llamas, but I was stupid enough to sell all of her crias!  May was part of our breeding herd for a few years, giving us 3 gorgeous crias.  She was certainly one of the few select llamas that I've regretted selling over the years.

April, Spring 2004.

Baby May, Summer 2000.

May's first cria, Autumn Hill's Blazing Starr, Fall 2003.

May's second cria, Autumn Hill's Trillium, Fall 2005.

About a month ago I got an email from May's owner, asking if I'd be interested in taking her back.  Even with her age, I knew I had to have her!  I'd already been searching for a new guard llama, and May is one of the best.

Everything is now set for May's transport to NY...she should get here the last week of July.  She'll be quarantined for a few weeks as a precaution, and then has a busy fall scheduled!  She's going to be joining Ralph, Kara, and Lily at the NY State Fair at the end of August, and then will be visiting Dakota Ridge Farm in Albany for a "date" with one of their breeding males!  Even with her advanced age (and the fact that she hasn't had a cria in almost 8 years!) I'm hopeful that she can be bred one last time.  I'd love for April's legacy to live on in my herd!

May and I at one of our last shows together, Summer 2003.

Garden 2015!

It is really disappointing how little "free" time I have at home now that I'm working full time.  So much less time for the fun outdoor stuff like gardening, and even less time to blog about it!  But I finally managed to take some pictures of my expanded garden, and thought I would share them.

The garden is at least twice as big as it was last year.  It was supposed to be bigger, but 2 broken rototillers later my husband gave up and I settled for what was done.  The plants are the same as last year though, just more of most of them!

These are the "hills" of squash and pumpkin.  I'm trying out a few different trellising methods, we'll see which one wins in the end.  Still battling the dreaded cucumber beetle, just like last year!

I finally got my permanent flower edges planted.  Hopefully I remember to mark them at the end of the growing season so that they don't get tilled under next year!

This is the second planting of spinach, onions, beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce.  I have gotten a TON of radishes out of this wide row, and picked a good amount of lettuce and spinach today.  

This is the row of cucumbers.  I hid them under a floating row cover for several weeks after planting, but they started to bloom so I freed them.  Darn cucumber beetles still found them!

Can't forget the tomatoes!  I planted almost twice as many as last year (not by choice!), so I hope they do well.  I did get some fungicide to hopefully thwart the blight.

My first planting of onions, spinach, beets, carrots, radishes, and lettuce.  I've picked almost all of the spinach, lettuce, and radishes, and most of the beets.  I noticed today that something is eating the carrot tops, but hopefully they'll still live.

Good old broccoli, if only everything were this easy to grow!  I've already harvested 3 big heads so far this week.

And last but not least, the potatoes.  I definitely planted the rows too close together, and I'm worried they aren't hilled enough.  But the plants look gorgeous!

Busy Spring!

I'll warn you, the blog is going to be sparse for awhile.  I started a full-time job last fall, so my blogging time is greatly diminished.  While I'm still doing lots of things around the farm, I just can't seem to remember to take pictures and upload them!

Anyway, here's a bit of what's been going on the past month or so.  Some of this will get expanded on in the future, so stay tuned!

My first spring project was cleaning and organizing the "garden shed".  It has been a mess since I moved in, and I finally had enough!  This is what I started with...

This is as far as I got the first day...hanging all the tools and wire edging/trellises.  The rest is done now, just need to get pictures to prove it!

The biggest spring project was cleaning up outside the barn.  Usually over the winter I try my hardest to take the manure down to the garden compost pile every time I clean, but after we got 2' of snow overnight it became impossible!  And that 2' never melted until March, just grew and grew!  So I resorted to dumping the manure outside the barn, and had a huge mess to clean up!  I used the tractor for awhile, but once I realized it was making huge ruts in the pasture I resorted to a wheel barrow.

This is just a fraction of what I started with!  Once again, I need to get "after" pictures now that it is clean!

And last but not least, the garden.  My husband tilled it a couple weeks ago, and parts of it look great!

Other parts don't look so great (they didn't get tilled deep enough to kill the sod underneath).

There is lots of lovely llama poop mixed in for fertilizer though!

The part that was planted last year really looks nice.  A few more years of sorting out rocks and we'll have amazing soil!

I built a cool little tool for seeding the root vegetables...a dibble!

It has nails in the bottom at various intervals.

When pressed into the soil, the nails leave depressions in which to plant the seeds.

After spreading the seeds I covered the area with a sprinkling of soil and watered well.  The radishes are already coming up!

The end of my first day in the garden...3 rows of potatoes planted (4 varieties), a raised row ready for broccoli (a few plants are now planted), and another raised row half-planted with root vegetables (onions, carrots, radishes, beets) and leafy vegetables (spinach and lettuce).  The other half will be planted in a few weeks.

Llama Biography #21: Autumn Hill's Inali

I have to admit it, Inali was one of my favorite llamas.  If only he had been a girl I would've been set for life!

Fuzzy boy!

When we got our new herdsire, Randallama's Cherokee, in 2004, we bred him to a bunch of our females that fall.  Alder Crest April Showers was one of those females.  April is pretty much my favorite llama, so I was excited to have another baby from her.

April, Inali's dam.

Cherokee, Inali's sire.

When the fall of 2005 came around, we had two Cherokee crias (Trillium and Catastrophie) born in late September.  Just three days after Catastrophie was born, I came home to find a baby running around with April.  As I was walking from the house out to the barn I kept hoping that it was a girl, but of course it turned out to be a boy!  But he was adorable!  April has a good track record of throwing babies with big bone and heavy fiber, and Inali got all of it!  He is built just like her.

Just a few hours old.

Mom and baby.

Fuzzy boy growing up!

Such a ham!

Trillium sold right after her first show in 2006, so Inali became my show boy for the year.  He didn't do great in halter because he was pretty small (although he did get a few 3rd places in large classes at the Indy Open and Llama Showcase), but by the time the 4-H fair came around he was doing great in performance!  We won Grand Champion Senior Performance, Grand Champion Showmanship, and Grand Champion Costume at the Shelby County Fair.  Unfortunately our show season was cut short, as Inali sold at the Llama Showcase show and went to his new home in northern Indiana shortly after the 4-H fair.

Shortly after being shorn.

Inali has a wonderful home where he is loved and spoiled.  He actually lives with a bunch of horses.  I went back a year after I sold him to shear him, and it was scary how much he looked like his mom!

Inali (now affectionally called Chewy) with his horse buddy.

New Llamas!

I've been putting off writing this blog post for awhile, as I just couldn't think of anything to write.  But then it hit me, I haven't talked about my new llamas!

Last fall I made the decision to find Mr. T a new home.  He just wasn't meshing with me or the herd, and I didn't think it was fair for him to be picked on all the time.  Luckily a friend of mine was interested, so she's getting T this spring and I'm getting a breeding to her gorgeous male for Kara next spring!

With T gone, I realized I had room for another llama!  I've been thinking about adding a new guard llama since I moved to New York.  April certainly isn't getting any younger (she'll be 21 years old in a month!), and I'd like to have a replacement sooner rather than later.  So I started the search for a guard llama.  Surprisingly enough, a good guard llama is hard to come by in the east!  A former customer of mine happened to have a few females for sale, two of which seemed to have guard potential.  The dark brown girl caught my eye, and I decided to make her mine!  So I'd like to introduce Colby, our new guard llama!  And the best part, she's going to be bred to Autumn Hill's Rainier in May, for a 2016 cria!  I'm very excited to have one of Rainier's first babies on my farm!  My husband wants me to start a line of guard llamas in my breeding herd, so Colby (and hopefully her cria) may just be the beginning of that.  Since she's getting bred this spring, she probably won't join the herd until August or September.

As if one new llama wasn't enough, I decided to go all out and look for a new show girl.  Kara will get bred next spring, so this will likely be her last show season.  Ralph isn't real happy about being shown recently, so I need someone new!  I asked around at a lot of different farms, but finally went back to a farm I've been dying to have a llama from...Mark Smith Llamas from Indiana.  I've always admired his animals (usually from behind them in the show ring!), and was determined to finally have one of my own.  I love the males that he has (in fact, I bought Kara's mom Bluff partly because she was a Tuna Catcher daughter), and was thrilled to find a young female who is a Mystery's Timone daughter and Tuna Catcher granddaughter!  So I'd like to introduce MSF Regal Princess (I really need to come up with a better nick-name though!), my new show girl and future breeding llama!  I'm just thrilled with her, and can't wait to see her in person next month!  I'm hoping to performance train her this year.  I wish I could get her to more shows, but it looks like its just going to be the NY State Fair this year.  More next year I hope!

Llama Biography #20: Autumn Hill's Catastrophie

Unlike her name suggests, Autumn Hill's Catastrophie (aka Taz) was anything but a disaster...in fact she was one of the most gorgeous and sweet llamas to ever be born on our farm.

Autumn Hill's Catastrophie at the 2007 Ohio State Fair.

About 6 months after Randallama's Cherokee joined our farm, we decided to breed our best three females to him.  The first was Little May Flowers, who delivered the beautiful Autumn Hill's Trillium the next fall.  The second was SHAG Cattera, the dam to Autumn Hill's Catastrophie.  And last but not least was May's own dam, Alder Crest April Showers, who delivered Autumn Hill's Inali.

SHAG Cattera, Taz's dam.

Randallama's Cherokee, Taz's sire.

Taz and her two half siblings, Trillium (L) and Inali (R).

Almost a week after Trilly was born, I came home from school to find the most gorgeous spotted baby with Cattera.  All I could think as I was walking across the pasture to see the cria was "let it be a girl, let it be a girl!", and it was!  Taz was gorgeous from the start, and quite a big baby.  She had a lot of fun playing with her two half siblings and the other cria we had born that fall.  Babies are always so much more fun in groups!

Newborn Taz with Cattera.

Taz (behind the tree!) with her cria friends.

Taz grew up to be a gorgeous girl, and sweet as can be.  And did I mention huge?  She was absolutely enormous!

Such a sweet girl!

Unfortunately Taz was never a huge fan of the show ring.  She went to her first show (the Western Ohio Triple Crown) with her two half siblings, and managed a respectable placing in a huge Medium Wool Juvenile Female class (Trilly beat her though).  I continued to show her on and off for the next few years, but she really never enjoyed it.  Her fleece did amazing in the shorn and walking fleece classes though, winning several firsts and champions.

Taz at her first show.

Taz winning Reserve Grand walking fleece.

When Taz got older, we knew she had to become part of our breeding program, so we sold her sire Cherokee and bought an unrelated male, MRLF Ridge Runner.  Taz was bred to Ridge in the fall of 2007, and delivered her first cria, Autumn Hill's McKinley the next year.  Taz was a great mom and Mac was adorable!  She was bred back to Ridge again that year, and had Autumn Hill's Annapurna the year after.  Once again a truly stunning cria!

Taz and her first cria, Autumn Hill's McKinley.

Taz and her second cria, Autumn Hill's Annapurna.

After Annie was weaned it was decided that Taz needed to find a new home where she could be better utilized as a breeding female (I was once again downsizing the herd).  My mom about killed me, but Taz found a great home on the East coast and has since delivered a stunning reverse appy daughter!