Tag Archives: alpaca

An Unseasonably Cold Weekend, By the Numbers

Posted on by
Reply

If you’re like us, you planted your flowers Mother’s Day weekend. Even with Colorado’s unpredictable springs, that date is generally in the clear for a hard frost. It has snowed as late as Father’s Day, but you have to live your life and try not to think about snow in June. We planted our winter squash, corn, and beans on May 1st because the forecast looked warm and damp. Flowers went in the ground and indoor-started veggies moved outside on May 7th or 8th. Yesterday it was 88°, but today, May 20th, we could get 3-5 inches of snow and the forecast calls for an overnight low of 28°. Tomorrow, the low is 30° and then things start to warm up to the mid-50s by Monday and 70° by Wednesday, with lots of rain between now and then. The precipitation is more than welcome, but the cold makes us worry about the garden. We take comfort in data, so we went in search of how cold is too cold for our plants. 

Here’s the breakdown of how cold affects our homestead, by the numbers. 

Bees

Our honeybees pulled through the winter, but we just split them into a second colony about ten days ago. We’re a little worried about the queenless hive being able to keep all the brood and queen cells warm enough, but the split, which has the queen and a smaller nest, should be fine. 

  • 41°: the body temperature at which a bee will die.
  • 93°: the average temperature at the center of the winter cluster, with brood present.
  • 57°: the temperature at which bees form a tight cluster
  • 45-50°: the temperature at which bees enter a state of torpor 

Dampness and wind are more likely to harm bees than the cold is.

IMG_20220520_141604464Garden

Germination and seedling growth are highly dependent on water and soil temperature.

  • 25°: hard freeze
  • 28°: for 5 hours: the temperature at which most plants will freeze
  • 32°: the temperature at which most seedlings will die. 

Evaporation will help raise the air temperature around the plants, so watering deeply in the evening can help, as can covering plants before the colder air sets in. We are using the alpacas’ pool, beach towels, tarps, outdoor blankets, old sheets—basically anything we can find—and I’m running the clean towels and sheets through the dryer first for good measure. And then I’m saying a prayer. 

I feel really lucky that I decided to plant peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants in the patio garden because I can move these more heat-loving plants inside for the weekend. I just have to keep the toddler out of them. 

IMG_20220519_200512260Orchard

Our apple and pear trees are beyond the flowering stage and it looks like many of the blossoms have been pollinated (thanks, bees!). Julio found this guide to critical temperatures for fruit trees. It looks like our trees should be okay, for the most part, and enjoy a drink from all the precipitation. 

  • 28°: the temperature at which 10% of buds will die.
  • 25°: the temperature at which 90% of buds will die.

Alpacas

  • 2 inches: how much fleece each alpaca has grown on her torso right now. 

IMG_20220520_123540163They’re wet, but probably enjoying a break from being hot. Alpacas can tolerate very cold temperatures, provided they have a windbreak.

I was in the middle of writing this when the snow started, so I had to run outside and cover the babies. Now, I’m sipping stress relief tea and praying for the garden while taking deep breaths. Best wishes to you, fellow Front Range gardeners. 

We will update here with how the forecast played out and if our plants survived.

IMG_20220520_142028894

Alpaca Dryer Balls: How to Make Them and Why Use Them

Posted on by
1

Not all of the fleece that the alpacas grow is suitable to spin into yarn. When alpacas are sheared, typically three cuts are done. The first cut, the torso, is the best fleece, perfect for spinning. The second and third cuts include the legs, neck, and chest, and have a shorter staple length. Although this fleece can be spun, the shorter staple length makes it harder to do so. Even still, the fleece is soft, durable, and worth using for other projects. One such project is making felted dryer balls. 

Why Use a Dryer Ball

 A dryer ball is used for the same reason you might use a dryer sheet. The balls tumble around the dryer with your clothes and help wick moisture away from them, cutting drying time. While they do that, they also reduce static and help clothes come out of the dryer less wrinkly. 

Unlike dryer sheets, however, wool dryer balls can be used for years, eliminating the waste of a single-use sheet. If you like the fragrance of your dryer sheets, you can even add essential oils to wool dryer balls to give your clean laundry a pleasant aroma. 

How We Make Alpaca Wool Dryer Balls

IMG_20220416_122334_773 (1)First, we wash the fleece. For this batch of dryer balls, I used Theodora’s seconds. I washed the fleece twice until the water ran clean, then plucked any remaining hay out with tweezers. This batch of fleece was good for making felt balls because it started to matt as it dried. I suspect that the water got too hot while I was washing it. 

Next, I rolled balls from the fleece. Each ball is approximately 1 oz of fiber. Because Theodora naturally has some white spots and different shades of brown in her coat, I played with the colors so that there would be some variation on the outside of the balls. 

Once each ball was formed, I placed it into a nylon stocking, tying a knot between each ball. I was able to fit five dryer balls in each stocking leg, or three in a kneehigh. For pantyhose, I cut the pair in half, but later I used kneehighs, which was a bit easier.IMG_20220416_122338_358

Next came the felting process. I tossed my maternity overalls and a bit of detergent in the washing machine and ran the string of fiber balls through a hot cycle. I checked on them every few minutes to make sure the balls were not felting to the stocking, until the rinse cycle, at which point my top-loading washing machine lid locks. 

The hot cycle followed by a cold rinse cycle shocks the fibers, causing them to stick to each other. The once loose balls of fiber become hard balls that won’t fall apart in the dryer. After one wash, the balls were hard enough to remove from the stocking. At this point, I went over each ball again, plucking stray pieces of hay out with tweezers. (Before the next shearing, we are going to give our alpacas a good brushing so there will be less hay. Rookie mistake!)IMG_20220416_122346_759_2

I set the balls aside and, to save energy, gave them another felting once I had the next string of dryer balls ready to go. If you wanted, you could felt multiple strands of balls at the same time, but I imagine they would get quite tangled with each other. 

Alpaca Fiber Dryer Balls

I was mostly pleased with how the dryer balls turned out, although some are more oblong in shape than others. I plan to keep making them with leftover fiber. I think it will be neat to make some with scraps from various spinning projects so that they will have a wide variety of colors, but that’s a project for later. 

IMG_20220416_122949_159Alpaca Dryer Balls will be available at our market days for $15 for a set of three. Any balls that do not pass quality control will be available at a discounted $3/each. We think they’d make nice toys for your cats or dogs. Follow us on Instagram @solhomestead to stay up to date on Market Days this spring and summer. 

Lessons We Learned In Our Second Year

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_20211030_173737939_HDR

We are having an unseasonably warm autumn where we are, with temperatures still consistently in the upper 50s. We’ve even had some days in the 70s lately, which has been great for the bees and for giving us a little leeway as we break things down for the winter. 

As we work on winterizing the garden and the beehive, it has been natural to think about what we learned this year, primarily by making mistakes or making things harder on ourselves. So, here are the big lessons we’ve learned. 

IMG_20210825_135914620_HDRBrush the Alpacas Before Shearing Them

During the first week of June, our alpacas were sheared for the first time at our homestead. They were so ready for a haircut! Before we sent the prime cuts of their fleece to a fibermill to be spun into yarn, we had to skirt the fleece—that means picking out the hay, debris, and matts. I don’t know if you know this about alpacas, but they like to roll around in the dirt and hay. They were pretty dusty and dirty and skirting their fleece was a nightmare. Kasey is still working on getting their second and third cuts ready to spin and it is just so full of hay. 

We contacted our mentor to ask him if there was anything that we could do to keep them cleaner. Some really serious farms keep their alpacas in coats so that they can’t get hay, etc. stuck in their fleece, but that is too hardcore for us. And Moira is always hot enough as it is. We also knew that brushing them could destroy the structure of their fleece, which is meant to have a beautiful crimp to it. We visited our mentor during Alpaca Farm Days and he showed us a bucket full of different brushes that we could use before shearing. If we are shearing them to spin the fleece into yarn, it is okay for us to brush them then, because spinning destroys the crimp of the yarn. Of course! So, we hope that next year that will be less of an issue for us. 

Get Beekeeping Timing Right

IMG_20210616_134653790One of the biggest disappointments we had this year had to do with the beehive. Kasey keeps our bees and this is her first year. She got the bees on May 2nd and now wishes that she had immediately tested the bees for mites and treated them, but she was new and nervous about it and it took a few weeks to get used to working with them before she was ready to check for mites. She did so the third week of May and the mite count was really high. If she had understood her options better, she probably would have used Formic Pro, but she didn’t understand that the temperature restrictions were just for the first three days. Knowing that it would soon be really hot, she instead used Apivar, adding it May 25 and removing it on July 20th. 

Apivar cannot be used with the honey supers on, because the treatment creates residue in the honey and the wax that is not safe for human consumption. When the treatment was added, there were no supers on, but there were two deeps. It was a killer honey flow this year, though, and so supers were needed after a couple of weeks so that the bees didn’t run out of room. Long story short, they filled two medium honey supers with honey, none of which was safe for human consumption. It will get fed back to the bees, but by the time the treatment was done, the honey flow was over and summer dearth had set in. So many mistakes. 

Kasey feels pretty annoyed and let down by this mistake. She didn’t plan on harvesting honey this year, but with such a good season, it would have been nice to be able to harvest a couple of frames to give as Christmas gifts. Then, in late summer, she did use Formic Pro, and the queen ended up dying. More on that in another post. The most important thing is that the bees make it through the winter, but this was a steep learning curve and the mite treatment was the only part that was really frustrating.

Gardening Lessons 

IMG_20211009_152353403 (1)The garden grew SO. MUCH. BETTER. this year overall. We grew a delicious assortment of winter squash and pumpkins, patty pan squash, zucchini, greens, some tiny carrots, green beans. The Harvest Moon Squash was a variety we’d never tried before and it was delicious when stuffed and baked. 

But there’s still room for growth (pun intended). We realized that we want more room, so next year we are most likely building four more raised beds to create a natural buffer in front of the beehive and extend the garden’s footprint. 

We also learned that our watering strategy was insufficient. Although we got many, many squash and pumpkins, our Jack O’Lanterns and corn were puny and we think that was in part due to shifting too late from the type of watering we were doing to encourage the seedlings to grow to the deep watering that the plants needed to form fruit. We will also be watering the orchard more. 

IMG_20211009_114345683_HDRWhen we cleaned out the barn, it produced a giant mound of old, old horse manure. We were able to give a lot of it away for people to compost, but Kasey also used a lot to create a base layer for flowerbeds around the edge of the horse run. The plan was to grow wildflowers there to support pollinators. Her dream is to have lush perennial wildflower garden that takes not that much maintenance. She planted lavender, sunflowers, apache plume, Veronicas, and cone flowers there. The lavender was really the only thing that grew. Everything else scorched. She needs to test the soil, but it seems like the soil is too hot. The plan is to mulch it over the winter to draw out some of the nitrogen, but it was a good lesson in checking soil PH. 

There were so many lessons this year, but these were the biggest ones. What did you learn this year through trial and error? Let us know below. 

Our First Year on the Homestead

Posted on by
Reply

It is autumn and we have pulled up the last of our tired squash vines. The pots and garden tools are tucked away in the tack room and Julio is busy getting the barn ready for our herd of alpacas. 2020 has been a wild, difficult year in many respects, but here on Sol Homestead, we have so much to be thankful for. Our first year produced a puny harvest from the garden, but our family and our homestead still grew and we have a better idea of what we need to do to succeed next year.

Let’s recap.

Farmhouse Updates

Kasey’s library

We moved to the homestead in January after painting almost every room of the house. We also replaced the carpeting on the main level with Cali Vinyl Pro, which looks gorgeous. It is also the most eco-friendly version of faux hardwood we could find (we couldn’t spring for the real deal). The previous owners left behind several nice bookcases and Julio helped Kasey set them up as a library corner, which saved the work of doing builtins for the library. It is easily Kasey’s favorite space in the house.

In August, Julio tore down the shed. It was described as “serviceable” on the real estate listing, but Kasey thought “ramshackle” would have been more accurate. Over the summer we saw a skunk come and go from the shed and it seemed like just a matter of time before something made the shed its home. With a small dog on the property and no real use for the shed, it made more sense to tear it down and use the space to expand the garden.

Kasey the preggo wannabe farmer

Garden Trial and Error

During lockdown from COVID-19 in March and April, we started the garden. First, we tilled a 48’x4′ patch of land by our western fence and planted cold weather vegetables there. In late March, we planted five bareroot apple trees, two pear trees, two plum trees, and a peach tree. The late hard freeze that was so bad for Palisade peaches also killed our peach tree. One of our apple trees scorched, and one was smashed by a construction crew working on the edge of our land. They replaced it. Our other seven trees took well and hopefully will start bearing fruit in the next few years.

In May, we added four 4’x4′ raised garden beds, which Julio built. Kasey also planted some seeds in the containers that we used for a balcony garden at our apartment and placed them on the porch. The porch garden did the best, but we did not get much of a harvest this year. We got several zucchini, a few cherry tomatoes, and two small pumpkins. Our winter squash was taken out by frost before it reached maturity. Early in the season, the arugula got eaten by bugs and the spinach bolted. A lot of our other plants either never grew or got scorched during the seedling stage. From all of this, Kasey learned several good lessons. First, she needs to be more methodical in how she plants things. There were no neat rows in her garden. Second, she needs to be more dedicated to sprouting seeds and hardening them before transplanting them. With our short, intense growing season in Colorado, that work will go a long way. Third, our soil needs some help. This year was really about experimenting, so here is hoping that the lessons learned this year lead to a more fruitful 2021.

A Flood

In mid-July, the waterline into our dishwasher burst and flooded the kitchen. Water made it into the heating vent and ran downstairs into our guestroom, soaking into walls and the carpet. Thankfully, insurance is covering almost all of the repairs, but we have had to replace the carpet, the ceiling, and sections of drywall downstairs and the flooring on the main floor—that new flooring we put down when we moved in. It has been four months, but we are finally getting that flooring done. Water damage is a beast.

New Members of the Homestead

Dear Theodora

In August, we welcomed a new human member of the homestead—our baby daughter! We are looking forward to raising her in an environment where she will help with gardening and taking care of the animals. As a friend of Julio’s explained once, it is good for kids to grow up shoveling shit sometimes.

In early November, we purchased our small herd of alpacas from LaZyB Acres Alpacas. Our four girls have great genes and sweet personalities. We look forward to bringing them home in about a month, after we finish fixing up the inside of the barn.

Looking Ahead

Our plans for 2021 include a chicken coop and our first flock of laying hens, residing the barn, replacing the pasture’s fence, and revamping the garden. We are also going to have to figure out how to process the girls’ fleece. Most likely, in the first year, we will send 3/4 of the fleece out to be processed and do one blanket by hand to learn how to do it.

Our first pumpkin

After tinkering around this year, Kasey has decided that in the next season, she wants to focus on growing pumpkins and herbal tea for market and then puttering around with the rest as a kitchen garden. We plan to build four more raised beds, till some flowerbeds for wildflowers and the tea garden, and amp up the pumpkin patch with some more quality soil. We also want to keep developing the orchard. This winter, Kasey will be building a seed starting stand and doing some serious planning for the garden layout and succession planting schedule.

We are so excited about the fun and fluff that the animals will provide and the hard work that bringing these plans to fruition will demand. We hope to see you in the Fall of 2021 with a plentiful harvest. Fingers crossed.

Stay tuned for more information on the herd. We are excited to introduce you to the girls!

A before shot. Time to beautify!