Property update...

We did close escrow on the property in North Fork. Woo Hoo!!! At some point in the future, Humming Hearts Ranch will reside within 11.3 acres just off Road 221. Here is a BEFORE picture of the house.



We plan on doing some serious changes to the house before we move in ourselves. To the exterior for example, the roof will be replaced. The house will be painted white with green trim. We'll add a proper porch to the entire front that you see in the picture. You can't really see the front door because it is directly behind the tree. For now, the house is being rented out to a very nice local family.

Anyone want to come and help put in fencing? :-)

Kimberly

Vaccinations

Bad News: West Nile Virus is a very real threat to alpacas.
Good news: Camelids can be protected by a series of vaccinations.

Ohio State University and Oregon State University have both done extensive studies with an equine WNV vaccination and found it to be effective in camelids. Their studies showed a series of three shots will provide protection against WNV infected mosquitoes. The study results can be read here: http://www.icinfo.org/Pages/wnvreview.html

Something worth noting: Several WNV vaccination serums are on the market. If your animals are vaccinated using one serum, all booster shots must be given using that same one. If for some reason you have to switch to a different vaccination serum, all animals must start from ground zero and begin inoculations all over. Make careful notes in your vaccination documentation which vaccination you or your vet is using.

Today we spent time giving the young boys and the young girls their second WNV vaccination. It's days like today when you really appreciate a well designed ranch. The girls and boys are in the front of the ranch. The boys are at the end. The girls are next to the boys but there's a catch pen in between the two with gates from both paddocks leading into the catch pen. We had to first round up the boys into the catch pen. Easy. Just open their gate and they run right in. Could it be that they know they'll be closer to the girls? :-) Close the catch pen gate. Next, we caught a boy, haltered him, I held him while Wayne vaccinated him, and finally I released him back into his own paddock. Same routine for the girls.

Sometimes they are less eager to go into the catch pen so I use a long PVC pole (probably 12 feet long) held at waist height to guide them where I want them to go. We have also on occasion used a long flat woven rope with one person holding each end. I prefer the pole because I can do it myself. Alpacas rarely challenge barriers (they'd rather flee to an open space like through an open gate), so they never come in contact with the pole or rope.

Halters aren't always necessary for these vaccinations. We used them today because most everyone was a bit on the feisty side. It is simply safer for them if they are haltered and tied up even though you have one person holding the animal while the other innoculates. For the truly feisty ones, we can walk them back to the barn and use the chute. It contains them very well. Thankfully, we didn't need to do that for anyone today.

Kimberly

Weaving: making something from nothing

A few weeks ago I drove to Southern California to pick up a LeClerc floor loom I bought through eBay. Thankfully, we have friends who live in Porterville, a town about halfway between where we live and where the loom was located. Our friends kindly offered to be a waypoint for me and the kids on this excursion. Here's my new treasure! I've even got a bit of my own weaving showing on it.



Here's a close-up of the weaving. I unrolled it off the front beam so that you could see more of it than is pictured above.



Now, lest you think I've been rather industrious since the arrival of the loom, let me say that the loom came warped with some-once-white cotton string. The previous owner had started a project but never finished it. I rolled the old project onto the front beam and started my own project using some of my icky* handwoven yarn. For yarn I considered garbage, it worked up quite nicely. Maybe if I full it (felt the fibers with soap and gentle agitation) the remaining paint flecks will come out and it'll make a nice placemat.

*"icky" because I dyed a wool roving using dyes that mostly sat on top of the fiber. It was an experiment gone bad. When I spun the roving, I got tons of paint flakes all over me. But could I throw away the yarn or roving? Of course not. Now I'm glad I didn't.

Location Update
As you know, we don't have a ranch of our own yet. We have been taking time this year to scout out various locations. To make a long story short (and I'll elaborate on it in a later post), we're in escrow on a nice 11 acre property in North Fork, California. We're supposed to close escrow tomorrow. I'm a firm believer in "nothing is yours until the deal is done" and there is one glitch that cropped up on Monday so who knows what will happen in the next 48 hours. Cross your fingers for us. I'll post more as soon as the title is (or isn't) in our hands. For now, I'm going back to weaving - it's been a huge stess reliever for me this week.

Fiber Competitions

My 9 year old daughter, Dana, participated in fiber-related competition this weekend. She was a member of a kids team in a Sheep to Shawl contest. That's where a team of 5-8 people (all kids in her case) take a clean sheep's fleece, card it, spin it, and then weave it on a pre-warped loom. Because their team was so young, they were allowed to weave a narrower piece. So I guess you could say they did a "Sheep To Scarf". The competition was held at the Alameda County Fair on Sunday.

There were a total of 6 teams: 4 womens teams, 1 kids team and 1 mens team.

Here's the scarf they did lying on the edge of a white table.


The warp was a burgundy wool along with a few grey strands of yarn. The weft, which is what was spun during the competition, was a grey Romney fleece.

The Results:
the kid's team tied for 3rd!! They were estatic!!

The Basics of Alpacas - an email conversation

It's been awhile since I've posted. Life off-line has been quite busy with the kids end-of-school-year events and our own short vacations to Eugene Oregon and Oakhurst California.

I received an email from a friend who has been interested in getting alpacas for awhile now. After writing up the reply, I thought it would make a good post. So here it is....

At 11:12 AM 7/5/04 -0400, Georgene wrote:
>Hi Kimberly,
>I love your web site!!! We're actually not sure
>exactly what we want yet. We want them first as pets,

I'm very glad to hear you refer to the animals you're considering in the plural sense. As you know, camelids MUST be with their own kind. You can not have just one. Their sense of herd is very very strong. There are documented cases of animals who died from complications of being alone (stress is the biggest contributor).


>and we want the smaller sized -- but we're starting to wonder
>if we might as well shear them and sell their wool?

All of the domesticated camelids have to be shorn once a year. You don't have to keep the wool but shearing them yearly (usually in May) is an absolute act of kindness. It'll run less than $25 per animal (I pay $15 but it varies regionally) so it's not a huge charge. I'd suggest making sure you can do this at the ranch you buy the animals from. Have them put it in the contract just to be sure.

What if they need vet care? Who's going to give shots? You can give them yourself with a small amount of training.

Do you have a way to transport them? Transportation is actually not so daunting. A simple mini-van with the seats removed and mats on the floor will suffice. If it's a short trip, they won't soil the floor. An SUV works okay too but I'd do that only in an emergency and only with an alpaca.


>We also know that their manure is excellent for the garden
>and that people will pay well for it.

Maybe your market is different than it is here in California - where organic gardening is big. We can't give away the manure for free! LOL. But that's okay -we use it ourselves and what's left goes out in the unused area of the lot.


>They are such clean animals. We have a few llama farms here
>in our area that we visit, but the crea's are excellent bloodlines
>and coats costing upwards of $20K each! We love llama's and want
>to add 2 to our menagerie.

Wow. I'm not familiar with the llama market but I didn't realize it was still that high. I know many places you can get average llamas which serve very well for pet use for under $1k - probably even less. I wonder if what you're talking about are the new (and expensive) "Suri Llamas". Their fiber is like pencil curls instead of the puff-ball wool-like fiber of common llamas.


>If we decide not to sell their wool then we will likely go
>for the multi-colored black, white and tan, I know that the
>multi-colored would not desirable for selling it's wool
>therefore they are less expensive. Maybe you can tell me
>exactly the kind that would be best for us as pets!

Multis, aka patterned alpacas, are starting to be the new "fad" in alpaca ownership. As a handspinner, I'd prefer a multi colored fleece because then I get several colors in one wool where all of the other characteristics are identical. What I mean is even though the item I make will have several colors, it will all feel the same softness, have the same crimp, be the same lock length, etc.. I've made a scarf using two colors from 2 different animals and you can feel a distinct difference between the colors. OTOH, some people want all one color. White would be a popular color animal because you can dye the wool. Some people like the darker color animals. My point is: get what *you* want. You can do something with the wool if you decide to but that's such a small part of owning the animal that it shouldn't be a major part of the decision for a pet quality animal.

Pet quality animals (llamas or alpacas) will be gelded males. Owners will geld males they don't need in their breeding program and are not suited for anyone else's program (flaw in conformation) and then they sell them as pet quality. It works best for everyone that way.

Have you seen any blue eyed white animals? They are almost always gelded due to the blue eyes but they can have some of the softest fiber. BEW camelids typically end up being born deaf or will have crias who are BEW and deaf, hence the reason for culling them from the breeding programs.

I'm sure there's tons of other things I could share with you but let me leave you with this one bit of advice. Camelid ownership isn't like buying a dog - you don't pick it out from the litter, wait 6 weeks for it be weaned and then take it home never to speak to the breeder again. When we started researching alpacas, we were told to find ourselves a mentor. Ideally, this mentor will be the person you purchase your animals from. They need to be the person you feel the most comfortable learning from. They should show you ALL aspects of camelid ownership and continue to guide you after you've taken your animals home when questions arrive. And they will.

Best wishes with your search!
Kimberly

Monterey Pronk 2004

Competing in a show is exhilirating
yet nerveracking
and also exhausting
but most of all, awesome!

This weekend was our first show. It was held at the beautiful Monterey County Fairgrounds in Monterey California. Our yearling male, Autumn Heat, competed in a full fleece halter show. Here we are walking in the ring as the judge (in red) looks on.



In addition to the halter competition, they also had a Fiber Arts Competition. I entered 3 handspun skeins of yarn and my daughter entered 1 handspun skein. Between us, everything we entered won a ribbon. I won 2 First places and 1 Second place and my daughter won a First place on her skein. Here's one of my First place skeins with its ribbon.

It pays to work.

All the time I've spent with Autumn Heat is starting to pay off. I went to the ranch today for a few hours. The first thing I always do is get Autie's halter and lead and go into his pen. In the pen is a mulberry tree just starting to grow leaves that the 'pacas love to eat. They'll stand up on their hind legs to try to reach any of the lowest leaves. Of course by now they've eaten all the ones they can reach. I, on the other hand, can reach farther up than they can. So I pulled down a few leaves and the boys came running over. You'd think I had candy!! Autie was the boldest. He would eat his leaves standing right there in front of me - the other boys would take the leaves and move out of arm's reach. After Autie took the last leaf, I reached out, told him "stand", put my arm around his neck, and put his halter on. How easy!!