since the last time I posted something. I’ll just put them all in this one post.

Living on the Land series

This is a 4 week class that the Oregon State University Extension office is putting on in Creswell. It is every Thursday evening, and covers topics that are perfect for small land owners like we are. Last week was our first class. The focus of last week’s class was soil. Yep, I took a three hour class on dirt, and it was great! We learned out about how to test your soil, what to look for, how to improve your soil, and what the importance of soil is. It was a great class. We learned a lot and feel we have a much better understanding how to improve our pastures and gardens.

This week (tonight) we learned about pasture management, pasture rotation, wet season pasture management, & pasture renovation. All in all, we really didn’t learn that much. We have been reading a lot about pasture management (Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, and others) and feel that what was covered tonight was a rehashing of what we have already done a lot of reading on. But, I still enjoyed it. It was good to hear what processes I have liked reading about is what OSU is also preaching.

In these sessions are a couple of other alpaca people. John & Sharon Weber of Lost Valley Alpaca Ranch and Ann & Mike Dockendorf of Aragon Alpacas. It is good to see them each week and get to know them better.

Cleaning Out Barn

The barn we have is a great barn, but it has years of icky buildup. Manure, straw, hay, mud, etc. It is hard to see in these pictures, but in some areas (near the hay feeder) it is up to 6″ thick.

So, our neighbor Howard was kind enough to come over with his tractor and scrape and drag out probably 3-4 tons of, well, CRAP!! It would have taken us WEEKS with a shovel and wheelbarrow what Howard was able to do in just about 20 minutes. I didn’t get any pictures of him doing it, but here is a picture of the barn afterwards and the pile of junk he pulled out of the barn.

We are going to let this dry for a while, and when Howard get’s his manure spreader fixed, we’ll load it up and spread all this on our pastures. Should be nice with the amount of organic matter in there.

Temporary Fences

As you will read in a minute, we are having 2 of our alpacas delivered tomorrow (Friday). So we have had to put up some temporary fences in the barn until we can get all the gates purchased and put up. (really we have to decide HOW we want to design the barn so we can then purchase what we need, soon we hope!!) Once again Howard came over on Tuesday with his tractor (Man we need a tractor!!!) and pushed the T-Posts in the ground for us. On Monday, we purchased some cattle panels (also some field fencing and t-posts) from Coastal Farm & Home Supply and had it delivered on Tuesday. So today we ran up to one of the local Feed & Farm stores and purchased some 2″ staples and put the cattle panels in and then attached them to the wood posts. It took just a few minutes (well, a little bit longer, but that is because we found a HUGE bee hive in the barn and had to take some time out to spray it). We were excited, this is the first fence we have built!!

New Fence

We also had to build a new fence today that will be permanent. The fence on the left side of this picture just to the right of the fence was in our way for putting up a good lock on the fence. It is also a badly built fence all the way down, so we decided just to replace the fence with the woven wire fence.

You can also see the fence we took out here on the right side of the picture.

So this would be the first PERMANENT fence we have built. We took the old fence out, and the was the easy part. The wood just popped right out. We then had to attach the new fence to one of the posts, and then stretch it to the far post. The strength of the fence comes from stretching it. Well, it turned out easier than I thought. We hooked up the fence puller and then tacked it in to the other post. I think it turned out pretty well. We added a 2×4 to the bottom so Bandit or Talbot couldn’t dig under as easy.

Fix Fence

We also had a portion of one of our fences that looked like one of the animals had tried to jump over it and didn’t succeed. Here’s an old picture from this spring where you can see it is all messed up.

So we had to bend it flat again, and then added 2 more t-posts to hold it up. We also re-wired some of the sections to make it a much stronger fence. We think we’ll re stretch this portion of the fence in the next few weeks to make it a much better & stronger fence.

Zach & Rogue Come Home on Friday

2 of our boys are being delivered on Friday (hence the reason I took off of work today to fix all the fences). Zach & Rogue are being delivered at 10:00 am on Friday morning. Here they are a few weeks ago:

We are excited to finally be getting our animals on property. It has seemed like a long time and a lot of work but it is finally here. I hope we have everything ready!! I think we do, but only time will tell.

I’ll post tomorrow with some pictures of our farm WITH alpacas on it!!

Bil