Settling in…

As I write this on early Friday afternoon there is technically snow falling outside of my office window. Though I am an enthusiastic alpine skier, I can’t claim to be totally happy about this. I suspect my psychological state, at least this time of the year, consistently lags behind the local climactic reality by at least a month. It’s all good though: it just means it’s time to get the fireplace in the living room going again, grab a book, and drink some delicious dark beer! I do believe that that is the siren song of a case of Guinness keg cans I hear serenading me from the fridge in our guest apartment. They know a soft target when they see one. With the end of our boys respective soccer seasons about a week and a half ago, we’re all finding ourselves nowadays back here at the house no later than 4:00 or so on most afternoons, which is really quite wonderful after the hustle and bustle of the last few months. This is definitely a time of year for big exhalations and introspection (and Irish stout).

Even as we were off at the fall shows over the past few weeks, the shift into our winter stance here on the farm was already well underway. More than two weeks ago the pastures around the CCNF Arena were closed off, and we fell back to our winter drylot that we use around that barn. That move serves two purposes. For starters, even the gentler slopes coming off of the south side of that barn are at a 12 to 15% grade, so there would be real safety issues with having animals out on those pastures during the wintertime, particularly when things get icy as they inevitably do at some point during the coldest months of the year. On the north side of the Arena things are even worse: some of those paddocks are at almost a 30% grade. That all resulted from carving/blasting/bulldozing a giant flat spot into the side of our mountain. Imperfect but definitely functional. Regardless, the potential health benefits of our female herd and their crias having the extra room to roam and romp throughout the winter months on those pastures are easily offset by the risks of broken bones or soft tissue injuries. The other reason we come off of those pastures this time of year though, is that by putting up the drylot and taking down all of the the electric hot tape we use in those pastures to subdivide them into paddocks throughout the grazing season, we are then able to get out there much easier and spread our composted manure and bedding as we do every fall. After all, even the “good” spots on those pastures have perhaps not much more than a foot of soil depth (which sits atop nothing but small boulders of granite, we did a lot of blasting) and need all of the additional humus we can give them. As we always tell folks whenever they see us topdressing our pastures, our only regret about our composted manure is that we don’t have more of it!

Our final three due females of the calendar year have now also been moved into the relative safety of the Arena’s warm room. Though they are allowed to go and loaf about outside in the sun on the warm room’s chunk of the drylot during the day, at night they are all locked inside where we keep the temperature a pretty moderate 50 degrees. No one likes finding a shivering hypothermic cria at 6AM after all!

We did breeze through a full-blown version of herd health (read: deworming, vaccines, AND pedicures for all) earlier this week in just a little over 6 hours, which was very nice (the speed, not so much the event itself). It’s always one of those things that we all know needs doing but nobody in their right minds looks forward to doing the nasty. That we got it all done so efficiently, particularly on a day where yours truly was off on a morning pickup/delivery run, just made it that much more gratifying. Not to worry, by the way, there were still plenty of toe nails left for me to trim when I got back home at lunchtime. Oh, yeah! THAT is why I woke up and hit the road at 5AM that morning, so that I could get back in time for herd health. What a fool.

Of course I had a really good excuse for missing that morning’s festivities. The purpose of the aforementioned run being to kidnap Sub-Zero from our partners at Little Creek Farm Alpacas for about 36 hours and get him back up here for a little late season action, as we truly wind things down in that department. In fact all things being equal, I have a couple of our females scheduled to be bred next week on the 13th and then that will hopefully be that until 2014! We shall see. This was the same tune we were singing last year at this time and here we are with our final female due sometime after the 15th…of December. Stay warm everybody!

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