Dried Bulk Foods

I apologize for the departure from fibery goodness, but I thought this was a good topic, especially for those of us who are trying to help the environment by purchasing in bulk to decrease packaging materials.

In the name of being thrifty and also prepared for the future, I've decided to start purchasing freeze dried bulk foods from www.shelfreliance.com. Right now they are having a week of really great sales, so I decided there was no time like the present. They have a neat application on the website that will allow you to determine how much food you should store for your family in times of emergency, which is a great guideline. However, I think that their calorie estimate is a little low, so it would be best to add extras above and beyond their recommendations. The part of this that I love the most is that you can subtract or add foods that you hate or love. That feature allows me to delete all powdered dairy products, and add a lot more grains and beans. Then, the Q program will send you packages of food for a predetermined top cost per month until your emergency food storage is complete. For me, a non-dairy vegetarian, there is a big advantage to being able to omit foods from the plan, and a huge advantage in being able to pay for the plan over time instead of all at once.

I really am looking forward to buying TVP from them, because buying frozen vegetarian entrees at the store is usually cost prohibitive, and being able to buy larger volumes of TVP to store would save money and be easier to store. (Store bought veggie meals are typically refrigerated or frozen, flavored TVP mixes are dry). Another item that seems to be an excellent deal is the Veggie Pack which gives you 30 gallon cans of freeze dried fruits and veggies for approximately $13 a can. I figure that if I mix a tiny amount of veggies and spices with brown rice or noodles, it will replace any instant (and expensive!) prepackaged meals we eat for substantially less money.

I should be receiving my products in a week or so, and I'll post here to tell you about their quality when I get to try them for myself!

Spring Update

My apologies for not updating this blog in FOREVER!  Life at the farm is always up and down, and this winter we've had our share of both.  Last fall, I was trying to find a ram to breed my ewe Orange with.  I didn't find a ram that I could afford to buy in a timely enough manner, but I was fortunate and purchased 2 gorgeous, huge rams from the Asheville Farm late this winter.  One ram is named Emerson, and he's an enormous white ram with a full and soft fleece.  The other one is named Thoreau, and he is a black badgerface ram (has light colors above, and dark colors on his belly).  Both of these rams are polled (no horns).  If we decide to breed our ewes in the fall, we will have plenty of polled rams to choose from - Thoreau, Emerson, and Aries, one of our ram lambs from last summer who sired two gorgeous ewe lambs this year.  We certainly went from famine to feast with the genetics of our polled flock!  Thoreau and Emerson both are close descendants of the Icelandic ram Flekkur, and they show it.  

The sad news this winter was that we lost 2 of our most promising ram lambs.  One started to fail to thrive in the fall, but he didn't show any specific symptoms for us to treat.  One cold morning, we went out to the barn to find him dead.  I was terribly saddened.  

What made things worse was that a few weeks later, the ram lambs escaped from their pasture while we were away for the day.  One of them ate something  (I suspect a bucket of birdseed) which gave him terrible acidosis.  Acidosis is a condition in sheep where they eat something that causes the bacteria in the rumen to go crazy.  The rumen contents start to foam up,  cook too hot, and start to rise up into the sheep's throat.  When we found the poor lamb, he was foaming at the mouth and unwilling to move.  We took him into my studio to try to force feed him some medication to try to get ahead of the foaming chemical reaction taking place inside his rumen.  Unfortunately, he was barely surviving - coughing, sputtering and already hoarse and inhaling rumen contents.  He would cough and thrash around and kept getting weaker.  Finally, he had a coughing fit, inhaled more foam into his lungs, and died instantly.  It was simply horrible to witness, especially when there was not much I could do to help.  We had called the farm vet, but there was just not enough time.  Even if the vet had come, acidosis has a poor prognosis.  Even if the sheep recovers from the foaming, he may contract pneumonia from inhaling the rumenal contents, or his rumen may have been damaged from the severe chemical reaction.  Either of these situations would most likely result in a prolonged illness and death.

The good news is that we have had 5 very healthy and hardy lambs this spring already.  We are ahead of ourselves this year - The ewes started giving birth March 30th - 15 days before they started last year.  These 15 days will give the babies a great head start before the long hot days of the Virginia summers.  Lambs grow so quickly that in these two weeks they will have doubled in size from birth.  Even better news - we've had four girls and one boy.  All of them are white except for one girl who is black and white spotted.  Apparently, the sheep deities were listening earlier this spring when I was complaining that I didn't have enough white fleeces to get processed into yarn!  We have one ewe that should be lambing soon - she'll have brown moorit babies.  I'm hoping she'll have a boy so that we'll have another moorit horned ram.

If anyone wants to see the babies, email me and we can set up a visiting day.  There's nothing in the universe much cuter than an Icelandic lamb.

Shearing day

We finished shearing this last weekend and the fleeces are soooo nice!! If anyone wants one, they are $15 a lb for adults and $18 a lb. for lambs. Let me tempt you…these fleeces deserve to be spun up into something sumptious, not sit in my studio waiting and waiting….for me to do something to them.

Here are the fleeces available. I don’t have photos or weights yet, perhaps I’ll get to that this weekend. These are all Icelandic.

Black:
Orange: Orange’s fleece is a dark black with only a small amount of grey in it. It is extremely long and thick. It’s medium in texture. This is a big fleece.
Shakti: Shakti’s fleece is a silvery black/grey, extremely curly and fluffy. It’s medium in texture.
Aurora lamb: THICK! and CURLY! This fleece is a black that is tinted a slight reddish/purple. Think about that shade of hair dye, and you’ll know what I’m talking about. This is an amazing lamb fleece, although it is slightly coarser than the greys. She’s mouflon, so there might be a tiny bit of lighter color around the belly and neck, but I think that got skirted away.
Grey:
Lamb Amidala: Oh, what a soft, soft fleece. Brown/grey, like butter. This is probably my favorite fleece of the whole group. She’s a decent sized lamb, but her fleece is very soft and fluffy, so there’s not a ton of it. This fleece is fine in texture.Lamb Aladdin: Amidala’s half brother, with virtually the same fleece. Aladdin’s a little boy though, so it’s a very small fleece. He's the brown/grey lamb in the photo.
Lamb Alonzo: Alonzo has a luscious fleece, fluffy black/grey.  He's the black/grey lamb in the photo. You can see how the outer coat is dark and the inner coat is very light grey.  Very pretty. He grew a lot of fleece with a lot of thel. Very fine fleece. This fleece is a very light silvery grey with black tog.

Brown:
Chewie: Chewbacca’s fleece matches her namesake. It’s a rich chocolatey brown, very long and thick. It’s somewhat on the coarser side of the adults, but still an exceptionally nice fleece.

White:
Bambi: Bambi’s fleece is ultra white, thick and dense. This one would be perfect for dying. There’s a lot of very nice fleece here. Her fleece is medium texture.
Aries lamb: Long and silky, with black spots. You could either separate the black and white parts or mix them. Very pretty fleece with ringlets. Medium-fine.
Sebastian: Lordy, what a fleece. Sebastian is our ram, and his fleece is immense. It’s white and brown spotted. VERY long staple. His fleece is somewhat coarse, because he’s a ram, but it’s exceptionally long and thick and lustrous.
Alpha lamb: Alpha’s fleece is like an angel’s feathers. That would be great except that earlier in the fall she stuck her entire body into a plant that was full of seeds, so quite a bit of it is going to have to be pitched. There’s a small amount of creamy white, ultra fine lambs fleece left.Leuci: Leuci was very sick early in the summer after her lambs were born, and we thought her fleece would be poor. She proved us very wrong. She grew a gorgeous, cream colored fleece any sheep would be proud of. Her fleece is medium fine and medium staple.

Store's Up!!

(Sort of...)

Check out Unplanned Peacock Studio - the beta version of my hand dyed yarn and fiber store!  Let me know what you think.  Granted, right now there's not a ton of yarns on there - YET.   I have dyed NINETY FIVE skeins of yarn in the last month that are just sitting in the studio, waiting to have someone adopt them and knit them into beautiful objets d'art.  It is going to take me until the middle of next week to add them all to the store and then make it all beautiful.  So anticipate many changes to this website, and my main website (which will be a new one that will link to this blog), and whatever else I can come up with.

If you have comments, don't be shy - I'm flying by the seat of my pants on all of this online business stuff.  

I promise it will all get more exciting as time goes on!!

Dye your Own Socks Day!

I'm pleased to announce that the second Sunday of each month will be the Unplanned Peacock Studio Dye your Own Socks Day!  It will be $20 for a 500 yard skein of superwash merino/nylon sock yarn and the non-toxic yarn to dye it.  Dyeing fun will begin at 1 pm.  Knitters who aren't interested in dyeing are perfectly welcome to hang out as well.  Here's the flyer.  Please RSVP because the studio is small, and only a limited number of people will be able to come per month.

Dyeing for You

I've been extremely busy either mixing up color concoctions, skeining yarn and trying to use my small web design skills to get a website up advertising my new creations.  Here are a few of the yarns that will soon be up for sale on www.unplannedpeacock.com. (don't go there yet!  It's not active!)  Here are just a few sample batches...

FeedBurner

Hey all, I've got an RSS feed set up correctly now.  If you want to keep up to date on all the farm and fiber goings on, it's ready for you!

(Tzaddi's just here to look cute!)