Thornwood Farm

I went to a builder's speech sponsored by ACAT (Alaska Center for Appropriate Technology) tonight. German guy (no disrespect intended, my memory is awful), living now in Fairbanks, has a building company building houses there. He has built two houses in the past two years based on Passiv Haus (German thing) and his own observations and also working with UAF building houses in cold places research group. 119 R value in his roof, 75 in his walls, and 68 in his floor. Plus a 5,000 gallon water tank inside the house envelope as another heat sink besides the walls and floors and ceiling. The tank is also where the hot water heater tank is, inside the top of the water tank, where the water is about 160 F most of the time anyway. The floor also has water tubing on top of the insulation and under the two feet of sand under the floor. On top of all that he has a huge set of solar water heating panels (the old kind, because the new vacuum types don't work in Fairbank's cold) so he's capturing heat any time at all that there is a btu that's out there to be captured. And then..... beyond all that.... as a back up heat system.... he has a mass super efficient stove in the middle of the structure, with water pipe through it to heat the water in the domestic water use tank, if it needs any more heating, plus connection to the infloor piping to heat that, if it needs... any more... heating. His only problem.... he has wayyyyyyyyyyy too much energy going to waste. He says he could put in a heated swimming pool out in the yard.....

Can you tell I had a good time listening to him? It was great. Lots of details I have left out: the vapor barrier is permeable just very slowly, it's plywood; two layers of tyvec mostly for experiment, but it acts as an air space for evaporation; ventilation is through lots of piping so it's very much warmed, and then exit air is sent through somewhere taking out the heat before it gets away; the insulation is cellulose, tons of it, the ONLY metal piece that sticks out of the house envelope is the metalbestos stack for the mass stove, all 4 of the other intake or outflow pipes are plastic to reduce heat transfer. That's all I can remember at the moment.

This is the link to ACAT

Thorsten Chlupp, REINA, LLC Fairbanks builder, was the speaker. He will be in Anchorage tomorrow, the 22nd.

A great article!

The Realistic Farm Tour

Back some years ago I made some bricks, experimenting with some different building materials: papercrete (paper and water with some cement), paper cob (paper and water with clay), and cob (clay, sand and straw). I made the bricks out of different percentages of the different ingredients, then put the bricks on boards so I could measure shrinkage as they dried, and did some rough, basic structural comparisons. I still have the bricks, most of them, anyway, but none of the notes I took. sigh! From the Alaska Permaculture group in Anchorage, I have contact with someone who has built with cob here in Alaska, and we're talking about maybe having a clay harvesting workshop this spring!

With temperatures between 20 and 0 F, my little house is staying between 60 and 50 F. It's a tad chilly for getting up in the morning, but makes a great warm up hut for when I've been out. Needs more insulation!

Another great thing about the Permaculture group... the valley group we started has in it a person who has been involved with putting up 5 yurts over the last lots of years. She might help get Kerri's yurt put up on my place! I have given up on the people Kerri bought the yurt from ever getting out here to help put it up, so I've been trying to work out alternatives.

I combed the first goat of the season, Topper. I'll have to comb him again soon since I only took off the loosest and raggedest looking bits, but, I've started! The next one to be combed will be Matilda. I already have a bag started of her fur that has been hanging off loose on her the past couple of weeks and I just pick it off as I go by.

The other little piece of news: my 11 hens laid 11 eggs yesterday! You go, girls!

Saturday, the 22nd, our brand new little Valley Permaculture group met for the first time, and met each other and told a little about our places. And, we set up the next meeting. We'll be meeting twice a month, the second and fourth Sundays, at 7 pm at Dayspring on Edlund Rd. So, next Sunday, the 30th, will be our second meeting, and we'll have a show and tell session. Woot!

A couple of weeks before I had gone into Anchorage and attended the permaculture group meeting and potluck there. It's quite an enthusiastic group, and motivated the creation of the valley group. Lots of information and lots of things going on. The website is http://akpermaculture.ning.com/  The Valley Permaculture group is listed in the groups section on that page and our events will be listed in the event section there, too.

Harold died this morning. In the last three weeks he had lost weight and I tried all kinds of different things to get him to get it back. He'd look better for a bit, then not so good. Last week he was shivering when it was 20 F, so he was basically out of body fat. I put a blanket on him. Then, Thursday he had trouble getting up. He did get up, but fell a couple of times. I switched into high gear on the special foods and supplements, and he perked up a bit. But over the weekend he continued downhill. I added a sleeping bag as another blanket. At least he wasn't shivering. His little buddy, Laddie, was keeping him company most of the time, snuggling up to him. When I came to check on him this morning, Laddie was there by him. Harold was still warm but there was no responsiveness left in him and no pulse.

He and Geronimo were the largest of the goats when they first came to Thornwood in November 2007. He was ragged and matted and thin. But, after the selenium and vitamin E shot and louse treatments, he and all the rest became quite active and their fur thickened up. They still didn't have any body fat that winter, so I added a little corn oil to their feed, and had wool goat coats for the ones who were extra cold, and heat lamps here and there. Harold wasn't one of the cold ones. He improved enough with the medication and all the feed that he did very well even in the minus 30 temps we got that winter.

2008 June, and I still hadn't gotten him brushed out! He and the rest enjoyed the fresh food, all they could eat. They ate as much as they wanted, then rested, and played. Like kids. Ran, and pranced, and butted, and ... played. It was a fun summer.

Geronimo and Harold were very close to the same size and had some mighty battles where neither one sustained any damage, when they felt like spending the energy. Other than those, Harold really didn't have much trouble with any of the others picking on him. He was just that big, calm and settled.

After Thor came to us in the fall of 2008, Geronimo had a new target besides Harold. Harold became the one both bucks flirted up when they were competing for alpha in the wether/buck herd, when they weren't outright battling, or just hanging out. Out in the woods browsing none of that mattered: eating was the only program.



Thanks for being here, Harold. Wishing you green forests, gentle breezes, good companions, and a sunny dust bath spot. Rest in peace.

The first winter one of the 16 didn't make it through the winter. Pinto died of "upper respiratory problems". I have been very lucky to have all the rest of them be healthy this long. My best guess is that Harold was at least 10 years old, and maybe as much as 14, based on his horn growth. I suspect that Geronimo is the same age as Harold, and have already begun feeding Geronimo some extra supplements in hopes that he will make it through to spring at least. He's looking good, but has been shivering some. Next oldest, I'm guessing, is Latte, the oldest doe. Really, Geronimo and Latte are past breeding age, I think. I hope it won't be hard on Latte to have kids this coming spring. She's looking really good, so I have high hopes. I will need to have geriatric fenced areas. sigh

My current favorite books:

Rain just before Thanksgiving, then down to 0, then windstorm, then cold again. At least we have some snow now, not much, but some. Maybe 4 inches. Just enough to at least look like winter. But, now it's back up toward 30 F again! Yikes, what a winter!

The chicken coop seems to be working out ok. It doesn't have enough ventilation, I think. There is frost building up on the inside of the egg doors and around the entrance hole, and moisture collecting on places on the walls inside. But, I don't know how to have ventilation without losing the heat from the heat lamp. As it is I have 1/4 inch air holes drilled in an area just off the floor of the coop in a space about 6 inches square or so. Then I have the outlet holes on the south side up near the ceiling, same kind of holes in about the same space. And, there's the chicken entrance hole, too. I spread bedding straw over the compacted, manured straw on the floor about every other day, 3 days at the most. That helps with the smell, too.

The 11 hens (and one rooster) have been laying 8 to 10 eggs daily for about a month now. Mom has lined up some regular customers, and I have given away eggs to friends and my hay men, too. The past couple of days there was a 7 egg and an 8 egg day, so maybe the deluge of eggs is slowing down! It's supposed to for winter.... I thought!

Breeding of the goats began Nov. 20th. My first actual breeding sighting was the 28th. I might have a little later kidding this year than last. That should be just fine. I have Latte, Mocha, Stripe, Matilda and Walk in with Geronimo. Nilla, Yang, Dark, Chocolate, Anime, Fanny and May are with Thor. I so need new blood in the herd. Maybe next year. Depending on Geronimo's babies sizes this might be his last year at breeding. It's my impression his babies are beginning to be smaller than they were the first year. Note to self: weigh and measure newborns, and then at 3 months, too.

I can't believe it's been 3 years already. And then again, it seems like I've been doing this my whole life. 

The chicken coop is almost complete. One of the original 10 chickens decided to spend the day in the does' pen, where the new coop is, with the two Homer chickens. It'll be interesting to see if she stays the night, too. The original 10 are laying 8 eggs sometimes, and a minimum of 4. We're being swamped in eggs! Mom is taking some to her church and finding takers there, besides what we're sending home with my brother and his family, and Michael, and Christine. Who knew 10 chickens could produce so many eggs!! I suppose someone knew, but it wasn't me!

So much to do, so little energy some days.

Thank you Jean G. and Rikki S., both out of Anchorage, for sponsoring goats! Jean has decided to sponsor one of this year's kids, "Laddie" (pictured to the left here) , AND Fanny!

Her friend, Rikki, chose to sponsor "Lambchop", Anime's doeling. And yes, she does remind me of Shari Lewis' Lamb Chop sock puppet! She's very smart and tiny!

The first two 2010 kids go to their new home tomorrow. How long does it take to get over sending the kids off elsewhere?? Gentian is taking Buttercup and Bergamot to Homer to begin their lives there. I'm hoping to get to see them sometime this winter.

I'm trying out an herbal wormer from Molly's Herbals . So far the does are delighted with it, but the kids will not even taste it. I'm having to squirt it down their throats. sigh. The bucks had to taste it and spit it out, but then they decided it was ok to eat. Starting on the wether pen with the wormer tomorrow.

I set up the two electric mesh fences together east of the main clearing to give the wethers a break from the muck in their pen. silly rain. They're not happy being "way out there" but they're a lot cleaner!

 Please contact us anytime! We look forward to hearing from you.

New pictures on the Weed Eaters page, of my Mom's place done with a goat treatment. She wanted the front yard to look less woodsy, and the back of the house to be less of a fire hazard. Apparently the home insurance people were concerned about the amount of growth back there. The goats had a fine time taking care of it!

Chocolate gave birth to a single buckling on Monday the 19th. He's a Geronimo baby. I remember a certain hole in the fence in February. I was totally unconcerned about it at the time since I believed all the does were pregnant already. Silly me. He brings the summer kid total to 18: 6 bucklings and 12 doelings. His picture has been added to the Picture Page.

Thank you, Cathy, for the wonderful collection of collars and leashes! I'm going to have the snazziest group of goats ever!

Construction technique to consider: 

Happy Independence Day!

My new favorite book is You Can Farm by Joel Salatin.I don't have his other books yet, but will be budgeting some money for them, or look for them in the library.

Trying to get myself to ask people to come help create the corridors in the forest. I'd love to have that at least started by winter so I can see if my idea for winter browse will work. Way lots of fencing to be done, besides tree cutting. I need to see if splitting the tree trunks will make usable fence material.

Let the weed eating begin! Today was day 3 of the goat weed eating as an enterprise project. My thanks to Cathy for instigating it, and to Janice for agreeing to it, and to Janice's sons, Colin and Dana, for lending their very large help setting up the fencing.

See Weed Eaters 2010 for the story.

So far so good. Tomorrow we decide when to move them. There is at least this much area left to eat and the idea behind this fence is to be able to move it easily enough to be worth while. We'll see!

The chickens are looking a whole lot more chickeny now, with actual feathers. They insist on eating styrofoam, which just can't be good for them. They do like eating green stuff, though, and I've been letting them out of their pen for awhile each day to do that. Their favorites seem to be clover and plantain, although they have tried nearly everything they've come across. Just like goats.

What a busy couple of months it's been!

I finished combing out the goats, finally, and was pretty pleased with the fleece. So were the people who bought it. Although I did find the mesh bags, I never did manage to wash any of it. I sold it entirely "raw" and left all the cleaning up to the buyers, bless their hearts!

The champion cashmere producer was Gomy. He's a wether that came with the original herd. In fact, he was the remaining injured survivor of the sled dog attack that took the lives of the other four goats we were supposed to receive from their rescuer. He made it through very well! He has longer and thicker guard hair than most of the others and I hadn't realized how much cashmere he had hidden in there. And, it was the cleanest of any of them as I combed it off of him... spinnable right off the goat! I want more like him! I had him sheared last year and never got the fleece processed, so I don't know if this is a one time thing, or if he does this every time. We'll see!

May 22nd I bought 10 hen chicks and brought them home to my tiny cabin. It's a really nice thing that they grow so fast. After a week I was able to move them out of my bedroom into the kennel where Sheela had spent her nights for the last 7 months. (Sheela is now sleeping with the goats, which is nothing like sleeping with the fishes!) The chicks seem to be thriving there, as I work on their coop for when they're big girls. They are going to live in the biggest of the goat pens with their coop inside that pen. To begin with they will have their own fenced area inside the goat pen, but I hope someday for them to have the whole goat pen to wander in. The fox hasn't made it in there yet, so I have hopes that it's fox proof. I might have owl or eagle visitors, but we'll just have to see.

I've pretty much got the garden planted as much as it's going to be for this year. It's better than ever. Nice to be seeing progress there. And, it is such a joy to watch the corn grow! The other stuff, too, but the corn just seems to be leaping right out of the ground! Way fun!

I've been feeding the goats by letting them out to browse our clearing and the woods right around it. That worked really well for almost 3 weeks, but now they've browsed down the immediate area and have begun to expand their territory. Unfortunately, their expansion includes my neighbor's yard and garden, which are not fenced yet. This means that I have to stay with the herds (I have them in three groups right now: moms and babies, Geronimo and Harold, and the rest of the boys) and insist that they don't visit that yard. It's a good thing they gave me as long as they did on my own, because that's when I fixed up and planted the garden!

Anyway, so, as I'm out moseying around while the goats browse, I have plenty of time to think. One of the things I've wanted to eliminate ever since we first got the goats was the thing about having to buy hay over the winter. No one delivers hay to wild goats up in the mountains, and they find things to eat. There should be some way for me to arrange things so my goats have things to eat all winter without even growing my own hay, which was the obvious successor thought to buying other people's hay.

Goats are browsers: they eat leaves and growing tips of shrubs and short trees. They will also eat grass, but they eat all kinds of things besides that, too. They love the power line trail for all the things that grow there, from grass and clover to all the shrubby things alongside it. In the winter they will eat spruce needles, branch tips, and bark off of some trees.

What if we were to create corridors in our forest. The power line trail isn't more than about 30 feet wide and it runs north/south. If we cut trees in 30 foot aisles north/south through the woods, leaving 50 to 100 feet of forest in between the cuts we could create bands of denser food growing areas. If we go ahead and scuff up the middle of the aisles, and seed timothy, rye, clover and whatever else comes to mind, we'll get the primary succession growth of wild things along with the planted. And then we can stick in willow sticks, and maybe even plant some hedge shrubs, along the edges of the aisles to create the layers of edge stuff.

I had been thinking that we could then fence through the wooded areas to divide the aisles into "pastures" so that we could rotate the feeding areas to allow them to regrow. But, it occurs to me that the goats do that on their own. They will visit a particular area once or up to a few days in succession, but then will stay away from that area for up to a week or two before they return. I wonder if we could let them self rotate. hmmm Yet another experiment! What an amazing thing it would be if we could arrange for enough food to grow for the goats for them to just stay on our property of their own volition!

I think they will still need a pen for the nights, though. A place they can feel safe, have a dry bed, and come to for their mineral, salt, baking soda and whatever else I want to supplement their diet with. Plus some actual liquid water, although they do pretty well eating snow.

hmmm!

A cold spell and other life kinds of things and I've only gotten 7 goats combed. /sigh Working on it! Now if I could only find the mesh bags I used last year to wash the fleece!

The cashmere is coming out pretty nice, but that bit in the last entry about no scurf....  ya there's scurf. Oh well. Still, the fleece is looking pretty good.

We've had 40F + some of the last few days, with gorgeous clear skies. It's clouded up today, though. Wonder what we'll get next!

Today, Sheela and I found the "middle corner" of the south boundary and made a path to the trail down the middle of the old field. We've been walking through the woods some days every week. I'm trying to keep her exercised, and trying to work a little on the path across the swamp, and the old field, too. Someday there will be fields there, again!

Yesterday, Saturday, I went to the monthly meeting of the Valley Fiber Guild. What a kick. Those people are just so great! The presentation was on cleaning fiber, mostly cashmere, and then using it either by itself, or with other fiber. I am aiming to bring cashmere to the April meeting for sale. I've just started combing, and am very happy with what I'm getting! No dandruff (scurf) this year, and practically no seeds!

Also, I've been watching youtube videos on combing and other subjects on cashmere goats. It's so interesting to see the videos and relate them to what I'm seeing in my goats! This one for instance!

Had a couple of visitors this past week. Actually, the squirrel is a regular, but the moose passes through more infrequently.

Just when you think things are going well....  So last month the head gasket in the ol' green truck had to be replaced. And, this month, the clutch has gone out. I'm driving a borrowed truck (yay for friends with trucks they are able to loan out!) since there is no way I can pay for a clutch replacement right now. This is sort of an experiment to see how many times I can go into negative numbers with my bank account and still have a bank account! Fortunately, the hay I'm getting is less expensive than normal: $110 for 1,000 pounds in a round bale as compared to $160 for 800 pounds in the "square bales". That helps, but still doesn't leave room for head gaskets and clutches. So far, the goats are fed and their water is still liquid. Hanging in!

I did NOT get the cashmere samples sent in for testing. Just can't quite do that this time. Maybe next year.

The does are all bred now, as far as I can tell, so now it's the wait-and-see season. I had Thor breed 7 does, and Geronimo bred 3 does, so I should have a nice set of kids to choose keepers from. I have taken cashmere samples and will mail them off for testing, so sometime soonish I'm hoping to have an idea about the quality of the cashmere from these goats. Combing will begin in January and continue through March. I am beginning to be able to imagine a day when this might be an actual business!

The kids will start showing up the last part of April, and then through May. I'm planning an open "house" (or open yard would be more accurate) for the 3rd Saturday in May to celebrate the new babies, and the passing of another winter!

I want to again thank the goat sponsors for their help making this winter a little more affordable for me. The goats and I are doing fine so far! I'm hoping to make a hay field of my own this coming summer to supplement hay buying for next winter, and a hay storage building so that I can buy in larger quantity and save money on gas for hay buying trips! I'm also dreaming of a barn, but let's not hold our breath for that one!

Wishing you all a fabulous 2010!
Helen and the cashmere goats

November 6th and 7th the Valley Fiber Guild held their "Out of the Box" annual sale of their handmade goods and they invited me to bring my fleece. Friday I took my fleece and set it up as best I could, but couldn't stay that day. When I came in Saturday morning, I found that they had sold all but two ziplock bags of the combed fleece! I arranged what was left and spent a lovely day there getting all kinds of positive comments and encouragement, and someone bought the other two sacks of combed fleece, leaving only the bags of sheared fleece still with me! I r a cashmere dealer! I feel so good and heartened about this project! My very big thanks to the Valley Fiber Guild for a wonderful day, and their support!