I'm the plant and carpentry and general tasks guy, don't really have a lot to do with the alpacas. I spent a good deal of yesterday, however, helping to clean out the barn, which hadn't been mucked-out since 1993, apparently. Fun conversation when you can throw in the word "coprolite". SO I spent a large part of yesterday flinging old poo around the garden area. The rain last night helped push it down into the ground a bit. Today, I spent the morning setting up two of the raised beds. Took a lot out of me. Six wheelbarrow loads of dirt brought down from the top of the hill, and two and a half hours of hard work, and I'm still trying to recover after stopping for lunch, and then posting this and doing some other stuff online. Got to get moving, though, as I need to get two more beds in before dark.
Oakheart is coming along. We did a huge amount of work on the barn yesterday, which Tiffany will talk about more in depth. We tried to go in with Song, the neighbor, and rent a tiller, but it threw a badly frayed belt five minutes after I started trying to use it, and then the rental guy turned into the world's smallest and biggest jerk at the same time. So, no tiller. Not much tilling, considering I have to do it with a mattock and shovel. What I will more likely do is dump raw dirt on the open spaces, do the used-tire tomato and potato bed thing, do some open scattered-site gardening, then see what I can fill in with. There's pictures over on Facebook, if you follow this link.
So, we're halfway through our first week on the property, and starting to actually get things done. We're still not sure if we're physically up to this, but if we keep plugging away, maybe we'll drop some weight, build some muscle, and develop some stamina. In the meantime, there's always blogging to pass the time while recuperating for the next leg of the trip.
And what a long, strange trip it's being. But that's another post entirely for another day.
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Shearing 2011-04-16
We got up at 06:00, breakfasted and headed up to Yellow Rose Alpaca Farm this morning for shearing day. Yellow Rose, as you may already know, is our herd source, and the current home of Angel Lily, the female we bought and then had bred. Shearing is just part of the day - each alpaca also has to get their nails trimmed, their shots administered, and their teeth checked and possibly ground down. It takes four or five people to get an alpaca onto the shearing table, and get all the work done in a short time so as not to traumatize the animal any more than necessary.
Here's a video of one of the other herd females being worked on. We had a power outage due to the thunderstorm toward the end, so the video goes dark and then cuts off as I realized there wasn't enough light for the camera.
And here's a video of Angel Lily getting her turn on the table. This one runs to completion, although it was a near thing as the camera's batteries were dying.
Another post will follow tomorrow after we are rested!
Here's a video of one of the other herd females being worked on. We had a power outage due to the thunderstorm toward the end, so the video goes dark and then cuts off as I realized there wasn't enough light for the camera.
And here's a video of Angel Lily getting her turn on the table. This one runs to completion, although it was a near thing as the camera's batteries were dying.
Another post will follow tomorrow after we are rested!
Friday, February 18, 2011
News on the Financial Front
We've gotten the official letters. The final part of our capital will go into our bank account sometime between March 1st and March 4th. We may actually be able to get onto our land in time to do spring planting. We'll start seedlings in peat pots and trays this weekend, and have plenty of large pots to transplant into just in case.
We looked into Kiva and Kickstarter as possibilities, and found they wouldn't work for us. Kiva is for microfinance projects, for the seriously poor, and we're nowhere near that. Kickstarter is for projects with a definite end point, a product that is financed, not for ongoing concerns. If anybody has ideas about other group-finance sites that might be useful for us, please let us know.
We'll be adding a donations button to this blog, and the official Oakheart Farm and Oakheart Alpacas websites once they're up, once we've located a bank or credit union to move to and got the accounts set up. Right now we're with Bank of America (boo! hiss!) and really don't want to give them any more business.
Please see our Etsy site, Nwyvre WeaveWyrks, for maille and textile items whose sales help to pay for setting up our farm. We're quite happy to do custom work in addition to the inventory you see on the shop.
We looked into Kiva and Kickstarter as possibilities, and found they wouldn't work for us. Kiva is for microfinance projects, for the seriously poor, and we're nowhere near that. Kickstarter is for projects with a definite end point, a product that is financed, not for ongoing concerns. If anybody has ideas about other group-finance sites that might be useful for us, please let us know.
We'll be adding a donations button to this blog, and the official Oakheart Farm and Oakheart Alpacas websites once they're up, once we've located a bank or credit union to move to and got the accounts set up. Right now we're with Bank of America (boo! hiss!) and really don't want to give them any more business.
Please see our Etsy site, Nwyvre WeaveWyrks, for maille and textile items whose sales help to pay for setting up our farm. We're quite happy to do custom work in addition to the inventory you see on the shop.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
One step forward, Two steps back
We slog on through the slough of despair and over the mountains of bureaucracy. Funny how they're next to each other, isn't it? Finance is being the bugbear of the moment. The wheels of the pension fund grind slow and exceedingly fine, and trying to get the money all together in one place so that we can make a cash offer on a property is being an exercise in patience and persistence. It's definitely time to get a Kickstarter video made. Fortunately, our marketing director will be arriving on site later today, to take up residence, and we can hand that off to her. We'll see what else she can come up with as far as ways of adding to the fund in the immediate future.
In the meantime, I continue on with the business plan. I've finally gotten through the Product descriptions, and into the Market Comparison. I get one paragraph for each of our product lines to talk about how they compare to what's already available, and what makes our stuff better than everybody else's. That, of course, is relative, not absolute, but I have to be concise. At least there's no word count limit. Doing the business plan would otherwise be far too much like writing a research grant for my heart to stand. (I worked n three research grants during my association with the medical field. The last one put me in the ER with atrial fibrillation.) Just wrapped up a two hour session of writing and research, matter of fact, and am going to take a break to fetch a pair of earrings from inventory to fulfill an order received. At least the maille is still selling, even if sporadically.
The power of positive thinking, yes. I am determined that this is going to succeed. We will have our farm. We will have our business. We will create something sustainable and profitable that our children can inherit. We will do this without breaching our ethics or morals. It is possible. It may be a hard process, but nothing really worth having comes easy.
So back to the grindstone I go, with renewed determination.
In the meantime, I continue on with the business plan. I've finally gotten through the Product descriptions, and into the Market Comparison. I get one paragraph for each of our product lines to talk about how they compare to what's already available, and what makes our stuff better than everybody else's. That, of course, is relative, not absolute, but I have to be concise. At least there's no word count limit. Doing the business plan would otherwise be far too much like writing a research grant for my heart to stand. (I worked n three research grants during my association with the medical field. The last one put me in the ER with atrial fibrillation.) Just wrapped up a two hour session of writing and research, matter of fact, and am going to take a break to fetch a pair of earrings from inventory to fulfill an order received. At least the maille is still selling, even if sporadically.
The power of positive thinking, yes. I am determined that this is going to succeed. We will have our farm. We will have our business. We will create something sustainable and profitable that our children can inherit. We will do this without breaching our ethics or morals. It is possible. It may be a hard process, but nothing really worth having comes easy.
So back to the grindstone I go, with renewed determination.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
More Details
Let's start filling in some of the blank spaces. I'm working on the business plan, and will post details from it as they become available for public consumption. The basics are these:
I'm the plant guy, the IT guy, and the permaculture guy. Tiffany is the animal person, and will deal with the alpacas, chickens, goats, and whatever else we have, including directing the construction and maintenance of their housing, feed storage, fencing, and whatever else they need. Liam is the beekeeper, and will be working with a couple we know from the First UU Church to get our hives established. He'll also be doing some of the construction, learning Earthship methodology in the process. Lucki is our marketing director and general roustabout.
Our products will divide into three major lines: alpacas, apiary, and agriculture. Some of those will cross over with each other, such as the alpaca yarn being dyed with woad and indigo that we grow (organically and sustainably) on-site. We'll have ancillary lines, such as my maille, and whatever other crafts people decide to pursue.
Today I am working on gathering money for the project, closing out my 401k and pension plan, working on completing the business plan so that we have it to present to loan officers, and seeing what sort of loan and grant opportunities there are for a beginning family farm. I've added a Paypal donation button to my own blogs (tarliman on Xanga and crankygeezer on blogger), and will be assisting Tiffany in adding a donation button to this blog, so that people who want to kick in a buck can do so. We're also talking about doing a Kickstarter video, but that's going to have to wait until we have land tat we're making an offer on, so that we have something to show people other than pictures of alpacas (although Tiffany would probably say that pictures of alpacas are enough). We need to go out to Yellow Rose, the farm we're sourcing our alpacas from, and shoot some video of their herd, especially Angel Lily, whom we have purchased, and the girls that are carrying our cria.
So that's the state of the state, as it is, Tuesday, January 11th, 2011.
I'm the plant guy, the IT guy, and the permaculture guy. Tiffany is the animal person, and will deal with the alpacas, chickens, goats, and whatever else we have, including directing the construction and maintenance of their housing, feed storage, fencing, and whatever else they need. Liam is the beekeeper, and will be working with a couple we know from the First UU Church to get our hives established. He'll also be doing some of the construction, learning Earthship methodology in the process. Lucki is our marketing director and general roustabout.
Our products will divide into three major lines: alpacas, apiary, and agriculture. Some of those will cross over with each other, such as the alpaca yarn being dyed with woad and indigo that we grow (organically and sustainably) on-site. We'll have ancillary lines, such as my maille, and whatever other crafts people decide to pursue.
Today I am working on gathering money for the project, closing out my 401k and pension plan, working on completing the business plan so that we have it to present to loan officers, and seeing what sort of loan and grant opportunities there are for a beginning family farm. I've added a Paypal donation button to my own blogs (tarliman on Xanga and crankygeezer on blogger), and will be assisting Tiffany in adding a donation button to this blog, so that people who want to kick in a buck can do so. We're also talking about doing a Kickstarter video, but that's going to have to wait until we have land tat we're making an offer on, so that we have something to show people other than pictures of alpacas (although Tiffany would probably say that pictures of alpacas are enough). We need to go out to Yellow Rose, the farm we're sourcing our alpacas from, and shoot some video of their herd, especially Angel Lily, whom we have purchased, and the girls that are carrying our cria.
So that's the state of the state, as it is, Tuesday, January 11th, 2011.
Monday, January 3, 2011
New Year, new beginnings
Over the last year or so, the Powers That Be have been trying to push my family to where we need to be. Which is, apparently, running a farm raising alpacas, goats, chickens, bees, and trying to provide as many of our own needs as possible. We have decided already that this will mean producing our own beer/cider/wine, and learning to make soap.
The journey began in September, 2009 shortly after we had relocated to Richmond, Virginia from Dallas, TX. I attended the state fair with my children and another homeschooling family. At the fair, I talked to Tara from Yellow Rose Alpacas of Virginia at some length. Alongside of learning a lot about getting into the alpaca business, which was something we had talked about doing for a while already, I learned that she was also a homeschooling mom. so we instantly had something in common. I took home lots of pamphlets and literature on starting an alpaca farm, showed it to Andrew. We decided to start working on a 'five year plan' to get him out of his corporate job and get us on a farm. And all that literature got filed away (in the vertical chronological file on my desk.)
The following spring, a friend had a Pampered Chef party and invited me to place an order. which I did. Now, I have been a consultant on and off for the last ten years with the Pampered Chef, and I started thinking about how much I missed doing that, and how we could really use the extra money and I contacted the PC home office requesting a local consultant contact. A couple of days later I got an email from a consultant saying she would love to help me restart my PC business here in the Richmond area. The address looked familiar...I riffled through my vertical chronological file on my desk to check and make sure I was correct...yep. It was Tara from Yellow Rose Alpacas. Huh. Small world. I called her. We talked about PC, and we talked about alpacas.
The other thing we had been talking about doing for some time was starting a sustainable intentional community, and about this same time we had a couple of other families who were interested in going in with us on this venture. We began looking at properties. Some of them very LARGE properties, and we went on an wrote up a contract with Yellow Rose to purchase one bred adult female alpaca, and two crias from her herd.
Unfortunately, our attempts at forming a community with that group of people at that point, did not pan out, but at least we got kickstarted with our alpaca business! We renewed our lease at our current property for another year and decided to start looking at other properties in the spring, since we would have to give notice to our current landlords by June 2011.
And then December came and stepped up our timetable. So many things have happened all at once. My husband, Andrew, was laid off from his corporate IT job at the beginning of the month. We look at this as the universe saying "what are you waiting for? get off your bums and go live your dream!" And a friend who raises chickens and sells their lovely eggs invited us over to her place to see how they had put together their chicken tractor.
We started off the new year by meeting with a team of realtors on New Years Day to begin an earnest search for cheap/short sell farm property that we can buy outright and not have a mortgage to deal with. And yesterday, January 2nd (which was also Andrew's birthday), we went to Home Depot and bought supplies to build our chicken tractor. We will get that done this week and within the next two weeks we will become the guardians of three Rhode Island Red hens. (we like them because their gender is linked to their color so roosters are easy to tell apart and weed out if need be. Roosters are scary and you don't want more than one at any point, really anyway.)
Our expecting alpaca mommas are all doing well, and we expect babies in May. At that point, I hope to have our land purchased and run-ins and fencing up so we can bring home Angel Lily (our adult female) and her cria right away. The other two babies will join us in the fall, after they are weaned. We are also hoping to purchase a Great Pyrenees puppy or two and a couple of milk goats from Yellow Rose later in the year.
Andrew is busily studying permaculture design and sustainable farming practices and will be our plant guy. I have to admit to having a black thumb and am glad there is someone with a passion for growing our main food supply.
As a bonus, my eldest son and his girlfriend, who are currently living in Minneapolis, are intending to move in with us and help us run this operation. They plan to build their own home on the land at some point in the future using Earthship (packed earth/recycled materials) building techniques. I look forward to watching them grow as a young couple, and watching our farm grow!
2011 is looking to be, if not the easiest year for us, certainly an interesting and exciting one! Bring it on, universe!
The journey began in September, 2009 shortly after we had relocated to Richmond, Virginia from Dallas, TX. I attended the state fair with my children and another homeschooling family. At the fair, I talked to Tara from Yellow Rose Alpacas of Virginia at some length. Alongside of learning a lot about getting into the alpaca business, which was something we had talked about doing for a while already, I learned that she was also a homeschooling mom. so we instantly had something in common. I took home lots of pamphlets and literature on starting an alpaca farm, showed it to Andrew. We decided to start working on a 'five year plan' to get him out of his corporate job and get us on a farm. And all that literature got filed away (in the vertical chronological file on my desk.)
The following spring, a friend had a Pampered Chef party and invited me to place an order. which I did. Now, I have been a consultant on and off for the last ten years with the Pampered Chef, and I started thinking about how much I missed doing that, and how we could really use the extra money and I contacted the PC home office requesting a local consultant contact. A couple of days later I got an email from a consultant saying she would love to help me restart my PC business here in the Richmond area. The address looked familiar...I riffled through my vertical chronological file on my desk to check and make sure I was correct...yep. It was Tara from Yellow Rose Alpacas. Huh. Small world. I called her. We talked about PC, and we talked about alpacas.
The other thing we had been talking about doing for some time was starting a sustainable intentional community, and about this same time we had a couple of other families who were interested in going in with us on this venture. We began looking at properties. Some of them very LARGE properties, and we went on an wrote up a contract with Yellow Rose to purchase one bred adult female alpaca, and two crias from her herd.
Unfortunately, our attempts at forming a community with that group of people at that point, did not pan out, but at least we got kickstarted with our alpaca business! We renewed our lease at our current property for another year and decided to start looking at other properties in the spring, since we would have to give notice to our current landlords by June 2011.
And then December came and stepped up our timetable. So many things have happened all at once. My husband, Andrew, was laid off from his corporate IT job at the beginning of the month. We look at this as the universe saying "what are you waiting for? get off your bums and go live your dream!" And a friend who raises chickens and sells their lovely eggs invited us over to her place to see how they had put together their chicken tractor.
We started off the new year by meeting with a team of realtors on New Years Day to begin an earnest search for cheap/short sell farm property that we can buy outright and not have a mortgage to deal with. And yesterday, January 2nd (which was also Andrew's birthday), we went to Home Depot and bought supplies to build our chicken tractor. We will get that done this week and within the next two weeks we will become the guardians of three Rhode Island Red hens. (we like them because their gender is linked to their color so roosters are easy to tell apart and weed out if need be. Roosters are scary and you don't want more than one at any point, really anyway.)
Our expecting alpaca mommas are all doing well, and we expect babies in May. At that point, I hope to have our land purchased and run-ins and fencing up so we can bring home Angel Lily (our adult female) and her cria right away. The other two babies will join us in the fall, after they are weaned. We are also hoping to purchase a Great Pyrenees puppy or two and a couple of milk goats from Yellow Rose later in the year.
Andrew is busily studying permaculture design and sustainable farming practices and will be our plant guy. I have to admit to having a black thumb and am glad there is someone with a passion for growing our main food supply.
As a bonus, my eldest son and his girlfriend, who are currently living in Minneapolis, are intending to move in with us and help us run this operation. They plan to build their own home on the land at some point in the future using Earthship (packed earth/recycled materials) building techniques. I look forward to watching them grow as a young couple, and watching our farm grow!
2011 is looking to be, if not the easiest year for us, certainly an interesting and exciting one! Bring it on, universe!
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