Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Spring Cleaning
Used straw to get hauled off.
Spring Cleaning......a necessary evil!
Throughout Winter, we've put straw down in the barn on the stall floor to keep our alpacas warm. At the end of the Winter season, that bed of straw gets quite deep and broken down and now we've begun "Spring Cleaning". We actually started raking up some areas a couple of weeks ago and it is a fairly long process because there is so much of it. We spent much of the day Saturday when it was nice out raking and hauling used up straw to the compost pile...not to be confused with our Alpaca Gold compost pile.
The farmer went to town early Saturday morning to get his propane tanks filled so he could cook down the maple syrup so I began raking stalls and monitoring the syrup temperature. What you see raked here is just a drop in the bucket and hard to judge how much really was there, but it took Ed several hours to put in tubs and haul off, an all day process. It looks much better, now it will just be routine daily maintenance until shearing time so the fleeces won't be full of vegetable matter (aka straw). Alpacas love to roll, and as you can see from the first picture how much straw this little guy already has in his fleece, and most of that will fall out before shearing and that's our reason for Spring Cleaning the barn...not to mention that we're preparing for our.
2nd Annual Spring Open House on April 12th
One of our cria, full of vegetation...
More used straw...
This is the first batch to get hauled off on Saturday tubs are all full, need emptying and refilled.
Still more straw...