Learning About Alpacas

Here is a kind of scary Halloween sort of picture of Hollywick and Ginger, two of my alpaca girls. Ginger is older, seven or eight years, and is displaying the long bottom tooth these animals grow. I don't have any idea why, but the tooth sort of comes and goes as she is able to break it off sometimes. It could also be trimmed off by a human, but this human hasn't the nerve to try that--yet.

Keeping alpacas (I have no male and so I am not raising alpacas) is very different from raising cattle or chickens.  They are sweet, gentle little animals with no real natural defences except a little kicking and a lot of spitting.  And after living with Ginger and company this last year and a half, I'm come to realize the spitting is really a communication device. Also, the spitting's noxious quality seems to depend on age.  Ginger spits fluid from her stomach which smell like vomit.  The others, who are only about two years old, seem to just spit a saliva like substance. The spitting indicates mostly anger and impatience, though when the girls first arrived they seem to spit at me as a defensive move.  Now, the only time I get spit thrown my way is if I'm in the firing line of one alpaca spitting at another.

Tabitha, the gold colored alpaca with one of the ISA Brown hens. Background grey is Pixel, then Hollywick.

Apple Roses

Someone of my Facebook friends shared a video post showing how to make these apple roses for dessert. Last night it was my turn to bring dessert to our family's Monday night get together, and since I have Monday off, I decided to make the apples roses.

The video is really well done, but I am not a visual learner.  I like to have instructions carefully spelled out in writing. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but I finally made 8 apple roses using dark red Jonathan apples from Irons Orchard next door.  I wanted a really red apple that would also bake well.

My apples roses were a hit! They were not nearly as pretty as the pictured rose, but every body said they really liked them.  I served them with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a spoonful of apple crisp which I had made for my two year old niece.
I've shared the post and here also is the link: http://cookingwithmanuela.blogspot.com/2015/03/apple-roses.html.

Cooking with Manuela: Apple Roses

Cooking with Manuela: Apple Roses: Impress your guests with this beautiful rose-shaped dessert made with lots of soft and delicious apple slices, wrapped in sweet and crisp...

Summer Sunsets

In between all the rain we had some gorgeous sunsets.  This is the view from my back porch.

Don't Save Those Hybrid Seeds

The fruit of hybrid pumpkin seeds

The garden books always warn you that the seeds of a hybrid vegetable won't produce true to the hybrid parent.  That was proved to me this year with the "pumpkins" pictured here.

Last fall a neighbor tossed a load of round orange pumpkins over the fence for the cattle to eat.  The cows loved them and this spring the pasture had a nice patch of pumpkin vines.

The cattle didn't eat of even trample the vines and when we went to mow the field this month we found they had produced these strange oblong, soft skinned fruits that look nothing like the traditional Halloween style pumpkins from last fall.  I've been chopping them into piece with a shovel and feeding them to the chickens. They are soft like a big zucchini and have a center cavity with large pumpkin like seeds. The chickens think they are great!

Belle Has Hypothyrodism

I noticed Taco Belle, my little donkey, wasn't acting as perky as usual last spring.  She seemed downright lethargic.  A visit from the vet who drew a blood sample confirmed she was anemic. Further test pointed to hypothyroidism.  I purchased a jar of medicine from my vet - it is called Thyro-L and is a thyroid medicine for horses and other equines. It is a gray powder you sprinkle on grain or other food.

Taco Belle last spring. I call her the dog in a donkey suit. She wants to be petted all the time.

Belle is a small donkey. I don't imagine she weighs much more than 250 lbs.  I figured the most I should give her was about 1/4 of a teaspoon a day. Yesterday the vet came to visit for a follow up and Belle is still showing low thyroid levels. We've upped her dose to 1/2 a teaspoon which I blend with three peppermint pillows that I crush with a meat mallet each evening.  Belle loves peppermint candy and licks the bowl clean. Hopefully this larger dose will do the trick.

ISA Brown Hens Lay Eggs

Brown eggs are not any better than white eggs but for some reason I just like them best.  Often the shells have different intensities of brown.  I like the darkest ones the best.

ISA Brown eggs. 

I've been very pleased with the ISA Brown hens so far.  They are prolific egg layers and seem to be very smart little chickens. Their eggs are not as big as the Aracanas, the New Hampshires or the Black Jersey Giant hen's eggs but they are big enough to qualify as large eggs.

Goldie the Buff Orpington with some of the ISA Brown hens.