Soap Making on a Dreary Day

What do you do on a dreay day in the fall? You make soap in summer scents! I have always found soap sets up much better on wet dreary days, It's not science but it does.  I have had a heck of a time finding lye to make my soap with. Apparently like many things in this time of Covid, this is scarce too! I finely found some at a small hardware store and set out this morning to get a batch made. I combine the above ingredients in certain weights to get a beautiful smooth soap.

Since all I can think about is getting through winter and getting back to Spring shows, I chose a Lavender-Mint to blend for my fragrance. I decided to do Essential Lavender with both Essential Peppermint and Spearmint combined to give it a smooth mint with a lavender scent. 

One of the greatest tools ever invented and discovered for soap making is the stick blender! It cuts down on so much time stirring. It cuts the process by about 10 times the time!

Once it was ready and I had the proper tracing, it was poured into a couple of molds. The batch I make is an 8 pound batch so you get quite a bit of soap! I will have bars as well as some soap to cut up for felted soap.

The finished soap! I wish I could have a scratch and sniff button on this blog! It smells amazing and so does my kitchen! I added some Lavender flowers for texture too!

 The molds are covered and the soap will be allowed to cure for a couple of days. I will the remove the soap from the molds and then it will be allowed to cure for a couple of months for a soap that brings you back to summer. 

Item of the Week: Alpaca Dryer balls

This weeks Item of the Week is: Alpaca Dryer Balls. These are made from our alpacas here on the farm. They are quite labor intensive but I do enjoy making them, the end result is just so amazing. We have packaged them in these nice eco-friendly bags which have a small window to see the alpaca dryer balls.

      Each bag contains 4 dryer balls, each a solid ball embellished with some alpaca. These are available to be shipped for an extra $5.

                       They are so soft and are amazing in the dryer. They leave your clothes soft and cut down on the time you have to dry your clothes. 

 Just an up close view of our soft and wonderful dryer balls!

The Poor Drones

While checking on the honeybees I saw this sad drone. He was walking on the landing board as if he was lost. That's probably because he was! This time of year, the female workers are preparing for winter. It's a painstaking process, they have to ready the hive, bring in enough food to get through the cold weather ahead and get rid of the free loaders. These are the Drones! A drones whole purpose in life is to reproduce. They do not forage, clean or work whatsoever in the hive. They are complete free loaders. If you don't do your work you get fired right? Well a little worse fate comes to the Drones, they are either starved out or they are carried out to their deaths! Many workers will darg a drone out, chew off his wings and drop him to his death. The hive can't afford this during the winter cluster so they must be eliminated.

I caught this guy on the landing board (center bee is the drone) going from bee to bee begging for food. Every time he approached the entrance a guard bee would block him. 
 

Here he is trying to convince this bee to feed him but quickly got the cold shoulder. So in conclusion, while it's wonderful to be born in the Spring, get fed, never have to work for it, hang out with other drones all day, get fed again, go to sleep and repeat the process everyday, all good things must come to an end!

Happy October!!! Homemade Vanilla: Item of the Week

As we dust ourselves off here after learning the rest of our shows for the year are cancelled, we are going to be featuring an Item of the Week. This week our homemade Vanillas are ready after curing for 6 months! We have 5 flavors to choose from, however this item is pick only.

We also have 3 sizes to choose from: 8 oz, 4 oz and 2 oz. These will make a wonderful gift for a foody or baker on your holiday list!

  We have many bottles in stock too! All three sizes!

Our selection of 5 different flavors and price list is above. These are made from fine cured bourbon and Madagascar Vanilla Beans. The Vanilla Vanilla is made from Vanilla Vodka which is also cured.

 We have 3 sizes available too! Give our farm line a call @ 203-881-1986 or email us @ CoonHollowFarm@aol.com or find us on Facebook or Instagram! These smell and taste divine!

Fooled by a Kiss

Just look at that face! Only a face a mother could love, right? Wrong! Today during second feeding, Teddy comes up to me as he often does for just a kiss, looks at me with those sweet loving eyes, bends his head down in a loving way and places his lips upon mine and then, whamo!!!! Spit in the face! That's right! A big old loogie right in my face! Thank goodness he had not started eating or it could have been worse! Well that will teach me to trust his nonsense again! I must not look in those eyes!

 

Oh the stress of the molt

With the loss of daylight, it's time for the chickens to molt. They need to loose those summer feathers and bring in those cold weather feathers and reserve some nutrients to grow new feathers in. They slow down on egg production which is not good for this farmer and her customers.  As they loose their feathers they begin to look very sad like this girl above! 

This poor girl only has this last spike of a tail feather left.

This poor girl! I'm ready to knit her a sweater! She almost looks naked! Her neck is half bald, but she is already showing some regrowth.

The good thing about this time of year is the beautiful feathers you will find. This was a wing feather but the unique thing about it is it has a double shaft and two feathers coming out. Contact us if you're looking for feathers, we have plenty!

 Looking at this girl, it's like she's channeling her inner Turkey Vulture! AS she was standing there, she was literally plucking her feathers off of her body.

So to our egg customers, this is the real reason why our supply of eggs is low right now! It should get better in the next couple of weeks!

Welcome Mr. Copper

Welcome Mr. Copper! He is a Black Copper Maran rooster that we have added to our flock. Sadly the one we raised from a chick met an accidental death. I was on the look out for another one and happened on one that was literally a mile away! When we added him to our flock, within a few minutes he challenged old Henry and learned very fast that was a big mistake. He has realized the pecking order, settled in well and is a very sweet boy.

He has been with us now a couple of weeks and has integrated into the flock quite well. Next Spring I hope to hatch some chicks with the 3 hens we raised this year. The exciting thing about this breed is the amazing color of their eggs, a deep red/brown egg. I'm thinking this may be my new favorite breed of chicken!
 

Well here we go...

Well here we go, after the initial shock that the New England Fiber Festival has been cancelled, it's time to dust ourselves off and reinvent the wheel. The farm can't run itself so I decided we need to re-open the Etsy shop and list all the work I have done preparing for the big show. We have lots of yarns that I have begun listing. I will begin to list each day as I go here.

This is such a hard time for everyone, so hang in there, this too shall pass!

The link to our Etsy shop is:

https://www.etsy.com/your/shops/CoonHollowFarm/tools/listings?ref=seller-platform-mcnav 

You can also click the link on the side bar that will take you to our shop!

Welcome Another Generation

 We welcomed 7 new English Angora bunnies on September 1st! Our CoCo and Frankie are the parents to this beautiful bundle. They are jumping and popping out of the nest already. I usually don"t post new babies so early but these guys are so strong and mom is doing an amazing job! Visit our Coon Hollow Farm Facebook page to see a video of them! (I can't figure out how to get it on here!)

Sad but moving on!

" After careful consideration, we regretfully announce The Fiber Festival of New England has been cancelled for 2020. Current COVID-19 restrictions do not allow for an event of the size, scope and passion that our Fiber Festival brings to the Mallary Complex every year."

 This was the message we got yesterday, completely devastating an already hard year for us as well as a lot of other small farms and businesses that depend on this Festival. From here we are moving on and are looking at other ways to sell our products. Please bear with us as we may participate in a virtual version which the Fiber Festival may offer as well as doing some on line here. We have worked hard all year getting our products ready and have a lot of handspun yarns in stock. All I keep saying to myself is this too shall pass. Stay strong everyone and stay tuned!

The End of the Dearth

 The dearth can be very hard on bees and other pollinators. It is a space in time in the summer when some plants are done blooming but the others have not started yet which can make food very hard to find.

The best part is the queen is unaffected by the dearth and is evident that she is still producing eggs so the brood can continue to grow. In this picture the brown covered cells are developing brood (baby bees).

 In this frame you can see the white developing larvae! So on we go, out of the dearth! We have fed the bees through this time, heling them to overcome the dearth.

The bees and the mites

One thing a beekeeper faces in this day and age is the relentless killer, the Varroe Mite. This mite was first discovered in 1987, was brought here from Europe and has reeked havoc on our honeybee population ever since. Setting up a treatment protocol is a beekeepers best defense against this deadly killer of our honeybee populations. Treatments are improving all the time but while doing my research it seems that a staggered approach as well as using a variety of methods is best not to allow the mites to build up resistance to one treatment type.

The formic acid treatment is our first treatment followed by two others staggered over time.

Our approah to this is so we can see frames like this one, a healthy queen and her healthy brood! 

A triple win of Fiber!

On a previous post I featured some blending I was trying with three fibers. I blended an Icelandic, black angora rabbit and white alpaca in this fine batt. It was a whole fleece of the Icelandic fleece with a whole angora rabbit fleece and a bunch of alpaca blended as it went on the drum carder.

If you look really close, you can see the guard hairs that are casting off the spun yarn. These are the guard hairs of the Icelandic fleece that were on the top of the fleece. This fleece had black guard hairs as well as a gray under coat which although somewhat on the coarse side, gave it a soft texture too.

I did not weigh the fleece prior to spinning but it did fill (after picture was taken) a whole Ashford Country Spinner spool! The weight of the yarns equaled 35.1 ounces, so in reality 3 pounds, 3 ounces! It was spun in bulky weight so it netted 428 yards of handspun yarn! The small white spool is to show a size comparison to the size of the big spool and yarn. 

Sadly once again, the picture just doesn't do it justice! This yarn along with the many others will be available so far at the only show that has not been cancelled, the New England Fiber Festival in Massachusetts in November. Covid19 has done a number on many Fiber Artist as well as other businesses. My hope is to see a back to normal one day. We may reopen our Etsy shop, but time will tell.

Who's the Boss of the Barnyard you ask?

I'm often asked who is the boss out of all the animals we have. I usually chuckle because of course it's me, but Pru runs a fast second. She commands control of the feed trough and has no problem with telling the alpacas that under no circumstances will she put up with their nonsense. She has no problem butting them and if need be using her horns to get her point across.

Of course Maddie, who is on the left here has no problem being assertive as well. So the answer to the question would be the two old lady Angora goats, they are the boss of the barnyard!

Only Teddy...

Every morning without fail, I open the feed bin, turn for the bucket, turn back and I will find Teddy head first in the grain. I usually take the scoop and fill the feed bucket working around old Teddy.

I just don't have the heart to close the gate on him. It's as if the grain in the bin taste so much better than the hay in the feed dishes. 

I fill the buckets for the others and he's still going at it! I save some for him and put his portion in the trough. Once that's done he takes his focus and locks it right onto the new grain that has been poured, as if that's even better  He is so predictable this guy.

I got this shot of Teddy and it just sums him up...munching away with not a care in the world. Only Teddy, you gotta love him!

What do you do?

What do you do when your one year old Lavender Orphington rooster decides he's going to start being a jerk and make a run for you say? You pick him up, carry him around and give him kisses! This can usually break them of that male driven protectiveness. You have to change their mind into self protection, not protecting the girls. If they associate you with contact they don't want, this can usually change the way they see you.

One thing that saddens me is when I see people who don't understand this behavior or how to break it and the young rooster will be destined for the soup pot or rehomed. This can take a one time solution or a few but eventually he will get it!

Trouble in the Barnyard

Look at this face, warm, sweet, beautiful...nope he's a trouble maker! Lately the once sweet Norman has taken to being quite the leader of trouble in the barnyard! He is currently 10 years old and we are quite baffled at what is prompting it. Has he realized that being a nice guy gets him no where? Has he decided that he is getting older and needs to start sowing some wild oats? Is he going through a mid age crisis? Is he bored with the way of life around here? Who knows? But it better stop! 

Lately he picks someone to pick on and it's on, but he has decided to form a gang! Cyrus on the left, with Norman center and Awan on the right! Yeah this isn't happening guys! No violence on the farm! 

So, currently Winchester (left) and Teddy (right) are separated from the marauding gang of 2 and their leader! These 2 are the most gentle souls we have here. Garth who is not pictured has decided to stay away from it all and I find him on the hill holding sentry duty as he should, not getting involved. If this continues we may need to get the Vet out here to take away one trouble makers trouble making things that may or may not be causing this!

Blending fibery goodness~!

In the time I have had while out of work, I've been putting this time in to get through my fiber stash. I had a beautiful black Icelandic fleece that I picked up last November at the New England Fiber Festival. It was soft but a bit coarse all at the same time. So it needed a blend that would keep the beautiful colors in but compliment it all at the same time. I chose a black angora rabbit fleece and combined it with some white alpaca to give it a nice soft texture and add some color differences. It has true black, grays of different shades and white.

These two photos don't really give the Icelandic fleece justice in it's beauty!

After the blend! It is so beautiful! This was pulling the first blend off of the drum carder, it beat my expectations!

I wish pictures gave a see and touch mode, it is so soft and so pretty! 

Trying to get it in the light, honestly I am so pleased!

So now to decide what to do with it, spin it up or bag it for sale as a spinning fleece or make punis out of it, hmmmm decisions, decisions! One thing I do know, as of right now the New England Fiber Festival is planning to go on as scheduled in November (see our schedule on the sidebar), it will be there for purchase, possibly in many forms!