LLAMA RUN FARM NEWS

All the news that we can get into print

November 1999

Welcome to the first issue of the Llama Run News! I hope you enjoy it.

Let us introduce ourselves, there is myself (John), my wife (Lorelei), five children, nine goats, 24 rabbits, one Llama, three dogs, and I don’t know how many chickens and cats.

We live in the small town of Warren Massachusetts. It’s about 5 miles due south of West Podunk. Yes, there really is one (Podunk is a local Indian word for swamp). There are about 2,500 people in town, with one traffic light, no tourists, and one of the last running textile mills in New England. Sadly, what they make there is polyester velour. Yes, we live in the velour capital of the United States, I suppose it could be worse, Lynn Massachusetts is the home of marshmallow fluff.

We got our first goats about two and a half years ago. Two young ladies (Brianna and Johanna) and an old whether (Brandy). It was a package deal, the old wether is an Angora / Dairy goat cross. The fiber is not nearly good enough for spinning (we have a friend who uses it to stuff pillows) and he was destined for the freezer…except that half of the couple we got him from considered him a pet…so in exchange for removing him as a source of contention, we got a real deal on the two young ladies.

Our next trio of goats was a mother and her two daughters (Helen, Heidi, and Olivia). They came to us from a family that started out with the animals and then purchased a farm. They could only afford a fixer-upper, so then they discovered that all of time they had to spend fixing left them no energy for the animals…

Our most recent purchase was a buck (Gamliel) of our own, bought from the same folks we got our first trio from. They went all the way down to Texas for his sire, and we got the benefit of all that driving.

We had laid out a plan for breeding and had it all figured out, when we got surprised in the summer with a pair of kids. You see, we had not gotten the boys moved over to the second pasture in time…

This left us a bit of a quandary with the fall shearing, as these two newcomers had not had the usual six months of growing. The staple length of their fiber would have only been two to three inches if we sheared them. If we didn’t do anything, by next spring they would have looked like an old english sheepdog that had been bathing in hair grow tonic. So we compromised and gave them a shave and haircut, but left the bulk of the body unsheared. We hope to have some awesome long staple kid in the spring.

This years fall shearing went well, despite the fact that my wife was largely sidelined due to very advanced pregnancy. The baby was born on October 4th and was 11 pounds, 10 ounces at birth, so as you may well imagine Lorelei was pretty big toward the end.

Shearing is a family affair around here, I do cutting, Lorelei holds onto the head, and any number of kids sit on whatever other goat parts are sticking out from all of that hair. We shear in the laundry room in our house, and I can tell you from experience that goats don’t run well on linoleum (neither do rabbits for that matter).

The bad news is that our really great deal on a winters supply of hay included a free thistle collection…much to our surprise and annoyance. It has made cleaning the fiber soooo much fun I cannot begin to tell you …

Sometime in the next few days, I should be sending the clipped mohair off for processing. In another month (or so) we will have Adult mohair again! What the pound rate will be on it I haven’t figured out yet. One of these days (I dream) we will be able to do all of it ourselves.

Go back to Llama Run Farm Home Page