Girls are gross

Not to be outdone by J's hard work, I spent my weekend doing spring cleaning outside. Last weekend I tackled the the garage, this weekend I cleaned out the girl's barn.

This past year we put down straw and then let hay that the girls didn't eat cover the ground in the girl's shelter. Quite a few farms do put a layer of bedding down to help keep the alpacas warm in the winter. But, not everyone does this. We do live where it is cold, but, we found they didn't spend much time in the barn at all. I don't think we will put bedding down next year. Or, if we do, it will be only a very little bit. This is how their shelter looked:




Saturday I spent much of my day cleaning the hay/straw mixture out. It took about 4 hours to haul all of it out (that's 4 hours split up between making the kids food to eat and doing laundry, so in the end it felt like I spent almost all day out there). At first I convinced myself it wasn't hard work, just tedious. You take a full wheel barrow out, only to come back and find you hardly made a dent in it. But, then it really was hard work. Our girls do poop and pee in the barn, and that mixed into the straw/hay was a huge mess. It was hard to get it scopped up and into the wheel barrow. While I was cleaning out the barn, the ladies were, of course, curious. They watched my every step, and when I'd walk off with a wheel barrow full, they would sneak into the shelter to see what is going on. One time I came back and found one of them had walked in there and pooped! Now that is really crazy. They have poop areas in the paddock and in the pastures, there was no need to come into my clean area to poop (I suspect with about 99% certainty it was Victoria, not to name names or anything). That sealed it for me, girls are gross.

Here is the shelter cleaned out:





I'd like to put some fresh dolomite in there to really clean up the inside. I'm disappointed it didn't clean up better. But, our girls hardly ever come inside the shelter so it isn't that big of a deal.

On Sunday I cleaned up this area:



Last year J started to pile their refuse hay (the stalky stuff they eat around and leave for waste). But, this pile got a bit out of hand. So I decided to clean it up.

Here it is almost cleaned up (just a couple little piles to finish up):



This didn't even take me an hour to clean up. But it's nice to have it done. I also cleaned up some of the other hay laying around the ground. I like to use it to cover new grass in the pasture.