Today was a busy one at Snowshoe Farm. With 70+ alpacas in four barns, we scrambled to prepare for Hurricane Irene’s arrival tomorrow. Like many people in rural areas, we depend on a well for water and if we lose power, we lose our water. So we filled 5-gallon containers with water for our backup. We picked up a load of new second cut hay today and stocked all the barns with extra bales so we don’t have to move any from the hay mow during the rain. We moved visiting alpacas from their shelter into the main barn “just in case”. The shelter is not only less sturdy than our other barns but one corner of the paddock has a large, old maple tree that we don’t trust to survive a big blow.
We picked up lawn furniture, muck buckets and other odds and ends and stowed everything in barns or the garage, parked the trailer up against the house and cleaned and stocked the chicken coop so we don’t even have to open that door tomorrow. Our apple trees are loaded this year and one, in particular, is an early apple so we picked a few baskets of apples and saved what we could from the garden. I can’t imagine the tomato trellis withstanding a lot of wind, but, hopefully, the rest of the garden will come through this OK. There are still a lot of veggies left to put away for winter.
Of course, we have crias due – two that are due any day – so we will be spending a lot of time in the girls’ barn or going back and forth between the house and barn. This is one time I wish we had a barn cam!
We hope all our friends in the path of the hurricane make it through with little or no damage!
Christine
Terry , We are all praying you all . Keep us updated
love,
Christine
Terry
We made out fine up here in Peacham. We’re a hill town, not in a river valley, so we’re not susceptible to the kind of flooding that hit many other VT towns. At least one town just north of us had a lot of flooding, but the worst hit were towns in the southern part of the state and a few along the spine of the Green Mtns. All we had was a lot of rain and a bit of wind. the power was only out for about 16 hours. We were prepared for a lot worse!