VISITORS AND HALTER TRAINING

We had a visit today from a group of 22,  year 10 students from the South Downs College. They were all very attentive, as were the alpacas, the weanling boys were proper little show-offs and gave a wonderful display of "boys" behaving badly with lots of orgling and frisky laddish behaviour, the students thought it was really funny, which it was - I have a feeling there may be a few little videos appearing on youtube soon. We had some great feedback from them ... hopefully some of them will be inspired to become alpaca breeders for the future.

Showing teeth

Spring is continuing to slowly emerge, we have frogspawn in the pond, in fact I can hear frogs or toads outside now and we have leaves on the elder bushes. The grass has grown a tiny bit in the last week, certainly greener, though most of our fields look a bit sad, we desperately need some rain, everything is so dry, but at least the pacas are lovely and clean.

The fencing has been finished and the hedges trimmed back so the boundary looks very tidy. Peter has harrowed the big field that we've been using since december, we have loads of moss which gets pulled up with the harrows which makes room for new grass -  now it looks completely trashed, but it will recover quite quickly and be lovely after a couple of months rest.  The birds love all the moss for their nests. If we have just a bit of rain we can roll the fields and get some fertiliser on them.

The halter training is going fairly well, just a couple of slow learners who are taking a bit longer, I have discovered that chatting to people on the phone whilst moving very slowly across a field with the reluctant ones on the end of the lead works rather well ... they walk back beautifully after listening to all that gobbledygook....

The boys penned up ready for halter training