Another month and the Hampshire countryside is looking so different - my absolute favourite time of the year and I just want to go on long dog walks and take pictures of leaves and fungi and stuff and then come in for tea and cake and sit in front of the fire watching rubbish on the telly - a simple soul, it doesn't take much to please me. The weather has been a bit wild at times - thunder storms, strong winds morning mists and even some frost. Half the leaves have fallen in the last week or so, and the colours have been fantastic.
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| A day of heavy showers - again |
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| Rare sunshine at breakfast time |
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| Autumn mists |
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| Todays walk - there's nothing like kicking through beech leaves! |
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| Beautiful fungi |
The females with crias have munched their way through two paddocks since my last post here and today they have moved on from "Willow" and into "Holly" (field names). The grass is still growing and looks lush and very green, but it's nearly all water and not much goodness so they're getting ad-lib hay and a delicious breakfast of hard feed to top them up. The field of fatties are still on their maintenance diet of grass, a little hay and camelibra and they're still doing very well thank you, so won't be getting more than that for a while yet, if at all.
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| Beautiful pacas! |
My trusty ride-on mower, which is an ancient hand-me-down, is in the hospital for mowers this week as the drive belt thingy broke. With nothing to tow the poo-vac or sweeper brush I have had a good excuse not to clean up after the pacas, the only down side to keeping them, someone needs to develop nappies for pacas? I will have to clean the little paddocks when the mower returns and I just hope that it doesn't rain too much in the meantime so it turns to mush. I had our biggest field harrowed and will leave that to rest now until the Spring if I can, hopefully we'll have a few really hard frosts to kill off the parasite eggs and help break down the moss and dead grass that was dragged up to the surface.
I went to the BVCS conference last weekend which was really excellent. Fantastic speakers - Jane Vaughan was especially inspiring, the venue was good and for me just an hour away, good food and company though there wasn't much time to chat as the day was so full of lectures. I'm surprised more breeders didn't go - I'm sure they will next year when they realise what they missed.
I've been giving some half day Beginners Courses here in the last few weeks to small groups of newcomers, there's been loads of interest lately and I have sold some females and cria which will be going in the New Year, that's good as it'll help make room for the 2013 crop of cria.
Anyway enough of my ramblings here are some autumnal pictures for you to enjoy...
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| Pacas in "Willow" they grazed off that paddock in a week! |
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| Moved into "Holly" |
Love the idea of naming your paddocks...much more inspiring than us with: top paddock, middle, bottom, strip etc., and only 1 named a(after a friend who helped us clear the little wood to make a paddock!)
ReplyDeleteThanks Judi - when we first came here we called all the fields after different weeds as there was so many of them - Ragwort, Thistle, Nettle, Dock, oh and Barbed Wire! We have a Bottom and Top too!
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