SPRING

Our early Summer seems to have left us - we have had all of 3 drops of rain today and clouds - can you believe it?! We are seriously very anxious to get rain, lots and lots of rain - the ground is cracked and the grass not growing - we definitely need lots of the wet stuff. 


Recent jobs on the farm have been harrowing, I mean with a tractor pulling chain harrows - not a traumatic experience or anything. We have loads of moss, much more than our fair share - most of it ends up on our show teams fleeces, so they look kind of green in the ring.  We usually follow this with rolling, not literally us, I mean with rollers behind the tractor (well you never know who reads this rubbish do you?) but that wouldn't have much effect at the moment as the ground is like concrete. We should be putting some fertiliser on, but you need rain to wash it in and apart from a few showers forecast today and maybe tomorrow there's not much coming our way, so not done it just yet.


The whole herd had their Spring vaccination at the weekend and we split the females up into 'OK and fatties' and need a bit more grub. They do love a change of field, but hate being split up from their friends - silly billies - spent a good 10 minutes prancing and pronking about and looking for each other, they should know that they get back together again eventually (unless they're sold - but I don't tell them that!).


Every now and then, as I sit here typing away , I jump out of my skin as a CD whizzes into my peripheral vision and crashes against the window - a very effective crow scarer that Peter devised hanging from the gutters, so we could sleep in the early mornings rather than being assaulted by aggressive/amorous big black buggers (crows) banging on our windows.

I'm off to the World Alpaca Conference next week - looking at the itinery there's not much I haven't heard before but with my awful memory it won't matter as it's always good to have everything reviewed numerous times for it to properly sink in - but I am hoping it will be good. I'm staying in the student accommodation which will be the nearest I will have got to being "At University"! Will be good to spend 3 days immersed in everything alpaca with everyone also equally obsessed with alpaca to spend it with.

And a picture from last summer .... look how green everything its...

In the foreground of this picture is The Sorcerer 1st Junior Grey Male &  Reserve Champion Grey Male, Eros 2nd  Junior Fawn Male and Bond 4th Junior White Male Futurity 2012

Spring!!

What amazing weather we're having - I've certainly made the most of it - been outside enjoying the sunshine and even took time to sit out with a magazine and a coffee and just absorb the rays... all that lovely Vit D! We have just finished all our Spring-time husbandry on the herd. The last ADE shot, wormer and heptovac... lots of injections, but thats it now for 6 months apart from the crias when they arrive. We don't have any due til the very end of May and the rest are all June and July, if all goes according to plan. We've had half of our fields fertilized and now we need a drop of rain to wash it in before we can swap everybody around and do the other half - hopefully we'll get rain on Wednesday - I just hope it knows when to stop, but we are desperately dry here, only having had 1 days rain in the whole of March so far. We have Camelid Vet Karin Mueller from Cambridge University coming here on Sunday to give a course on Crias, Birthing etc for Members of the Southern Alpaca Group - should be an excellent day. Our course with Jay Holland went really well and everyone thoroughly enjoyed it - the pacas behaved impeccably and were led around the obstacle course by the end of the day.