After a long silence I have decided to make and effort to keep a blog again. Looking at the old posts it was interesting to be reminded of what was going on with the animals and ourselves in past years.
Mike and I are both aging and finding it more difficult to remember times and dates when events happened, or even whether we have carried out routine tasks. Maybe keeping a regular blog (if I keep to my resolution) will be interesting and at the same time serve to settle any disagreements about dates, times and events.
Although the farm shop has closed I am selling off remaining stock online through the Alpacastuff website.
There are a few socks and quite a lot of hand knitted hats, bobble hats, and mittens still available at www.alpaca-stuff.co.uk. We have only six alpacas now. Two males and four females. I expect they will live out their lives here, although we would be happy to sell them if a buyer appeared.
We have 35 hens, so we keep the four female alpacas in their paddock. As the hens are free ranging and only shut inside at night, it is good to know that the girls are round to raise the alarm if Mr. Fox appears. The alpaca alarm call is quite strange and difficult to describe. Something like a series of very short high pitched yelps with a loud intake of breath between.
We let the alpacas free range during the day and they pop themelves back into the chicken paddock at usually a little before dusk to take up guard duty.
As we have three dogs - two older boys and a three year old, there is plenty of noise and excitement if anything happens -like a customer coming to pick up eggs from the egg box which is situated half way down the drive. I like to think they would make a lot of noise to alert us if they saw a predator in the chickens' field too.
All in all we have a very good team.
