Welcome

Being on a farm involves ongoing maintenance, and sometimes that includes building maintenance as well. Many of the fittings were poorly installed before we bought the property, and we have gradually repaired and replaced most of what was sub-standard. This month was the turn of the garage windows, which were originally 2nd hand, and installed without flashing, so the wood surrounding them gradually rotted. We now have brand spanking new glass windows with aluminum surrounds, and flashing!

Before replacement commenced The old windows out New windows installed

Now that we have reached late Autumn, our summer tasks are ending, and winter ones beginning. Matings are over now until Spring, although we still have some pregnancy scans to confirm pregnancy happening later this month. Our Spring cria have now been weaned and have started their halter training, this will continue on an ongoing basis as the summer and autumn cria reach 6 months of age, and are weaned in their turn.

We have sown the last of our pasture to be regrassed. This has been ongoing over the last 3 years, and our pasture is showing the effects (see the photo  of  Masterclass standing knee high in grass). The last paddock has been fenced off with a temporary raceway at one end so we can get the alpacas down to the roadside paddock to graze. This new fence caused some consternation with our alpacas the first few times we used it, as they didn’t know where it was taking them!

Cheryl has also split the roadside paddock in two with temporary fencing. This will give us more management control by enabling us to leave paddocks ungrazed for a while to recover and regrow. It is a temporary fence only, as this large paddock is also our hay paddock, so the fence will come down in Spring to enable the hay to grow. By then our resown pasture should be ready for grazing, so the temporary raceway will come down then too, with a more permanent fence going in down the fenceline that has been just a row of posts for several years!

Masterclass kneehigh in our new pasture

Our first cria for the season was born on 20 September. Rather small – weighing in at under 6kg, and managed to get chilled in the cold wind, so lost a lot of strength. We put a cover on the cria and brought mother and baby inside where the baby also sat on a hot water bottle – she was able to cush, but not stand. We bottle fed the cria with milk and glucose so it could regain strength – but it was the next day before the cria could stand and feed from mother. A true black – as you can see from the photo, no brown tinge on this cria! And just to show we don’t always get it right, after 2 days of thinking we had a male cria, we discovered in fact, we have a female!