Zulu warrior arrives

May 16. 2014

It is really warm
today, in the twenties anyway; no coats or boots needed. Our new alpaca, Zulu
Warrior was delivered this morning. He is larger than the goats, even the
bucks, but smaller than Bo’s tiny pony, which is a good thing, as he does not
like being handled. We have brought him so that he can act as a guard for the
sheep in the lambing season. At present he does not look much of a guard or a
warrior. Our moorit ram chased him round the paddock until the novelty wore
off. He is also white, a colour his name does not suggest, but he has a good
spinning fleece so we cannot complain. Coloured alpacas are more expensive so
we will start with this one.

With all the sunshine
I am back to garden work. Today I finally dug out the zucchinis and transplanted
the remaining garlic and onions so that we have another bed clear for
replanting. I will need to put more composted manure in first and some lime.
Our ride on mower that pulls the trailer for fetching compost has broken down
in un-obvious ways so we borrowed a friends trailer and took it to the garage
yesterday. We are all a bit lost with out the mower. Edd uses it for transport
around the farm to save his sore knee, I use it to mow the grass and cart heavy
things and the grandkids use it as a go-cart. No wonder it is over worked and a
bit battered.

All our goats selected
for this year are now mated with some of them into the second month of
pregnancy. They take five months to produce so in theory we should be going
into the quiet time of the year, with less dairy work. In reality I am still
making cheese twice a week. I think that after this year we will get a Boer
goat for mating so that the kids will be more suitable for meat production. My
herd is now full of really good goats and I keep the best of them up to ten
years before they go to retirement homes.

The youngest chooks
have still not started to lay but the others are doing well. So far we are
keeping the fox at bay, but I can smell that they have been nosing around when
I do the morning feeds. Our dogs are living next to the chook run during the
day when they are free range and they give an alert if anyone or anything comes
near them that they are not sure about. It is possible to get a maremma sheep
dog to live with the sheep as a guard but I think the cost would be fairly high
and it might be dangerous to children.

We have kept sheep
here for thirty-five years and it was only last year that the usual protection
methods failed.