New arrival, visit to the mill and a weekend off!!

As everybody knows, it is a real delight when the first cria of the year arrives and as always, we were excited at the arrival of our first for this year........ a healthy, 10.24kg boy from Memory of ACC out of Accoyo Remarque. We have named him Easter-Wood Aramis following on from our latest theme out of Alexandre Dumas's book, The Three Musketeers.

It wasn't a straight forward birth as we would hope and so we assisted Memory with her ordeal. As soon as the cria's head and part of his feet were presented, it was obvious that one foot was slightly back and to make matters worse, both of his feet were alongside his head and not above it! Once the feet had been manipulated into the correct position however, everything went to plan and she delivered without any further complications! Since Gemma, a new Alpaca Breeder and latest client of ours, was here at the farm, she was able to witness her first birth! We are expecting a significant number of cria this month so our lives are going to be pretty hectic during the next few weeks!

Having collected 25Kg of solid white fleece from this years shearing back in June, we took a trip up to Banbury a couple of weeks ago to deliver our fleece to Haggers Mill. Whilst there, Richard Hagger gave us a quick guided tour around the mill and I have to admit that whilst I have an engineering background, I was in total awe of the complex machinery that surrounded us! Anyway, we are looking forward to receiving the finished product from them.

At the beginning of this month, I went off to play a bit of golf in Devon. Along with my son Neil, my brother-in-law and another friend, we headed off to a long weekend of Golf, eating good food and enjoying the sunshine. I have to say that my golf wasn't up to much but the break, the food and the banter was much appreciated!! Whilst this was my second year at Ashbury (near Oakhampton), my son had not been before and upon arriving, he acknowledged that this was indeed a wonderful golfing mecca but observed that 98% of the guests were men! We have therefore nick-named it "Blokeland"!!

"A blokes weekend"!!

We have now taken delivery of another 40 large bales of  haylege for this year and it seems that not only is it most prefered by our Alpacas, it is cheaper than hay so it's a no brainer really...... ! We are also trying a new (to us) Alpaca/Llama mix from our local stockist. It appears to be somewhat similar to goat mix but certainly seems to be a favourite of the "pacas"!

Will return again soon.