Paddock rotation and Halter training

Good morning folks. Yesterday was a day for moving the Alpacas around. We tend to operate a rotation programme here at Easter-Wood, simply to ensure that the paddocks are kept in the best condition as possible. Each time they are moved across, the paddocks are cleaned and any long grass that has not been touched by the Alpacas, is mowed down to a reasonable level. It is a joy to see the antics of them once they have entered their "new" paddock. They run and prance around before settling down to graze again. I have noticed however that the grass growth seems to be slowing down a little and that tends to herald a fast-approaching Autumn!! Whilst the season is OK, it is the shorter daylight hours that I am not so keen on!

We are continuing our halter training of "Tin Tin" who is still fairly reluctant to be led on the lead. We have been introducing him to the halter and lead for a couple of months now and whilst he is happy with the halter, he still refuses to be led. I am sure that his reluctancy is due to the fact that we didn't start the training until he was over 1 year old. We will of course persevere.

Well, we are now the proud owners of 8 chickens and so we will at least have our fair share of eggs from now on! Sheila and Marion (her sister), picked up the chickens yesterday and I have to say, they look very healthy birds. After we had put them in their chicken house for a bit, we opened the door and gave them the opportunity to venture out. This just didn't happen so we took them out one by one and having experienced their new found freedom, they seemed to be very happy wandering around, pecking at the grass and some thistles along the fence line. Anyway, we are looking forward to our first "Easter Egg"!!

And now for something different!!.......We had heard recently that it was possible to use Aplaca dung as a log substitute! Apparently if you compress the dung pellets into a log shape and dry this out, it will burn like wood, so armed with an old baking tin, I attempted to make an Alpaca dung log! Whilst the compression worked fine and the subsequent "log" was created, it broke apart easily once it had dried out! Not a success I am afraid so I will have to conduct more research on the matter. If anyone has tried this and been successful, I would love to hear from you!