A vet visit, A new purchase and more DIY.

I am sad!! Easter-Wood Polaris will not succeed as one of our herd sires. Despite having a terrific phenotype, fineness of fleece and a great Sire, the crimping is simply not good enough to pass on to his progeny so we have decided to give him the proverbial chop! This decision was based purely on our breeding programme and the ability to produce exemplary, elite cria. Our focus is to create the best that we can and whilst it seems a rash decision, his cria would not be up there with the best!

Whilst our vet was here, we asked him to do the honours with the ear tagging and microchipping on our 2010 crias as well. I did attempt to do the microchipping myself last year but frankly struggled with the size of the needle so as the vet was here....!!

Of late, we have had a fair amount of success in using eBay and since we were in need of another mobile Hay Feeder, we conducted a search and found one that appeared to be fairly new in Sussex. It is always an entertaining exercise with these auctions and managed to secure this feeder at a very competitive price. This week, we hitched up the trailer and took a ride out to Heathfield in Sussex to collect it. It is now sitting proudly in our Elite Australian's paddock!

For some reason, we are prone to a few power interruptions/surges here at Easter-Wood and every time this happens, the RCD's in the power distribution panel trips off and subsequently seems to damage the individual power circuits for the CCTV camera's. This happened again last week and the net result is a need to purchase another power supply!! So annoying (and costly)!! I am re-positioning the cameras along with their controls this week so I am hoping that this will make a difference!

We also finally managed to fit the guttering onto the cabin last week. The amount of rain water that had been cascading off the roof was amazing and presented us with a constant challenge having to face a "curtain" of water when trying to get in or out of the cabin. So, the guttering couldn't be put off any longer and I owe Barry, my brother-in-law a big thank you for helping me out (in fairness, he did most of it!). Anyway, allowing the rain water to drain off the roof was only the first part of the solution, the next was; where to pipe it? We decided that as there is a water ditch around our farm, the most sensible solution was to direct the rain water into the ditch. The problem with this however is that between the cabin and the ditch, there is a steep mound which would require a substantial amount of digging.......hand tools were certainly out of the question! We hired a man and a digger for this exercise and once we had accurately calculated the "fall" of the drainage pipe and excavated the trench, we laid the pipe and back-filled it.......Great job. The following day, it bucketed down and hey presto, it worked!!

We are looking forward to a fun day out at next weeks GWR fleece show. It will be good to meet up with old friends again and no doubt, catch up with news, etc. Sheila has spent the last few months really focusing on garment production and so plans to have many "knitting-related" conversations with a few of our friends.

Off to feed the pacas now, so will be back.