Carrots, concrete, cr*p circles.

We've been preparing for the return of the herd this weekend, and looking forward to it greatly. Each time I visit, one of them will have a bit of dead bramble clinging to their fleece, which grips tenaciously, and requires gloves to pull off. Although we've not had large amounts of rain, since they left, we have had several spells which were enough to get most of the grass growing after the spring slow-down. We've noticed that our latrines get larger and larger in diameter, which 'sterilise' large areas of otherwise grazeable pasture, and wondered whether it's because of our constant clearing - I've heard that males tend to keep their dung piles more compact, whereas our herd are all females. So, a little experiment: I've mowed around one latrine leaving a small area of longer grass, and mowed a patch inside another latrine, to see whether the shorter grass encourages or dissuades them. cr*p circles anyone?

Before that though, Ambrosia is entered at the Bath & West Show, and I'm looking forward to that particular class on friday. When feeding carrots, I like to tease her to maximise her prehensile lips, and tried to photograph them at full stretch - hence these odd photographs - well there's more to owning alpacas than just standing around, isn't there? She's a bit grubby after a wet day:

Work has continued apace on the Fibre Workshop and Studio, though it's all been groundworks, and two full skips of muck have been barrowed away, culminating today in a bit of concreting to extend the original floor slab into a complete rectangle, so not much to show in a photograph, but you're going to get one anyway - a couple of weeks until the timber frame goes up.