Weight gain, gates and wilting.

Elstar has made good progress this week, putting on 2kg in 7 days! Bramley is being a great mother,and is clearly proud of her daughter, and even brought Elstar to meet some friends of ours who'd never seen alpacas close-up. Bramley has suddenly returned to being the friendly alpaca she was before pregnancy, when she became a bit stand-offish.

We have had them in the 'home' paddock for birthing, but the grass is dried, barren and like a dust bowl, so I've let them over the hill during the afternoon, as they use the shade of the shelter in the morning and we're waiting for another birth - Bramley went to the corner of the new paddock, looked over her shoulder for Elstar, who wasn't there, and turned with a look that said, " crikey, I've forgotten the baby" and ran back over the hill to find baby making her own way over!

I hung a pair of gates and fixed some more fencing over the weekend - doing it before 11 o'clock coffee break when it became too hot in the sun, and I wilted  - funny to think back to February when I was digging the trench for the fencing, and hanging the first gates, when the temperature didn't rise above -1degree, and I had to wear two layers of clothes.

One effect of the super-saturated ground over the winter, is that the fence posts have become loose, as the ground has dried and shrunk away due to the huge loss of moisture.

We had our fibre statistics back today which was very interesting, and a good test of our own hand analysis - without broing you with all of them, Moira, our maiden, and 12 years old today, as it happens, returned an 18.1micron with 97.1% Comfort Factor on 2 years growth! If only she could conceive...