Quarter House Alpacas
The cria have been growing well since their early arrival in the summer and as we weigh them every week, it has been interesting seeing the differences in the weight gains. The one exception is our lovely white male cria Tonto, who was born to Philly, (our rather large and very friendly girl). His weight gains have been much slower, as his mum doesn’t seem to be producing very much milk for some reason. We even saw him sneaking an extra drink from Twiggy whose Cria is a similar colour, but that has now stopped so maybe he got caught out and was shoo-ed away once too often.
In mid-September for the first time, Tonto failed to put on any weight, so a rescue plan has sprung into action, and once again, we find ourselves starting to bottle feed a white cria, just like last year with Hosta. Luckily, Tonto still has his mum around, and she is very laid-back about it all, but he’s taking a while to get used to drinking from a bottle. We think he is still getting some milk from his mum so hopefully we won’t have to supplement it too much, but I foresee more late nights wandering up the field with a torch and a bottle in all weathers for the next few months
After the shearing in May we sent most of our fleeces away for cleaning and combing (‘carding’) and three large boxes of carded fleece have finally arrived. It has come in mats around 30 inches by 15 weighing nearly 200gms and they are beautifully soft and lovely blends of browns and black. We took them to an Open Day at a large Alpaca farm in Hawkhurst at the beginning of September, where they attracted a lot of interest. We have now started selling the `mats` at £5 each and they are proving very popular with spinners and felters. If anyone is interested, our details are now in the new Wittersham Rural Business Partnership (WRBP) directory, on the village web site or our own website. We enjoyed hosting a meeting of the WRBP in the summer to explain to other members all about how Alpaca farming can work as a business. It was probably the only wet evening we’ve had for months, so we had to spend most of the time in the barn, but I think everyone enjoyed it nonetheless.
With this year’s mating over we had tried to put our two studs back in the fields with the other boys, (having separated them to prevent them picking on the little boys). All seemed OK for a while, but we have just rotated the fields and that seems to have unsettled things, so they are split again. Hopefully they’ll all be happily back together again soon, but devising suitable patterns to keep the girls away from the studs, as well as resting some fields is again proving an interesting challenge. Life is never dull with Alpacas.