After the Storm

Saffi Puppi is fluffi: quick, take pictures before she is once again soggi and mucki.

Powered by Paca Poo

Today the heucheras and the Amelanchier moved home, along with a few other bits and pieces.

The drive in autumn

Serious garden work and planting always entails trips back and forth from the alpaca paddocks to acquire paca poo to add to the soil. Hence this is an alpaca blog post, for the sake of avoiding having two gardening posts in a row for the people who come here to read about animals.

Usually, alpacas defecate in one or a few places about their environment. Olivia is still restricted to a turkey pen as she gradually loses weight, which makes her manure very conveniently accessible, but I had already used it this morning. So I went down to the salad bowl where the dams with crias are.

Most of this grazing is still very long, and although they have grazed the edges and a strange spot in the centre, they hadn't poo'd there, and I wandered round and round with a wheelbarrow but could not find any! Rather than following them about for an hour or so until one of them needed the toilet, I went to the other paddock where the boys are.

Trident and Costa spend their time engaged in serious manly pursuits, such as horseplay, neck-wrestling, and humping each other. They don't live with the females. The lack of female company seems to have resulted in a loss of standards inherent to the disgusting bachelor lifestyle, because as it turns out, they don't appear to have be using certain areas for toilets at all, and there was poo all over the paddock like they'd just done it wherever they happened to be standing. Some time later, there was enough paca poo to go on the garden.

I can't move any more plants today, as I need to wait for my fertiliser supply to regenerate.

Ecce domus, quod est stercore foraminis

For reasons that were not anticipated, the entire garden on the west side of the house is having to be dug up to make way for groundworks, and all the shrubs are having to be transplanted to other places around the site. Autumn and winter are the best times to do this, so the work to relocate the garden commenced this weekend.

Nandina domestica

This part of the garden has not been maintained for a long time and the stone marking the edge of the path has become buried and overgrown, so in a way it is a good excuse to sort it out and make it nice again.

Acers and Tamarix tetranda

Chickens

These chickens are traditional copper French Marans. They come from dark brown eggs and a point of perennial fascination invoked in everyone who sees them is the colour, which is controlled by incomplete dominant alleles on a single locus. What this means is, there are two versions of a gene, one which causes black feathers, and the other which causes silver feathers. If an egg inherits two black versions, you get a black chicken. If it gets two silver versions, you get a silver/white chicken, and if it gets one of each, it hatches into a blue chicken. We always seem to end up with more of the black chickens than the other colours.

The Better Part of Autumn

It was a beautiful autumn day, but like any day in autumn it was benighted by rotting fruits. Although all the dogs like to sample the rotting fruits, Hobsey and Saffi it seems like to make a career of it, which is why they're both wearing muzzles in this video.

Adhara has recently lost her lovely fluffy coat, which happened for several reasons, mainly Saffi's horrible puppy coat and the work it entails and me doing something to my wrist. I don't know what is wrong with it, but the earliest GP appointment available is in 2 weeks time, and they will probably just tell me to go away and enjoy my middle age, like they usually do. I made a pig's arse of her new haircut, which I shall also blame on my arm, but hopefully it will look better when it's grown a bit. I am hoping Adhara will begin competing in agility next year. It did not happen this year because of general disorganisation along with several things cropping up.