The Journey: Done!

Baling finished as evening gathers.

Finally the haymaking is finished and the cutter, hay turner and baler are put away for the year. The hay is baled, stacked and under cover and we can relax a little as we now have more than we need. It is always good to have reserves in case of a bad year. Or maybe we just need more alpacas. Whoops! Did I just say that? I don't mean it. We have nowhere to put more alpacas except the old greenhouse and that is stock full of stuff at the moment - a job for a rainy day to sort out and there hasn't been much of that over the last week.

In the longest stack there are 150 bales of hay

Three stacks. That's a lot of plastic, but would be even more if
they were individually wrapped as you see in some fields. We
have re-used the plastic from last year too.

This cricket hung around and let me photograph him (or her),
it looks like something out of an alien film.

I've had a lovely couple of weeks off. It was nice just to be able to get in the garden and be available for haymaking without worrying about getting my university work done too. I managed to find the onions that needed harvesting in my vegetable garden gone wild and lots of potatoes in places where we hadn't planted them. I've also sown some more carrots and turnips in the hope that they will germinate and grow in the warm soil and be ready later on in the year. In the greenhouse I've sown some broad beans, cabbages and kale that will give us some late autumn salad leaves if nothing else. I have to sow them in the greenhouse since the mice ate a lot of my beans that I planted outside earlier on in the year and the cabbages will be eaten by lot of different bugs. I've been delighted to see that the brassicas outside have done remarkably well this year, normally they struggle due to our dry summers, but the rain that made haymaking difficult meant they have grown well, now we just have to keep the caterpillar onslaught in some sort of check. I'm not a fan of daily caterpillar squishing chores, but needs must as we say.

We are still waiting for the vet to come and
x-ray Turbjørn's neck. Hopefully he will come
soon, as we finally had contact again. Ian enjoys
giving Turbjørn a massage as he gets to cuddle him.
Amazingly for a very nervous alpaca that doesn't
like anyone nearby, including other alpacas and
can be very vocal in letting everyone know, he does
stand and let Ian massage his neck. He seems to
appreciate it. Turbjørn is a highly strung alpaca and
so this is quite a breakthrough really.

A pygmy grasshopper

We use permanent beds and try to dig as little as possible, but I think this year we will have to dig some beds over. They have got far too weedy, but also the mice and ants seem to have taken advantage of the lack of soil disturbance, which is something I didn't anticipate. Our cats are reasonably good at keeping the mouse population down in the greenhouse near the alpaca food, but not so good in my vegetable garden. Sophie though does seem to be in the process of controlling a weasel population, which we didn't know we have. Weasels are cute animals but not good when you have chickens, they can get through small holes and decimate a flock. So can pine martens as we found out earlier on in the year and we saw one of those this week scampering around in the evening before we put the chickens away. The main menace at the moment though is an eagle that seems determined to try and get through the netting to the chickens. It's had a chicken by the feathers twice, once last week and once this week. We just hope the netting around the ark holds up to the attacks.

A southern hawker dragonfly. I love the vibrant
pattern on this one.

Bargain flour... I think! 😂

Haymaking took up much of the early part of the week and we were grateful for some cooler weather when it came to collecting and stacking the bales. It's a hard job made worse in the high heat. We were even able to do the job over two days, which is a good when we had 269 of them to move. Even though they are very small compared to most bales, it is a lot of manual work. No rain was forecast but there were still some very dark and ominous looking clouds and so we were relieved to see them pass over and have all the bales under cover before the few spots of rain that did land in the night. There wasn't much rain though, despite the predictions, so now the ground is parched.

A mushroom

A common field grasshopper - maybe! Only it looks different
to the other one I photographed as it has a darker back.

Our friend took us out for a meal but after we
got back the animals needed some treatment
so on with the wellies and the head torch so I
could see what I was doing.

With haymaking complete it was good to have a friend of ours come down to visit us from Estonia, it meant we could sit and chat a bit, as well as have some help pottering around in the garden. There was a query as to whether she would be able to, as there had been a spike of Covid19 in Tartu, but it seems to be under control for now and we know she's pretty careful about avoiding too much contact. Travel is certainly more complicated these days and I don't really fancy the journey with the potential to get the virus but our friend came by car so a safer option. I wish it was that easy to get to see the grandkids.

Arachnaphobe alert: There are pictures of spiders below, look away if you don't like them. I still think they look amazing though and do a fantastic job trying to keep the fly population down.

Herkules and Freddie sporting the very useful cohesive bandages.
At least these have mainly stayed on. Herk occasionally scratches
his off, but we've found that if we spray some fly spray on, then
the flies stay away and he is less likely to scratch off his bandage.
The wounds are healing slowly. Freddie's bandage gets taken off
every third night and left to heal. Unfortunately we can't do that
with Herk's as he scratches at it. Slowly we are getting there.