The Journey: Winter arrived

Winter is here, but these are from a few days
ago. You will have to wait for daylight for
snowy pictures

As I write the snow is coming down quite thickly now. We've had snow before already this autumn/winter but it didn't last long and something we expect at this time of the year. This snowfall may last a while though as the temperatures are set to plummet. I managed to dig up the carrots, leeks and parsnips at the weekend. Hopefully I found them all under the light blanket of snow. This morning I harvested the kale and savoy cabbage as there is no guarantee I will find them once we have a thick blanket down on the ground.

A frost covered savoy cabbage

Frosted mallow plants

I haven't had the chance of getting my flower and herb beds protected with spruce coverings but maybe I can do that at the weekend. The plants won't need the protection from the cold at this time of the year as the snow will do that but they may need it in the spring as the snow melts and they may need protection from being eaten by deer.

The deer nearly ate my water lily one year, but this
year they would have difficulty getting to it.
I love the abstract effect of the autumnal colours
frozen under the water.

How can one little cat cause such a fuss?

At least the fences have all been taken in, as it is difficult to taken in an electric fence once it snows and it could be broken by the weight of the snow, as well as a tripping hazard once the snow gets really deep and we forget where it is. The boys was taken in after their little escapades and they haven't been allowed out of the paddock since. They moan from time to time but I think they mainly realised that it's that time of the year anyway and if not, they will now. They don't like to go far in the snow. The girls' fence was taken in yesterday due to the forecast of up to 20cm of snow.

An alpaca eye, Jakobs

Lolly is quite tall and getting very fluffy. She
will need all that fleece next week to keep warm.

Despite the on and off bits of snow we've had, the weather has been quite warm in between at least most of the time and so we've not had the urgency of moving out of the caravan yet. We will this week as it is getting too difficult to prepare an evening meal with the cold and dark. Some warm water on tap sounds wonderful right now. I don't ask for much do I? One of the reasons for not being in a hurry is that Lolly also still needs feeding and she is still getting a late night feed. However, this evening she challenged Chanel for a tray of food and so this will help to fill her over the night, along with the hay of course. She is one of the earliest to start eating the granular feed and will just about manage that from Ian's hand now.

Josefs is Lolly's half brother and he's quite tall too

Ilvija can be quite timid, but definitely seems to
have learnt how to avoid being handled from her
mother

This morning Ian managed to get Chanel and Ilvija separated. Chanel is still very protective of Ilvija and that makes it very difficult to trim Ilvija's toe nails and do anything else that needs doing. This morning Ian wanted to check her front teeth and there certainly seems to be a problem with them. It is as if they are rotting away and yet just a month ago they were perfectly fine. We now have to try and work out what the problem is or whether she has been kicked and we hadn't noticed. At least in a white alpaca if there is any injury it is easy to see, but not so easy with a dark alpaca. We also did take the advantage of trimming her toe nails but she was a very squirmy one - probably because she doesn't get used to being handled due to her protective mum.

Her mother can be sweet too, but we are oh so
wary in case she gets upset and starts spitting.

Raspberry leaves

Antonia sunbathing! In the frosty morning!

I saw a house sparrow here on our land for the first time recently. Ian has seen them before but not often. So what! It does mean that the bird diversity is increasing here, which is good. Sparrows are not that common on our land and I've seen more eagles and buzzards than sparrows in the rural areas. At the moment the most common bird is the coal tit but there was a surprise one morning when I looked out of the caravan window and saw a crested tit land on the grapevine. It was more of a shock because the caravan is in our greenhouse and the doors were shut. Not sure how it got in. We had to leave the doors open for it to escape before our cats found it.

Frosted pine needles

There's a scary cat over there says George.
George is a bit of a wimp when it comes to the
mud. Before they were locked in their paddock,
for bad behaviour, they would have to go through
a gate with a muddy puddle in the middle. He
would delicately pick his way around the
puddle.

Our internet is back up and working properly now that the lockdown has finished. I guess a lot of folks went home, or maybe it doesn't take a lot of people to slow down our internet. I don't know. What I do know is that we now regularly get 4 or 5 Mbps but we get even more in the morning, around 10-20Mbps. I went back to our apartment for a meeting the other day as it wasn't appropriate to do that in the caravan and I got a whopping 54Mbps - bearing in mind this is a mobile internet we are using and not a fixed line one. Shame it couldn't be like that all the time, it would make some of the work I do a lot faster.

I think this is the horehound.

Mr. P contrasts nicely with the

frosty grass

This will be put in the barn for some tender
loving care over the winter, but first we need it
to get plywood to fix it and to take stuff back
to the apartment - providing there isn't too much
snow.

Ian's been busy too. He's been fixing broken feeders, putting a rubber skirt on the barn door -made from the divider that was in the horse box- to stop snow and wind from blowing underneath, helping other alpaca owners with their alpacas, recovering the haystack with a breathable synthetic felt cover to replace the brittle plastic (I also helped with that) and last but not least trying to order a summer house, which will be a step up from the caravan and mean we can work on constructing a kitchen that I don't have to worry about the cats getting into. The only problem is that we haven't heard back as we decided to try and go for the self-build option as the built option was just outside of our price range. I would need to do quite a bit more proofreading to pay for that.

A close up of George

Our caravan is in there!

Having the caravan spare though means we can have people to stay, particularly those who will help us with the alpacas. Now that will be good - not sure if it will work or not but at least the option is there. Ian did get a surprise message from two French students studying some veterinary related course but he's not heard back from them. Probably put them off with the rather basic accommodation, even if there will be a caravan.