Spring is Well and Truly Sprung

The spring equinox has passed and life here is moving into to gear.  Just a week ago I was waiting for the first blossoms to appear and now there are trees that are alive with the gentle hum of insects. It’s as though a big switch has been on and everything has burst into life.

Well not quite everything. As I’ve probably mentioned before, the weather here has been described as exceptional everyone of the 5 years I’ve lived here.  This year is no different.

February is the usual month for the cold snap when the winter frost usually gets a bit harder and we might go down to minus 6 or even minus 10C.  If it snows it only hangs around a day or so with the cold snap lasting only 2-3 weeks.

Up to the end of January it looked like a ‘normal’ winter, then the cold snap arrived,, bitterly cold wind from the north east and the temperature plummeted to minus 18C.  The snow fell and remained for over a week and my water to the house froze.  Outside was like being up in the mountains in winter, clear blue skies, bright sunshine but bitterly cold.

It didn’t trouble the Huacayas much, they just sat down, bottoms to the wind and actually seemed to quite enjoy it as long as their hay was topped up and the ice removed from their water. 

All but one of the Suris were in the barn and the only one out in the fields, Bethany, I’m sure felt the cold more than the Huacayas.  The other Suris had been in the barn since Christmas eve when I’d realised that one of them, Pandora, was extremely thin.  She’s been thin since I got her last month and I’ve been struggling to get weight on her all autumn since she gave birth but this was even more extreme.  The decision was taken to move her indoors as she would struggle to keep warm so thankfully when the really cold weather hit she was fine.

Once the weather looked like it was improving my sister and my thoughts turned to the water system.  My sister spent a couple of days gently warming the pump and pressure vessel but to no avail.  In the end, after warming, lagging to make sure it didn’t re-freeze overnight, and then warming through the day again we gave up and decided that if the underground pipes were frozen we would just have to wait from the ground to heat up a bit.

So we waited but it made no difference; but the good point about waiting was that it gave tie to go over the possible causes as to why it wasn’t working. Then finally the pump started working -hurrah – but we still weren’t pumping water.  I’d noticed that the manometer on the pressure vessel wasn’t returning to zero even though we had the tap on the top of the vessel open.  Originally I’d though it was reading 5 bar due to expansion of ice in the vessel but that didn’t make sense now so for the sum of 17€47 I bought a new manometer we had water again. 

Once the water was flowing it became obvious that there were no leaks in the system so despite having to spend a couple of weeks bucketing water from the well – which actually makes you realise what a luxury having running water is – we were very lucky.

In preparation for winter, I’d put up the new alpaca shelters. This is the third version I’ve made and it is by far the most successful.  It is very definitely a case of less is more.  My alpacas generally avoid the previous ones I made that were more like horse field shelters and I came to the conclusion that they don’t like what they perceive as enclosed spaces.  So for this version I’ve increased the roof area but only put up a solid side to counteract the main wind direction.  And so far, it seems to be a success; so over the summer I will convert the previous shelters.

A Spring Sunday in the Sun

 

Sunday here was glorious; a clear blue sky and sunshine so it was time to go outside and play.  I had a pile of wood and a recently purchased climbing rose…..

The rose tower, which is currently in the process of being painted with a wood treatment is 2m high and 40 cm square and hopefully will be sturdy enough to carry the rose.

Behind it is one of the two large fruit harvest boxes I purchased last year.  A friend of mine told me about the boxes and said they were around 60cm square and 50 or so cm high so I reserved a couple.  When I went to pick them up it turned out they were quite a bit larger that she had said, they are approximately 1m x 1m20 x 75cm.  In fact, having got them back home I realised they were really far to large.

My daughter, C, spent part of her holiday here last summer and spent part of it repairing the cases and painting them with preserver but since then they have languished outside as I had no idea what to do with them – they were to be small planters for a patio. 

I finally decided something had to be done with them before the grass started growing again and they would be in the way of the mower, and while walking round them I realised that with the addition of four more pieces of wood, I could cut them in half horizontally.  The top piece is destined to become a garden border into which the rose tower will be set while the lower piece will become a planter somewhere in the garden.  I will probably use one of the planters to give some height in a border and the other I am thinking about using as a peat bed so I can indulge in some acid loving plants in my limestone based garden.

An Early Start

 

Today I was up early, I’d ordered a delivery of fuel and previously I’d been first on the delivery schedule and the tanker was outside my door at 8am.  No tanker today but I was greeted with an amazing sunrise. 

Actually there was no delivery at all today, somehow my order had been forgotten so it will be an early start again for me tomorrow.

While there was a frost this morning it’s nowhere near the –18C we got down to during the cold spell.  That day is being described as the coldest for around 50 years so it looks like 2012 will be another of those years that are not usual.

During the coldest bit I noticed my oldest cockerel, Mr L was looking a bit dejected and hiding in the corner of the chicken shed.  I didn’t think too much about it as he’s at least 5 years old and I though he might be feeling his age.  The following day he was on the floor where I could get to him and that’s when I could see that something was very wrong.  Up until that point I didn’t realise that wattles could freeze but it turns out they can and Mr L’s large wattle was swollen and frozen solid, so much so he couldn't lift his head properly.

Once I realised the problem I brought him inside  in front of the range and hand fed him as the frozen wattle stopped him from being able to pick up food himself.  Once he had started to warm up we transferred him to the shower cubical – the only place big enough to contain him that was in the warm.  He remained there, or on the patio if it was warm and sunny, for a few days until the wattle had defrosted.  I then put him back in the chicken house as the really cold weather was over and he was missing his Lacey Ladies.  It’s taken about 5 days for him to settle back in but he’s now reclaiming his dominant place in the pecking order. 

The lower half of the wattle has withered but apart from that he’s better than he was before the cold spell.  I think Mr L had the problem because he had a magnificently large wattle and he probably got it covered in snow and then we had the deep freeze, but I now know that wattles can freeze, although hopefully I won’t need to worry about that for another 50 years.

5 Years and Counting

 

I’ve just celebrated 5 years of owning my farm; I’m not really sure if the time has passed quickly or slowly but one thing is certain, I don’t regret any of it.

There have been ups and downs, the birth of crias being one of the highs and the deaths of alpacas and my lovely cat Snowy being the main lows but as I generally say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.

So what about the next 5 years?  That is actually a really difficult question.  Earning a living in France can be a challenge well it is certainly one for me.  My plans are constantly evolving; what is easy to do in the UK, (where my initial plans were formulated), can be nigh on impossible to do in France without enormous expense.  For instance if I were to give up my farming status to just raise the alpacas for fleece, by law I wouldn’t be able to sell one bale of hay from my land, – to sell anything harvested you need to be a farmer and hay is classified as a harvest.  The auto-entrepreneur classification, (similar to self-employed) doesn’t cover anything that the farming departments regard as their domain.  The result of this is my plans are in a continuing stat of flux while I try to work out what I can do under which regulations and whether it will generate enough income.

All that said, and having passed the 5 year residency barrier, I’m off to the Marie today to get the forms to start my citizenship application.  Although even that is now in doubt; up until Christmas you only had to display a working knowledge of French but then the law was changed so you now have to pass an exam to demonstrate you are at the level of a 15 year old native speaker.  So anyone know what the French is for ‘What ever’?

Merry Christmas Everyone!

Well this is what I started writing on the 23rd December…. so no change here!

Well so much for trying to post more often,; in my defence I’ve had a busy year, but I think the phrase, “must try harder” applies .

I think a review of the missing bits of the year is called for – who knows, I might even get round to writing it too!

I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas.

Deborah x

Is it Autumn Already?

The weather this year has been odd, I think the most succinct description I’ve come across to describe it is; Summer during Spring, Autumn during Summer and Summer during Autumn.  And while the calendar might say October, the thermometer has been in the 30’s. 

I am loving the extra warmth this year but the lack of rain is more than worrying.  Sometimes it’s the obvious things that remind you, the great cracks in the ground as in the pictures above and bellow or the depth to which the well has dropped, other times it’s the less obvious that suddenly hit you, in my case it’s the access to part of my septic tank.  The lid used to be level with the ground, now it protrudes 5cm/2in due to the shrinkage of the soil around it – I suppose the good sign from this is that the tank isn’t leaking

Anyway, back to autumn, it’s migration time when I start scanning the skies for the cranes and storks migrating south for the winter.  So far I’ve not spotted any but I have been lucky enough to see a large group of golden orioles flit through the trees in the garden last month and yesterday it was 6 red kites flying south and then circling on a thermal just to the south of me.  They looked so majestic gliding effortlessly across a clear blue sky.

Moving the Alpacas

 

I wasn’t planning on moving the alpacas until I’d built the new field shelters but they have totally run out of grass in the old fields and while we’ve have had some rain over the last couple of days it’s been nowhere near enough to get the grass growing. 

The interim solution is to let the boys use the trailer as a shelter in their new field and to let the girls have access to the shelter in their old field from the new one.  Al and I moved them in this afternoon and they have been beside themselves eating the new grass.

Moving them entailed a fight with one of the castrated males, Dartagnan.  He can be a total pain and at one time thought he was in charge of me.  He was put in his place by Colin the shearer and I’ve been doing my best not to let him gain the upper hand again.

Dartagnan decided that first he’d stop the others boys from moving down to their new field.  Once we’d moved them round so the other 3 started on their way to the new field, Dartagnan decided he wasn’t going to follow and went to the far side of the old field and patrolled the fence where the girls were.  He wasn’t going to move and there was no way I could shoo him to the gate’ so I got the leading rein. 

He let me put it on him with only a little fuss but there was no way he was going to walk.  He’s my biggest alpaca and to be truthful I’m a little scared of him.  He’s also the most likely to spit, his nickname is ‘spitty boy’, well at least the only one I can write here is.  We then performed something like a dance along the edge of the field, and by positioning myself in just the right place,  when he moved it resulted in a step towards the gate.  It was taking time but we were moving in the right direction and then… he let me lead him!  He wasn’t particularly happy about it but he let me walk him round to where the other boys were at which point I took the rein off and all was fine.  And even better I only was subjected to a tiny bit of spit – more a case of some he had in his mouth rather than aimed at me.  A very definite success, well for today at least.

I’m still working on the field shelters; the uprights have all been cut to length – some the wrong length but that's life!  

In this picture I’m in the process of planing the bottom of the uprights to fit the metaposts – one third of them are done and I’m hoping to finish the rest tomorrow and paint them with the wood treatment.

After that there’s just the matter of another couple of cross members and another 30 or so, 4 meter long, roofing planks to paint and we’ll be ready to start the construction.