One Quiet Country Weekend

This entry is created to showcase various photos from a delightfully ordinary weekend.

Haying the field across the street began with cutting on Friday. All day long the tractor labored around the field, cutting swath after swath of hay. I was impressed with the amount of work that goes into a single bale of hay. Throughout the weekend trucks pulling flatbed trailers hauling the different equipment needed for the job passed regularly along the highway.
On Saturday it was teddered... ...and baled. Late that afternoon we enjoyed watching a hot-air balloon floating over the newly-hayed field.

On Friday while I collected sifted soil from underneath the protective tarp down front, the Leo-BullyBob tag team wandered over to stupervise for a bit. Each day lately I’ve tied the boys in pairs: the fainters, Joshua and Whiskey; and the dwarfs, BullyBob and Leo. They hustle down from their night enclosure to meet me at the gate, then spend the days browsing the front acres. This system works far better for me than tying them out, and I think they prefer it as well.

As usual the girl goats headed into the woods, closely minded by Heidi and Molly. (Luther spent the entire weekend in timeout in the home pasture because he and Heidi keep slipping out to wander. This started when I had the fence off mid-week because the equipment to pump the cement from the truck into the workshop-in-progress’s foundation snapped a wire as it entered our fenced area. Unfortunately, though, turning the fence back on again was not enough to contain the dogs. Indeed one evening’s late barking and clucking alerted me to problems and I went out to find Luther acting silly and Heidi with a bloody paw and a dead Buff Orpington pullet at her feet. Now the poultry are again being locked in safely at night, after many weeks of 24/7 free-ranging.)

Saturday brought another few bouts of neck-wrestling between the alpaca boys.
Shawn mixed it up first with Romeo and later with Hamilton. During their fights they often bite at one another’s feet and/or genitals. (Our operations manager discourages them from the latter practice, facetiously claiming that they’re trying to “cut into our profits.”) As sweet and gentle as alpacas first appear, they are very athletic animals—probably the fittest on the farm.
The photos attest to their quick maneuvers while wrestling, quicker than the photographer’s reflexes or the camera shutter’s speed.

Finally, Sunday afternoon brought territorial battles over the truck's bed. Although we often use it for hauling wood, hay, fencing, and the like, the chickens thought it would make a good nesting site. It took several attempts to convince them to look elsewhere.