Yesterday we welcomed our first of two llamas to our farm. Our second llama doesn’t arrive for another 3 weeks or so.
What’s his personality like? Very curious and willing to please. The trainer spent over two hours in the 90+ degree heat and 1,000% humidity teaching us how to work with him and what commands he knows.
He does have a huge swollen shoulder from an injection they gave him. I feel like this so commonly happens to me with animals and it’s so weird b/c I feel like people who think vaccines are awesome don’t have half the vaccine troubles I seem to experience with the animals that come to me vaccinated before I have a chance to move them over to my organic and holistic approaches. UGH. Bentonite clay poultices it is. Ledum. Thuja.
He definitely will take some time to adjust. He is TERRIFIED of the pigs. The trainer told us as he was leaving to expect humming sounds. Instead what we woke up to today was loud shrill siren sounds. He’s panicking about the pigs that are two pastures away from him! But I’ve seen other people have llamas with their Kune Kune pigs, so surely he can calm down eventually.
We are already envisioning our llama trekks and llama picnics and eventually some day llama carting.
What else is going on this week? Another full week of farm tours (and booked through mid-week next week). Record breaking temperatures expected this week is not a good mix with the farm tours. UGH. That’s been the only bad thing about the farm tours is that it’s already too hot to offer them past about 11am.
The bucklings got moved to the old buck pen which also got expanded in the past two weeks. Christine has been busy, busy expanding fencing, cutting down mesquite trees, building a new indoor enclosure for a few goats that aren’t getting along with the others, and putting up fencing for the llama. We also put up fans and misters for many of the animals (but not the goats because they hate water).
We had some visitors over this past weekend who are interested in moving to our tiny home community. They came in from out of state and spent a good hour and a half with us walking the property (we did take a drone video a few weeks ago but unfortunately our internet has not allowed us to upload it yet!). They don’t care too much for animals (we did get asked why we have so many goats, oops!) but they are very much into the gardening/permaculture things that we are terrible at. Did I mention I killed my tomato plants? Boo. Strawberries? Dead. The potatoes are the only things working out for us aside from all our meat animals. I’ll blog more about them next…stay tuned.