I should let you know that the large franchise found in Perth- City Farmers- is not actually us. And, while neither myself or my husband Mark had any farming experience before we came to Diamond Forest Farm Stay, we have, over the years developed many skills, techniques and a good knowledge base to ensure our animals are all healthy and well looked after. However, there are days when it feels like the name City Farmers really should apply to us; where one thing after another goes awry and I’m quite sure that our guests and our animals are looking at us like we are complete idiots. One such day was Alpaca shearing day.
Once a year our alpacas get their annual haircut, dental, pedicure and vaccination. Our alpacas are generally easy to herd around and we have professional alpaca shearers, Tania & Travor Gellatly from All About Alpacas, come in and basically do all the hard work. All we have to do is get the alpacas up to the round yard. Easy peasy.
This year it was all going to take place just after our Daily Animal Feeding which would finish at approximately 9.30 am. The plan was that Mark and I would both do the animal feeding as per usual until we got to the alpaca paddock and then Mark, with the help of my visiting nephew, would herd the alpacas up to the yards to be ready for our alpaca experts.
The first thing to not go as planned was that my nephew, as is typical of most teenagers, slept in and entirely missed the animal feeding. We were not too concerned. Our alpacas have never proven much of a problem to herd around so Mark was confident he could do it on his own. Things got a little trickier when one of our sheep, Bart, was in with the alpacas rather than with the other sheep.
Bart decided that wherever the alpacas were going was good enough for him so he decided to tag along. So did Houdini, one of our goats. A little bit embarrassing that we can’t keep our animals in the paddocks they are supposed to be in. But it didn’t end there. As Mark moved the alpacas through the sheep paddock he managed to ditch Bart and Houdini where both of them got a good feed along with the rest of the sheep. I figured we could always move Houdini back to his own paddock later and moved my little group of guests along to the next paddock to feed our cows.
Everybody was looking forward to bottle feeding our little orphan calf, Leia. Apparently Bart and Houdini were keen on it too, because the next thing I knew they were in the cow paddock, much to the amusement of our guests. At this point Mark had managed to herd the alpacas up near the yards with the help of one of our alpaca shearers. But all was not going to plan there either. Somewhere nearby a tree fell. . . . and all five of our alpacas bolted . . . . .in the wrong direction almost all the way back to their paddock.
As we had nearly finished the animal feeding we decided to get the guests to assist us with the now very nervous alpacas. Our two dogs, totally untrained in any actual farm work other than greet the guest duties, decided that it was a grand game and got in amongst the alpacas in what appeared to be an attempt to have a race!!. Despite both Mark and I trying to call off our dogs it took until we were nearly at the yards before we had our dogs under control and we managed to herd our very upset alpacas into the yard. While our guests didn’t seem to mind at all and, in fact seemed to enjoy participating in an activity they would normally not get to be a part of, both Mark and I felt every bit the ‘city farmer’ that day and a little bit embarrassed with our ‘comedy of errors’.
In the end, however, our alpacas did get to have their haircuts and the following morning, by animal feeding, both Bart and Houdini had managed to find their way back to their own paddocks. Maybe we’re not such bad farmers after all.