We've moved...

... to Wordpress.

Anne has spent quite some time working with Wordpress for her other literacy blogs and so to keep all our blogs in one place Alpacas of Lewis is transferring across.

You'll find us here from now on - http://alpacasoflewis.co.uk/

Thanks to all our followers and those who left comments. You should still be able to follow us at Wordpress through Blogger. New postings will appear under "Croft News" on the new site.

Final cria count

We were a little concerned that the last of our bred females was getting quite late and started to doubt she was pregnant at all. Then, on the morning the shearer was due to arrive, out popped a cria. The boys win this year with 4 boys v's1 girl.

Rose's new boy - still to decide on a name.

 

2 brown boys Padington and his uncle Noah

Jeffrey, a lovely fawn boy like his mum.

Rumer, our only girl this year.

The highs and lows of breeding

We're thrilled to announce that Nadia gave birth to her first cria this morning and what a gorgeous boy. Just love his rich brown colour. Once Nadia is shorn she is actually a similar brown but over the year her fleece fades with the sun.

The joy of our yet to be named cria was sadly over shadowed when only half an hour later we discovered Tara who wasn't due for another 10 days had also given birth but was pining over her motionless cria. We suspect she chocked on a piece of membrane which is upsetting as it could have been avoidable although we have been on cria watch for a couple of weeks now.

All we can do is be as vigilant as posible and hope things go better with our three remaining expectant mums.

First past the post is...

...Jasmine, with a lovely fawn baby boy. She's a week early so must have seen the weather forecast and decided not to hang about for it to change.

Hopefully, we'll have 5 more in the weeks to come but there is no guarantee. One or 2 of them don't appear to have much of a tummy but you can never tell.

We're on TV tonight!

A while back Mac TV filmed a piece with us for a programme about 21st century crofting. If you’re interested the programme is called Trusadh and will be on at 10pm tonight (3rd April), BBC ALBA (Sky Channel 168, Freeview Channel 8). We're on about 15 mins into the programme.

Toe in the Water

Last week, after many prototypes and various styles of hats, gloves, scarves, hand warmers etc... we took our favorite items to An Lanntair who agreed to stock our products. This is fantastic and a major step forward for us which now means that, all going well, we will soon be able to cover our alpaca costs and continue to build up our herd. We just checked with An Lanntair and they have confirmed that despite the time of year there has been a lot of interest and have sold quite a few of our items. Time to ramp up production I think... if only I knew how to knit!

We continue to get many enquiries on how our CF11 wind turbine is doing. It's now been running for 7.5 months and generated 20,000 kWh which is just about on target for us to meet our annual estimated generation. I previously mentioned the issue we had with our grid connection for the first 3 months so were only running at 6kW (50%). Well soon after, we were told we'd be getting a stronger pitch control actuator but until it was fitted we'd be restricted to about 175rpm or 8kW. I'm happy to say that although there were a few issues relating to the upgrade we are now properly running as an 11kW turbine and have just generated 1,000kWh in the last 4.5 days. Had we not had any of these issues I'm confident we would have / will generate in the region of 40MW per year. I'll be posting monthly generation figures here - https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pMgdBC-cyC82Xq-qAdpGMfw along with other turbine owners figures. See row 30.

I'm having to bite the bullet and get access to the turbine sorted. With the recent visits from C&F to sort it and the fun an games getting stuck in a boggy field I'm putting in a bit of a track accross the feld. This is me in the mini digger I hired and Harris doing his best to doink his sister (who is holding the camera) with the bucket!



A month or so ago, when walking our dog, I came accross what looked like an injured seal pup which had made its way up our shore and onto the track. It apeared to have blood about its jaw but was clearly able to get about and scurried back into the sea when it spotted us. I managed to get a quick picture before it was gone. A couple of days later I saw it again on the shore and thankfully it looked fine with no sign of any blood.