Hello
I have just joined this website as my husband and I recently had a midlife crisis and decided to buy a small holding! We have been on the farm for 4 months now and are absolutely loving it. I finally feel like I have come home. The whole farm is just under 3 acres and broken up into various bits of garden and a paddock of almost 2 acres.
The garden part is fine and the veg patch that we hurriedly set up is doing fine, although a bit of sunshine wouldn't go amiss! We have also bought 3 pygmy goat wethers
for one area and so far they are great and we don't have any problems. Have only had them a week though! We are planning to add chickens too for eggs but will be back on another forum thread for that one!
I also decided to get 3 alpacas for the paddock as it looked really sad and empty with nothing in it! They are totally lovely but as the stocking rate for the field size is so low (I think I could put about 10 in there in theory) they are never going to keep control of the grass.
This is where my problems begin. I am not quite sure how best to manage the field. I have been given so many conflicting thoughts including getting sheep to keep the grass down (maybe in the future but not sure yet!) to making the field smaller for them which seems a bit mean and using the rest to make hay which seems a bit stressful at the moment.
I am also not sure whether to get a compact tractor or ATV to mow/top the paddock and generally be a use for other things. I managed to kill the ride on lawnmower trying o do it with that!
I would just be grateful for any advice or thoughts that any of you might have. Having read other comments on other threads there seems to be a wealth of real experience on this website.
Thanks
Julie