SUMMER DAZE (DAYS)

Here we are in the middle of Summer - regular 37 degree days.  It's was time to pull out the corn and tomato plants and let the vegetable garden beds rest till autumn.  Water is too precious to use on anything that is not producing food.  The herb garden however shows no sign of heat effect with strawberry, eggplant, spring onion and sage thriving. 

The hot days are perfect for washing and drying alpaca and llama fleeces to get them ready for felting and spinning.  Three different fleeces are sitting in the sun drying today.  My friends Georgina and Michael who are llama breeders kindly provided about 20 fleeces from their 2010 shearing.  These have been stored in sealed white plastic bins in the shed to protect them from the mice. 

We're still learning about the alpacas - I noticed that Seve (aged 2) had lost one of his incisors and that a new tooth was sitting at the back.  However the new tooth is very discoloured, so I will be watching to see it develop and move forward.  The camelids regularly chew the bark off trees (must watch they don't ringbark the wandoos), so are able to dislodge old teeth. 

I gave the corn stalks which we had pulled from the garden to the camelids and it was hilarious watching Camilo running around throwing his head this way and that trying to dislodge a whole stalk hanging out of his mouth.  He had not contended with anything this long before and could not dislodge one of the leaves from his back teeth.  Very soon it fell out and I quickly jumped the fence with some secateures and chopped up the stalks before the same happened to any of the other boys.  This morning the demolition was complete and only the very hard stalks were left.

Finally some of our grape vines have reached the top of the poles and I have to train them to go back down inside the nets as we have flocks of galahs in abundance and they will just nip off the ends.
So on these hot summer days it's best to do all outside work before 10.00am and then turn on the fans and watch the Australian Open tennis with a cold Dietcoke and give the longsuffering puds some attention.  By 6.00pm it's possible to go back outside and enjoy the sunset as it cools down and the summer daze clears.