The last day of January is here already. Summer can't be far away now as the local irrigation company have sent their bills out for the coming year, for the privilege of irrigating about 20 acres of the 25 which we own, we pay just over $1000 per year.

We only have two crops if you can call them that. We have the pasture grass which the alpacas munch on while roaming about and we have the hay grass from which we make hay for winter.

One thing I have learnt from alpaca farming is that if you go into a pasture at any time and look at the combination of weeds, grasses and legumes growing, then that combination will pretty much be the ideal combination for this temperature band and soil type.

Anything you plant will flourish then eventually decline back to where it was in the first place.

Unless you also adjust one or more of the following:

The amount of irrigation water used.
The nutrients available in the soil.
The number of weeds.

So think very carefully before spraying herbicides, applying fertilizers or just the amount of water you put out in the summer.

The plants growing in your alpaca pastures are a very carefully balanced mix and destroying one will almost always cause another to flourish in its place. Now usually we expect this to be the grass seeds which we just planted but the truth is that we can never be truly certain.

If you think about it its obvious really.

Adrian Stewart