Lambs meet pigs

Sunday was pretty much a perfect day.

I've already posted about taking our first honey. But the day had been pretty special even before that.

Limpy The Lamb no longer has a limp so it was time to take the lambs to their new home, further down the land. The followed Sue with gusto. In fact, Sue had to run to keep up with them. They went straight into their new enclosure and we quickly closed off the electric fence and connected it back up again.

Easily led.

Happy in their new home.

It wasn't long before the pigs realised they had some new close neighbours. They were straight over to the fence to investigate. What surprised me even more was that one of the lambs was equally as inquisitive and went straight up to them. It showed no fear whatsoever.

Of course, it wasn't long before one of the noses touched the electric fence. As it happened, it was the lamb's. It was enough to keep it from crossing but didn't seem to cause a great scare.

I spent a couple of hours just relaxing in the grass, watching the lambs, pigs, chickens and guineafowl.
Once I was happy that they wouldn't escape straightaway (I wonder how long it will take them) and that they were happy I turned my attentions to moving the geese into their old paddock now that it had been vacated by the lambs.

The first thing they did was to stick their heads back through the gate to get at the grass where they had just come from! But it wasn't long before they settled in and cleared the paddock of buttercup flowers. In fact, they seemed to enjoy these most, closely followed by the racemes of seeds atop the taller stems of grass. This is the advantage of mixed grazing, as different animals graze different plants in different ways. It's also advantageous to move grazing animals onto new areas on a rota as this stops parasites building up in the ground by breaking thier lifecycles.