I’ve been hard at work for months cutting the broom bushes that proliferate in the pasture and choke
I’ve been hard at work for months cutting the broom bushes that proliferate in the pasture and choke out the grass (in summer they bloom bright yellow and are pretty but infested with ticks…) and clearing brambles and shrubs to make room for the donkey’s shelter and a chicken coop. So I had large piles of green waste all over the place, and my big January task was to burn them. First I had to make an appointment with our local firesetter—a town hall official whose job is to go from farm to farm setting things on fire and then extinguishing the fires properly (in French he is known as l’incendiaire, a very cool job title.) After he ascertained that I wasn’t a pyromaniac and wasn’t in an at-risk area (my land is very wet), I got his green light to make fires by myself. I penned the llamas in the corral the first time; the second time I just left some hay near the gate so they would be busy and stay away; eventually I realised that they don’t care a fig about having a big fire in the middle of their pasture. (The donkey does. Pirlouit is v. suspicious and has not once in his life assumed that humans know what they are doing.) But llamas are surprisingly chill—once they trust you and think of you as a bold and worldly llama they just follow your cues, so if they see you serenely standing near the fire they will decide that this thing is not to be feared, and will come and watch it with you. -- source link
#crawling along