21/12/2025
Our last alpaca walk of the year is just wrapping up 🦙 I had planned on doing one of those yearly review posts - a fancy reel, maybe some captions on photos, maybe even some scary face to camera action 😆
Alas, the lurgy got the better of me this week, I’m still not prepared for Christmas and life feels like one big 🤹 so here I am with an old school post instead.
As Digital Dopamine would remind me, an honest post is better than none at all.
Firstly THANK YOU - to everyone who supported us this year. Whether you volunteered, glamped, camped, came on a walk, bought a voucher, some manure, adopted an alpaca, brought your team or school, or youth group, or came on a retreat. We are so grateful! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - farming is hard, our overheads are high, so all your support means so much and keeps us going.
I do however want to reflect a little bit on all we achieved this year, because sometimes it just feels like pushing 💩 up hill without stopping to look back:
1. Carly Chandler-Morris continued to transition the farm to Camelidynamics (a more gentle handling approach) and natural alpaca care 🦙
2. We were featured on the BBC and ITV Anglia (TV and radio). Not something we planned for, but so fun!
3. We ran our first ever family farm mini festival and a women’s retreat. Both such wonderful highlights of my year.
4. We ran loads of women’s and men’s wellbeing groups.
5. We started to use more of our alpaca fleece 🦙 running knitting and felting workshops and running our first ever fleece open day.
6. Yoga and mindfulness with the alpacas returned bigger than ever with sold out classes.
7. We planted hundreds more trees with Treeapp and our wonderful corporate sponsors.
8. We ran another successful camping and glamping season (thanks Em).
9. We launched home ed days on the farm and ran visits for schools too.
10. We received some very generous funding from Cummins Inc to build a year round structure and do some much needed work on our ancient woodland. Thank you to everyone else who donated to our ancient woodland fund. The work starts in January 🙏
11. We got extra qualifications - first aid, safeguarding, care farming and Camelidynamics to be able to grow our not for profit care farming provision.
12. We welcomed so many people through the farm gates to connect with the 🦙, to nature, to each other, to themselves.
13. We launched trip adviser and have been blown away by the lovely reviews. If you want to send us a Christmas gift a review would be wonderful 😉
+ so much more! This is just off the top of my head.
Now it’s time to relax for a while and ponder plans for next year. The business will look a little different, but there will be plenty of opportunities to visit us still ❤️
Happy Christmas everyone and so much love.
Amy x
