Estancia Los Potreros

We woke up this morning to a landscape dusted with snow, to cap off one of the more extraordinary weeks up here on the estancia.

The week started with unseasonably warm temperatures, up to about 30C, so we were all pottering around in our T-shirts, whilst our fruit trees sprung into blossom, despite us being barely out of winter. Unfortunately with the hot weather came one of the big threats that happens in our winter months when we have no rain - bushfires.

After the driest winter in the province for 30 years, everything is tinder dry, and at the beginning of the week some fairly serious bushfires took hold, burning over 100,000 acres of the beautiful sierras. This time we were lucky, as the fire swept through north of the farm, but out intrepid gauchos still worked through the night to help our neighbours protect their land and their livelihoods. After passing us by, the fires burnt relentlessly on, the top story on all the news channels in Argentina, heading towards the tourist valley of La Punilla.

A drop in wind, and our unexpected snow, finally put them out, and we all let out a collective sigh of relief! Roll on the first rains of spring . . .meanwhile, Norman has been enjoying the snow!

We believe here that every animal here needs to have a job and earn its keep.

Here you can see ‘Norman’, the latest addition to the Begg family, extremely hard at work keeping our guests happy . . .

This little fella is the odd one out . . .he has 4 black brothers and sisters! Congratulations to Pippa and Harvey, two of our lovely labs, on the arrival of their new family!

A lassoing practice session in the corrals results in some interesting techniques and some rather bemused looking calves. Despite this, one of our guests Ingrid managed to ‘catch her cow’ first time round, much to the embarassment of our experienced gauchos who took just a little longer . . .

Kevin and Lou are pleased to announce that they have become grandparents!

Menta (aka Fluffy) the cat, yesterday proudly gave birth to four healthy kittens on the end of the bed! Given their mixed parentage (fluffy, ginger, grey and white mum - noisy Siamese dad) we were slightly concerned what they were going to look like, but there are two pretty tortoiseshells and two black and whites . . . one of whom came out complaining loudly like his Dad!

For any of you that know Los Pots we don’t need much of an excuse to break out the champagne and so we will be toasting the new arrivals this evening . . .

2 years young today . . .

Well, the last few days we have lost and found quite a few things here on the farm!

LOST - one little black and white lamb

FOUND - one little black and white lamb, upside down, legs in the air, in a fence post hole

LOST - one leggy foal, who didn’t come in with the others when brought in at night

FOUND - one leggy foal, down a large ´hole’ at the bottom of a stream bed, unhurt, just slightly surprised (found after 3 hours searching in the pitch black!)

LOST - 100 black cows, reported heading down to the local town

FOUND - 100 black cows, safe and sound at home. It was our neighbour herding his own cows that caused the fuss!

Never a dull day . . .