Just realised I've been posting away and not introduced myself....I live in Caithness now, having bought a croft with 11.5 acres of land which runs down to within about 200m of the cliffs here, just 10 miles south of Wick. My OH is characterised as a Duracell bunny for his seemingly limitless reserves of energy - myself - not so much
I am 60 and he is my toy boy of 59. Before moving here we had kept chickens (for about 3 years)and a couple of Pygmy goats (for about a year) and helped a local farmer by having three pet lambs on the bottle till weaning. OH spent a week with the farmer lambing but didn't actually even see a birth, although got plenty of practice ringing tails and testicles
So not huge livestock experience. However we agreed to take on the livestock on the croft as the previous owners had come to the end of their resources and just wanted to take the money and run, so we got 22 assorted sheep, 1 wethered angora goat, a fine looking cockerel, 4 buff hens and five month old chicks. This was at the end of October last year. We arrived to find every internal gate on the property open - so 8 rams - 1 registered Jacob, 2 Ryeland, 2 Soay and 3 Heinz 57s all chasing around the assorted ewes - 2 Blackface, 3 unregistered Ryeland and 7 mixtures. With 2 rigs added for good measure. So the last five and a half months have been a fairly steep learning curve for us both. We had joined the Scottish Crofters Federation last summer when we were still just looking for a place so we asked if there was someone nearby who would be prepared to mentor us and after a shaky start when we were advised to cull all the sheep as most of them weren't even tagged and we had no idea of their health status, we were sent our Crofting Angel who has endless patience with us. And a trained sheepdog, which we have managed without - the power of the feed bucket
So far three of the sheep have given us 5 live lambs completely unassisted and one stillborn. We have planted about 1300 trees. Someone gave us another 8 chickens and two of the original chicks turned out to be cockerels, which we re-homed. And now the girls are in overdrive laying. I spend about 2 weeks in every 6 looking after my father, who has Alzheimer's,in East Lothian, so I have missed out on two of the lambings, but I will be back home tomorrow so it will be my turn to do the night time checks for a while.
I realise I could easily be accused of over sharing here but that's what happens when I start. I'd just like to say that I LOVE this site and it's been so helpful already. And thanks to darkbrowneggs I now know what I want to do next when I'm too old for this crofting lark. Thank you all. Oh and the name Treud na Mara is gaelic for the crowd by the sea, which is our flock name, seemed appropriate as the house and croft are called Tigh na Mara - house by the sea. However a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and we now know that we are actually in the Norse area of Caithness (roughly north of Lybster) but in our defence I would say that we didn't name the croft! Enough already
Topic: Hello hello (Read 10207 times)
