Boots / Calves / Queens
Posted: Monday 6 August, 2018
Monday 30 July
Warm and sunny with showers – watch the grass grow. Ace is courting Annie again – 21 days after their first “romance”. This is good news and bad news – bad news that she didn’t hold last time but good news if she holds this time – because that will move her due date to 10th May, by which time, the cattle will be turned out. If she comes back in another three weeks, I’ll be gutted.
Blizzard is giving almost 18 litres of milk a day. Cheese making will be starting very soon. Gwenna is doing her best to help with the milk lake.
Gwenna.
Decided to have Gwenna spayed – she’s bonny and has a terrific nature but she’s just not a good enough example of the breed to take pups from. She’s long and skinny – like an eel. She can get through tiny gaps in fences and under gates. We’re having it done keyhole, so she’s going in on 10th August.
Jarred the beetroot I cooked yesterday and Dan finished the design for Dalmore Croft labels.
Did the paperwork and some Festival stuff.
Dan went strimming and to the skip. Hard to know how he stands the excitement lol
Tuesday 31 July
Lovely misty morning today, then sunny. Did general pottering and a bit of a tidy up. Baked for the farm walk tomorrow.
Wednesday 1 August
Dan cut the back lawn today – first time for 6 weeks. There wasn’t much to cut but it really tidied it up.
Did out first farm walk today for two families – we think it was successful!
Thursday 2 August
Very close and muggy this morning but the sun got out later and lifted it a bit.
Blizzard was so thrawn this morning; took ages to get her in.
Wrote my article for Smallholding magazine and wrote some book reviews – we get unsolicited books to review and sometimes it’s hard to find time to do it. Of course, I’m not obliged to, but I don’t like letting folk down.
I got new boots. Simple pleasures.
New boots.
Friday 3 August
Ross gave me a contact number for an electrician; we want three more strip lights put in the barn. He came down today and is doing the work next week. Yay!
Started to turn out and defrost the freezers –won’t be long until they start to fill up again.
Cleaned out three henhouses.
Saturday 4 August
Really enjoyed the Intro to Smallholding course today – lots of folk now looking to support small-scale, local food production from their smallholdings.
Ruaridh and Rocky are growing well.
Ruaridh and Rocky
Sunday 5 August
Another good Intro to sheep keeping course. Alistair, our chum and vet, does the health session of the course but after he’d finished he, Dan and Alistair’s eldest daughter, Sabine, went off to try and find the queens in a couple of our hives. They were successful. We now have two Buckfast queens and one daughter of a Buckfast queen and one legacy queen, but all four seem to be working well.
