What day is it? - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Friday 11 July, 2014

by Rosemary Champion at 2:00pm in Smallholding 2 comments Comments closed

OK, I've now lost track of the days :-)

Wednesday, we split off the seven gimmers, Crovected them and took them up to the bloke we buy our hay and straw from. He's fenced off a nice wee paddock for them and his youngest laddie's going to keep an eye on them for us. It's a bit long, so he's going to top it as well. It's a good sheltered paddock so I might winter some sheep up there too.

No idea what we did the rest of the day, but we were busy. I  milked Annie; she's very good but I could get zilch yesterday. She was much better today and I'm going to try making some soft cheese tomorrow.

And Smokey's sound. And my new DVD has arrived - thanks, Claire. It's Pat parelli with a bloke called Nate Bowers. I now need to make time to watch it and put it into practice.

Thursday we had the ewes (12) and lambs (21) in; the lambs got their second dose of Heptavac, wormed / fluked and all thirty three of them got Crovect on. They'll be going back to the rented grazing as soon as Dan's topped it (planned for Saturday). The sheep handling equipment is getting better use now - we haven't quite got the layout right but we're getting there.

Next thing will be weaning in August. I am minded only to take the tup lambs away and let the ewes wean the ewe lambs themselves. The ewes are hardly thin :-) I've sold six of this year's ewe lambs at weaning but I'm keeping eight. We had twelve lamb this year; two are cull and one, maybe two, are retiring so with the seven gimmers, that'll be fifteen to the tup this year with eight coming on for the following year.

Max and Dudley are feeling the pace. Dan couldn't get Dudley to come out of his bed last night, so that he could get Max's (the beds were piled on top of each other). All four dogs are flat out just now -the heat doesn't help.

Dan's been for hay, straw and deisel this morning; he's finishing putting the new guttering on the barn now. I'm going off to do a list of "wee jobs" - tying in raspberries, cutting back geraniums, cleaning out a water butt and throwing down some grass seed.

Just another day in Paradise :-)