A merry Christmas from one and all
Christmas is almost upon us and as you can see, Daisy is certainly looking forward to it. As are we all.
We get a daily reminder when we go to feed the sheep each morning – our (German) Shepherds definitely like watching their flock!
Merry Christmas to you all, from the Croft.
New layers start laying
As our chickens have seen a few summers now, our egg production has dropped off considerably over the last couple of months. To remedy this, we got some new layers through a neighbour of ours around the middle of October – 8 shiny new pullets.
Although it has taken a little while for them to settle in with their ‘elders’, they are now starting to lay quite regularly despite the long evenings.
We won’t reach the dizzy heights of last year, where we ate so many eggs we were starting to resemble them, but hopefully we won’t go short either. We see a glorious menu of omelettes, cakes, etc ahead. Yummy!
Daisy settles in and joins the pack
October has brought rain, then some more rain, topped by even more rain!
Much of the croft is quite soggy, and whilst this does add some challenges to the daily feeding and husbandry routine, the dogs absolutely love their new water feature – a huge deep puddle/lake that has formed in the lower corner of the main field (pictured).
Daisy is settling in well, readily testing the boundaries of the other dogs (and us), and is also enjoying regular clicker training sessions. She certainly seems to be intelligent, even if her attention span is understandably short at the moment.
Unfortunately, the wet weather brings downs as well as ups, including the potential for a bout of footrot in our sheep. A regular inspection (including foot trimming, and tagging the lambs) revealed one of our new ewes with a minor case, so she has been temporarily moved into pen for treatment.
At the same time, Olive (this year’s Dexter calf) is avoiding the cattle pen with dexter-ity! Something has obviously spooked her in there, so she runs around the entrance instead of going in like the others do. Slowly, she is coming round though, which is just as well because a vets visit is imminent…
A new pup helps mend our broken hearts
Life has been slowly returning to normal at the croft, after a difficult August.
Two of last year’s lambs have been sent to the abattoir and should be back from the butcher shortly, and we recently acquired some broiler chickens for the pot (one of which has already been sampled!). Apples and plums have been picked, and the grapes are very nearly ready to be harvested too.
Whilst our remaining three GSDs have adjusted to the new ‘structure’ in the pack, we have found it much more difficult to deal with. After considerable thought we finally succumbed, and made a new addition to the household in the shape of a small white GSD puppy called Daisy.
She will never replace Molly or Amy, but her antics have been a real tonic. Her puppy behaviour (polite description) never ceases to amuse, amaze, and even shock us, and it has certainly been a while since we felt the pinch of a small pin-like puppy tooth! It is hard to be sad with a puppy in your presence.
The clicker training has begun, and she is responding nicely (within her short attention span), and once her homeopathic vaccinations are complete, we hope to start introducing her so some of the livestock.
We lose two of our beautiful girls
Thanks to a welcome gap in the weeks of torrential rain, we had the hay cut early in August. Praying for good weather, we were rewarded with sun and breeze for 6 days, and managed to bale successfully. Nice dry stuff, if a bit loose in the bale strings!
The following day, our friendly neighbour delivered three round bales of straw, and we spent the afternoon re-baling to give us easier to handle square bales. The baler could be stored for another year.
Unfortunately our delight was short lived. Only days after putting the hay in the shed, Molly, one of our GSDs fell ill. We never doubted for one minute that she would be fine, but she continued to deteriorate. After 6 days, we couldn’t hold on to her any longer, and she had to be put to sleep.
Almost at the same time, Amy (another GSD) also became ill with an unrelated problem. Exactly 7 days after losing Molly, Amy went to the vet for exploratory surgery, and we were advised not to revive her.
We are devastated and miss them both very much, and the shock of losing two seemingly healthy dogs is still very real, but life on the croft must go on.
The apples are maturing and will be ready soon, and there is still plenty going on in the polytunnel that demands our attention.
RIP Molly and Amy.
Keeping an eye on our prosective wine crops
As we continue to work through our wine collection from last year’s fruit, it never hurts to keep an eye on the makings for this year’s batch!
Our grape vines are doing very well and we hope for a similar size crop to the one we had last year, and the blackcurrants are just coming up to the point where we will have to watch them very closely.
We didn’t manage to harvest many blackcurrants last year so the blackcurrant wine was missing unfortunately, but the grapes more than made up for it. We believe that last year’s red grape wine is the finest we have ever made.
Our third calf here on the croft but still a delight
Near the end of June, and about a week before expected, our new dexter calf put in an appearance. Her name is Olive.
We were on our daily feeding round, and found that Pippa had calved in private as usual. A small bundle could be seen in the grass, and Pippa didn’t seem too keen to come over and feed.
We approached to a safe distance (cows with calves can be very protective), left Pippa’s feed, and retreated to watch. From their behaviour it seemed that Olive hadn’t been born long before.
Although Olive is our third calf here at the croft, we were still surprised and delighted when we saw her! She is a delight.
It was time to bottle the wine
The time had come to bottle last year’s crop of red grape wine, which has been sitting in a cold room in demijohns for about 6-8 months.
In truth, the wine should have been syphoned into fresh demijohns a couple of times to remove the silt, but these ones have been pretty much left to their own devices since they were started – plenty of warmth for a couple of weeks, then left in the cool to finish.
Once we had cleaned out and sterilised several bottles, the bottling began. Obviously each demijohn had to be ‘sampled’ to check that it was actually worth bottling the contents, and thankfully all 5 passed the taste test!
We now have over 20 litres of delicious red wine, made from the juice of grapes grown here at the croft! If we can just give them time to settle…
We get out of pigs
After much deliberation, and prompted by a hospital appointment, we finally decided to dispose of our last couple of pigs.
The sow was bred by us 18 months ago and was originally to be our breeding sow, and the boar was bought in for the purpose. Unfortunately, by the time we had decided not to breed them we weren’t in a position to take them to the abattoir, and have been rather coy about the decision since!
We did manage to sell the boar, but had the sow converted to bacon and mince (in the most part) which should see us through for quite a while. We haven’t gone off pigs completely, so no doubt we will have weaners at some point in future.
A lesson in spinning leads to a bobbin of yarn
For some time now, we have been intending to make use of a spinning wheel that we bought a year or so ago. We dusted it off and tried it out, but without any idea how to use it properly, we didn’t have much luck.
Then, we attended a local craft open day to see what craft classes were available, and as luck would have it, had the opportunity to try a wheel for a few minutes under instruction.
There is no substitute for practical experience, and with just that short practice, we are now able to use our own wheel, albeit not perfectly. After a while, we had a full bobbin (pictured) of spun wool from the fleeces of our own sheep! Not exactly a jumper’s worth, but you have to start somewhere!
