In recent months we have spent many hours telling ourselves that we had more than enough to keep us busy here. The pigs, cattle, chickens and our 2 bedroom self catering holiday let (plus my day job) are keeping us busy enough, not to mention the 3 cats making a mess of the house! We had …
Despite getting up bright and early last Saturday morning, I was still caught out by the slightly early arrival of Sissy’s litter. According to my calculations she wasn’t due until that night at the earliest but apparently she had other plans and had done most of the hard work by the time I checked on …
After the big snow fall a couple of weeks ago we thought we’d probably had the last of it. However as is often the case, there is generally a late burst here which catches people out. Even though the current snow isn’t as bad this time around, it would certainly qualify as a significant amount …
About a week ago we brought Esther and her litter of 9 piglets into the pig shed to start the weaning process and in preparation for collection. At this stage they were just over 7 weeks old and had been on hard feed for a while so it was a good time to start. This …
A little later than planned but eventually Esther and her litter were moved out to their new pen in the woods last weekend. Originally I had planned to do this when the litter were about 3 weeks old – by this time they’ve usually started showing a good interest in hard food and are drinking …
Last weekend was a short notice visit from the hoof trimming man. We only have the 2 Dexter cows (plus calves) so we had to fit in around his other workload with larger, commercial herds of cattle. As usual when doing anything with our cows, my first concern was whether I would be able to …
I was a little over-confident on Saturday but I learned my lesson (yet again) after staying up most of the night waiting in vain the first litter for this year to arrive. Over the last few weeks I had been convinced that Saturday would be farrowing day mostly because her last litter came after just …
With the Christmas and New Year period very quickly becoming a distant memory, it seemed a good time to post a quick update as a stock check for the coming year. Things have a habit of creeping up on me and getting out of hand if I’m not careful so it’s probably best if I …
There’s no escaping the fact that winter is here with the short days and cold temperatures but it’s even more obvious this evening because the snow is falling. The waterproof trousers are always at the ready just in case and I’ve already found out which pairs of wellies have holes in. The cattle are happily …
As well as selling the pork from the last of our Tamworths this month, the time has now come to start thinking about selling our grass-fed Dexter beef for the first time as well. It’s been a tougher time than I’d expected but our first Dexter steer went off to slaughter at the start of …
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