Establishing contacts.

Its been a great week at Westyard Farm. A week of meeting new neighbours; a week of establishing agricultural contacts for much needed jobs doing on the land; a full week at school for the small girl who has struggled to settle....rounded off with a promised milkshake at our local cafe. Needless to say it was given a double thumbs up and resulted in smiles all round.
Morning time: letting out the hens

Even the new hens are showing they are feeling at home now by laying us lovely eggs. The small girl has a little basket for her after school job, (the bottom off an egg box laid in the base of the basket, to place carefully picked eggs in...) We've had a few accidents, running to the back door in an excited frenzy when the inevitable happens. Splat – which of course the dog gets to enjoy so they never go to waste.

My husband was 'sniped' this week. A new term to us. He was watching an all important tractor attachment on a well known online auction site. After a few months searching for this item 2nd hand they seemed impossible to get hold of, but lo and behold here was one. The spec was right. The price was right. He placed his bid, shortly before the close. One minute to go and he was outbid without an option to counter. He was furious!

After school job: collecting treasure

As karma would have it, he was the ultimate winner....the sniper fell thru and the exasperated seller re-posted his item the next day, offering said item direct to the first interested party. This was when I changed my hat and got involved. I've been called many things over the years but Arthur Daley has never been one of them! Arthur would have been proud....I did my level best, won over the seller – knocked 50 quid off the price and did the deal. Said tractor attachment now belongs to us and is on its way, due to arrive on site at the end of next week. Photos to follow I promise....its a cool tool. And will do a great job for us. Our first working weekend on the farm with friends is early November so we'll test drive said item then and report back.

Other items on their way to us include a whole bedroom of new furniture – not for us but for a guest bedroom that one day will be our Farmhouse B&B room. A new king sized mattress to adorn the king sized bed. Some more kitten food. Oh, and a family pony. But that will have to wait for another blog, it's a long story and i'm sure will be the subject of much discussion. What I can tell you is her name. Mandarin. Cute huh? Not so, she's a chestnut mare with a red-head attitude.

Note to self: need to read up on making haylage.

Comments

  1. Unknown18 October 2014 at 15:27

    I love this blog. And what you're getting up to. Have just had an offer accepted on a house and six acres - small potatoes (ha ha) but am going to try and he some strawberries for you and us from our current strawberry patch xx

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Snow days....and moving home.

Image
I'm currently in a pregnant pause....we're a week or so prior to lambing starting; a week or so till we move back into the farmhouse, and less than a week until the Easter holidays begin. I tried my best to separate these major events in our lives...however, funny as life is, it's now all happening at once.  Like the proverbial London bus - either nothing at all or they all come at once! The builders have been thwarted with snow days, bad weather and challenging times.  I got fed up of waiting 'to be ready' and just picked a date that seemed reasonable to book our removals to bring our possessions back from storage.  I want to be in before Easter, as this heralds the start of lambing. Lambing is an intense time for all involved.  The 'Ologist and I will be going it alone this year, so the two of us will be single handedly taking care of our ewes.  That means covering 24 hours of the day between us, mostly spent in the lambing barn.   And I was hop...
Read more

Of mud..and having Faith

Image
Our great oak now stands clear of surrounding debris, banks of rubble and random intruders.  The landscape is beginning to take shape while the earth is sculpted and scraped around it.  Amidst its roots the drainage pipes have been laid.  Now the snowdrops will have sufficient light to grow.  Followed by the bluebells in the spring.      Its been a productive but increasingly muddy few months on the farm. We've had a flurry of activity in the fields, clearing the cut wood, processing it and then moving it to season in the barn. Thank goodness we were talked into using a processing unit – a magic piece of kit that has saved us days and days of back breaking cutting and splitting. At one end you feed in cut and cleaned off straight tree trunks. It gets sawn, in our case into 12” chunks, then it gets split and then via a conveyor belt spat out into a trailer. We then dump it and stack it and hey presto....an hour of work c...
Read more