As 2016 fades out...

No blogs since November?  Apologies...moving house, busy saving the turtle dove, and you know...just getting on with life!

So a quick update...we're finally moved in.  While home is not yet finished, we are settling down and making it our own.  Normal service can be resumed, and get this blog back onto farming.

It's dark up here on the hill, but that makes for good star-gazing.

The neighbours are curious...

Winter observations of note...the partridges don't like getting soaked and so seek shelter in our porch, huddled together looking bedraggled.  The other birds have found the feeders, and once we have some time (!) and money (!!), the mudpatch outside the front of the house will be transformed into a patio and herb garden...as much to stop people parking there as to provide culinary delights.

Meanwhile, farming goes on.  Ian M is getting into his swing now that he is on site all the time, and so far the cattle have not been noisy enough to keep us awake...even during weaning.  It's time to start bringing the ewes in closer, so we had a nice post-Christmas walk with friends to bring the Common sheep down to 13 Acres.  Slight overkill on the staffing front, but a good wander.

Jordan ignoring Rachel's Sound of Music medley, while Simon fails to reach his toes, Rob is playing on his mobile (as per), and Cathy wonders why she left the nice warm couch to spend the afternoon with madmen.

Cathy, Simon and Jordan lead the way - keeping the walk slow and steady (after all, these are pregnant ladies!)

Steaming sheep in the sunset.

Almost there...

No time to blog...almost there!

A cow's eye view of proceedings.

Our self-filling pond.

Ian M's new walk to work...handy come lambing!

Carpets and lights?  Luxury!

Erm, but this might be a problem come moving in day...

Clad tidings!

As the weather turns and it becomes misty moisty again, we are progressing into the final stage of making Blacktail Lodge ready for habitation.

After tidying up the site (dumpy bags of wood off-cuts, metal, plastic, misc rubbish, wood, more wood, oh lordy look how much kindling we have for the next twenty years...) a house appeared from behind.

Scottie, our chirpy chippy, has started putting on the external cladding (hence the dreadful pun in the title).  We "bought local" (Tiverton wood merchant and processor), only to find that the finished product was put on a lorry, sent to a distribution centre in Birmingham, then driven back past the gate of the wood merchant's to us.  We did try...but being green is bloody difficult when people are idiots.

On goes the cladding...

...but we aren't yet too excited, as there is all this to go...

Meanwhile, a tall French plumber barely fits in our water shed...

Dear old Joey guards the gravel put aside to drain the septic tank (coming Monday)...

Inside, a bit of colour makes it feel more like home...

...a few fittings in the bathroom give hope that one day we'll be able to have a wash and make use of said septic tank...

...and suddenly, fiat lux!  We have illuminations!

Smurfs live here

At Blacktail Lodge, things are still moving along...

Insulation for the space station...

...which then gets boarded in.

Water tank and rats' nest of piping.

Blue walls?  No, we've not turned it into a Smurf house...it's sand-impregnated gluey paint that goes on the walls (arms, face, hair) before the plaster.

Mules in the mist

After a few hot days, a cool autumnal morning surprised us, and was a reminder that summer doesn't hold all of the aces when it comes to the best weather...our girls grazed contentedly in the mist, yet it was still warm enough to be in a T-shirt (us not them...which now has me wondering what caption or logo would be on the front...mind wandering again).  In the far field the calves were lounging on the hillside, from time to time stretching out all four legs and risking a backwards roll down into the combe.

The rams came back from the orchard for a pedicure, and from the smell of them, they are getting ready for tupping.  This year we kept three of the ram lambs as "teasers" - not pure-bred, they've each had a vasectomy and will be put in with the ewe lambs before someone else arrives to do the necessary.  Apparently, this gets the women-folk ready for action...who knew?

Meanwhile, we now have a slate roof, solar panels, windows, doors and installed under-floor heating...another step closer to completion, but it will still be a while yet.

Front door and wee chimney (small, not something you wee into...)

The outside-inside to-be-decked area.

My desk will go here.

Not being on-site, the garden has done its own thing for most of the summer.  A scattering of marigold seeds from Crangs House in spring has given us a nice splash of colour. 

Without the grazers, the wildflowers have come up and made the mud-pit their home.  The challenge will be keeping the grass down so that they can stay.

All species welcome, excepting thistles, docks and stinging nettles that would spread into the fields and upset the stock.  Ignominious deracination for them.

The plan is to encourage as much wildlife as possible, and even without doing anything yet, we have rabbits (grrr!), stoats, two partridges that were living in the doorless house, swallows roosting in the rafters (and crapping on the screed), lizards on the rockery, yellowhammers on the fenceposts, and various bumblebees, bees and butterflies that I will one day identify when the books come out of storage.

Cody 2 Dyson 0

Like a lion on the Serengeti, Cody brings down another Dyson (although come to think of it, I don't remember ever hearing David Attenborough talk us through a lion disemboweling a vacuum cleaner, but perhaps I missed that episode).

You may well look away in shame...

...the dung heap is not the most appropriate place to go ratting, Flossie!

The Weaning Blues

Where's ma mumma gone? (do dum do dum do dum)

I'll holler all night long (do dum do dum do dum)

I'm keepin you awake (do dum do dum do dum)

For ma mumma you did take (do dum do dum do dum)

[Repeat, ad nauseam, all bloody night, taking it in turns - first the calves, then Brian's lambs across the valley, now ours]

On goes the roof

More updates from Blacktail Lodge...

The roof is now boarded in, and Mark the Builder is battening ready for slates:

The front porch ended up being far far bigger than we imagined:

Ian and Sonny in the living room/kitchen (I think Ian is standing in the sink):

Looking back across the living room to the front door, a bedroom, and the storage hatch in the roof:

The view from the living room windows (hopefully someone will move that van):

And for Auntie Ann, Ruth's rose is thriving after it's transplant from the cottages:

The difference a few days make...

What is it about my absence that galvanises activity?  I go to Cambridge on a Sunday, and come home to an almost completed house on the Friday...

While Ian and Farmer Rob make silage and hay, suspiciously eyeing the gathering clouds, builders descend upon our building site and up she goes.

Start with foundations and some scaffolding...

...add a crane...

...a load of panels and a couple of men...

...and several more men and panels...

...and more...

...voilà!  Now all we need is a roof...watch this space, coming on Monday.

Góðan dag frá Íslandi!

Shearing over, and a pause for breath - so a perfect time to take a week out and travel to Iceland.  While here is not the place to wax lyrical about how wonderful the scenery was, how awesome the glaciers and volcanic geology, and...ooop, just did...this is a farm blog.

The Icelandic sheep were ubiquitous - small and hardy, seemingly as happy to be grazing beside a road as on a cliff face or the volcanic beaches.  Lambing was well over, and each mum had two rapidly growing charges.

While there were cattle, mostly dairy as far as we could tell, another staple of the Icelandic diet (look away now if you are squeamish) is horse (along with various other things foreign to our palate, such as whale and reindeer).  I can categorically state that we most probably did not eat horse burger (and I am most definitely lying - when in Rome...).

We were probably the only two tourists who stopped to watch haymaking (coming soon back at home) and looked longingly at the über-cool combined baling and wrapping rig that the local bóndi (that's yer real Icelandic for farmer, that is) was using to store away his winter feed.

However, some of the tractors were a bit small.

The official line is that we did not flirt with other sheepdogs (please, please don't tell Sonny!)

The bird life was amazing, and each field had territories of redshank, whimbrel, snipe, plover, godwit, redwing - the dawn chorus was the space-invader sound that snipe wings make as they fly about, with a background of wader calls and skylark singing.  I say dawn chorus - given it was light all night, a 5-6am peak in activity was probaby just habit.

Black-tailed godwit, long-tailed duck, red-necked phalarope, Slavonian grebe, whimbrel, black guillemot

An eider mother and her chicks