Busy weekend

We meant to have a quiet weekend after the excitement of the hempcrete. But there were so many things that we have been not doing because of preparing for the spraying we had to get ob and do some of them.

We took the dog for a walk (or rather we went for a picnic lunch and watched the dog run around like a maniac).

We killed (and plucked and gutted) a couple of cockerals someone very kindly gave us (because we are known as heartless killers!). We then ate one of them for dinner with squash from the garden. They weren't very big yet but we couldn't put them in with our cockeral so decided klonking them was for the best. This one was very tasty!

We picked medlars and made them in to medlar jelly (technically this task needs to be completed next weekend or by Doug during the week as we ran out of time...)

Doug fenced a new field for the cows on Friday - it has had horses in it before but fences need to have a lower strand to (mostly) keep the cows in. Despite a lot of chasing and trying to get him to follow his mum, Bif insisted on being left behind on the drive so had to spend the night there. This gave us the opportunity to catch him by bringing his mum out of the field the following morning as he was starving by that time. We took the chance to milk Buttercup at the same time - which we haven't done for a while. We then decided to put Bif in one of the stables to tame him a bit and get him interested in cow nuts. We will let him feed from his mum once a day. It will also be a good chance to feed Buttercup up a bit on cow nuts when she comes in each day, as she is getting a bit thin providing something like 10l of milk to a fat little (actually getting quite big) calf.

We then spent some time cleaning up the horses feet. Owen has a nasty crack where he got a scratch on the part where the hoof grows from earlier in the year and Daisy just has horrible feet anyway. We haven't been giving them as much supplement recently and plan to get back to that as winter is coming. After that we went for a quick ride as it has been months and also riding on the road is good for wearing their hooves down.

I don't have photos of all this but here is one of Lismore. We put cream on her horn buds a few weeks ago which should have burnt them out and stopped them growing. We will need to catch her soon and check. Love the topknot thing she has got going on - and what a cute face!