Finally hung some lanterns

We have been planning on doing this since we came up with the idea of the outdoor kitchen -YEARS AGO - fianlly they are up. We do still have some Moroccan lanterns in boxes somewhere to hang also.

Soooo pretty

Worming the sheep

We started off with injectable wormer, this is good (apparently) because the dose is precise and you know each sheep got what it should. It is a bit time consuming though, and once the packet is open it leaks slightly as you have stuck a needle through the top of the bottle.

We moved on to oral wormer given with a syringe. We found this easier, but it can be messy and I have to put my hand in the sheeps mouth quite far which often results in some minor bites and grazes. It also is messy getting the wormer out of the bottle in to the syringe and lacks a bit of hygene as the syringe goes from sheeps mout back in to the bottle of wormer 

So I have bought a special applicator. We tried it today and it worked well. The pipe goes in the bottle of wormer, you set the dose on the gun and just keep squeezing it for each sheep. Apart form the tiny detail of catching them (which the dog actually managed to help with) it went smoothly. 

 

The dog killed Batty

Batty bunny got out of his cage and the dog killed him. Very upsetting when he had finally decided after a year that he was a male rabbit and ready to do his job. We mated Ginger with him last weekend, but she has not been getting pregnant so far, so not sure if there will be any issue from that.

Bedroom floor

We have been humming and hawing for ages about what wood to have.

This is our latest choice, and as I am about to order it, we haven't got long to change our minds again!

Funny advert from the vets

More lambs (hurrah!!)

We had given up the meat flock having lambs. Harris died in October, which is just before the breeding season. We kept his son, but weren't sure if he would be old enough - although we have found that normally lambs born in spring can father more lambs by autumn, but as time went by we gave up expecting it.

Witth two lambs born this weekend he was obviously having fun 5 months ago!

The nearest one to the camera has a black mother, granny was a Jacob and her mother and father I think are half brother and sister?? It gets confusing.

The further away one is with her mother, I don't think her parents are so closely related.

The lamb Doug is holding above, decided the dog was her mum. The dog took fright at this, it was very funny seeing the dog run away as a little lamb ran after her bahhing madly.

Here are the other flock with all their lambs (5 ewes, 5 lambs and a ram) we tried to catch them to worm, but they were having none of it. We will need to take them in to the field with the hurdles to do it. We did catch Raasey and weigh him which was useful (20kg) as there is a lot of guesswork in how much wormer to give. The one we have sounded bad if we overdosed.

Baby bunnies and Batty finally mates

Bernardette's litter survived the excitement of the fox massacre. A couple fell out the nest a few days ago, one Doug saved and the other died and went to the chickens (recycling you know)

There are maybe six in the litter.

In other exciting rabbit news Batty Boy has finally decided he is a boy and had his wicked way with Ginger. We have had him for over a year so he is something like 16 months old. Rabbits mostly mature at around 6-8 months for large breeds so he is pretty slow on the uptake.

He is called Batty because of his big bat ears.

This means that Bottom Harvey is first in the klonking line at the moment, he needs to be fattened up a bit though. He is the one who broke his leg a while ago. It seems to have healed fine.

Ginger has been mated quite a few times and still not got pregnant so things aren't looking too great for her either. She did seem more enthusiastic now, maybe now the weather is warmer. Apparently it can be a problem if you leave it too long before mating them and she must be nearly two and should have been mated at something like 9 months.

This is my clever look...

... and my tongue is reeeaally long

Shower progress

Bit of a fuzzy photo sorry. This is special stuff (not plasterboard) to waterproof around the shower. It will be tiled in small tiles which match the ones on the floor.

It has always (well ok not always, only since I got old enough and sad enough to think about these things) been my ambition to have a shower where it is level with the floor. We won't be able to do that upstairs probably - due to joist locations - so super happy to be going to have it here. Of course will mainly be happy to have somewhere nice and new and less mouldy to shower in.

The towel rail will go where the wood here is. There will be plasterboard first of course.

The drain is filled in

There is still another section beside the end of the house and the outdoor kitchen to do. But this bit is so much better now. The gutters are drained well away from the house and water that falls behind the house is also drained away.

Before and after

A year ago it looked like this

laviealapetiteferme.blogspot.fr/2015/04/mini-digger-in-house.html

Now it looks like this

You wouldn't know it is the same place!

Bloodly b*****d fox

Something, probably a fox has killed all but one of the quail (there were seven). It left behind two dismembered bodies. We had thought the cages would protect them, but apparently not.

We have removed the one remaining quail and all the rabbits in to one of the stables (the hay store actually) as we are worried about it coming back for more.

The chickens are protected by the electric fence, but something did get through that around this time last year and kill some of them. It seems likely our egg glut is likely to be coming to an end.

We don't quite know what to do from here as they cannot really live there forever. It will get very hot in summer, and we need it to store hay anyway. It is very frustrating not knowing what to do. We might give a trap a go. We don't have a gun, and never actually see it to shoot it anyway and we cannot stay on guard all night. You can get electric scarers that flash light or spray water. It sounds like they might work for a while, but then the fox gets used to them.

One of the rabbits had just had babies and I don't suppose that having a quail massacre right beside the nest box and then being carried around will have improved their chances of survival - it is the mother that abandoned the last litter after a few days, a local suggested probably because she was frightened by something...

Both really sad as it is so hard to stop the fox once he starts, steeling ourselves for other losses.

Mmmmm bacon

Home made, delicious. We don't have much left.

Ski touring

The ski area closed a few weeks ago (really early because Easter was early and they always close the week after Easter). Ther is still loads of snow, today we went for a walk up one of the pistes and skied down again, it took an hour and a half to walk up, we had lunch, then really only a few minutes to ski down.

Beautifull view

Kisses - nice!

Poppy ran about a 1000 miles even though she has a bit of a sore foot because the rip of one of her claws has snapped off. She is now exhausted!

She loves it when we go really fast, it give her a chance to run at top speed with us. She is always excited as we set of from the top, which she shows by trying to get her legs cut off with the ski edges as she prances around just in front of us.

Because the weather was so lovely we decided to have a bbq. By evening the weather had changed a bit, but we decided to go ahead anyway. This photo doesn't really show the wind and driving rain that had appeared.

More sewing lessons

I am having some more sewing lessons now that I have practiced skirts a bit.

It is going to be a dress like this - although shorter.

My material and some of the pattern pieces

It has been good getting help how to adjust the fit. This is a very simple pattern, so a good starting place. She is explaining here how to add a dart after adding in some length to go the further distance over a bigger bust.

I have also used the ovelocker which is very exciting. It gives a nice finish to the edge of things.

Both Doug and people at work who I have showed the result to are surprisingly uninterested!

I keep looking at them in John Lewis. Maybe I will buy one - don't tell Doug!

Wow the walls look like walls!

I think the finish will get paler as it dries. We need to work out whether we need paint on them, I think so to cover bits around the windows with the same colour which won't have been plastered, but we can see.

Spring planting

We failed to plant peas and broad beans in the autumn which we have found gets them off to a really good start, but we were just too busy with the rush to get ready for the hempcreting and heating.

So we are just planting them now.

Doug also mowed round the edge. The paths need doing again too. 

Stuff has started growing. Mostly weeds, but also the rubarb

Purple sprouting broccoli (and some kale not in the shot)

Mint - good for moroccan mint tea. I think it would take over the garden given half a chance, it is growing in a buried pot but had managed to extend out from there somehow.

Is rabbit pizza a good idea?

I wasn't quite sure. It sounded weird. 

But the answer is YES!

This is the young wild rabbit Poppy caught earlier in the week.

I coated it in semolina mixed with salt and paprika and fried it for about 15 mins with the lid on and a few more mins with the lid off to get rid of the little bit of liquid that had formed.

I then let it cool and took it off the bones (bit fiddly as some of the bones were tiny) and put it on a pizza with peppers and egg (everything has to have egg at the mo to cope with the egg glut - even poppy eats some - boiled and peeled of course)

It was very tasty. The rabbit had a slightly more gamey taste and darker meat than our rabbits, I guess it had run around a lot more than any of ours do.

Bar Bak

Bar Bak is a new restaurant in town. It was a restaurant before called Canteloup - most people who have visited will have been there and sat out the front. It was good so we were sorry when it changed hands. The new name didn't sound promising.

However it turns out it is still very nice. It does kind of French tapas, little taster things like mini burgers, chorizo and peoper, fried goats cheese and twice fried chips. It also does a good selection of local meat which you order by the 100g so you can share a selection.

This is onglet, Black Angus steak, pork and veal. The presentation was nicer befor we all dived in and scoffed loads of it. It came with nice sauces too. Woe to the diet.

More eggs incubating

I bought a new incubator which turns the eggs automatically, and manages the humidity. 

The other one is fine, but I wondered how much difference it would make to our hatch rates. With quail particularly they have not been great.

We have put a batch in which us half chicken and half quail. The other incubator, the way the eggs are turned means you can only do one size of egg at once. Some of the quail eggs we weren't sure how old they were, so this batch won't necessarily be very conclusive about whether it makes a difference or not.

The little box at the size is the humidity pump, the incubator is on a stand and rocks from size to side slowly several times a dat.

It is a bit dark to see it here, but you set temp and humidity and can also set it to cool the eggs for some time each day to simulate the chicken getting off the eggs to feed!

We have also put on more chicken eggs in the other incubator.

Chicks

The chicks hatched last weekend while I wasn't here

There are 11 of them and they look to be very happy. We didn't use the heat lamp this year, just the pretend chicken (which is a heated plate they can go under). They seem more relaxed with this, perhaps because they get to sleep at night - with the heatlamp it is light all the time. They like being able to pop under the plate when they are scared too.

Lots of other photos I see on the internet always have beautifully clean cages. They poo A LOT and it doesn't stay clean for more than a few seconds. People must time their photo taking well. Maybe they have a stunt clean cage for taking the photos in...

Some London photos

I guess I am kind of boring with where I go in London when I have time not at work. The Cutty Sark was new, but these are all old favorites.

Oxford Street (hate it but always seem to end up there)

John Lewis - went there to buy some zips and sewing bits and pieces.

Liberties, not to buy anything, just to look

Lorna's favorite place! Beautiful and very expensive fabric. Thought about buying a sewing box, but didn't in the end. I miss her.

Royal Academy - being refurbed for ananniversary 

Arcade by the RA, full of expensive watches and jewelry.

Fortnam and Masons - reminds me of Michael. Miss him too.

Always buy fruit cremes there. They stopped doing them for a while. Crisis! But now they are back.

Picadilly Circus - getting more high tech screens

China town for crispy duck (these are obviously prawn crackers not chinese duck!)

Trafalga Square - we took a walk after the crispy duck down to Westminster to try to walk a little bit of it off.