Never seen so little snow this time of year!

 I’m putting these here so in other years where it gets a bit thin we can remember how much worse it could be!

Now there are two!

 I suppose they are eating worms, they have made a right old mess!

First Silkie Egg

First Silkie has laid an egg. I suspect it was the middle one of the white ones as she squats for the rooster (dark one on the left).

They are small chickens, so a diddy little egg.

She laid it in the mud at the edge of the run. I am hoping she will get the idea and lay the next one in the nest box. I added a few more fake eggs to give her the idea. One of them has been digging around in the nest boxes and throwing all the eggs out (there are 2 legbar in this run already laying) for a few days, so I have been wondering if one if them might be thinking about starting laying. So exciting!

More snow needed!

It’s been lovely sunny weather for a few days, and before that a lot of rain. Both of which have been hard on the snow cover. Pretty, but we need more snow!

Here is Poppy doing her best snow dance…

First Frost

 

Lots of joists

 The old joist are still very solid, except at the end where they went in to the wall

So sadly we ended up having to replace them all

Now on to laying the subfloor, sanding the beam and taking some plaster off the wall before moving on to the 2nd section of the 7 there are to do

New ram called Coco

 The previous ram is in the freezer as he was being mean to his ladies (and had a go at me too).

It’s hard because they get all fired up with hormones in breeding season. But butting the girls when they were heavily pregnant and in labour was the final straw. Hopefully Coco can be more of a gentleman.. 

It is late in the breeding season now, so it is possible that the ewes are all pregnant already. We will see as there is enough of a gap between the rams being with them for us to tell which is which.

White is quite rare for the Ouessants, so it will be interesting to see what colour the lambs come out…

Christmas Cake

 I always mean to make it earlier, but then I don’t :)

In the oven

Happy Halloween!

 That’s a ghost monster munch in case it wasn’t clear :)

First blue egg!

One of the cream legbars has FINALLY started laying. I am so eggsited!

Her friend has also started laying her pretty brown eggs. Both first eggs are small but with a little time thry will be laying normal size ones… Mr legbar also in this picture. I’m hoping when I breed him and the one layong brown eggs that the offspring should have green eggs…

Fixing up the floor

You’ll notice some of these don’t reach the wall, not ideal for holding up the floor. There was a chimney breast here and we had to have it removed before it collapsed, which is why the joists are hanging like this. 

The floorboards have basically been giving this bit the strength to stay up. They are pretty rotten and are coming up. We can then do something about replacing these joists with ones that do reach the wall…

Admiring the sunrise

 

Good year for mushrooms

Penny bun and Orange Birch bolete, this is about half of the ones we have found recently. We don’t normally get so many, they obviously liked the drought the. rain…

We’ve also found lots of field mushrooms, although there have been other years with more of them

Clearing some fence lines

We have some help clearing the fence lines which is much needed and appreciated.

This is a photo of the cows helping them out - I’m not sure their help was appreciated as it involved eating branches before they had finished being cut and tossing around the ones neatly piled for burning!

It looks green in the photo after a little rain, but the grass is really in a bad way after the drought. We will be getting hay for the cows very soon I think. A month or more earlier than usual.

Rendering the end wall…

The end wall has been getting damp because rain drives on to this wall and goes through cracks in the render and doesn’t dry out.

We’ve had it all taken off and redone. Looks much nice, we will lime wash it eventually a warmer colour.

We helped to the extent pf getting sand and lime, but we cannot claim to have done any of this ourselves. Expert plasterer was needed for this job!

Before

During

After - it will dry a lighter colour than this…

This is the rest of the wall below the out door kitchen roof. It’s not quite finished yet, but gonna look great! Will be nice not to have sand and rubble falling off the wall all the time too!

View of the land

 

You can see some land is not fenced in. We hope to get them fenced one day!

Numbers 1-6 are fields, we call them

1.) The hay field (or the sheep field)

2.) The bottom field

3.) The corner field

4.) Daisy’s field

5.) Owen’s field

6.) The top field

7 is the area of the woods where we sometimes keep pigs

8 is land around the house and barns including the orchard.

Windows/doors structurally complete

Unfortunately we are now going to have to board them up for. while until a few things are finished so we can put the new windows and doors in…

View will be amazing!

Still got to remove these acrows and clean up a lot of rocks and rubble…

It’s going to be amzing going from here which will be the kitchen in to the outdoor kitchen…

Nearly finished (hahahahahaha!)

 Work in progress…

Just a tiny bit of squaring off the edges and a bit of a hoover to clean up the mess, and job done!

Not one, but three…

The front opening is the biggest and the most stressful - because of already having been mangled about and huge amounts of super hard concrete in there, but there are two others being done at the same time…

One here in the end wall from what will be kitchen/dining in to the outdoor kitchen

One upstairs in what will be the living room

The supports are in for both of these now too. Just waiting for the lime to dry a bit before hacking them out too…

Destroy! Widening the door…

 Graham the builder seems very confident, but I am a nervous wreck! I don’t want my house collapsed and I don’t want Doug to be squished (in reverse order of priority of course…)

That beam you can see on the left is just supported by 3 acrow props. It holds not only the floor upstairs up but also the A frame supporting the roof. Glup!

Building back better - 2 of the new beams in place. Feels less scary now. The old beams will sit on these new steel ones. The door won’t be this high in the end as under the beams there will be a roller shutter and fly screen.

Nearly ready!

This is part of why doing anything takes so long! It took 2 half days going to Bernard Page to get the I beam needed for the 3 doors/windows.

They were very helpful though and now we have them (after minor setback when we turned up to collect them and they had done 3 x 4m lengths instead of 4 x 3m lengths. That would have been a super large window!)

The big beams for the window at the front weigh nearly 100kg, it’s going to be a good job getting them in to place!

 

Frenzy of preparation!

A builder is starting work next week (working with Doug) to add a new door and window and enlarge an existing door. We have been in a frenzy of preparation for what feels like years now.

Taking some floor boards up because we need access here to support the wall while we widen the door below.

Ceiling below that gone too

This is the door to be widened downstairs

Bloody cows, bloody neighbors, bloody heatwave/drought

Wandering around a really steep field well after sunset chasing the neighbors cows out of one of our fields. AGAIN. It wouldn’t be so bad, but it is still hot given the heatwave and this field has pretty much the only grass left for the cows, the rest has shriveled up in the heatwave.

Pretty though…

Drought!

Normally the sheep refuse point blank to eat hay, even in winter they prefer to scrape around for what little grass they can get. The last week they have been begging for hay and scoffing it down enthusiastically, all the grass has frazzled to a crisp. Really hoping this is a one off, else we are going to have to cut down numbers.