Meat balls

 

We had some sausage meat left over from making the scotch eggs so I turned it into meatballs. They were cooked in a tomato sauce and served on rice. Sadly, we are not in a position to grow our own rice so that bit of the meal came from the local Coop!

Scotch eggs

 

We have a modest glut of eggs at the moment so we decided to make 12 scotch eggs. The casings were made from a leg of pork that came from a food swap with a friend.

More Hebridean lambs

 

After visiting a local fair with our livestock, we normally want to sit down for a cup of tea when we've taken the animals back to the farm. On Thursday, we didn't have time for that. Instead, we found that another of our Hebridean ewes had delivered 2 lambs when we got back from the Cloverhill School fair. Well worth missing our tea for this!

Cheese cake

 

Penelope, the nanny goat we are currently milking, just can't stop producing absurdly large quantities of milk. We have been forced by necessity to use up as much of our milk lake as possible. The cheese cake was made using a load of cheese made from Penelope's milk. What a tough life we lead!

Rotted down leaves

 

This is a great way to keep your chickens happy - given them a sack of rotted down leaves which were collected in the autumn. The leaves are full of bugs and worms on which the chickens feed. By giving them leaves like this, they can employ their natural feeding instincts as well as keeping them occupied. And, of course, the leaves cost nothing and have no food miles.

Hebridean lambs

 

Yesterday the first of our Hebridean lambs were born. Two ewes gave birth, only 7 more to go! Two girls and one boy.

Cracked earth

 

We have had no rain for about a month here in the North East of England. The ground is drying up and cracking. No rain is in the weather forecast. I hope this won't impact badly on our crops.

Avoiding a charge!

 

Two of our ewes, and their lambs, have found a way through our electric fence. I had to round them up and walk them through to field 1 and put them in there. Field 1 was where we had been keeping them previously but we moved the sheep to field 2 so that field 1 could recover from 3 years of constant grazing. Two ewes and two lambs in a two acre field should mean the grass continues to grow quicker than it is eaten for the time being. Nevertheless we needs to sort the electric fence and find where they are getting through as our Hebridean sheep are due to go onto field 1 in month's time. By then, they should be lambing.