Ripening

 

I took this photo a few days ago. The blackberries are starting to ripen. Get ready to pick a free and abundant crop of fruit. We will be making jam, jellies, fruit liqueurs, pies and crumble. If you are into self-sufficiency, this is a definite to pick.

Baby goats

 

We moved Agnes and Florence, 2 of our nannies, from the farm to our Nearside allotment at the Whinnies last week. Both were due from 7th July onwards and being on the Nearside meant it was easier to monitor them and deal with them once the babies arrived. Agnes delivered her 2 babies on 7th. Two boys. My friend Heather bottle fed them.

A very local swarm

 

We had a call on Saturday from someone who lives in our street - a swarm of honeybees had descended on her garden. Normally we get called out to deal with swarms a few kilometres away so having one on our doorstep made for an easier collection. We rehoused the swarm in an empty hive on one of our allotments.

New goat babies

 

On Friday 7th July, Agnes, one of our nanny goats, gave birth to two male kids. As Agnes is a milker, we are raising the kids ourselves. We have one more nanny waiting to have her kids. Florence is likely to have two kids as well. As with Agnes, she is a milker and she had so much milk last week that we decided to milk her to take off some of the pressure. We got six litres though this milk is to be fed to the babies as it's full of collestrum and is not suitable for human consumption. About a week after her babies are born, we can start consuming the milk ourselves.

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!