July 2017

Diary

Harvest / Cheddar / Butter / Smallholding Scotland

Thursday 6 July, 2017

by Rosemary at 10:34am in Smallholding 1 comment Comments closed

Monday 26^th June

The fox woke us at 4am this morning. Bryn was going daft and had to be released to do whatever he does – runs around barking, I guess.

Couldn’t get back to sleep, so baked some almond biscuits and coconut cookies to fill the tins.

Milking machine still broken, but Dan is working on it :-(

Mini milker pump Milking machine repair, looks complicated.

Rosie's calf / Crovect / Great Tapestry / 1st spuds / Pie

Friday 14 July, 2017

by Rosemary at 3:22pm in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 3rd July

Beautiful morning. Up at 4am, wondering if Rosie was calving. She wasn’t. Consequently felt a bit zombie-like.

Lots of strawberries – best crop ever. And a good crop of gooseberries too. Raspberries are poorer – but they were supposed to be replanted this year and that didn’t quite happen.

The freezer is getting full, even though we’re eating lightly cooked strawberries with yogurt every day for breakfast. Delicious.

Milking / Harvest / Bread / Short course / Birthday

Monday 24 July, 2017

by Rosemary at 5:31pm in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 10^th July

Overcast but dry. The cows were exceedingly unco-operative today – Blizz just refused to come in – and I ran out of time and patience, so no milk today.

Bug had his feet trimmed – they grow at a huge rate.

Sent off the registrations to the Shetland Cattle Herd Book Society – Annie’s calf, Panda is registered as Rosedean Xena and Rosie’s as Rosedean Xanthe (she doesn’t have a pet name yet). Blizzard’s steer calf isn’t registered, of course.

A wedding / Record-keeping / Cattle / Bread and cheese

Thursday 27 July, 2017

by Rosemary at 2:20pm in Smallholding Comments closed

Monday 17^th July

While doing the routine weekly paperwork, I’ve been pulling out the costs for this year’s pigs and meat birds. Because they are short-term discrete enterprises, it’s pretty simple.

Today we cleaned the eight birds we killed yesterday – they weighed 2.3kg to 3.4kg, totaled 22.3kg, average 2.79kg. I’ll do the same when we do the nine hens next week and see how much they cost us to produce.

As things stand with the pigs, if they have an average deadweight of 60kg, they’ll have cost us £3.73/kg to get them to the butcher.