May musings

Life is busy on our little farm at the moment!

I am on a few weeks leave from work and it has been great to catch up with the house, the animals and of course the children.

The weather has been very poor for the month of May. It has been cold and wet with poor grass growth. I hope to get a good honey harvest this year so a few weeks of hot temperatures will be necessary.

My attempted queen rearing using grafted larvae was a failure. The bees rejected the grafts by removing the larvae. I have three hives now with hopefully young queens. I will check them today to see if they have started to lay.

Our elderly wolfhound had a surprise pup two months ago. He is a Irish wolfhound x German shepherd named Fionn. We were quite shocked to discover the pup one morning, as the mum is ten years old and never had a litter previous.

We have our herd test this evening for the cow and calf. The calf is sold and will leave the farm in the next few weeks. 

The magpies are stealing the hen eggs from the coop. It infuriates me as all that is let is a mess of broken eggs in the nest box each evening.

I'm keeping them locked in until noon at the moment but when I return to work they will be let out early and I expect we will have no eggs again.

The pigs are doing well. We need to fatten up the two younger pigs and send them to the freezer. When the calf is gone, there will be plenty of milk for the pigs.

Rats

I have been putting out poison every few days recently and today I got a great surprise when I went out to the big freezer. The rats had burrowed under the freezer, I assume for warmth, and at the entrance I found this well feed rat. I am delighted!

Hopefully their numbers will sharply decline. I have noticed that there is less burrows dug in the chickens bedding and on the odd day I have managed to collect a good 7-8 eggs instead of the 0-4 eggs I usually get.

Our poor little kittens went missing. A few days later one was road kill a km up the road. We assume that they went into the car engine and dropped out onto the road some distance away. We are disappointed but the children haven't noticed yet!

The freezer

I go out to the freezer everyday to take out meat or maybe veg to defrost for the dinner the next day.

Yesterday evening while doing this task, I was met with three large (well fed) rats rushing out of the shed. 

And when I opened the freezer, I discovered that the food at the top was starting to defrost. Arghh! The freezer wasn't working!

After some detective work, I discovered that the sockets didn't work rather than the freezer itself. The electric fence used for our neighbours cattle had tripped the fuse, which I plugged out. I went to the outdoor fuse board, located high up in the chickens shed and flicked down the switches and the freezer fired up again. I pushed the turbo switch on the freezer to quickly freeze the contents.

I sighed with relief as the freezer contains a great deal of food but thankfully we didn't loose any.

Once I got the freezer sorted, I lay rat poison safely in the shed. They are inevitable when you have poultry but I want to keep their population as low as possible. I reckon they have been stealing plenty of eggs from the hen house.

Our two kittens are growing well and have unfortunately started to catch small sparrows. But hopefully they will be good rat catchers in time.

 

Our new arrivals - kittens

A night last week at 2 in the morning while asleep in bed, I heard a scratching coming from a bag beside our bed.

A mouse, no doubt!

The door to the cottage is left open in all weather. From the kids not closing the door behind them and to the frequent comings and goings of us as we do jobs about the place.

The nights have become cooler, a cue for the mice to decide to move indoors for the coming winter.

Since our small elderly dog wanted nothing to do with mouse in my bag, and hubby is afraid of mice, I was left to tying off the bag and putting it outside.

We decided that night we would get a couple of mousers. Cats of course!

Our last cat got hit by a car late last year. Our location really isn't ideal for them or their lifespan. But fingers crossed!

We got two little black and white kittens. A boy and girl who were rescued and hand reared. They are assumed to be eight weeks old, but they look younger to us. They are in poor condition and really could have done with some fresh jersey cream!

Our little girl loves the animals but the feeling isn't always returned ;-) Our wolfhound is sure she isn't a pony!