Tuesday, 23rd April 2013

Am: Am early start this morning as my house-mates car is in the garage for it’s MOT and I have said I will take him into work and collect him again later. After dropping him off I take a hot drink back to bed and knit for about am hour. I am making a baby hat for my new niece which is going to look amazing when it is done but seems to be building up so very slowly. After I get up again I go and start the days chores of feeding and checking on everyone and between me and mother we get most things done in a reasonable time. I spend an hour or so cleaning out one of the goat sheds which is not currently being used. The weather is glorious, it has to be the hottest day of the year so far and it is bright sunshine. The bees are making the most of it and are out flying busily.

Lunch time: At about mid-day I go back to my house to have some lunch and spend the afternoon in my garden.

Afternoon: It’s still really warm out and it is lovely working outside. I sort out bits and piece and start planting out potatoes in old flower buckets. This year I haven’t bought seed potatoes but have some bags that were sprouting and reduced in the supermarket (Shetland Blacks and Exquisa) and I’ve added a few others from the veg shop to these (Benji and Maris Piper) and have been sent some free Rocket and Piccolo Star. I only manage to plant half of the Shetland Black’s and maybe a third of the Exquisa but it is a good start. Then I carry on into the back garden and plant out the garlic I have had growing on in pots, the blackbirds here seem to love garlic and onion sets to I have taken to planting them in pots with a cover over and then planting them out when they have got going enough for the birds not to be interested.

Late afternoon/evening: After collecting my house-mate from work I go back to finish off the goats for the day. My sister is there when I get back with her baby, it’s the first time she has walked home since the baby was born and we spend some time in the kitchen before having to go off and look for some sheep that have been reported out in the next village. It’s almost 100% certain they’re not any of ours as ours are all in as there has been an outbreak of Scab mite and the free roaming animals have all had to be brought in for treatment. Ours have all been treated and we are just waiting for everyone else to before ours can get back out on some grass. There’s no sign of the sheep so after half an hour or so of driving around we go back and I finish the goats for the day and go home.

At home the Green Party candidate for the council elections drops some leaflets off as I’ve said I’ll post some through letterboxes locally. It’s still really warm outside so I carry on pottering in the garden and then sit out whilst the sun goes down and watch the bats as they start flying in the dusk

Saturday, March 30th 2012

Many years ago, when I was being made redundant from my first job which was in a community radio station, a colleague suggested that I should made an audio diary of my day-to-day life. I’ve always liked the idea but as the project folded and I became busy with other work and just general life took over I’ve never gotten around to it but it has remained an idea I’ve liked. I thought I would revive the idea here with a monthly post of what has happened during the day…

Morning: Woke up early as normal but made myself go back to sleep for a while. Yesterday I started a new job (HURRAY!) back working with young people, the shifts are long but not that much longer than I have been doing and fewer each week. When I wake up again I stay in bed for a while watching the end of an episode of A Touch of Frost I started watching the night before and ‘surfing’ (facebook/email and wherever those take me). Outside there is still some snow left but it is only really around the edge of the fields and where trees throw shade over the ground. It looks nice enough but still cold. I get up and go over to mothers spotting a ewe and her lambs we have been trying to get back from the edge of our run (the area of common our sheep roam over), the patch of grass she is on is long enough for her to stay for a while so I carry on back and collect mother to make bring her back easier. We bring her back and check the others. At the bottom of the pen is what looks like a dead sheep but lucky it is a ewe who has cast herself (when a sheep rolls onto their side, normally with their legs up hill and can’t get back up) When I reach her I found a MASSIVE lamb cuddled up behind her. I stand the ewe up, she is very wobbly on her back end not really surprisingly given the size of the lamb. I check the lamb over; he is fine but has only been half cleaned and the ewe (a first time mum) goes straight off to join the others without a backward look. We bring them both back to the house and put them in a pen, he gets a bottle and she gets a bucket of feed and some hay. We carry on with the other bottles, Enchantments and we have three lambs too. Then phone our feed merchant to check what time they are closing today it being Easter weekend. There is time to have a hot drink and hay and water the goats before we have to leave to collect the weeks feed.

Lunch time: We collect feed and a van full of hay and go back home for home made chips and butter bean curry.

Afternoon: It’s still cold and not at all conducive for working outside even though there are plenty of jobs to be done and stopping to eat lunch has made me realise how tired I am, so me and mother agree not to try with any of the extras today. We take hay and water to the ponies. At the moment my brother is fitting a kitchen and we have no outside tap, even if we did I would have thought it would have been frozen, so watering everyone involves filling our collection of 5 gallon water containers with an old plastic milk bottle from the kitchen tap. On the way home we stop by at a neighbours to drop off some feed and have a chat. Everyone is feed up of this weather; the frozen water buckets, the lack of grass, the driving wind that goes right through everything and all the extra jobs it makes. Back home I finish the goats, more bottles and I collect some eggs to take home. We open the bees and place some more fondant in with them, it isn’t really warm enough to open the hive but there was an alert go out the other day about feeding because of the cold weather and when we open the hive to add more they are out so good job we did. The sun comes out and the wind dies down and they start to fly for about ten minutes whilst it lasts. I feed the donkeys and call in on my sister on the way home to drop some bits off and cuddle the baby then home.

Late afternoon/evening: Back at home I get a second wind and can’t sit still for long so occupy myself with cleaning and starting an over due sort out whilst watching more A Touch of Frost. I have too much stuff; too many bags of things saved for craft project I’ve never even started, too many piles of paper work that needs filing and too many bags of ‘recycling’ so as I don’t have to put too much into the landfill bin. I think maybe next month I might try to de-clutter one thing each day; take one item I know I will never use again to the charity shop, put the bag of batteries out for collection, offer the pile of used jiffy bags on freecycle and tick off one of those sort of little jobs to stop hoarding so much of it. I find lots more packets of seeds and fill a bag of egg boxes and borrowed clothes to return to my sister. I stop at some point for some fried egg butties for dinner. It’s light until just gone seven pm and all of the snow seems to have gone from the fields, not so at mothers which still has a layer of white anywhere that is not in the open. I go to bed just after nine pm

Bundles of spring joy

In the early hours of the first day of Spring my sister gave birth to an unbelievably beautiful baby girl; Acacia Daisy Jade.

My beautiful niece Acacia Daisy Jade; born 20th March 2013

Needless to say she is by far the most exciting baby of the year. I had been meaning to blog about her expected arrival since we held a surprise baby ‘welcoming’ at the beginning of the month for my sister and her partner but she couldn’t wait to meet the world

A piece of my family history

This week my Grandmother woke to begin her 80th year. She was born just before WWII broke out in the same house as her sister was born in 10 years later at the war’s end. During the war she returned to the safety of the same house with her mother to stay with her grandmother, my great-great grandmother.

Last Sunday we all gathered for a meal in a pub next door to where another of her relatives was born, I forget who. Then went for a look round some of the place she knows from her life in Bristol where much of her family is from. She’s now living in Devon close to my Auntie and cousins after spending much of my life looking after my great-grandmother.

We went back and found the house she was born in and it is still there, currently empty whilst being done-up but looking like it will soon be someones home again;

 

Gloves, fingerless, or mittens??

I have done it! I have finally finished another whole knitting project a mere 3 or 4 years after I completed my first ever projects (a knitted flower that I can’t find the post for) I have made a pair of what I am calling gloves, but they might be mittens I can’t remember what the pattern I first started to follow called them;

Finished gloves – January 2013

They were based on a free pattern from Ravelry that I changed as I went along as they were much longer than I wanted.

1. Cast on 30st and join
2. Ribbing for 15 rows (k1, p1, k1)
3. Knit stockinette for 10 rows
4. 13 rows stockinette not in the round (knit one row, pearl one row)
5. Join then continue in the round for 13 rows
6. ribbing for 3 rows
7. Bind off and weave in end

It is super easy when you get going, even though it has taken me the best part of 6 months to complete. After finishing my first second glove I weaved the end in much too tightly and so the whole glove was useless, I did try to unpick it but just made a bigger mess than I started with.

They are being worn with great pride.

Snow days

Snow covered Oak at the edge of the woods – 18th January 2013

We have had snow for the last three days here; along with most of the rest of the South West and Wales I think. There was snow forecast for last weekend which never came to anything, thankfully as that would have left everything to mother and MYS with me away working until Wednesday this week.

Thursday was spent preparing, and saying goodbye to Dougle (Bella’s goat kid from last year) who went to his new home just before the heavy snow set in. We ordered some extra round bales of hay so as they could be left with the sheep and not wheelborrow small bales to and from and there was extra for the goats at home. The extra hay and a 4×4 has made this spell of deep snow not easy as such but much less stressful than it has been in other years and even left room for some playing.

Back garden snow – 18th January 2013

Friday morning we woke to about 2 foot of snow, I managed to get from mine back to mothers using a mixture of my van and mothers 4×4. Everyone had hot drinks, the large bales of hay were opened for everyone to help themselves to and me and my brother gritted the main road through the village so I was able to get all the way back the next day. Then I went home and met with some friends and their children in the park to play sledges and unsuccessfully build snowman, the snow was far to fluffy to stick together very well.

The march up to their big round bale of hay – 18th January 2013

Since then it has been days of filling containers with hot drinks for everyone (goats, ponies and checking on everything. The sheep are not convinced that we don’t have something better to offer them as hay and stock cubes are not what they like to eat, they like sugar beat and lots of it too but it would seem we are going into a shortage as it was a bad year last year and they haven’t been able to get much out the ground this winter.

Snow days – 18th January 2013

There is more snow forecast for next week but so far that is being moved back each day so we shall see and I shall be keeping my fingers crossed for a thaw as I am back at work tomorrow

Outline Photograthy

This post has nothing to do with gardening or craft or anything else like that but wanted to share…

This weekend I collected the prints from Outline Photograthy and have to say I am over the moon with them!

Outline Photography – November 2012

The photshoot was a prize given away on their facebook page and is something that me and my sister would never normally do but it was so much fun and the results are amazing.

Outline Photography – November 2012

 We tried lots of different things out and took all our favourite clothes that we don’t normally get to wear as we trudge through the endless mud of this year.

Outline Photography – November 2012

The morning was loads of fun and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Winter Solstice 2012

This year I finally marked the Winter Solstice; it has been some years since I have do anything bigger than maybe light a candle or maybe making a nice meal. This time of year seems to be such a rush with daylight hours being in such short supply and Christmas being just days away everything else seems to get pushed aside, wrongly really.

“Merry Midwinter” tin can lantern – December 2012

This year I met with friends and their children in the woods. We set up camp with candles and fairy lights, made tin can lanterns, ate party nibbles and homemade cake, drank hot chocolate and tested out my bucket BBQ and made popcorn.

Making popcorn over the fire – December 2012

The light was magical and by the time we had finished a mist had fallen that hung around until half way through the day today.

Thank you Vicky for the use of your photos from the evening. The lantern only stayed up for a short time and didn’t last long enough for me to take any.

Countryfile

A bit of a hectic end to last week and a busy time at work has meant this is not the post I was hoping it to be but the excitement had to be shared whilst there is still time to…

A few weeks ago me, my sister and mother caused a little bit of a stir in our rain swept village when the Countryfile film crew came to record a piece with us about our sheep and how we graze and manage our flock, which is following the local tradition of grazing them out on the common waste land of the area;

Countryfile: Free roaming sheep in The Forest of Dean

This link should take you straight to BBC iplayer and to the right piece of the programme and will be there until this Sunday (16/12/2012)

Free roaming sheep are something of a marmite issue, either you love them or hate them. I am bias and think that they are a local tradition predating any of the open plan drives in the area and the tradition of keeping sheep on forest waste land saved many a starving miner when times were hard. And that is before I start on the subject of the way they help shape and manage the area or anything about our flock.

Home for the the winter

I wrote this almost a week to the day ago but have had some trouble getting the photos onto it…

We took advantage of a dry morning yesterday to bring the donkeys home from their summer grazing. It was a nice excuse to have a walk through the woods which we don’t really get time for normally.

Once we were off the main roads and onto the foot paths the donkey were (mostly) happy enough to wander along enjoying some of the taster bits of grazing the woods have to offer;

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

The woods down into the valley and out the other side are very different;

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

Once you are down into the base of the valley then it is dark and much cooler than the top of the hills, even in summer. You can see signs of how the wood would have been when the area was a Royal hunting ground and of the industries that have let their scare on the landscape. There are signs of old coppice and of the wild boar that are spreading out and up the hill.

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

To the right of this photo is a patch dug over by the wild boar and to the right is the entrance to an old mine, now ‘capped’ and hardly more than what looks like a pile of rocks fallen from the bank above.

For the whole of the walk the sound of flowing water followed us and the signs of the recent heavy rain fall was everywhere;

Donkey walk – November 2012

Donkey walk – November 2012

There was some more photo showing the water-logged ground but wordpress seems to have changed their system for uploading photos and I am not sure how the new one works. A few days after the donkey came home part of our walk was completely flooded to over half way up car depth so our timing was chosen well!