We had a touch of blue sky today and being the rare event it is at the moment, we thought we ought to capture it on camera. It was actually a lovely evening after a promising start to the day disintegrated into cloud and drizzle. It’s been windy too although wind is fab for drying everything out so we don’t complain too much about the wind, unless it comes WITH the rain and then we complain a lot!!
It’s hard to believe we have now been here at Cadbury Cottage over a year – it seems as though we have been here a very short time and yet when we look at the smallholding we are amazed at how much had happened on it in just 12 months!! We are trying to look ahead at the next 12 months and plan our breeding, selling and general overall management of the land and animals. Here are just a few of our current musings:

• Do we keep with three cows or sell Sage and both her calves? Keeping her has implications for the winter and do we NEED three cows. Selling her has implications for the heart strings and a potential loss of income – in theory we should be able to sell a heifer calf for MORE than it costs is to keep Sage over the year...
• Do we want to continue to advertise Onion and one of her kids OR keep them all for the moment and see what happens in the Autumn/Spring? At the moment the goats are proving very easy to look after because they spend a lot of time outside (protected by the hedging even in the rain). We also of course love them and are happy to have more rather than less...
• When should we start to advertise our poultry? We have the two goslings to sell (now very handsome looking young adults) plus Indian Game and IG X chickens and of course rather a lot of ducklings… numbers MUST be sorted for the winter
• Need to get good photos of all our ewe lambs ready for selling – and WHAT are we going to do with Muckle’s handsome ram lamb??

And then there is the 'to do' list which even though we are high summer and all should be quiet still seems to be very long. As fast as we tick one thing off, at least two more get added. There is no doubt that the weather is making a difference (reference our recent comment about the field shelters being used more) plus feeding Pluto takes up probably around an hour and a half each day as we are still on 6/7 feeds.
We also added up our numbers today: from a mere 23 four-legged and just over 30 two-legged animals in the winter, our totals this summer are now 45 four-legged and just over 100 two-legged – a mere three times the numbers - gulp!!!