It’s taken us a long time and several days of hard work – but finally we’ve got the Ancient Artefact out of the lawn and (partly) to the tip! That means we just have to deal with the pampas grass and the lawn will be officially Done.

It’s just a question of what to do with the pampas grass, really. The sparrows do love it – both as cover and as fodder, since they like the seeds – so I’m reluctant to just haul it out and compost or burn it. I think I need to find out how well it can be transplanted – then perhaps I can move it to somewhere where it doesn’t block out most of the view from the lounge windows. It’d be fine on the boundary somewhere, maybe in the North Paddock – and maybe several somewheres, if I can split it safely.

Hen with Prolapse is back with the flock today, fully recovered. The four original birds were all on the perch together tonight, bundled together snugly.

Mother Duck is still making herself known as top bird in the yard – today she bit several chickens who were pushing their luck, and then pinned the geese into the duck stable and stared at them for a while before they managed to escape! She’s had the ducklings out in the sun most of the day, making free of the goose feed dish as a bath, considering moving into the henhouse and teaching the ducklings how to mow grass nicely. I herded them all back into their stable for the night and put the barrier up to keep them safe.

I have a plan for rescuing the quail from the hens, who keep pinching all the food from the quail. Very sensibly, the quail refuse to stick their beaks out when the hens are standing in their food trough, so tomorrow I hope to shift them to a different cage, complete with food hopper and large water supply. With luck, I can get the bunnies set up with large water supplies too, which will reduce the amount of work required daily.

Fingers crossed we can get through the work without too many large ginger horses in the way…

Quite a big day for the ducks today – I took their barrier away so the other poultry could mingle a bit.

It started with the geese coming to the door of the feed room to honk quietly, almost invitingly. Mother Duck didn’t look too chuffed but she just waited, ducklings all lying peacefully in the sunshine  around her.

A chicken walked in, spotted a food dish and homed in. A duckling turned its head and fixed a very beady eye on the chicken, then hissed, quite firmly. Apparently the message got through, because the chicken stopped mid-step, jumped backwards, then turned round and walked off with a nonchalant air, as if to say ‘I was going elsewhere anyway…’

I went through the barns and collected up all the hay nets, refilled them, rehung them and went back to see the geese venturing into the feed room, still honking quietly. I think they did actually have quite neighbourly intentions – but Mother Duck was rather firm about disinviting them. In fact, she hit Hannibal squarely in the head at high speed from a standing takeoff!

Later on she took the ducklings out into the yard for their first excursion and I managed to get some of it on video:

In other news: Abe is getting used to me putting my hands on his back and jumping up and down on both sides of him – in fact he’s started to give me ‘what, again?’ type looks. Dancer is still making reluctant progress away from giving me the ugly pinned-ears ‘I shall walk on you for treats!’ approach and is getting rewarded each time she puts her ears forward, so it’s sinking in slowly. Poppy, of course, has beautiful manners towards humans even if she is rather unpleasant to geldings… particularly poor George. The Insidious Abe is slowly getting on her good side, though Dancer has taken to biting him if he’s in her way!

Abe has the most ingratiating way to steal other people’s dinners. He slowly sidles up next to the target bucket, looking totally innocent, and waits until the rightful owner comes up for air, then the grey nose slowly hooks over the edge of the bucket, he takes half a step closer, tilts his head and the rightful owner finds there’s no room to put his own nose back in! I say ‘his’ though I have seen Abe do this to Dancer – but not if Poppy’s looking! Dancer has a very short way with trespassers in her bucket, though – she bites his ears until he leaves again. George looks disgusted, finishes his mouthful, then starts nudging Abe’s head hard until he manages to dislodge the intruder and reclaim his dinner.

Insidious! It does make it difficult keeping the Tubby Arab on the right side of the weight curve, though.

George has found today a bit of a trial. Every time he comes in for a chat with me, Dancer follows him. Then Poppy follows Dancer. Then Abe realises he’s on his own and he turns up as well – so poor George is getting practice in looking polite while I hand treats out to other horses besides himself. He gets some as well, of course, but he’s learning that I disapprove of him warning off Abe or Dancer if they approach while he’s talking to me. Poppy gets exactly the same stern verbal warning if I spot her bullying George, of course!

The new evening tablet seems to be working for Mum – she stayed in bed until half past five this morning and was much brighter and more compos mentis than usual all day. Fingers crossed it wasn’t a fluke!

But first, before we get into the depressing stuff, have some bath ducks!

I reckon they’re settling in fine. Mother Duck seems to be a shy little soul but she wags her tail a lot, which is apparently a happy sign in Muscovies.

I had a long chat with my GP yesterday afternoon. It seems the waiting time for hearing back from the memory clinic is about 4 months, so we’re looking at an appointment somewhere the other side of Christmas if not into next year. After some description of the kinds of behaviour we’ve been getting from Mum recently, the GP dictated a letter asking for her to be bumped up the priority list if possible, and another asking the social care department to get in touch with me to arrange a needs assessment and see if we can get some help, at least someone coming in to help Mum get washed and dressed in the morning and ready for bed in the evening.

He’s also prescribed a sedative to try and extend her sleeping time somewhat – at the moment she tends to go to bed about 8pm and is up and having breakfast about midnight, then goes into a sort of behavioural loop of dozing – having breakfast – dozing – walking to the shop (which is usually shut the first time or two she goes because it’s the small hours) – having breakfast – etc. This morning apparently she was in her bed until 2am, so maybe it’ll work and we can adjust the dose once a new routine’s established. I have to admit, I’m concerned about her stomping off to the shops by herself since she now checks for oncoming traffic before crossing the road not by looking but by listening…. and she rarely puts her hearing aid in these days.

I’m thinking we’re probably also getting close to the point where we have to step in and prevent Mum doing any cooking. This evening we agreed to have a chippy supper for a change, so I headed off to collect the food. Michelle left Mum downstairs having a cup of tea (she was quite tired, since we’d spent the afternoon shifting rubbish, cutting weeds and dragging the next section of the Ancient Artefact out of the lawn) and I returned to find Mum had put out lots of plates, turned on the oven, put all the frozen fish fillets in the freezer into it and boiled up a pan of peas until they were thoroughly dead (Michelle thinks she’d left Mum unwatched for about 15 minutes.)

The dogs also had fish for dinner. They don’t do vegetables, however, so they refused to help with the peas (I’ve not had a sighthound who did vegetables, but they’ve all been kleptomaniac fruitaholics….)

Part of this was Mum’s ongoing conviction that the house is full of people – at the last count, at least 4 ‘university friends’ all asleep upstairs and ‘a lot’ of small children who come and go at will, plus ‘a few’ strangers who come in off the street and move things around when Mum’s not looking – the same ones who snatched her book out of her hand the other day and packed it in her suitcase for her holiday with my sister, perhaps.

The GP was fairly blunt. It is, in his opinion, undoubtedly one of the dementing diseases (a very accurate description!) and it’s really just a question of whether it’s Alzheimer’s, Vascular Dementia or both. The only difference from our side of the problem is the exact flavour of drugs used to try and slow progress down. I mentioned Mum’s ongoing fixation with getting the use of her car back and he was quite alarmed – until I assured him I have the keys hidden and secure. I’ve dropped comments a couple of times about putting the battery on charge, too – as an additional measure of control. I don’t think there’s much danger of Mum managing to pick up a car battery and put it back in the car if Michelle and I have pulled it out and plugged it into a charger at my place, and the car certainly won’t be going anywhere without a battery in it even if she jemmys the door open and hot-wires the ignition!

Yesterday she told me the road was clear and I should pull out of a junction. Fortunately I always check for myself no matter who tells me the road’s clear – and there was a huge artic bearing down on us. When I pointed it out to Mum, she was quite surprised. She’d thought it was part of the landscape, apparently. She also informed me the speed limit was 100 miles an hour – and when I expressed surprise, she revised it to 80. Admittedly, a lot of people seem to share that particular delusion, but there’s no way she should be behind a wheel again.

We’ve had some very determined attempts to get the car back recently. It was MOT’d at the end of last month and the garage receptionist told me Mum had been walking up and down the street looking to see if she could spot her car through the morning. The following day she went round to try and pay the bill and get the keys back – although of course I’d sorted the bill out when I picked the car up, and I had the keys as well. A few days later she told me she’d gone round and talked to the service manager to see if he could order new keys for her, because someone had taken her keys away. (He couldn’t, of course – and they all know not to help her in these schemes anyway, because I’ve told them she’s under medical orders not to drive). I spoke with him two days ago while paying for a tank of diesel and he confirmed it, then told me she’d been convinced that the car needed MOT’ing again so she could get her licence back…

It is fascinating how devious and inventive she can be on this sort of thing, yet it takes us half an hour to get her to take two pairs of pyjamas off from under her trousers and then turn her trousers round the right way in the morning before we go out, because she can’t remember how to untie a shoelace, or needs someone to talk her through each layer of clothing separately…

Truly bizarre. I can totally agree with the ‘dementing’ bit of the description!

Anyway, we’ll see how things go in the next week or so. Social Care is, of course, as grossly under-funded and under-resourced as the rest of the care sector so the best they can offer at present is apparently a maximum of 4 half-hour visits from a carer who can help with washing, dressing, taking pills and maybe (at the most) putting a packet in the microwave…. I’ll settle for a couple of visits around getting Mum up in the morning and back to bed at night. Apparently there’s a major healthcare group in this area right now that’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy… and nowhere else to put their 16,000 dementia patients or provide care for them in any way.

I got a slightly grim laugh off the GP when he told me about it and asked what could be done for them, because my response was ‘organise 16,000 pauper’s funerals’. Sometimes black humour is the only thing you can offer.

On the brighter side, George has developed a new behaviour. Unless it’s raining, the herd is usually out grazing in the field when I go off to do my bedtime round of critter checks. By the time I’ve quietened Hannibal the Guard Goose down, shut up the chickens, counted duck beaks, collected empty hay nets, counted bunny noses, the hen with the prolapse, 3 sleepy silkies, 5 quail, 8 ferrets (but no pear trees!), refilled the hay nets and hung them back up, checked the hay box and topped off any water buckets that are getting low, there’s the sound of large hooves padding over the concrete and a little nicker in the darkness announces George’s arrival.

I go over and give him a good scratching session, up and down his mane and the angle of his shoulders, round his ears and down his forehead and cheeks, all interspersed with nose-nudges, the occasional sleeve-tug, several handfuls of nuggets and a great deal of quietly talking nonsense to my big ginger teddybear, then I give him a final handful of nuggets and we say goodnight to each other before I come inside and lock the door.

I half expect a voice in the darkness calling ‘G’night, John Boy!’…

Yesterdays’ ducklings were fine overnight, though obviously missing their mum, but they cleaned out their food dish tidily and were all active in exploring when I let them out of their overnight run into the larger stable space.

This afternoon, however, I got a message from their previous keeper to say their mum was missing them dreadfully, kept going back to the stable where she’d raised them and wouldn’t stay with the flock, so would I like to take her (for free, too!) and reunite her with her babies?

No hesitation for thought required! I don’t like the habit humanity has of assuming that just because an animal can survive without its mother at a certain minimum age, that should be the maximum age for weaning as well…. which is why Dancer, of course, is still suckling at 15 months, because I’m leaving that to Poppy to arrange. I may say things to Poppy like ‘are you still letting that ginormous great animal drink? She’s almost as big as you!’ but that’s as far as my interference in the matter goes! Abe was weaned and gelded at 6 months, which is the bare minimum, and I think he’s lost out as a result – he hasn’t had the additional socialising from his mum that George (for all his problems!) got, and as a result he can be a real PITA to other horses and get kicked and bitten as a result. George has stupendously good manners with other horses, and I put that down to being educated in horse etiquette by his mother for an extended period. Male horses which are gelded young also suffer from losing the growth and developmental influence of testosterone, of course – as do dogs. Animals need those sex hormones to govern how big they get, how wide they get once they’e reached full height, how dense their bones need to be and so forth – something that I learned some years ago when Wicket was still a pup, because I had a Jack Russell cross dog pup who needed surgery on his stifle joint. I asked if I should get him neutered at the same time, before or after, because the pups were both approaching a year old and I didn’t want whippet/Jackie lurcher pups coming along, and the specialist vet doing the surgery said no, on no account should I neuter him until he’d reached full growth because it would affect so much in his development, including how well he healed after surgery! Just keep them both on leads when they were out and separate them if Wicket came into season, but don’t screw up their hormones until they are both absolutely full grown.

It’s impractical to consider keeping a horse entire until he’s reached full growth, of course – a yearling colt can be quite a handful even if he’s a tiny little Shetland and anything bigger can be outright dangerous to the unskilled handler. I have had an entire Shetland stallion but he was a remarkably easy fella to handle – if he’d given me trouble I’d have had to get him gelded. Most aren’t so laid-back. Even so, the longer they’re left as nature intended the better, and certainly George’s magnificent size and broad, powerful build, even for his breed, may have been influenced by him being left until he was 18 months before he was ‘cut’. I don’t know if Abe’s going to broaden out across the chest much further – he’s 5 now and still quite narrow for his height and length, and while Arabs can sometimes widen out at 6 or so, he’s certainly a bit on the weedy side in terms of chest width. He has, however, learned better horse manners in the past year, living under the guiding hooves of Poppy and George between them!

After all this digression around the social lives and hormonal influences of animals, the long and the short of it is I was delighted to pick up Mother Duck this afternoon and here they all are, reunited and restored to being a Happy Family of Muscovies again.

Having their mother back should mean the ducklings get tuition in how to forage, what to eat, how to swim and fly properly, as well as protection from rats and other predators – and, of course, they’re less stressed and more content.

Late last night I spotted an advert on my Facebook feed, posted by someone I know slightly (George’s granddad’s breeder). 7 Muscovy ducklings, 6 weeks old, free to a good home.

I got straight back to offer the requisite good home and this afternoon we picked up the ducklings – literally, since the seller’s daughter doesn’t like handling birds. I also picked up the mother duck and restored her to her flock, rather than left her alone in the stable where she’d been raising her babies. The ducklings came home in one of our big spare bunny cages and are now safely installed in the pony stable (previously the feed room and henceforth the duck run!

They have a tray of water, which they’ve splottered about in extensively, and a big dish of food – grower’s pellets, layer’s pellets, mixed corn and a garnish of mealworms. Hopefully it’ll give them the idea that they’ve landed on their webs properly. They’ve got straw for bedding and there’s a slight slope to the floor in there – I put the dry straw at the top end and the water at the bottom, where it can drain into one of the old cow byre drains just the other side of the wall.

They’ll be staying safely in there until they have hard feathers through, then they can start to explore and learn to forage outside on nice days, and I’ll keep them in the rat proof run by night, give them more liberty by day – but still within the stable area.

George watched them all carried in and sniffed my hands very carefully. He refused to take any treats until after I”d washed thoroughly, though!

Apparently all the horses got out of bed on the wrong side this morning – except George! What a reversal. They were all plastered in mud first thing, which is not ideal for horses about to have their hooves trimmed, so I set about cleaning out hooves, then started brushing off dried mud (there’s no point trying to brush off wet mud!) but there was still quite a lot of mud on their legs and hooves when Odette arrived to trim them.

Dancer was feeling antsy and kept taking her hooves out of Odette’s hands, or back off the hoof stand. In the end we spanked her (I hurt my hand on her shoulder and Odette hurt hers on Dancer’s rump) and then she stood properly and sulked until the job was done.

Poppy was fidgety and kept taking her back feet away, but as I hung onto Dancer at least we didn’t have barging and staggering issues this time!

Abe was a little swine and kept waltzing around his stable, which is very unlike him. In the end he got spanked, too, and then he stood still and sulked.

George was sweetness and light, didn’t try to bite anyone and had a lovely time after the others went out, because he stayed in and got lots of targeting practice (and treats!) while I was going in and out with the 40 bales of hay I collected last night. They’re now all stacked in the big dairy shed, so I can probably relax about hay until the beginning of next month now. In the process, of course, George got about 40 sessions of targeting over the door of Abe’s stable, along with the resulting treats!

I need to pick up another sack of nuggets tomorrow.

Once empty, the trailer was swept out, turned round and parked ready to take back to its owner tomorrow morning.

Hannibal played Fairy’s Footsteps with me several times during all this. He’s getting quite mellow at the moment – possibly because we’re coming into winter and he’s not feeling as territorial as he does during the breeding season? I’m wondering if I can train them over the winter – teaching them to follow me when I call their names, for example, could be useful as I’d much rather lead them to a new paddock than chase them there!

This afternoon I brought my mother up to the Croft for a while and we did some mucking out together – she looks after the barrow while I do the sweeping and shovelling, with the horses out of the way. George was still in at that point but he was obliging about stepping into other bits of the barn for me! We need to put up the next bit of ‘wall’ for the compost heap soon, so we’ll have a poke about and see what we have that will do the job tomorrow.

I think the hen with the prolapse is nearly ready to go back to the flock, which will be a huge relief to her! She’s not happy in her cage, but at least she’s healing and it’s only temporary.

 

I’ve remarked several times that I dislike spending hours of time mowing the grass in the yard and goose paddocks. Yesterday we headed off to the Thainstone Shetland Pony sales in search of a couple of colt foals to be lawnmowers for a couple of years.

I’ve never gone to the sales before without finding hordes of mostly-wild almost-unhandled new-weaned colt foals, fresh off the boats from the Northern Isles, which go for £5-£10 a head – directly to the meat man, poor little devils. Last time I went, someone I knew picked up 25 black colt foals, both miniature and standard, for £125 the lot. At least that batch went to a field rather than a slaughter house and she put in the work to get them tame, halter-trained and then found them all good homes gradually over the next several years!

Yesterday the prices were eye-watering by comparison. The top filly sold for £1,700 and even the weediest late-born unhandled colt foal playing dodge-the-human in the sales ring fetched £60! There were only a couple under £100, most were around £500-£800.

We came home without the cute furry lawnmowers we’d been hoping for, which was very disappointing. Mum liked my last lot of mini Shetlands a lot and even Michelle admitted mini Shelties are adorable!

Plan B is to get some smallish sheep. I’ve applied for a CPH number today (County, Parish, Holding) which is the required land identification number demanded by the government before any farm livestock can be moved onto any piece of ground in the UK. Horses are exempt, not being farm livestock, and the poultry are separate – they go onto the GB Poultry Register when I have more than 49 or when I have any other farm livestock on the property.

I’ve always intended to add a small flock of sheep to the menagerie for several reasons; they eat grasses and weeds horses won’t, so they help improve grazing quality and keep docks under control, and they provide a control measure for internal parasites, since any horse parasites they may pick up will die and any sheep parasites the horses may pick up will, likewise, die. The only exceptions I know of there are liver fluke and tapeworms, so they’ll all still need worming – but much less. I’ve heard of someone only a dozen miles away who keeps Castlemilk Moorits and occasionally puts together a little starter flock for people… once we have the CPH number sorted, I may get in touch and see if she has any available next year. I’ve not had Castlemilks but we had a closely-related Manx Loaghton years ago and she was a great character, appointed herself ‘flock midwife’ and refused to drop her own lambs until she’d overseen every other ewe lambing!

I don’t know that I want the headaches of entire rams, tupping, consequent all-night vigils at lambing time and the worry of sick or weakly lambs, though, so I’m hoping I can assemble a wether flock. Wether flocks used to be very common in the days when a sheep was worth more for shearing than scoffed as a lamb but these days they’re extremely rare – castrated male sheep carry a heavier, finer fleece, however, and they’re equable, get quite tame, don’t try to ram you with their horns and, obviously, don’t lamb! Half a dozen or a dozen wethers would be small enough to be manageable, not too much work at shearing and foot-trimming time but sufficient number to keep the lawns mown and the paddocks under control behind the horses.

Meanwhile, today turned into hay-day. I asked for another 21 bales (£5 apiece) from my usual supplier at the end of last week, had to pick up another 6 over the weekend and was down to brushing the floor last night to get enough to feed the rabbits, so when I spotted an advert on Facebook for hay only a few miles away, I jumped at it. Naturally, the regular delivery turned up this morning as well! I put away 21 bales this morning, spent the rest of the day shovelling a week’s worth of muck out of the barns onto a newly-constructed compost heap, and then hooked up the horse trailer I borrowed on Sunday (hoping to be bringing a couple of foals home yesterday!) and set off to pick up 40 bales of decent hay at only £2.50 a bale.

With some careful packing, we managed to get all 40 bales into the trailer. It’s stacked to the roof and we had to shove the last bale in over the top of the ramp once it was up, but it all just fitted! It’s probably something like 700kg of hay, which when added to the 900kg or so of trailer means the car was hauling slightly over its own weight! It’s rated for towing 2.1 tons, though, and apart from noticing my braking was a little slower than usual and making sure I took corners steadily, the Kuga behaved superbly and was capable of accelerating away from junctions quite respectably.

To my amusement, the place I got the hay was actually a property I tried to buy last year – that fell through but the owners and I have friends in common in that area, so we got on fine and if she has any more surplus hay later in the winter, she’ll let me know.

The trailer is still stuffed full of hay, parked outside the barn. I’ll unload it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is hoof trimming day, so I’ll have the horses all in again, scoffing hay…

 

 

 

It’s very peculiar how my mother can twist things around now her memory’s totally unreliable. For instance, she kept asking whether she can go to Skye to see my sister for a week or so and no matter how often we kept telling her it’s all sorted (last week in November) and showing her the calendar where it’s written down, it didn’t seem to stick. The other morning my sister called and they had a nice chat, and that night Mum started packing – no matter how often Michelle and I kept telling her she still has 6 weeks to go before she needs to pack! Maybe hearing Katrina’s voice added immediacy to the vague idea, made it all concrete in her mind?

As a result, she was complaining bitterly this morning that ‘one of the people’ in the house had stolen her multivitamins. I went through her suitcase and took out two pairs of slippers, her everyday shoes, all her clean socks, her current paperback and, of course, the multivits.

Two packs of them. About 6 months’ worth.

We simply cannot convince her that there’s only her and Michelle in the house – she’s absolutely certain there are lots of people in and out all the time, wandering freely in off the street and moving things around. It’s apparently called ‘confabulation’ – because she can’t remember things correctly but doesn’t acknowledge it (however unconsciously) her brain’s just filling in the gaps in her understanding to try and make sense of the world. I think part of the problem is that she doesn’t actually recognise Michelle and I some of the time, so she assumes we’re strangers who’ve just ambled into the house. Friends of ourselves, perhaps – she has referred to ‘your friends’ or ‘university people’ a few times.

I don’t know if it’s worth trying to straighten her out or just letting her run with it – she certainly got very cross about us correcting her this morning when we pointed out she must have packed things herself because there’s nobody else who would – it was definitely some of those hordes of other people who’ve been in and out of the house, in her mind.

It reminds me somewhat of the rage you get in climate deniers when you force them to face facts – they’d rather wrestle a starving lion head-on than look at an accurate fact and acknowledge their understanding is wrong.

I really, really hope the appointment letter for the memory clinic arrives soon – and that the wait to an appointment isn’t too long!

Anyway, once we’d found her book (stolen out of her hand by a complete stranger, apparently…) and the multivits, told her yet again that no, she is not out of all her meds (and five minutes later reminded her she takes meds every day) she came with me to pick up a big trailer I’ve borrowed from a friend for tomorrow, which is now parked in the yard at the croft. We’ll be making an early start in the morning and I’m hoping to be on the road by 8.30 for the 25 mile journey to our destination (yes, I’m still trying to avoid jinxing the project by being deliberately vague and mysterious). Hopefully we’ll be back mid-afternoon, at which point (assuming it has worked the way I hope!) there will be a full report with pix.

I’ve been doing a lot of mileage recently, with chasing around after my mother so much – some days over a 100 miles, others just under. I did manage to start the day with some good George time, though – he’s going incredibly furry and fluffy with his winter coat coming in, as are the Arabs and Dancer, but he’s quite mellow at the moment, very happy to be scratched and patted and talked to. Since he’s getting so good at lifting hooves when I run my hand right down his legs, I’m scaling the signal back – he’s now getting the hang of lifting his hoof for me as my hand reaches the back of his elbow rather than his feathers, and the moment he begins to shift his weight ready to lift, he gets his click and treat. It means he’s not lifting his hooves very high, but I don’t have to bend down and give him ready targets for teeth either! We’ll get back to working on hoof lift height and duration once we’ve got this new refinement of signal settled between us. He’s also responding to the sound of me asking ‘may I have your hoof?’ which has been the signal for hoof lifts for quite a while now, so really it’s not too big a change for him and he understands perfectly well what we’re up to.

I have to admit, though, that the sooner the rain clears and the horses want to go back outside again, the better. They’re scoffing their way through 3 bales of hay a day between them.

After all this horse cuddling, though, I headed down to the village, picked up my mother, headed back to the croft and picked up the trailer full of rotten wood and one of the old road signs (why the previous owners collected the things, I have no idea!) then we headed for the tip. Having dumped all the trailer’s contents into the appropriate skips, we headed out on the Peterhead road to visit the hay farm, picked up 6 more bales of hay and then home.

The haynets were all spotlessly empty.

I stuffed four nets and refilled the hay box, so that was a bale and a half gone… I should get another 21 bales early next week, though. I suspect this winter will be a matter of spending every spare penny on hay!

After this it was back to the village to drop Mum off at home, pick up Michelle and do a little circuit – Longley’s for dog food and speedi beet, then back to the village shop for Michelle to grab her preferred kind of food, then back to Mum’s to drop Michelle off before I came back to the croft.

I spent a tedious half hour disentangling a load of the old stock netting we pulled up last week, removing the fence posts, rolling up the wire and squashing it, so now the trailer’s full of scrap metal! Still, that cleared the new fence line and I’ve got three strands of electric wire up, so now the Orchard Paddock is done. I just need to hook the electric up to the field fence somehow (I’ll deal with that tomorrow) and it’ll be complete.

At least, I think it will be! You never know with livestock…

It was starting to go dark by then, so I fed everyone, stuffed some more haynets and came in to feed the dogs and light the fire.

Tomorrow’s another driving-around-day….

I’ve been wanting to clear the clematis out ever since I moved in here. The previous owners planted it next to the greenhouse, growing up a wire fence some twelve feet long with no other purpose than providing grip for a rampantly successful climber. Any amount of rubbish had been chucked under the clematis, where of course it just lay festering uselessly. It was a perfect illustration of the old saying about ‘away’ – ‘there’s no such place as away so stop throwing stuff there!’

Our fence and rubbish clearing in the garden has reached the point of being able to get at the clematis, however, so yesterday Mum and I went at it with pruning shears. It took a couple of hours, but it’s all now gone, all rubbish picked up and added to the stack waiting for the next tip run (I think I have enough now for half a dozen runs!) and we’ve reclaimed not only a space some twelve foot in both width and length, but uncovered a good chunk of the greenhouse and cleared the line for the new electric fence to go up to make the poultry paddocks for the winter!

In other news, the horses have now chosen to lounge around the buildings for a third successive day and my hay stack is looking severely depleted. I’ll order another 21 bales today…. ouch….

Another ouch is the amount of muck in the barns, of course – and since the car’s in the garage getting a new spring fitted today (more financial ouch!!) I’m probably going to be down in the village all day, so it’ll be even worse a job by tomorrow!

Oh well. I’ll dismantle another compost bin from Mum’s garden and bring it along when I come home tonight, I can fill it up tomorrow….