A Life Less Simple

I started hand milking Primrose on Friday, I haven’t handed milk properly for a couple of years now so me fingers and wrists are really hurting. It’s nice though, her milk is really creamy and after about an hour in the fridge then the top of the milk is yellow with the cream. So next on my list to buy (when I get paid, as always) is a butter churn and we can have all our own butter as well as milk.

Last week I decided to sell/rehome all my AOV (any other verity) goats, I just have too many at the moment. I’m going to be sad to see them go but so long as they go somewhere nice then it will be ok. AnnieRose is the first going, next weekend, I found an ad for someone looking for a goat to keep their maiden milker company after their oldest goat died and they came to see her today. It sounds like a really nice home.

My quail have started laying again, Rhys found this on the floor of their house last night

What’s even more pleasing is that it’s from my pair where I wasn’t 100% sure that it was a male and female but this proves it. The quail are still all indoors as it seem just a little bit to cold to put them back out yet but it should soon be warm enough. 

I order some seed beads and other bits today, or I finally paid for the order that I’ve been putting together for a week or so. I haven’t done any bead weaving for a while now as I got feed-up with the primary colours I had, I had all these ideas for golds and blacks but nothing for bright green and red.

It’s just hit me what I should be doing with all the sacks of well rotten (and I mean well rotten, it’s like compost in places) manure from the cow shed, growing potatos in them!

Well, Christmas and New Year are finally over. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them, it’s just I find the week in-between so odd. It’s like being in limbo and nothing you do seems to have any weight to it.

I have found some interesting looking websites in the week off www.backyardhive.com and http://www.accidentalsmallholder.net/index.php I haven’t had time to go have a really good look at them yet but they seem a good read.

Primrose is due to calf on the 4^th of February, she’s starting to look really big now. I spent yesterday morning bagging up manure (with Rhys’s help, of course) now there’s just the other half of the house to go.

I haven’t had time to do anything other than work this week. Saturday and Sunday were the first days of the Christmas Market, which went well, but there’s nothing really interesting to say about them.

The quail chicks started to hatch on Saturday. A few days before that there was a power cut and so I wasn’t sure if any of them would hatch at all but there are now nine** of them in the brooder and three hatching out in the incubator. So not bad really. I’ve made the brooder out of my old fish tank and it’s working really well. I tried taking so photos of the chicks but because of the red light you can’t really see anything.

The weather’s also been rubbish all week, or at least it feels like it’s been raining all week.

I got 24 strawberry plants from eBay for £5.49 the other day. They’re from a nursery so they should be really nice plants. I keep looking for cheap raspberry canes as well, strawberries are nice but I like raspberries better, but I haven’t found any yet.At the start of this week I was having big dreams about owning my own a veg box round or something like that, it’s sometimes disheartening that the work that get paid for doesn’t really match up with my longer term plans, however much I’m enjoying it.

*This was written last night to post up but it was far to mesmerising watching the little quail, I’m now a little sorry I missed ‘Pig Big Brother’  **The total is now up to 12 in the brooder, including one with a misshapen foot who I don’t know how well it’ll do

Last night I finally got the push I needed to start off, I was on a forum and someone said that they would love to follow something like this, there are already loads of popular TV series, books and magazines about self sufficient so that must mean that other people are interested to. So this is my two pence worth to add to.

My idea is very simple: produce as much food for myself as is possible with what I’ve got, that said I already know that it isn’t as simple a task as it sounds. I also would like to learn how to live as cheaply as possible and make some money from the things I enjoy doing.

What I already have/where I’m at: I already keep goats, two of whom are in milk but I’m not milking them at the moment for no really reason other than the fact that I haven’t sorted myself out into doing this. I have quail; I got some for my last years Christmas present (in April, but I said I wanted to wait to get what I really wanted rather than having something else) from these there is one male left and I brought four more the other day, two females and two males and I brought 24 eggs, 12 of two types, for hatching from ebay last night, they should arrive on Tuesday next week.

I’m a vegetatian, but others in my family eat meat, and I’ve got most of a vegetable garden up and running now but ‘the family’ have just been told that we can use part of a field we keep donkeys on as a vegetable garden as well which is quite a big space. I’m going up there tomorrow to start clearing the ground and covering some of it with manure ready for the summer.

“The Family”: that is me (eldest daughter) my parents, my two younger sisters, a younger brother and my boyfriend. ‘The Family’ also includes a whole host of dogs, cats, ponies, donkeys, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, rabbits and a guinea pig. I don’t think I’ve left anything out but I might have.

So there are a lot of us, some useful others not so useful.

I plan to be adding more very soon and to start adding some photo’s when I’ve got to grips with how to do things on here.