Tale of woe with a happy ending..............

Well we encountered our first death in the animal department on Friday, sadly one of our little welsummer chickens died. We're not sure what happened, she was in her nesting box when I let them out first thing and when I went back to check them she was dead. So, armed with marigolds and a spade, I had to remove her from the nesting box, a bit tricky as she was a stiff as a board, and gave her a wee burial at the ground behind the workshop next to the burn, poor wee thing. As I'm contantly reminded by our farming neighbours, these things happen with livestock and you just have to get on with it, but it was a wee bit sad for me.

So poor William the cockerel was looking very lonely wandering round the garden with his two welsummer ladies as both the marans are broody at the minute! Until, on Saturday morning, our friends Allan and Ali came to the rescue. They also have a couple of chickens which they got from my uncle David, two light sussex ladies. Unfortunately they were being a wee bit too noisy in the back garden, so Allan and Ali decided to relocate them to beautiful Perthshire before they got a knock on the door from the neighbours!
Our two new ladies seem to be settling in fine today, they've even laid me a couple of eggs,
albeit not in the hen house but out in the run! I'm sure they'll get the hang of hows things work up here pretty soon. So things have definitely turned out for the best as the residents of the hen house are in far more even numbers, two welsummers, two marans and now two light sussex, plus William and the two geese!
Now that we have Allan and Ali's old house we're also planning on moving one of the broody marans onto some eggs tomorrow, so we'll hopefully have the noise of cheeping little chicks in a few weeks, fingers crossed.
The geese are looking a bit sorry for themselves these days as they've started to moult and have now stopped laying for the year. We were very lucky as they laid for a lot longer than expected, we'll just have to look forward to Valentines Day for some more eggs from them as that's when they'll hopefully start laying again.

Fence building and berry picking.....

We all had a great weekend when my mum, my Uncle Brian, his boys Cameron and Logan abd my youngest sister Zoe came to stay. Brian and Gregg spent the weekend building the picket fence around the vegetable garden, so it's now fully enclosed and hopefully hen and goose proof!! At last the garden is starting to take shape!
The kids slept in the tent, much to their delight, Logan had never been camping before! Cameron did ask to have a ghost story before the were left to go to sleep but I didn't think that was a great idea, so no ghost stories!!
We went berry picking on Saturday and picked about 12 kilos of rasps, mostly for jam, we made a dozen jars on Sunday afternoon and then managed to eat the rest of the rasps! We were all very good and didn't eat too many while picking them!

We also went along to the little bridge just up the road from the cottage, there are lots of baby trout in the burn at the moment. We managed to catch 5, one of which was so tiny that it managed to get through the netting, Zoe caught that one! we took them back later on that evening and put them back into the burn.
When we were sitting outside enjoying the warmth of the evening, we were lucky enough to see an owl perched on the telegraph pole in the garden, it swooped between our garden and our neigbours, an amazing site as it's quite a big one.
We also saw lots of frogs and toads on the farm road when coming back from a walk up the Welton on Friday evening, logan caught one and moved it into the grass verge incase it got run over! So between playing in the burn for most of the weekend and sleeping outside under the stars, the wee ones had a pretty fab weekend!

Updating our website

We've spent the last 2 days updating our website
www.primrosehillinteriors.com so we're both feeling a bit google eyed! We did get the opportuntiy to get some nice photos though, especially of the geese and hens, and some nice ones around the garden. All we need now is a successful P.R. campaign and away we go!
Chrissie, our new dog, had been behaving extremely well until this evening when she was caught red handed! We had noticed that the cats seemed to be getting through their food a lot quicker, i.e. their bowls were empty, which is generally never the case! So the culprit was caught this evening, and even after getting a row, she had the cheek to return and polish off what was left, ooh the cheeky monkey!!! Never mind, we still love her loads!!

We are keen to get some more hens, as William the cockerel could do with some more lady company, I think his current lady friends are getting a bit fed up with him contantly hassling them! We should really have put some eggs under our broody

maran hen but I think we might be a bit late as
she's been broody for almost 2 months now and
must be due to come off the boil soon? We'll see, we might try her with some eggs under her, it would be so lovely to have some little chicks this summer!

Our new dog!

Our first blog, how exciting! We've been meaning to do this for ages, but as usual, we always seem to take ages to get ourselves organised.....! Well, here's a picture of our new dog, Chrissie, she's a 9 year old retired working collie and loves to play football! She also likes to go wandering off to discover the fields surrounding us, but thankfully she hasn't decided to take herself off on a wee day trip for a while.......!

Having this new distraction means that I'm getting less work done than I should be (what's new), but hey ho, never mind, that's what being your own boss is all about. We're hoping we'll be able to teach Chrissie to round up our ducks once we get them, so that'll be the next project, building a duck house!