Well the hustle and bustle of the Christmas Markets is finally over. We had a lovely 10 days without having to worry about the butchers shop.
Christmas happened, as inevitably it always does, despite me having been ill and even in hospital for a couple of days, thank god for mums! Christmas day saw eleven around my table, even though I had told myself I would like a quite Christmas (it will happen one year!) and just eleven again for boxing day, which included our very good friends Rita & Andy, Rita is having treatment for cancer at the moment so we were very pleased she could share some of our Christmas.
Scanning had been booked for the Tuesday after Christmas. Much as I love my three children by this date I had been in the house for nearly a week, without hardly seeing another adult, so Philip was confined to cooking the lunch and looking after children (he doesn’t do more that two things at once!), and I went off to see how many lambs we would be expecting
Our new Shepard, Wyn, was quite amazed. He has come from a hill farm where it is unusual for the small ewes to have more than one lamb; in fact they mark the ewes that are having twins as being out of the ordinary, whereas we mark the ewes that are having singles because the majority of lambs have twins. His poor eyes were popping out of his head when he realise how many lambs we would be roughly expecting!
All in all a good result apart from one batch of yearlings where it seems that the tup was not up to much… he’ll be going off soon… and not returning. So they’re now with another Tup, which will extend our lambing by another 2 – 3 weeks, but what the hell when you start in Feb you may as well just keep going, it seems to fit the rest of our programme- don’t stop just keep going, it’s the only way we seem to get things done.
Cambrian Training came down and we have signed all of our butchery staff up to do NVQ’s in Butchery. So Philip, Andy and Julia will soon be far better than myself and Colin, although I’m sure when push comes to shove that they will still require our assistance in the butchers shop especially if like this weekend we have four markets on the same day (Don’t ask, I said after Christmas that we would never ever do it again… here we are just 4 weeks alter- will we ever learn?
We have a new edition on the farm. Misty gave birth to two pups one alive and one dead. As you can imagine he is one of the fattest little pups in existence sue to him being the only customer at the milk bar. Misty has a little mastitis, and the vet visited her on Sunday evening. She thought that she was also a little depressed. You don’t think of animals getting post-natal depression do you? However after two days of treatment she is looking more like her old self again.
I’ve had a good spring clean in the office, it’s amazing how much paperwork you accumulate over the period of a year, and very often you don’t want to throw anything away in case it may come in useful. The amount of periodicals or magazines I keep and think it will be interesting to read those when I have a spare minute, which re all still sitting there waiting for the spare minute that never comes!
We are all set to do anew farmers market in Merthyr Tydfil which will begin on St David’s Day 1st March 2006, it will then continue to be on the third Friday of every month including March (17th). We are also looking for more farmers markets to do, so if anyone has any information on existing or new markets please get in touch. We would be interested I doing Welshpool, however I have failed to find any information on the market or contact details- perhaps someone out there can help?
Well thats all for now must get back to updating all the events etc happy new year to you all, and we hope to carry on serving all of you into the future, we really want to get it right.
