Sheep training

The access route between the two fields is rather complicated - the small fiel only exits through a narrow steep gateway into the garden, the big filed has a gate into the road some 50m down the lane from our garden gate.
So I have been planning the sheep move for some time with as many daily training sessions as possible (sometimes with a clicker, sometimes just with a feed bucket):
- come to me when called (somehow I ended up with a rather silly call, that sounds a bit like 'shoooosheeeee shipship'... it works though, even across the big field)
- eat from the bucket, then from my hand (it took the first one less than a week, the last one almost 2 months to be happy to eat from my hand)
- allow handling while eating
- follow me with the bucket
- follow me to new scary places (i.e. the garden, which turns out to be lush and yummy!)
- eat from my hand in new scary places (not suprisingly, they seem to return to a 'raw' flighty state when in new surroundings)

After all that, I just opened the garden gate and the flock happily followed me down the road and intothe new field, no problem - who needs a trailer?

The big field is alive!

And about time it was: donkeys & sheep now happily grazing together.

The field sat more or less unused for the past year, as the fencing had to be fixed/partly redone before I could seriously consider putting any animals in it. Now that this has been done (with the invaluable help of Jo & Brett, the lovely HelpX couple that stayed with me last month) the field can finally come alive.
Lots of lush green grass there too (while the small field looks pretty bare at this point.) Maybe not surprising then, that the donekys threw a proper tantrum yesterday when they couldn't go to the field because of bad weather!

The donkeys have arrived!

And my gosh are they gorgeous!

this photo: Jo Peak

Having donkeys was on the tip of my 'critter wishlist' when we moved here. But all sorts of obstacles had to be overcome before they got here:
> earn extra money to pay for the field shelter (no less, by running a chicken training workshop!)
> attending the mandatory course in donkey care (my first attempt was cancelled due to the donkey farm being snowed in at the end of March)
> getting the field shelter in place (means spending ages researching suppliers, deciding what I needed, carrying all the parts into the road-inaccessible field, having it put together...)
> getting the Donkey Sanctuary to visit twice before my paddock was 'approved'
> then waiting 4 1/2 long months for that phone call from the Sanctuary (that call came last week!)

Yesterday they finally arrived - just 2 weeks short of the one year mark since our move here.
They will be (re)named as soon as I get an inkling for 'their' names - suggestions welcome!

Harvest

Oops, I forgot to check the tomato patch for a week!...
Cheeky the chicken is very interested in the bounty of over-ripe tomatoes.

Munching blackberries

Island cat

Happy chickens...

... enjoy roaming far and wide!

Killing fields

The worker bees have started evicting the drones...

I never realised it was going to be in such huge piles of dead bodies....

Gazelles? Goats? Sheep!

I'm thrilled at the arrival of 4 gorgeous, gazelle-like Soay sheep!
It all happened somewhat accidentally - the internet is a great place for coincidental discoveries. I was, really, looking for infomation on hay (making/byuing/selling) which led me to a link of a local breeder selling Soay pet lambs, which led me to read up on this unusual breed, which made me think they'd be just perfect for here, and they'd be perfect for me, too.
I never really intended keeping any sheep, as everyone else does here anyway. But this is a wild, primitive breed, not messed about with moderns stock breeding ideas, so it's hardy and able to get on with its life without human interference. Just my kind of animal, in theory. Then we went to look at them 'for real' at a farm on Anglesey, and that did the rest for me:
I have fallen in love with these sheep!

By the way, the ram is called Elton.

Wonky beans fixed

Spent some time today switching the beans from a wonky, wind-blown bamboo-with-link-balls frame, to a couple of 3-cane tepees, that seem a lot more stable (at least for now). 

Why didn't I do that ages ago??

The new arrangement also means that I had to remove the netting that was (kind of) protecting the plants from invading chickens. The plants should be big enough now to be in real danger, but I fear a good scratching session could still uproot the lot, so what to do?

Maybe I had good idea: I put down a patchwork of old slate pieces - there are still lots of gaps so that should be OK for water but enough of a solid hard surfarce to deter any scratching. Or so I hope.

You can probably tell I'm a veg-patch beginner.... In London I had a few herbs pots, tomato plant and potatoes in grow sacks out on the patio, but never really got my head around doing it properly. Not that I'm doing anything properly now, despite having tried to ingest a lot of information about the subject over the winter. The long winter and my newbie status put me off sowing anything, so I ended up sticking in a hotch potch of plug plants in late May; whatever I could find locally, with no plan or system. Still, after a slow start everything seems to be doing really well now, and we are struggling with the quantities of chard, lettuce and calabrese, and that's only the start!
Coming from Greece, where the hot summers scortch everything from une onwards, I am still shocked at the ease and abundance of lush green growth in this country!