Gone fishing

It’s not as if we’ve been posting regularly on this blog over the past few months – the realities of the three full-time jobs that we’re each running right now has made it harder than ever to do that – but the blogspace is for sure going to be vacant for a week. It’s that time again: the annual fishing pilgrimage to South Uist. Fishing for David, not for me. I’ll be strolling along the west coast beaches with the puppy, weather permitting, and basking in the delights of no computer for a whole week. Last year at this time the weather was pretty grim, and the fish were few and far between. This year, we’re hoping for better in every sense. So here’s a little piece of last year’s expedition to fill up the space while we’re gone.

Sharon

 

Autumn light

Or, a little golden light at the end of the tunnel, if you’ll forgive the cliche. It’s been another frantic year, just as each of the past three years has been since we began Two Ravens Press and thought it might be a really good idea to combine it with running a croft and keeping our fledgling writing careers going… Well, maybe we’ve both had better ideas than that one, but we’ve been working hard over the past 2 or 3 months to get everything back in balance again, getting way ahead of ourselves in book production for 2010 and not taking on anything new for a little while. The croft is halfway in shape, and we’re getting ready to go on our annual week’s holiday to the island of South Uist this coming weekend. More like a fishing pilgrimage for David, but a break without computer access is a very fine thing for me, too. And when we come back we hope to be able to settle down into the winter with a slightly lighter workload and a little bit of breathing space.

In the meantime: the puppy continues to grow. She’s about 5 months old now; here she is with the Big Puppy on an outing down to the beach at the bottom of the croft. Not a bad way to spend an hour in the middle of the day…

Sharon

 

Nothing much changes…

…She’s still rounding up hens – or trying to. Here she is catching sight of one of her favourites, a lavender araucana.

 Sensibly, it heads back inside … but she knows where it lives…

She has actually graduated onto the bigger beasts, and very much wants to work with the sheep. She’s a bit small right now, though, so we minimise her opportunities for her own safety. She’s an expert at driving them: perfectly paced, doesn’t run at them … only trouble is, she has no idea where she’s taking them, until she can learn a few directions from us!

Sharon

 

Man versus sheep

If there’s anyone out there who thinks sheep are stupid, think again. Very, very stubborn, yes; stupid, no. The evidence for this? Our week-long efforts to separate ten lambs from ten mothers. Shouldn’t be very difficult, should it? You have two fields, you have two groups; you just get them all into the fank, separate out the lambs, and then it’s done. And it’s quite important that it’s done, and done now: the breeding ewes need a bit of a rest before Mr Tup comes along again in early December, and for them to regain condition they need their lambs to stop suckling.

So, easy-peasy. Ewes in the bottom field, lambs in the top field.

Pandemonium reigns; you’d think everyone had had their legs cut off. Sheep are lined up one side of the fence; lambs are lined up the other side of the fence; everyone is bleating pitiously. We go to bed, contemplating earplugs. And after a while it stops. Oh good, we think: they’ve gone to sleep. Next morning, Nell and Frodo and I happen to be strolling down the croft on our early-monring walk to the lochside – and notice that there are NO lambs in the top field and 20 black blobs in the bottom field.

We do it all again. Fluke, we think. Again: 10 lambs in the top field, 10 sheep in the bottom field.

An hour later, and the count in the top field is 6.

I’ll spare you the details, but this goes on for about 4 days. Lambs are jumping on top of stone walls, getting under a wooden gate and lifting it off its fastenings, and even untying knots in a rope tied around said gate in an effort to make it more secure. Lambs are climbing onto and under and over anything and everything in an effort to get back to their mothers. (The mothers, meanwhile, have their lives back and are as far down the bottom of the field as they can get, trying to ignore the fact that there are lambs who seem to think they belong with them.) The fence between fields isn’t exactly the most secure of all our fences – it’s a wee bit rickety and the fencing man is coming to replace it in a month or two – but for heaven’s sake, it’s still a FENCE. FENCES are supposed to keep sheep out.

So we spend a few hours building the equivalent of the Berlin wall along the dividing fence. The barricades in the French revolution have nothing on this. We look at our handiwork, nod tightly, and set off to try to extract the four lambs that are back with their mothers. Easy-peasy.

Not. Again, I’ll spare you the details of lambs bouncing over hurdles and crashing through the fank. Let’s just say that, about a week later, we are finally up and running and the ten sheep and ten lambs have been apart for a coule of days now. We’re hoping that we’ve sold the four ewe-labs on for breeding (someone is coming to see them today); the surplus males will be fattened up for the table (Hebridean lambs are generally too small to make good eating in their first year). And in December, when Mr Tup comes around, it’ll all begin again. Except that, with a bit of luck, next year we might have a sheepdog to do our rounding up for us…

Sharon

 

Autumn beckoning

I love this time of year more than I can say. Most people feel the excitement and anticipation that I’m feeling around springtime; I do too, but to a lesser degree, because I know what’s ahead: long months in which you never see the night sky, everything too light, light everywhere, leaving you restless and sleepless. But now, the nights are finally beginning to draw in for real, and I can actually get to go to bed in the dark. I can’t explain why it is that at the end of August the world seems finally to tip into some real balance – but it’s something I’ve found here every single year. Don’t misunderstand: winters here can be long and hard and gloomy, and by the time February comes around I’m longing for some warmth and sunshine just like everyone else. But if each of us has a season, mine is definitely autumn. It’s not just the obvious things: the colours, the quality of light, anticipating the beginning of the rutting season and the stags roaring in the hills – it’s that less definable sense of hunkering down for the winter, burrowing, slipping slowly down into that dark cave of creativity where so many things are born and nurtured. For me,this autumn is about completing a novel that is complex in construction and conception even for me; about cutting out the bright clutter of the growing season and groping back inside for the final threads that’ll bind it all together.

Sharon

 

Puppies at play

It’s really hard to tell them that it’s not always a good idea to stick your head down the throat of a dog with teeth that are almost as long as your nose…

…but the big puppy seems to be getting used to it.

Sharon

 

More new additions

We went down to feed the animals as usual this morning and guess what we found – Mrs Duck, with six baby ducklings in tow. Oh goody – just what we need, another 6 ducks – they are rather fertile creatures and we’re already struggling to divest ourselves of those that were produced earlier in the year. We’d prefer not to eat them but if they can’t be sold it may come to that. So anyone reading who’s in the are who’d like to buy a duck or two, please do get in touch! She has been put into an enclosure with the ducklings and some shelter, but hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet. We’ll be watching…

We also found, in the midst of what is probably the only remaining serious unstrimmed nettle patch in the field, nestled into a stone wall, 16 very fine eggs. We’d wondered if they were laying away; even considering the possibility of the August moult, 2 eggs in the last 2 days from 16 or so laying hens seemed a bit pitiful. So we’d better keep an eye on them too from now on …

And finally: a puppy pic for the addicted.

Sharon

 

Chaos and other sad stories

Well, I suppose a small puppy (currently approaching 11 weeks) can’t be expected to bring anything other than chaos, no matter how well-behaved most of the time. Here she is sleeping with the big puppy, who has become a paragon of virtue in his 6th year and seems quite happy to let her take large chunks out of his tail and bite his mouth. But her presence has for sure meant that we’ve been deprived both of sleep and time to update our blogs – we’re just about managing to keep everything ticking over, as is demonstrated by the fact that I just spent the morning of my second wedding anniversary vaccinating and worming sheep…

Meanwhile, chaos also reigns in bee-world. The very fine river of bees described in David’s post below were gone

David surrounded by swarming bees

 within two days. Who knows what it was precisely about their new accommodation that didn’t fit the bill, but they did a midnight flit and we have no idea where they’ve gone. Since then it’s been a case of bees behaving badly, with another swarm appearing a few days later just as the weather was turning from sunshine to rain. Half the swarm turned back to the original hive as the rain came in; the other half formed a small ball around the queen on the grass.

David with collected swarm

Bad weather just about to hit means no time for niceties; we just bundled them into a box that had a super inside and then into the hive before it blew away. So far they’re still there, but there aren’t very many of them …

It has been a grim year for flies and insects of all descriptions. Not only have we had the worst year for midges I can remember ever since I moved here, but the ‘clegg’, a kind of horse-fly, was much in evidence earlier in the summer and I still have the scars to prove it. Ordinary house and garden flies abound wherever you go.

But hopefully the end is in sight; the middle of August and soon the nights will be dark again and the moon and stars back in evidence. There were two hinds and a calf in the field the other day; if they’re coming down from the hills that’s a sure sign that the year is beginning to turn…

Sharon

 

A River of Bees

I don’t often use the word miraculous but it seemed like the right word for what I saw when we introduced a swarm of bees to our second hive.

It went like this… On Tuesday it was a blue, sunny day for the first time in a while and we half anticipated the jet-engine noise of a swarm of bees coming out of our first hive. They have filled up all the space we can give them and after that funny ‘phantom swarm’ of a couple of weeks ago we knew they had a move in mind.

I think I noticed them almost as soon as they took flight and it took about 20 to 30 minutes before they settled as a ball, about 20 ft up in a drooping branch of a big mature larch at the top of the garden. We couldn’t reach them from the ground even with stepladders etc – the ground was at a terrible slope and nothing much seemed to be firm enough to stand on. So I climbed the tree and sawed through the 3 or 4 inch diameter branch at the end of which were the bees. There was a bit of a scramble when the branch finally cracked and bent, dropping them down to about 8ft above ground level. But after a bit of flying about the main body balled up again. We got an upside-down garden chair to deal with the slope and were able to shake them into the big box in the picture.

With a small ‘door’ cut into the box we left them facing the hive entrance for an hour or so and then it was crunch time. It was coming on to look like rain and they really didn’t need to be left in a soggy cardboard box. With a big flat board leading up to the second hive’s doorway and covered in a white cloth (their preference apparently) I tipped and tapped the whole bundle of them onto the cloth.

Three Minutes Later

The cloth was initially all dark with bees. And I must have missed the queen making a quick dash for the darkness of the hive because within seconds there was this curious order to the random movement of the bees. They all started forming up to follow the curved path that the queen must have taken up the cloth. In the photo is the tail end of maybe 8000 bees making their way into their new home. Thirty seconds later than this shot and the cloth was empty and I was still mesmerised.

As of today the bees have stayed in hive number two and are busy redecorating…

David

 

Puppy brain

Those of you who’ve ever dealt with a tiny puppy (or even a tiny baby, if you’ll forgive the comparison :- ) will know the syndrome of Puppy Brain all too well. Spaced-out feeling, glazed expression due to sleep deprivation (‘we must get up early to (a) see she’s still alive (b) hasn’t gnawed her way through the metal cage (c) hasn’t hung herself with David’s old tee-shirt which we put in there as some attempt at comfort or (d) is feeling a bit lonely/grumpy/peckish’), no ability to exchange an intelligent word with your husband beyond ‘did she pee yet?’ and ‘please tell me she didn’t just gnaw off all the courgettes’… She is the sweetest puppy ever (yes, I know: everyone’s puppy is the sweetest puppy ever!) but has a wild streak that normally asserts itself just at the time when you’re settling down to dinner and a nice quiet evening with a good book. Lots of busy days ahead, but this time at least there are two of us to share the load. When I first had Frodo, five and a half years ago now, there was only me and I thought I was going to go completely insane after the first eight hours. The feeling lasted for about two years … which I understand is quite common with golden retrievers!

Meanwhile, the bees seem to be behaving, but maybe they’re just unable to get up to much because of the weather. The pair of ravens who live on the hill at the back of the croft have had a good hatch this year and, unusually, have been bringing the babies down from the hill and quite close to the road and the house. A few mornings ago there was a baby raven roosting in one of the Scots Pines up by the road, practising its musical scales – ‘now what exactly can I do with this funny voice?’

On the rest of the croft? A broody Rhode Island Red has hatched six baby Lavender Araucanas and the five from the incubator are all outside now and growing strongly, and will be available to sell in the autumn poultry sales at the local marts. We’ve already had an order for a pair of geese, and so we know at least two of the seven goslings will be going to a good home. The vegetables are developing triffid-like tendencies and by the end of the season we’ll either have green skin or will be looking strangely courgette-shaped. The sheep have been shorn (and, having done it for the second year now, David is deeply happy that we only have ten of them …) and we hardly recognise them any more, they’re so lithe and goat-like.

Sharon