From Basil to Pesto in three easy steps...

Peppers

Baby peppers on the pepper plant! I think these are the sweet peppers, and we also have chili pepper plants...

Semen World

For all your semen needs... :)

Balwen Sheep

This is a Balwen -- the breed that I think we are probably going to get.

Sheep Shearing

A bit hard to tell what's going on in this photo, but this is the semi-finals of the sheep shearing competition. The shearers work so quickly it is difficult to follow the action!

Meat

Not only are there prizes for the best sheep, there are also prizes for the best carcass... I didn't even think about it when I was taking this picture, but looking at it now, it reminds me of some pictures I took a very long time ago...

I want one!

For all your shopping needs...

JCB Dancing Diggers

Teifi Evans

This is Teifi Evans and Goldfoot Vulcan 6 -- one of his prizewinning pigs. Teifi won four firsts at this year's Royal Welsh Show including Best Male Welsh Pig. For those of you who are wondering why I care about Teifi and his pigs, the place we were thinking about buying before we saw Bwlchyrhyd was Teifi's piggery!

Chicken Update

So we gave up on the last chicken being broody as she clearly wasn't and put her back with the rest of the chickens where she seems much happier... But over the last few days there is now another hen who is so clearly showing signs of broodiness that I am not having all these doubts in my mind like I did with the last one... So, tonight I am going to try to transfer her to the broody coop and if she sits nicely in there for a couple of days I will give her some eggs...

In other news tomorrow I am going to the Royal Welsh show which I am very excited about so I will take my camera along with me and post up lots of pictures when I get back....

Next year's blueberries hopefully!

My new friends! :)

Have finally got our fencing sorted so the chickies have now got TONS of space to play in!

Future blackberries!

I am eating fresh lettuce every day now -- my lunch begins with a walk to the garden to pick it -- and I have just planted my second crop (in between the rows of the first crop). It tastes so much nicer than store bought -- there is no bitterness!

One of the many things I love about living here is how clear the sky is at night! Dw i'n mynd i wely nawr. Nos da!

Feeding time for chickies...

The world's largest scariest spider! (But not quite as scary as the carpeting...)

Anybody have any idea what's going on with the feathers on her breast here? Are they growing back in or being plucked out?

Old chicken mesh and rusted barbed wire that I dug out of the ground this afternoon-- will we ever get it all out??? :)

The beginnings of a larger area for the chickens to play in.

Sitting on the eggs... She has pushed two eggs out of the coop which have cracked (from the fall onto the concrete floor?) but seems to still be sitting rather contendedly on the rest -- is she broody or not? I have no idea!

And this is the hen that I hope is broody! Have just put her in the coop with the eggs about an hour ago so will go check her in a little while to see how she's settling -- I must admit I am a bit nervous about all this!

Sorry this is a bit dark -- I am trying to avoid using the flash as I don't want to startle the hen -- here are the eggs in the broody coop (which is supposed to be dark!).

These are the eggs we are going to give the hen to sit on -- they were laid on Monday and Tuesday and have been sitting in the shed at room temperature since...

Here is the hen in her coop (yes, I know you can't actually see her, but trust me, she is in there...) She was rather unsettled this morning but now seems to have spent the rest of the day in the coop sitting on the fake eggs. There's nothing stopping her coming out of the coop, but unless she's doing it very quietly when I'm not looking I don't think she has. Assuming that she is still happy there tomorrow morning, I'm going to swap the fake eggs for the real ones (10) and then hopefully we should have chickies in 21 days... :)

Baby tomatoes!

Mega-worm!

Can anybody identify these pretty flowers for me?

So we think one of the hens is broody and wants to sit on some eggs so we built her this broody coop to do it in...

Something smells good!

Big boy!

I am constantly amazed at how well my kitties have adapted to their new life outdoors...

Fancy a mud bath?

And the compost heap is now filled with stuff ready to compost...

Are these cherries? We have about three trees that look like this at the mo.

And we bought a barbecue!

The compost heap, finally built!

It's rocketing along! :)

Am making some progress with the strimmer but it is very slow going. And, I have to keep refilling it as a tankful of petrol doesn't last very long!

Like magic! :)

We have now got a proper feed storage bin so the shed is starting to look a bit more organised...

London Terror Attack

Many thanks to everybody who has called and emailed to make sure that Greg is okay. He doesn't actually work in Central London where the bombs were but rather
in an office building about 16 miles West of there.

The area I've managed to clear so far. It's really hard going -- my arms are still vibrating! :)

The strimmer we bought last weekend -- my first petrol powered tool! :)

The first flower on the pepper plants...

Have just been to collect the eggs and this one was a bit broken at one end so I tried to crack it (was going to put the shell in the compost and the egg down the sink) and underneath the shell was this very thick membrane that I had difficulty puncturing with my thumb -- any ideas?

This morning -- a cloud hanging at the bottom of the valley!