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I've decided to take up organic beekeeping. Our garden is seriously devoid of bees and I have all these high hopes of flowers and veg and herbs. I'll start off with one wee hive in the garden and see how it goes. I have no idea how to keep bees and as a matter of fact I'm terrified of bees but that's no bother! I won't buy any bees or hives this year - I'll do a bit of research first and learn a few things. I've joined the British Beekeeping Association so I can start asking ten thousand questions. If I end up enjoying beekeeping we have access to 80 acres of heatherland - how yummy it would be to have organic heather honey!

Cheers!

The horse thing just isn't going to work for a variety of complicated reasons - wrong kind of grass, horse would be lonely, etc etc etc. So since we are set up for cattle I'm going to train up an ox for driving and riding. I'll choose him from one of our back-end calvers so I can work with him from the day he is born. I'll take a calf out of our Angus bull "Prince Chan" because he is very sound and correct and nice and stocky.

Cattle are smart, they are less spooky then horses (a good thing!) and they are also very affectionate and bond with people like horses do. So an ox will be perfect!

Look at all that lush green grass...

We are gearing up for the latest edition of All The Farmers Bring In Their Silage and All The Wives Feed Them. I've hit silage season every time I visited Orkney and now I'm here to stay - for all of the future silage seasons! Erlend is outside raking the mown silage grass so that it spreads out and dries in this fabulous hot sunshine. Meanwhile I'm trying to tidy up the kitchen. I've organized a menu of fresh light foods for the silage men as they make the rounds over to our farm: bacon, cheese and tomato sandwhiches, fresh salad, garden pea soup and home-grown rubarb crumble. Mmmmm Mmmmm Mmmmm!

It's sooo funny: as soon as ONE farmer starts to cut a silage field the rest of the farmers get freaked out and start mowing away. There's an unspoken competition between the farmers as to who gets theirs in first. (They also mind who starts and who finishes calving first etc) and there is a silent competition between the wives as to who throws out a good meal for the guys as they migrate from farm to farm and bring in the grass.

Orcadians are like cows and sheep: they won't eat something that they haven't seen before. Instead they stare at it with suspicion and politely pick at it - and then flee at the first chance. I didn't know this when I first came to Orkney. I lost the Silage Meal Game the first year because I served a mountain of potato salad - something these Orcadians don't often see. To top it off they eat like birds - whereas American farmers would have inhaled that mountain of potato salad and asked for seconds!

I lost the game the second year because my gravy turned SOLID. (I still haven't caught the knack of making gravy...) Erlend said to make mince - the guys would recognise that! So I set about frying up a couple bags of what we call "hamburger" back home. I tried to make a gravy and it turned into a brick right there as I stirred it! I had to call Erlend's cousin Marina to come and save me since I had no idea what on earth "mince" consisted of. She brought a tub of brown powder and made a brown sauce that went with the mince and I discarded my "gravy" and tried to act natural when the guys came in for dinner and Marina snuck out the other door.

I lost the game last year because I served up corn bread and no one here eats corn bread! Corn-based stuff is sooooo American and I LOVE the stuff! I thought, man - hard working farmers would LOVE nice hot steamy corn bread fresh from the oven and slathered with butter!!! They'll be drooling as soon as they come in the door and take a whiff of the air! Yeah they would: in America! The Orcadians stared at it nervously and nibbled it down with polite smiles. I was slightly baffled when several of the men thought that the corn bread was for pudding (desert) and they put ice cream and other deserty things on it. But hey, at least they ate it!! I wanted to hide under a rock though - my pasta dish had been a rubbery watery wreck and the corn bread went over like a lead balloon.

This year I have to be careful to organize the salad in a Scottish Friendly fashion - folks in the Land o' Haggis eat their salads in a different way then we Americans do. I don't want to send the silage crew screaming in terror as they flee across the fields...

Meanwhile as I cook and the men pack the silage pit the cows watch from the fields as their winter's worth of grub is piled high to ferment in the pits. They know what it is - they eat it every year. It's so uncomplicated feeding the cows!!

Ok...back to organizing the kitchen so I can cook a huge meal, sit a crowd and serve up the food without going mad!

I was walking past the silage pit after checking on the sheep (a lamb had escaped!) and I spotted these amazing clouds!





They remind me of deer or hounds running across the sky!

My ankle is doing better these days and one of my pleasures is to be outside in the fresh air weeding one of our tattie patches. Erlend planted them and we bought a dutch hoe so I could weed them - a skill I learned while spending part of a summer at a monastery! (You learn a lot of useful things with nuns...)

Sunset at the Ring o' Brodgar

We had sheep shearing at the farm last night! This was my first sheep shearing so I came armed with the camera!! Erlend and our friend Grahmme worked out a trade: he'd shear our sheep and Erlend would lend him a tractor and grass topper. Grahmme is an old hand with sheep and has finally found a farm of his own up here in Orkney!

We separated the lambs from their mums and they were NOT happy! They baah'd for hours!! Here they are looking well-fed and healthy. And cute!!

Grahmme was so swift that most of the photos came out blurry. You can still see what's going on though!

The sheep didn't struggle much. I was surprised because I expected them to be freaked out! But they were rather calm and matter-of-fact about the whole thing.



I saw that shearing is a dance: Grahmme had a very precise position for himself and the sheep every step of the way.



The sheep was eased this way and that - it seemed as if she were being slowly rolled out of her fleece! (You can see a muzzle poking out behind his knee...)


(The sheep shot like a rocket out of her fleece!!) I was stunned when I saw Elsie emerge from her fleece: she was so scrawny undernieth! I had expected her to be MUCH bigger then she was!



I was shocked: the average fleece was about 8 feet long by 5 feet wide!! (This was a small fleece from a yearling.)

The Wooly Ladies are no longer wooly. Instead they look like big-headed aliens from outter space!

On Monday we are escaping the farm for a five day holiday "doon sooth" where we are meeting up with Dag, his wife and one of his daughters in Dingwall! This is going to be some fun!! I bet Dag and Erlend will talk farm, farm and more farm for ages hahahahaha! If our camera works we'll be able to post some photos on our return. Cheerio!!!

"Come any closer and I'll peck your nose!!"

We've watched this hoodie crow hopping around at the end of the driveway for the past couple of days and we finally had to investigate because I can't stand to see one of God's creatures suffering. We were planning on dispatching the animal to put it out of its misery but to our surprise the crow is incredibly fit! The reason it is hopping about is strange: he is missing the back halves of both wings. It looks as if they were torn off. If you look closely you can see that his wings are far too short - that's what clued us in that something was wrong with the bird. Also, he has an injured leg which he seems to hold against his breast most of the time. He can walk on it though so it is still working. Maybe it will heal?

He's not bleeding and he is very bright and active so hopefully he'll survive! We are guessing that he was hanging around the end of our driveway because that way he could get water from the burn. It's been so dry lately that he would have certainly starved to death or weakened to the point of being caught by a cat. (Brodgar most likely!!)

At the moment we have the critter in our cat carrier and I've been feeding it old bread and scraps. The silly thing has a sweet tooth (sweet beak??) and LOVES hot cross buns and bannanas!!! I highly doubt the animal has seen a bannana before so you can imagine my surprise when he snatched the chunk from my hand as I was pushing it through the bars!! I can see that I'll have to keep sweet things as a Sunday treat or he'll die of junkfood poisoning.

If he lives (she?) then we'll build it a portable cat-and-rat-proof aviary and try our best to give it a good life. While doon sooth I'm going to try and find a large bird water thing and some perches and bright dangly bird toys. I don't believe in caging birds but in this case a cage is the only way to keep the crow out of reach from the rats and barn cats!! In winter he'll have plenty of birdy company in the sheep barn (plus the sheep!) and in summer he can be put out in the yard on bonnie days. Crows are pests but they are also magnificent creatures. They are the most intelligent of the birds. People back home in America have had "pet" crows that learned to talk! They are incredibly social and downright brilliant animals. I've always felt that God would not give us a world filled with stupid and emotionless creatures - that would be sheer cruelty! I delight in the animal kingdom! Hopefully Mr. Crow will live and enjoy an easy life of free food and safety in exchange for his feathery companionship.

P.S. I have another delightful bit of birdy news! Twice now in the past two years I've watched a male Hen Harrier hovering aboot our walled garden! The first time I saw him out of the upstairs bathroom window and yesterday I spotted him from the kitchen window which is right below the bathroom window. I wonder how many times he scopes out the goods in our garden without any of us seeing him?? What a delight it was to see him there! Just as long as he doesn't take a cat...

Whooo boy! God has blessed us with incredibly healthy lambs! Look at the little monsters! They are built like tanks!!