Its chucking it down here tonight so we have had to resort to our wet weather routine. This involves doing inside jobs until the rain relents slightly at which point you charge from job to job outside hoping to get it done before a fresh deluge finds all the gaps in your waterproofs.
As there was so much to do tonight the casual observer would have seen me attending to a variety of tasks, feeding all the critters, watering the plants in the green houses, exercising the dogs, unloading the pork and bacon form the car, plucking chickens in the semi darkness, cutting branches for the goats by torchlight for them to munch during the small hours and generally falling over in the newly created mudbaths that tend to gather in the gateways.
Patches and Pixie have been transformed into delicious bacon and pork, Patches' bacon will be ready in a couple of weeks of careful management, hopefully this time the cats wont find a way into the meat store and help themselves to an unfair share. Tradition has it that the first piece of pork eaten is a strip of belly while I sort the rest and I was happy to uphold the tradition tonight. Stuart the butcher who cut the piggies up was again very impressed with the quality of the meat produced at Rock HQ and if there was a way of supplying him two a week like he has asked for I probably would!
Dinner was finally served at 10.20pm.
I was asked by a nice researcher from channel 4 the other day how we managed to fit it all in, working full time and farming part time. Simple answer, I didn't know, we just do. And we love it.
