Princess Eira greets her admirers

Well, I haven’t been called in to do any emergency lambing procedures on my own, and the sheep seems to have done pretty well popping their offspring out. They’ve considerately managed most of it while Rich has been home. One ewe prolapsed while Rich was at work, but I balked at playing vet for such a scary procedure, and Rich had to roar back on his motorbike to put it right during his lunch hour…

Joli played assistant to Rich while I was working on the computer, and when I got back in she rolled her eyes at me. “Honestly mam, I don’t know what you were so stressed about. It was easy!”

We’re still waiting for the other half of the herd to give birth, figuring the ram must have caught them on the repeat cycle. So I may have my non-existant lambing skills tested yet.

In the meantime, our beautiful, placid Saanen goat Glenda (I call her Glenda, Rich just calls her Whitey) has kidded!

Clever girl, she gave birth all on her own during the night on Friday to three beautiful triplets. Sadly, two were billies and we had to get rid of them…

But the remaining one is a delicate little princess nanny goat named, by popular vote, Eira (Welsh for snow). Eira stayed with her mum to get the all-important colostrum for a few days, and then we brought her inside to bottle feed, so that we can get on with milking Glenda. Eira has taken to being an inside goat with no noticeable pangs of missing the barn!

Eira explores the kitchen

She slept inside last night with Joli and Elly, and Elly brought her down wearily this morning…”She woke me up at midnight – and at one thirty…and at three..”

Good practice for being a mum, I reckon!

In the meantime, we’ve been busily sorting out the polytunnel. I didn’t put anything into it before we left for the wedding, so that no one would have to water while we were away. So we’re behind with our tomatoes. I usually like to start mine from seed in February – I love the planting, choosing the exotic varieties and watching the seedlings grow.

But we buzzed down to the garden center, stocked up about ten sturdy little tomato plants, two pepper plants and two cukes, and made up for lost time.

Mom mucks in, planting tomatoes!

I had to reluctantly admit that with no seed wastage and no dud plants, just buying two of each kind of plant you fancy, it’s probably even a cheaper way to get the tomatoes in than planting them from seed!

But there’s nothing like the thrill of seeing the first green shoot from a seed you’ve planted yourself…

My mum (currently stranded in Wales by the volcano, due to sail back to California on the Queen Mary in June) volunteered to help plant tomatoes in the greenhouse, and she and Joli scattered mixed cut-and-come again seeds to make a mixed lettuce bed on the other side. I spread a layer of the gorgeous rich compost made from the aged sheep muck, dark as chocolate cake, over the earth and they tossed the seeds straight into it. A quick rake over and they’re away! I know you’re supposed to plant seeds into a fine tilth, but our lettuce beds always romp away on the lumpy, richly manured ground, tilth or no tilth. I reckon the seeds haven’t read the gardening books…

The polytunnel is looking very smart these days. Rich got a load of concrete slabs from a man who will forever be known to us as Slab Man, and George lent a hand to lay them into a tidy path down the center of the tunnel. So we’re weeded and planted and path-ed and ready to go…

Rich and George get manly, putting a concrete path in the polytunnel

My dad, Don Nix, has been writing poetry while he’s been with us and has nearly completed another book! His previous collections of poems and meditations on the cosmos (much in demand by artists and quantum physicists alike!) are available on amazon.com or barnes and noble.com. Look for titles including The Field of Being, Patterns of Being, Moments of Grace and Dancing with Presence. It’s beautiful, luminous writing that will lift you right out of the humdrum and into an experience of the extraordinary…