A Cottage in Clarkville

More goods for sale from a Cottage in Clarkville. We have had a good first year from the daffodil bulbs that my Mum gave us. Unfortunately the roadside stall is not finished yet so I was just selling them at work which was quite successful. Not all of the bulbs flowered and we will be expecting a big crop next year when they hopefully all divide and flower. The variety of daffodil is ‘Camilia’.

We have been getting some raw milk from a local farmer which we have been enjoying. We have read about the health benefits of raw milk and wanted to give it a try. With our last lot I took off the cream from the top and whipped it up to make butter. A successful exercise but probably not worth the effort for a small amount. Maybe I will get back into it when we have a house cow….

We are still here but completely over all of the aftershocks. Our chimney got taken down before it decided to fall down. We can still use our log burner but not the coal range. Now that it is warming up a bit that won’t cause us any problems and hopefully we can get it rebuilt by next winter.

Obviously we have been very lucky that we didn’t suffer any other damage. I haven’t been under the house to check the pilings, not too excited about doing that in case we get another aftershock. Luckily Noah doesn’t care about earthquakes and aftershocks. He is still doing great, almost 7 months old now.

On a brighter note there are plenty of signs of spring around. We have realised that we aren’t going to get rich from our daffodil crop this year. While most of the bulbs are going to flower several aren’t, and we will be looking ahead to future years when the bulbs divide up.

The fruit trees are all starting to blossom. They haven’t had their big prune, still doing lots of learning on that front, I have found out it will be a 3-4 year process to get them to where they should be. No rush, we aren’t going anywhere.

The lambs are doing really well, we ended up with 3 sets of twins, so a 200% lambing for us, a great result. 4 ewe lambs so that will help in expanding our flock. It is great to see the 6 lambs gamboling around, especially late in the afternoon.

The chickens have finally figured out their new feeder, it took muck longer than the 2 or 3 weeks indicated, but they got there in the end. Let the savings on chicken food begin!

Just a quick update to let you know we are all ok here in Clarkville after this morning’s earthquake.  At about 4.30am we were awoken by Ceilidh bolting off the bed and rather violent shaking (7.1) of the house.  We jumped out of bed, grabbed Noah (who was wondering what all the fuss was about) and stood under the door frames.  The aftershocks were just as scary, and unfortunately Chris was due to go to work.  He was there for a few hours in the morning but back home to us around 10am.  We had a broken potplant, some broken jars and our chimney needs some attention.  Compared to some of the people on the telly we came off very lightly and pray there are no more quakes to come.

Chimney