Well, we were one pregnant sheep short this morning, which meant that I had a quick look around the field. I couldn’t see her, but eventually saw a herdie head poking up among the rushes. As I walked down I saw a little black bundle by the side of her, and as I got closer saw another one. Both were on their feet and struggled when I picked them up – which is a good sign. They both had full stomachs. We know through our experience last year that one twin (Tiny) can lose out so I checked them both and made some colostrum up to feed them, but they both refused. On expection they both appear to be girls. Which is great – and a first for us! I have taken them into the cellar and was going to leave them there, but it is a lovely day today and I have let them out again as I thought that sunshine would probably do more good than being shut in the cellar, and both lambs seem confident on their feet – but I’ll keep checking them.
We are having to be harsh to Scooter, and not let her live inside. She therefore sits outside the front door and cries. We realised that we were going to make a rod for our own backs if she becomes too much of a pet, and she does have to realise that she is a sheep. This meant that yesterday she spent much of the time when not pining outside the front door running away from the sheep and hanging out with the chickens.
Now the evenings are getting lighter we need to remember to shut the chickens in at night as the routine of shutting them away before tea is not longer workable. We forgot last night and had the benefit of the cockerals crowing from about 3.30 onwards! Ian has suggested we have a sign up which sayes Chick In and Chick Out which we can turn around as appropriate hung up by the door. Now if only we knew someone who went to pottery classes……!
We had six viewings this weekend, two we got ourselves through advertising on Google, two were Jeremys and two Gareths. The first of ours came up from London on the train so they were pretty commited – however we would have expected to hear from them by now if they did want to proceed so guess that we are not going to hear now. The other people came round yesterday and had very similar ideas as us as what they wanted to do – but I think it will be a while if we do hear again becuase they were thinking of the business potential. One of Gareths was a second viewing – the people who visited at Easter and thought the ground was wet. We were expecting it to rain yesterday given these people concerns – but it didn’t and the sun was out and it didn’t appear too wet – I hope. If we don’t get anything from this weekend I will carry on with the Google Adwords. This works well for us as the key words we use to advertise on are words like ‘smallholding for sale’ and this only costs about 11p. Words like ‘rural property for sale’ cost around 70p which is quite a lot more expensive. (the way that Google Adwords works is that you identify words which when people search for, will show your advert in the bar at the right of the page. So if you type in ‘Soap’ on the right will come up a series of adverts for soap. Different words cost different amounts and of course, will target different people. You can set a daily limit and we set £5.00. Our ad was showing about 400 times and we got about 20 ‘click throughs’ which meant that 20 people were interested enough in our ad to click on it for more information. It works well for us as there is no way that we would appear at the top of a google search otherwise)
We still have the horses although Mike is changing them over this week. It doesn’t make any difference to us now as the weather is warmer and we would not have the sheep in. Mike has offered to take our tups to market which will be very handy for us.