Behind with the blog

A number of people have emailed to asked why I haven’t updated the blog for more than a week.

The fact is that I have half a dozen draft entries saved, but the pressures of work on the croft have meant that they haven’t been finished and posted.

I’m going to try to get some of them finished in the next day or two, and post them so people can see what we’ve been up to, including the arrival of our latest pigs.

So stay tuned - and hope that I can get slightly on top of the workload!

Cider making

We’ve been picking, sorting, chopping, pulping and pressing apples all day as our cider making gets started.

By the time we finished to do the evening chores and have dinner, we’d filled one fermenting vat with a little over five gallons (25 litres) of apple juice pressed from 70kg of apples.

We only have another six 25kg bags of apples to go…

A pig of a day!

Today has been a day for the pigs.

The Big Lad, the Wee ‘Un and I had an early start, taking the two Saddleback gilts to the abbatoir for slaughter.

I was up first and the preparations we made yesterday for loading the pigs paid off, as all I had to do was to connect up the light inside the trailer, sprinkle some food on the floor and then open the gates into the pen.

Ready to load up

With the two Saddlebacks going to the abattoir early tomorrow morning, it makes sense to get everything set up ready to load them in the dark.

This is also when layout of our pens and race comes into play.

The second of the two gate posts at the end of the race is stepped back as this allows me to reverse the trailer in at a shallow angle.