Top in July they will surely die!

Or so that's the plan for the thistles and nettles, which seem to have grown faster than ever these last few months. Like most people we don't have a lot of money so there is nothing else to do but to get the petrol lawn mower out and spend the day mowing an acre at a time. At least the sheep have done a fantastic job and have hoovered most of the grass down so it's a case of dot to dot on a grand scale except the dots are thistles and nettles and instead of a pencil I use a mower!
It seems ludicrous but as with many other folk I spend a lot of time thinking and hatching plans and this highly labour intensive but low mental input activity allows me to scheme a little more, and add to the future project list. Combine that with the sense of achievement and all in all not a bad days work!
July was a strange month. Originally I had planned to have two minor operations done at the end of the month which thankfully I managed to fit in as we had family staying who could help out whilst I was having a period of rest and recuperation, well apart from helping friends the day after returning home to take their hay bales from the fields to their barn as the rain was going to destroy there crop that night if it wasn't sorted. What a fantastic evening 3 families working the fields so to speak hard work but a highlight of the summer for sure.
For those with a curious mind one of the ops makes me much more empathetic to those young bulls who are just starting to present their owners with a few behavioural problems! The other I shall hang up in the cupboard marked skeletons!
The beginning of the month presented a rather more serious experience, which to be honest scared the heck out of me. Having been let down by a professional sheep shearer I took it upon myself to get the job done with our 7 ewes. No not with the kitchen scissors, but with proper hand shears. Didn't really make any difference, as shearing sheep must be one of the most unenviable jobs going around physically it really takes it out of you, and I really was knackered half way through them.
I had also given up smoking yet again a few weeks earlier knowing that having the ops later in the month would be much easier without congested lungs, plus its about time I stopped wasting money on fags and spend it wisely trying to offset our losses each month! Problem was my lungs had felt tight from the moment I stopped smoking I put it down to either asthma or my lungs clearing themselves. I went to the doctor and got an inhaler and some blood samples taken. That was midweek.
Now when your Doctor phones you at home on a Friday afternoon to tell you to go to the city hospital now for further tests it gets very serious. As a trained nurse I know that Friday is when the hospitals are looking to empty beds and try to have an easy time then back to full flow on Monday morning. Only emergencies or serious problems are seen to over a weekend. Anyway me being me I drove myself the 30 miles to the city hospital much to the surprise of the hospital staff who informed me that they were treating me as having a suspected heart attack!
Ever been in the situation where your trying to tell people something and they don't hear what your saying and in the end you just keep quiet and then doubts start creeping into your own mind? Well that was me for the next 24 hours. By the following morning I felt like a pincushion as around 6 separate samples of blood where taken from me and tests here performed.
Anyway all I can say is bravo to the Scottish Health Service as I felt like I really came away with a clean bill of health, as I don't think any other tests could have been perfomed. What seems to have happened is that in my original blood results a certain enzyme had shown that a lot of muscle damage had occurred and putting the fact that I am overweight, recently stopped smoking, and presenting with a tight chest the Doctors had naturally thought the worst. They had sent for me to have further blood tests which showed the muscle damage wasn't my heart and I presume it was the damage caused by the day to day tasks many of us do including shearing bloomin sheep! Just goes to show though that you really cant be too careful and that it does involve hard work this smallholding lifestyle!
Our pig plans have progressed further when I took Baby and her young boar to the abattoir, which meant that the freezer was and still is full of all kinds of pork products Including sausages, which at last are acceptable to the boss!
Bonnie was separated from her piglets as they really were taking all the goodness from her. To anyone who didn't know her they would have thought she had been starved so was the amount of condition the piglets had taken from her, although she is now regaining her normal physique rapidly.
At the end of this month I hope to have sent Ginger to the abattoir and in doing so close that particular chapter of our pig breeding experiences. Unfortunately producing only 2 piglets in each of the 3 farrowings meant that there was just no way we could keep trying with the sisters as the feed to maintain them is high so needs to have reasonable results in the amount of piglets produced.
We do make a loss living this way but offset this with my part time work and is something we are prepared to do to ensure the quality of our food! However we have to be practical as our income is pretty tight. We intend to keep Bonnie and breed from her again early next year with one of the unrelated orphan brothers from earlier this year and see if the resulting farrowing is as productive as her first so although our breeding programme had stalled a little we shall see how this way works out, and whether we can continue to produce our own home reared pork. Just have to organise the dates to fit around the lambing next year.