Bad news – Good news

Beginning of January I was looking forward to pick-up our 3 goats from their love-holiday with the ram, when Hannes confessed that he had sad news: Jaqueline had died before Christmas (cause unknown, although Jan, the goat farmer, blames overly rich feed this summer making her a little overweight and prone to heart failure – I disagree of course ). Anyway, we were down to 2 goats but at least they should have been pregnant. And they were, until Pâquerette lost hers last week… So that ended-up being pretty unsuccessful. We could drive her down to the ram again in a month or so, but honestly I am not sure we’ll go through the trouble, knowing that she would then have her kid in summer, and this would stretch out the milking season across autumn but with only one goat. The ewes should have their lambs within the next month.

Little Azrael joined our maintenance crew in January; if you know your Smurfs you’ll know what she is. Hopefully she will develop a clear preference for hunting stable rats and mouse and not birds. She is still living indoors and getting along ‘very well’ with Kasimir (regularly clawing at his giant nose when he gets too enterprising) but should be relocated to her HQ in the barn to monitor and control rodent population. Kasimir will also partly be moving out, at least during the day he should stay in a part of the garden that will be fenced off, to prevent him from going for daily walks across the nearby villages. Hannes has taken it upon him to design and build fence gates that should, according to him, last for the next 100years. The time he is taking to design and build these marvelous things seems proportionate to their foreseen longevity.

The next project will be the construction of our Wwoofer house in March (as in ‘Willing Workers On Organic Farms’) together with our first real-deal willing worker and carpenter who is flying over from the US and who will be staying for a month or so! It will be a wood and clay construction to offer simple accommodation to wwoofers and friends during the season.

The best news though is that we have been visited by the owner of the high-stem orchard that is situated in Mechelsdorf (a 85-year old descendant of the former local nobility that owned and managed much of the area). He asked if we would be interested in using and managing his 1,5ha of orchard and pasture! It looks like we have a busy fruit harvest ahead this year and plenty of shaded greens for our ladies…