Our second December here at Grobdale, and we feel settled , less fly by the seat of your pants, maybe even comfortable.. dont  get me wrong , every day has an out of your comfort zone moment or three but the majority of the time it’s jobs that we’ve done before or at least something similar ..For  instance painting your loan Tup with raddle   !

Surely that’s just finger painting with animals instead of children .

If you’ve followed the link above ( click on the underlined word raddle ) you’ve read that by putting a dye or raddle on Gibbs , makes sure that he leaves his mark on any of the girls he’s mounted , so we know who could well be  in lamb and who’s due first if she is pregnant. All good information to a good shepherdess (and I am trying to be).

The loan tup Gibbs was turning out to be rather lovely to deal with , hopefully he’ll be as easy to load and return to his owner at the beginning  of next month ..

December has been beautiful here in D&G , lots of clear frosty mornings , pink sunrises and clear star filled skies.One such evening we heard a bit of splashing down on the loch and

after some sniper style sneaking around

(wasted tip toeing actually ) we discovered an otter feeding !

We watched him/her for ages before she did a final flip,  dive and disappear .. 

so lucky , I wish I could spend more time just sat watching our landscape, I’m sure we are missing masses.

Our wildlife is precious and watched from a distance , protected almost, however our own livestock even though they are well cared for occasionally  end up on the dinner table .

The Muscovy ducklings were now huge and well Christmas wouldn’t be the same without some of our produce on the menu so, sorry Alisa ,

And then there were 10 .. 

This 5 spice Chinese duck  recipe is well worth a bash,

Animals absolutely rule here at Grobdale however a new toy arrived in the form of a plasma cutter one Friday and the creatives in us started bubbling .. the first creations were

‘Dark skies incinerators’

previously known as old oil drums ( a bit of skip ratting down in England earlier in the month ) Christmas presents for our neighbours sorted ..

My Christmas present on the other hand was something a bit more animal inspired, one of the properties we had viewed before Grobdale had had a rather cool piece of taxidermy on the stairs and I’d had an idea to finish my new décor on the stairs and landing with something similar or maybe with antlers ..

Husband and Google did good !

They came up with Renee, probably my most gruesome Christmas present to date… also my fave ,a bit more interesting than pyjamas and bubbles dontcha think ?

So  December was over and time to take Gibbs back to his own flock .

It had been  best knickers on all round (for my sheep that is )for the last month !

A ewes cycle is 17 days and so it’s common practice to keep them with the ram for two cycles so a month or 34 days of your being picky to make sure everyone gets seen to (there’s no lovely way to put it ) .. cross your fingers we’ve got some lambs on the way x