Tips to warm up: eat chestnuts, shovel pig poo

Evening itinerary:

Arrive home from day job as the sun sets.

Check last night's 13 newborns (when I watched steam rise from their wet, warm bodies).

Shovel out stables where mums and babies are, replace with fresh barley straw.

Pick grass for squeaking guinea pigs and sniffing rabbit.

Pick kale for hungry human (curly and red russian).

Roast chestnuts (from Preolenna, high rainfall area in the far north-west) under hot grill.

Invent kale fritters with chopped, cooked kale, buff sussex eggs, crumbly local cheese, and breadcrumbs.

Autumn is definitely here, there's no doubting it now. Speaking in short sentences also helps conserve energy for warmth.

A morning at funny farm

Feather fascinator

This buff sussex hen was quite put-out this morning when a feather got stuck to her comb. A couple of hours after I took the photo she was still trying to shake it off.

Remember the sow with the funny tail that arrived on the farm in December last year?

We thought she must have had it trod on when she was a piglet, but it appears the shape is heritable. One of her nine piglets is not quite like the others.

We've got a lot of little piggies running round getting in to trouble at the moment. They're just the right size to slide under the electric fence.

So straight to the grain shed they go...

And from her seat on the rock wall outside the stable, Puss observes it all. What a farm to have been dumped at, she thinks.

(More on the cat, and the division she has caused, in a future post).