It’s the last day of May… (wasn’t that a song by ‘Blue Oyster Cult’?) so I guess it’s time for an over due catch up! Just over three weeks of leave gone and what have we done? Well, it’s been busy again. We started the leave looking at other properties. We had been contemplating looking to buy somewhere else and putting our current property on the market. We even offered on three different properties, but each deal fell through for a different reason. I think the main thing that we took out of these experiences is that, although there may still be some outstanding issues with the property that we have, none of them are insurmountable and there are many aspects of the property that are actually very good. So, I think that we have decided to stay put and progress with where we are. To that end we have now completed the ‘big pen’ for the goats and tomorrow should be the grand opening 😆 On the livestock front we have sold four goats and bought four sheep, (two Karakuls and two Lincolns) We’ve also had a couple of kids, referred to as ‘Chop-chop’ and ‘Hamburger’ as they as destined for the freezer. We’ve added more ‘peeps’ basically in three stages. These include geese, ducks, turkeys and a variety of chickens – rhode island red, barred rocks and Araucanas. As part of our decision to stay with the land we have, we have been looking at more house designs. We’ve found an interesting design philosophy called HTM building, which stands for High Thermal Mass. His is a way of building using concrete blocks and a glass fronted south facing building that utilises passive solar heat and the concrete mass stores the heat and releases it slowly as the temperature cools.
