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Posted by Simon

The snow is, for the moment, slowly melting away but the scenery has been lovely and great for taking photos. Although walking the dogs in the snow has been hard work - either deep snow or ice, taking the camera with me means I can get a short rest whilst taking photos.

As Rosie has posted we have been reducing animal numbers and we are improving our skills in that department - I was quite pleased with my lamb butchery, especially the chops. I must admit the bowl for off cuts and 'slips of the knife' still seems to fill up resulting in plenty of meat for mince, therefore it's rather lucky we all like mince!

In between meat preparation, I have continued insulating the attic. The actual insulation and most of the boarding in is complete now. Next I'm going to make some shelves and then we can sort all the 'junk' that is in the attic before I continue with the construction work. It was good to have a HelpX who helped carry up a lot of the materials. This meant I could spend more time getting on with the construction work instead moving materials around, which seems to take up a huge chunk of time. The photo shows the house and gite a couple of weeks ago and it is pretty obvious which side is not insulated. This week the whole roof has evenly thawed out - so it seems to prove it works.

And finally the piglets are growing fast and giving us a great amount of amusement. The second batch (of 4) follow in their mother's footsteps and bury deep into their bedding hay to sleep. Feeding and checks results in one of us tiptoeing carefully around their pen and then a small circle of hay starts to slightly shake - and lo and behold 4 little piglets appear- except for one morning, then only three appeared. There I was searching around - checking where every step was placed. No piglet. I was just about to go and get extra help when in the corner of my eye I noticed the other sow had 5 orangery coloured piglets suckling away - I'm sure she only had four orangery ones. A couple of counts and sure enough she had one extra mouth feeding from her.

And Rosie did return the right piglet to the right sow on the second attempt and after a few little squeals. All now seem correctly 'connected' although we are still not sure how he got into the wrong pen, but he is now called 'Adventure'.