It is quite a while since I wrote in my blog, an indication of how busy we have been.

The ice cream kiosk wasn't a great success, but it did give the chance to meet a lot of the neighbours.

We closed it last weekend, just before the kids went back to school.

At least now I can devote more time to training our animals.

I have started taking smartie (our 3 yr old Shetland) for walks, to teach her to leave the others and to learn the commands for walk, halt and trot etc. I am very pleased with her so far.

We have spent a lot of time de-cobwebbing the barn. I left that to Shane and Luke and I got to clean out the goat pens. A job that was extremely smelly as they hadn't been cleaned for the six months that the goats occupied them.

However Chinook (our puppy) loved all that amonia and dampness. Just the thing to roll in.

I don't know how anyone can keep animals in such dirty surroundings.

We have our first horse boarder (livery). She is a 2 year old Quarter horse Appaloosa cross.

We have another one arriving on the 17 September.

We have also started converting our basement into a self catering holiday apartment.

We need to get it finished soon as we will need to advertise in the tourist brochures if are to get bookings for next year.

We are spending out so much to do all this work and buy equipment for the farm and nothing coming in so we have taken a job cleaning the club house at one of the local golf courses.

It pays quite well for NB but we have to go in late at night and have been doing it 7 days a week.

Next week it will go down to 3 days a week, which will be more manageble.

We still have to build a good field shelter for the horses for the winter and insulate the chicken house.

There just isn't enough hours in the day. Still we are enjoying making improvements to the farm, an unlimited budget would help though. I wish.