Farm update time (someday i have to start numbering these)

First the cat update, feral acclimatization is going about as well as I expected. Havana still sits bravely in the back staring at me during the entire food/water exchange and Minnie has stopped trying to climb up the crate to get away and has dialed it back to just cuddling with Havana for protection. Alex was slightly disappointed that there was no cat holding or petting going on. Maybe someday but not soon for sure. Charlie and Hayley have pointed out that my random cat assignment somehow got me minime’s of their cats. I suspect this means I’m in serious trouble if this doesn’t work out for whatever reason.

We had grand plans to ride both Banner and Heidi this weekend together and thanks to my obliviousness, we had finished grooming and tacking up Heidi when her weird behaviour triggered a dim memory. Yep, Heidi is in heat. Well that explained so much. Normally this won’t be a huge issue but for the first leadless ride it seemed to add a complication we didn’t need so we stuck to Banner rides this weekend and Heidi got one on one attention and treats. Poor girl.

Started Banner on a lead line but he was pretty good at listening so we freed him for rides fairly quickly. Saturday was a huge challenge to get him to pay attention to cues, not look in every direction except the one we wanted him to go in and to actually move faster than a walk. Sunday was still a challenge but much less so. He’s a good boy, just very much learned to love his life of leisure. Alex and Chris both had a lead line ride and he was very good with them. We will see how Heidi does when she gets more time but it’s looking like both will be suitable for visitors with some assistance.

Jenn also got several pictures demonstrating why I can’t get good pictures of the horses while I’m in the fields. Serious love bugs, both of them.

Brian spent our riding time working on clearing the fence line for the new pasture, so that’s more than half done!

Monday morning was a crazy misty beautiful morning and I got a great picture of the horses in their pasture.

I also finished automating the garden watering this weekend. Just in time for the dry hot days to end. Super thunderstorm last night laid all the grass over sideways. Was the first rain that came in the open windows so we were running around at 2am closing windows. Serious setback in my office organization as I had several piles of documents on the window sill. Hopefully the important ones will dry out.

Thankfully I was lazy and after I mulched the gardens I didn’t move the lawnmower and trailer. As a result they acted as a wind break for the pepper garden and despite the fields all laying over the gardens look great.

Had a visit from bylaw enforcement yesterday – someone complained about uncontrolled dogs. Now 6 weeks ago that would have been a valid complaint as we had a three experiences with the dogs completely ignoring me and running across the road. Made huge progress since then so it was a shock, but he was happy with the steps we’d taken, very happy the dogs were registered and closed the complaint with no action. He did say they were behind but still believed that the complaint was about 2 weeks old. Something for us to keep an eye on.

Oh and, almost forgot the best part about the weekend. We are single property owners again! Last minute on Friday the purchasers managed to get everything in place. Took until almost 6pm for them to deliver the money to our lawyer so we had to wait til Monday to get it but it’s done!

That’s all for today – Saturday night the bees arrive so we’ll do another update early next week.

And here’s a picture of two of our favourite girls, Lexi and Pepper, cuddling!