About a year ago I visited a friend who has a big cow farm and helped him do his morning rounds feeding the various herds. The photos from this visit just surfaced and reminded me how slack I was in not putting them online at the time. His philosophy is very similar to mine –Continue reading "Moving the cows with the carrot, not the stick"

Cold morning.   Patient cows.   Fresh lucerne hay.   Well-rested grass.   Watching the rollout.   Nom nom nom.

I visited the Aveyron again to check out some cows for sale. I’m in the market for some mother cows or first time heifers to be giving birth this spring and some younger animals for meat or motherhood. Here is their cowshed in action. It is an old-style one with the chained mother cows andContinue reading "Checking out some more Salers heifers and cows"

Between the ceramic canal tiles, the cement mortar and the concrete roof tiles there is plenty of scope for some interesting mosses and lichens to grow. You don’t notice this when standing on the ground, but once you climb around the roof these things dominate the view. And the corrugated iron roof likes to growContinue reading "Moss grows on the roof"

The old stone barn sits inside the less old cinder block barn. There are only two walls left of it, but they are interesting. Moss growing on top of the old stone wall where the roof had blown off a couple of years back. This is no job for people with vertigo. The first cutContinue reading "More barn roofing work"

What do you do with twelve hectares of former vineyard? There are a number of special properties about these old vineyards that you have to take into account. Firstly, you are left with rows and rows of long gashes where the excavator has ripped up the line of vines and posts. Then you have theContinue reading "Once were vineyards"

This is Jan from the neighboring village who fixes pretty much everything. We’ve been working on the various broken barn roofs over the last few days. There’s still a bit to do but the big windstorm has halted work for the moment, which gives me time to upload a few photos. Gosh that backhoe isContinue reading "Fixing a hole where the rain gets in"

We’re building some new pens inside the old cow courtyard. The first phase is to get rid of the old parts we no longer need. This is going to be the alley with a bud box at the far end. This end is an entry point but is also a shelter for cows we wantContinue reading "Reworking the cowshed – demolition time"

The farm is at zero-point-something degrees of longitude, which makes us just a little east of Greenwich. But we’re in France, so that puts us on Continental time despite us being under Britain. What this means is that the sun hits its zenith some time close to 1pm (2pm on daylight saving days) and theContinue reading "The sun also rises late"

In the last few months attempts have been made by a few friends to plunder the posts from the vine mountains. Now it is too late; the vine mountains have been set alight. At one point we had ten bonfires burning around the farm. [Incidentally I am mentioned once in a book about Bon ScottContinue reading "The Burning of the Vines"