Exciting week, after several years without any ruminants of our own on the farm (just poultry, crops and apples) we have taken delivery of our first small step back into stock farming, four lovely cows.  We have bought four organic South Devon cows from a neighbour.  The girls are due to calve in the spring and hopefully be the start of a small herd of suckler cows.  Tomorrow they go out to start eating some of the tonnes of autumn grass we have on the farm.

We are also frantically picking the last of our apples amongst the showers.  We picked half a tonne of Russets today, one of the few good quality and quantity varieties in the orchards this year, poor year for English organic apples…. which may go some way to explain an unexpected call from Emma this afternoon who explained she had had the police on the phone.  After immediately thinking what have we done, turns out they were letting us know about a theft form one of our neighbours.  Turns out owners of a neighbouring orchard (who live elsewhere) turned up today to find a whole crop of apples, 100 plus trees, gone, stolen.  There is a big shortage of UK apples and demand but even so, takes some dedication and organisation to pick, transport and sell that many apples.  Today we had six people with two tractors and stacks of boxes picking and we cleared about 20 trees and 400kg in an hour, so 100 trees would be a big undertaking and alot of work.  We are just about finished now for this year, Kelly and Kirsty are off on well deserved holiday next week so things will calm down for a bit now, hopefully!