The Easter holidays have passed with mostly glorious weather after such a gloomy start.  It has kick started the spring and now everything is racing to grow.  All the leaves, daffodils, tulips and wild flowers are coming out together which after the long winter are a beautiful sight.  The first house martins were spotted at the beginning of the month and they will soon be taking up their old nests which are dotted around our buildings.  Another bonus with all the sunshine is the sun heating up the pool via our solar panels.  They are incredibly efficient and it is so good not to be using any fossil fuel.

The various improvements which we had done in the winter seem to be meeting with approval.  The new laundry room for the cottages is much nicer and guests like having a DVD library in here to give them a much greater choice.  The cottages’ hot tub is really popular and the booking system is working very well.  We have just had the surrounding area slated which has finished it off well.  We are debating whether to put up some decking here as well to give a seating area, though this will have to wait.  Hopefully the swimming pool shower area is going to be re-tiled in a couple of weeks which will entail the shower being closed for about a week.  This shouldn’t be too inconvenient as guests can use their own showers.

Our on-going war with the foxes continues, with the fox coming into the garden in the middle of the day for the chickens.  We have arranged to have a fox proof fence put up around about two acres of gardens which we hope will put an end to all our loses.  This should be put up over the next two weeks and then we can release the chickens back to freedom and replace all our ducks.  The alpacas will also be moved down here so all our animals will be in one secure place where the guests can visit them.

We have a delightful addition to our menagerie as we have just got our three pygmy goats.  They are called William, Hubert and Violet-Elizabeth after some of our favourite fictional characters.  We are spending a lot of time with them in order to make them tame and they are really responding well.  When they are fully grown they will be spaniel size and should be very happy with human company.   We are also looking for some rescue pygmy pigs but as these are rather more unusual it may take  time to get some.  A lot of children (and adults) are asking to feed the animals and this is helping to get them used to people.  The alpacas are quite shy creatures and the more gentle human contact they get the better they should become.