'Gnasher the crocodile'

'Gnasher the crocodile', I mean Ruby the pup, is settling down well into life on the farm, judging by the way she licked and slurped all over Spog, one of the farm cats, as he made his way reluctantly past her and into the kitchen this morning. She is keen to befriend every thing that moves, and carries everything that doesn’t move around with her, that is if she can fit it between her tiny jaws. This morning saw her wobbling and tumbling her way down the stairs with an ever so large slipper clamped between those jaws, each time the slipper hit a step Ruby was blinded by fluff, thus making her journey precarious and challenging and ever so funny if you happened to be waiting at the bottom of the stairs to retrieve the slipper.

My days seem to be filled with endless feeding rounds just now. 'Gnasher', I mean Ruby has five small meals a day, and then there are the cats to feed, the other dogs, the hens and the children. The biggest task I face is convincing Ruby that all of the food on the farm is not for her stomach. She cannot understand why the cats are on hunger strike, the happy farmer has even replaced the sack of economy cat food with a sack he brought from the vet the other day; however those spoilt moggies are now turning their noses up at the non economical food too, whereas Ruby thinks the cat bowl belongs to her. I even caught her trying to get  up on the kitchen table yesterday, and am in no doubt she was intent on a plate clearing mission having spied the children’s leftovers . Ground rules need to be established quickly with the ‘walking stomach’ here. The farmhouse is suddenly going to become super tidy and efficient and all in the name of keeping Ruby’s ‘gnashers’ firmly away from anything but her bowl!

The walking stomach doesn't just stop at Ruby either, yesterday I discovered that Mist, the sheepdog, had taken it upon herself to empty Charlie the hen’s nest of a dozen or so eggs and eat them all up. I had left a puckle of eggs on the nest to see if Charlie would become broody, Mist must also have spied them and then stolen them, payment probably for the fact that Charlie and the chicks have been strutting into her kennel bold as brass and helping themselves to her  kitchen scraps. Poor Mist is ever so slightly wary of those hens, so she watches, drooling, as the hens tuck into her goodies. Today Mist helped her ever so greedy self to a whole nest of eggs.

The challenges of yesterday began early in the morning, when as I made my way out of the door armed with bin bags on the ‘joyful’ domestic duty of bin emptying, I was confronted by a large frolicking, bouncy Highland cow, bounding across the lawn towards me. I am not sure who got more of a fright, but I made a very hasty retreat into the farmhouse. Marmite, not content with the bale of silage the farmer had left out for her in the field, had taken it upon herself to mow the front garden again, guzzling away greedily. Safely indoors, I sent out an immediate mayday call to the happy farmer, one football was lobbed across the grass and one Highland cow took off at speed across the farmyard. Once the coast was clear I made my way out across the farm yard to the bins only to find one bemused and harassed happy farmer. Marmite had fled at speed but only as far as the tractor where she could be caught peeping out waiting for the coast to clear so the lawn munching could begin again in earnest. 

Until next time…