Winter Walk

We had a very chilled Father’s Day celebrated with a delicious breakfast at Living Life with Quentin’s parents and a lovely afternoon walk on the farm. It’s been a very mild winter so far aside from one really cold snap last week that even brought some welcome rain. The night time temperatures have been particularly warm compared to previous years. It’s still drops below zero degrees, but that’s mild for us. I remember the first week I ever spent on the farm in June 2010 when Quentin and I were still dating, the minimum temperature dropped to -17 C one night – and that still didn’t put me off marrying him and moving here!!

We are getting very busy organising our annual Vastrap Boran Auction, which will be held on 19 August. It takes a lot of work to select all the animals and to make sure they are tested and ready for sale. Then there is all the marketing material that has be designed and circulated, which I mainly take care of. A lot of people also visit us before the auction to view the animals so that takes up a lot of time and obviously closer to the auction there are other logistics to manage. It’s an exciting, albeit nerve-wracking time of year for us. You never know how things are going to turn out, but we can only try our best and hope for a good turnout on the day. It seems like the cattle take up all of Quentin’s time at the moment, but on the farm they are also busy reaping the sunflowers and getting ready to plant wheat. The recent rain will help a lot to get the wheat crop off to a good start, but we can only hope that there will be some early spring rain too. You can see from the photos below that grass and water are very scarce so there is still a long and gruelling winter ahead for the animals.

Anyone interested in seeing what we get up to with the cattle can visit our website www.vastrapboran.com. I have been focusing a lot more of my attention on our website blog to keep the information flow fresh and relevant. Sadly, with two small kids vying for my attention in the house this blog has become neglected. One day I will get back to cooking and gardening and taking photos of things other than children and cattle!