When is the best time to calve

Its mid-autumn and our nine angus-cross heifers are currently calving. This may seem an odd time of the year to have calves, and certainly in the temperate areas you would expect to see baby calves and lambs in spring, but in the sub-tropics we can do things a bit differently as we don't have a cold winter.

Read the rest over at my house cow ebook blog.

eight acres: what time of year is best to have calves?

Buy my ebook "Our Experience with House Cows" on Etsy, Lulu and Amazon, or email on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com to arrange delivery. More information on my house cow ebook blog.

Reviews of "Our Experience with House Cows"

Kim from the Little Black Cow Blog

Fiona from Live at Arbordale Farm

Marie from Go Milk the Cow

Renata from Sunnyside Farm Fun

Gavin from Little Green Cheese (and The Greening of Gavin)

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Getting started with chickens - Tanya from Lovely Greens

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Farmer Liz: You will remember Tanya from Lovely Greens from the first series, she lives on the Isle of Mann and added chickens to her garden about a year ago. You can leave comments for this post on Tanya's blog.

How many chickens (and other fowl) do you keep, what breed and what do you use them for (meat, eggs, slug control etc)?
Tanya: Around the same time that we were initially thinking about having hens another friend beat us to the punch. She went to the local pet store and bought a flat-pack hen house and chicken run combo and found a local farmer who had dozens of semi-feral chickens running around his property. One night he pulled three down from the trees and my friend took them home in a pet carrier. She named them Miracel, Carmen, and Geraldine and though they’re probably related they were all…

The new Eight Acres website is live!

Very soon this blogspot address will automatically redirect to the new Eight Acres site, but in the meantime, you can check it out here. You will find all my soaps, ebooks and beeswax/honey products there, as well as the blog (needs a tidy up, but its all there!). I will be gradually updating all my social media links and updating and sharing blog posts over the next few months. I'm very excited to share this new website with you!

Making a dressmaker's dummy

For a while now I have believed that the main barrier to me doing a better job of sewing my own clothes was my lack of a or dressmaker's dummy (aka dressmakers form or mannequin). When I last investigated the cost of a dummy, they seemed too extravagant, so I looked for a way to make my own. There are a few methods around, using plaster bandages, using paper packaging tape, and finally, the one I chose, duct tape!

Not only is making your own dummy very cheap, if you are careful, you end up with a form that exactly matches your own body. Well its a lot closer than an expensive adjustable dummy anyway. All you need is a few rolls of duct tape (at least four to be safe), and old tight-fitting t-shirt to wear (and cut up) under the duct tape, a spare 2-3 hours and at least one person to help (pick someone that you don't mind smoothing duct tape over your upper body, I used my husband). The first element is the easiest, the others can be more difficult, when I got the bag of …

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