Happy New Year to one and all.

With the new year comes new life, we now have twin female kids born a week ago. Unfortunately the mother is one of our older goats and she had no milk for them so we have two wee things which we are bottle feeding, so much for having kid meat to eat!. The father is a young billy and young billy's seem to sire females. Our youngest cat rather had her nose put out of joint with these things demanding time from us, but she quickly got over it and now pretends they aren't here.

We feel as though spring is not far away despite the snow on the ground and have at last placed our seed order, a bit experimental this year, we are having a go at celeriac and Florance fennel, we have never seen these seeds on sale here, or the veg themselves so we will see what happens.

All the onions and garlic are planted in a tunnel, the onions last year did particularly well in the tunnel so we are hoping the garlic will as well.

For years we have wanted to skip Christmas, this year we nearly managed it.

Although it's good to have a celebration in the middle of winter it's all the commercialisation that comes with Xmas, although in Spain it's not quite so bad as in Ireland or the UK, it's fast getting that way.

The first Christmas lights were up in the shopping centres at the beginning of Nov.

Christmas eve we made a concession with some holly and ivy to decorate a small area in the dining room.

Christmas day we went for a Chinese meal with some friends, and St Stevens day we had a nice meal followed by a Xmas pud I had made last year, and of course a bottle of wine, on the 27th we had some friends over for a meal. That was our skipping Xmas, maybe we can manage to really skip it next year, like a school report, we could do better. Maybe we will just celebrate Yule Tide on the solstice.

The downstairs loo has taken two months to complete, although it's the smallest room in the house it posed some problems not least that it was below the septic tank level so we had to install a macerator, however it was finished in time for Xmas

[ All I want for Xmas is a downstairs loo] and the overall effect is great, no traipsing upstairs during the evening or trampling mud through the house to wash your hands when working in the garden, we also now have a very nearly completed pantry, so we have good storage space for all our bottled fruit.

The next project is to complete the stairs to the kitchen, as these are going to be of wood I might live to regret this if mud gets trampled in! Once this is done come the big job, converting the old kitchen and attached barn into independent accommodation.

I have got rather behind with this blog over the last two months, autumn came late, but winter has now started. There was some beautiful autumn colour and so many different types of fungi and this year at last we managed to grow melons. Some people have no problems growing these, but I always have, the ones we produced were not planted, they appeared! obviously we had not got the compost heap hot enough and the seeds must have been in the compost we put into one of the tunnels, whether we can do the same again remains to be seen.

We have made a far bit of progress over the last two month though, the sun room is now completed and the downstairs loo is done, the pantry is now well under way.