Rose Cottage Cattery

It has been a few weeks since the last blog entry and a very busy few weeks it has been.

The cattery is doing very well, we were full over half term and the diary is filling up for the summer so if you are still booking a holliday, secure a place for your cat(s) as early as possible.

Our two rescue cats, Peaches and Ting-Ting  (pest control division) are still arriving nightly to grab a bite to eat and a bed for the night before disappearing back to the neighbouring farm to keep down their vermin.  Such is life. Meanwhile our incumbent rats are breeding like mad and babies can be seen scampering merrily across our field.

We had village open gardens last week, I had been approached during the winter and asked if I would open my garden which seemed like a good idea as a spur to getting the grounds ready for our daughter’s wedding.  I have been very busy planting, trimming, mowing, digging for weeks.  Then my youngest son, who was going to be a great help with the heavy jobs, stood on a glass bottle which had just been dropped and slashed his foot - he’s ok now but this was only three days before the open day and I still had a scarecrow to make.

One of our alpacas gave birth to a baby girl alpaca, our first, on the Sunday before the open day and on the open day itself over fifty people visited and made a bee line for the baby alpaca, no one took any otice of the garden.  At least its tidy for the wedding.

My veg plot is looking quite productive, I made a potato tower using old car tyres and it looks as if it has been a success, I will remove the tyres this weekend and see what is there.  There were not enough insects in the greenhouse to fertilise my tomatoes so I tied some hens feathers to a match stick and made an artificial bee, now my tomatoes are setting fruit.

Joy
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Its full steam ahead in the cattery at the moment.  There are a number of kittens visiting which is lovely.  They can be heard, of an evening, chasing their ping-pong balls around the chalet.  One older cat takes exception to that kind of youthful high spirits and can be heard snarling and hissing at the kittens next door.  You can almost hear her shout, “Turn that awful racket down, I can’t hear myself think”.

The floor painting in the cattery has started but will have to be done in stages when there are less cats in residence.  It does look very fresh and light, agood move I think.

We have another cat waiting to be homed by the Cats Protection.  He is lovely with the most unusual coat, very thick with dark grey on the top but when his fur is parted, its cream underneath.

On the poultry front, I hatched 12 ducklings in the week, they are all Aylesburys and will be looking for new homes, they make lovely pets, are decorative in the garden and even lay eggs!  One of my hens, Tango, is sitting on six eggs, due to hatch next weekend.

Peaches and Ting-Ting are still arriving in the dead of night to eat my food but still havn’t discovered the rich source of rodents in the smallholding; you just can’t get the staff these days!.

Our garden is open to the public as part of the local fundraising effort so I have been furiously planting stuff everywhere and adding lots of alpaca poo in the vain hope that it will look like an established garden in six weeks - some hope.

Joy
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Don’t know if you realise but cats actually enjoy radio four.  They know if its been a purrfect day in purrliament, of if there has been a catastrophy in catmandu.  They sit on their little green shelves listening to desert Island discs and start preening furiously when a song from Lloyd Webbers “Cats” is played.  “The Archers” tends to send them rushing for the litter trays and Sandi Toksvig sets them all caterwalling! can’t imagine why.

Joy
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The cattery is full for Easter, its lovely to go in first thing in the morning and see all the little white name tags and the row of eager pussy cats waiting for breakfast.  It gives me a warm feeling of satisfaction and usefulness.

We have another addition to our pest control staff.  This one was in a sorry condition when she was rescued and is currently in the main cattery for rest and recuperation.  I told hubcaps he could name her expecting something musical, so I was surprised when he came up with Jet or Smudge.  I settled for smudge but then he came to his senses and renamed her Ting-Ting.  She has another trip to the vet for a final check-up before being released for duty.

The winter weather has taken its toll on the isolation unit floor, frost has lifted the paint from the concrete and the overall effect is unsightly.  My solution was to lay tiles, modern and easy to clean.  One of the local DIY stores had lovely cream coloured 12″ tiles on special offer so I snapped them up.  One warm sunny day last week I laid them and they do look lovely.  So why am I telling you this?  We have a cat in there at the moment, one that hasn’t been vaccinated and the weather has changed.  Every time I go into the unit I leave a trail of black muddy footprints and then have to reverse out with a damp cloth cleaning up the mess!

I did think about tiling the main cattery floor, occasionally when I go in to empty a litter tray I see red spots  in the litter and my heart does a flippy thing, on closer inspection I find that it is flakes of red paint from the floor.

On the farming front, we lost two aylesbury ducks to the fox this week which was very upsetting.  I had given thier offspring to the neighbours as pets so I had to break the news to them that their ducklings were now orphans.

Joy
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Peaches (pest control officer) has been on patrol for 11 days, she comes back for a meal every night, I have seen her paw prints by the bowl but there is always the niggle that it may be some other opportunistic moggy guzzling the lot.

Because of this, hubcaps (my other half) has set up an infra red camera to monitor the situation.  I bought this camera for him as a christmas present, the idea was that he could keep an eye on the alpacas and at the same time look out for any wild life.  It has taken more than 3 months to set it up but it is now working and as we watched Monty Halls in the Highlands, one eyeball kept drifting towards the laptop.

Hubcaps suddenly shouted with excitement and there on the screen were two bright white circles moving up the path and disappearing between the sheds where the food is left, they looked just like the cats eyes in the middle of the road.  After a few minutes she reappeared and headed back down the path, we rushed into the kitchen and watched Peaches strolling along the wall in front of the cattery and disappearing up the road.  It was very exciting until it dawned on us that she wasn’t heading up to the field and barn to kill all our rodents, she was instead heading off to the neighbours.  Well you can’t win them all!

Joy
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Peaches, our new feral cat, was released from her captivity last Wednesday.  Thursday morning arrived and her nocturnal activity could be traced in dead bodies.  Presumably she is in a cat utopia, she returns every night to eat her dinner and use the litter tray!!

We looked after a cat last week, I’ll call it cuddles to protect its identity.  Cuddles had been to the vet and required a urine sample to be collected, I can almost hear the laughter, but its not as difficult as you may think.  First you get a clean litter tray, then you half fill it with tiny plastic beads, the cat pees in the beads and you have a clean sample.  Cuddles wasn’t having any of it!  Cuddles’ owner swears that cuddles adopted a cross legged position and refused to perform.

The owner had the idea of sprinkling a few wood litter pellets on top of the plastic beads to encourage use of the tray so I duly placed the tray in position and checked regularly.  Next morning at 8.0am the tray was still completely dry but cuddles had eaten and drank as usual so I looked in again at 9.0am to find, joy of joys, a distinctly disturbed litter tray, the sort you know they have put their heart and soul into scraping every bit of litter to cover their toilet.  I whipped the tray away smartly, it wouldn’t do to get the urine contaminated with solid waste, and tipped the tray to collect the sample in the corner.  Nothing happened!  Their was a large amount of pee in the tray. the white plastic balls had a yellow appearance, there was a strong whiff of cat pee but the few wood litter pellets had completely absorbed the excess.

There was only one thing for it, I had to separate the plastic beads from the wood litter which was now just a brown mush.  I filled a bucket with hot disinfectant and scraped everything into it, gave it a good stir and let it settle.  The beads all floated on the top, nice and clean.  I was busy scooping them back into a clean tray when my Son came to see what I was doing, “wouldn’t that be easier with a sieve” he said helpfully.  “If you don’t mind the kitchen sieve being lightly coated in cat’s pee and disinfectant”, I replied.  He saw the downside to that.

The newly cleaned, rinsed and dried beads were put back with cuddles and next morning we had success.

On the chicken front, we had a good hatching session with eight live chicks.  There were nine but the very first one to hatch only lived for an hour, it did look a bit anaemic.  Two duck eggs are due to hatch on Wednesday.

We had a great training session with the alpacas last Friday, it was sort of alpaca whispering and we feel more confident about handling them now.  Minnie is due to give birth in May and Pela is due in July, that should be fun.

Joy
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This is the first blog since the addition of a ‘blog tab’ on the website.

Early spring is a quiet time in the cattery so we have been catching up with some maintenance.  This is mostly painting with a few repair jobs thrown in.  The big freeze brought burst pipes in the cattery so while the plumber was here we had new taps plumbed into the cat kitchen.

I have recently re-homed a cat through the cat protection league.  When I say re-home I actually mean re-locate as Peaches (the name we have given her) is an outdoor feral cat.  She is joining the Rose Cottage farm management team as Pest Control Officer.  She has been shut inside for almost four weeks so when she is released, look out rats.

I have 14 hens eggs due to hatch next Wednesday and three duck eggs the following week, its always exciting to see what comes out of the shell when all our hens are cross breeds.  My grandson who is 18 months loves to feed the hens and collect eggs, I hope he has inherited some farming genes.

Joy
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Decorations are up in the Cattery although Kerry insists that my Christmas tree is more of a winter twig. We only have one chalet free now so we will have a lot to do over Cristmas and the new year.

Two Fat Alberts (Hercules) went over this afternoon, I wonder what the cats made of that, sitting in their nice warm beds having a cosy cat-nap, then the roar and drone of those big machines lumbering overhead.

The ducklings have moved up to the field now although still protected from flying predators under a mesh frame. We lost two ducklings to the crows last spring, it was very upsetting.
I thought the chickens had stopped laying for the winter but they still seem to be popping eggs out regularly.

I ordered fruit trees for the new orchard , 2 eating apples, 3 cooking apples, 1 pear and 2 damson. I hope alpaca manure is good for vegetables as I collected 5 buckets of it today.

Joy
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This is the calm before the storm at Rose Cottage Cattery, with Christmas and new year bookings coming thick and fast (like the snow up North) it’s good to have a chance to spruce up the chalets.

Weatherproofing the wooden buildings was a timely job as it seems to have been typical Somerset weather since we finished. Seeing the droplets of rain bouncing off the wood, instead of being sucked into the grain, gives me some piece of mind.

We have invested in some beechwood step-stools for the double chalets, when two cats are sharing we felt both cats needed somewhere to sit and watch the world go by - or me struggling up and down with mops and buckets. They have proved very popular so we may have to buy some more.

The four ducklings are 3 weeks old now and making an awful mess, they are much too young to go outdoors, especially in this weather but everything in their enclosure has to be changed daily.

The young chickens are still small enough to sneak through the fence into our neighbour’s garden where the grass is greener, well there actually is grass next door, our field is a quagmire with the occasional island of greeny-brown.

Five ducks are still laying every day, the Khaki Campbells are good layers and as this is their first year, I am expecting eggs all winter, which is good for my egg customers. I might pop some more eggs into the incubator after christmas ready for spring.

Joy
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