Magpies Nil, Us four.

I had intended taking a photo of our offending Magpies but apparently they have left home!  No a sign of them today, and for two days running we have eggs again from the main house. They had clearly tried to remove the rubber eggs yesterday and had even managed to get one off it's string but it was left behind.  Today there is no sign of these birds, I have an image in my mind of several very annoyed magpies sitting in the forest behind us, nursing sore beaks, (the rubber eggs had been pecked,) I do hope so. We did find the mustard eggs that they had clearly had a go at but left, I hope their mouths are still burning. So we have a respite from the saga of the missing eggs, I wonder how long it will be before it starts again.

Just one day to go to the longest night and we can then look forward to spring. So far the weather has been pretty mild and I have noticed that the buds are now swelling on the willows, the behaviour of our cockerels has also changed and they are now having a go at each other through the various fences, clearly they think that the breeding season is just around the corner.
 Christmas decorations are still growing in the hedgerows, we will pick some holly and ivy on Sunday ready to make some effort on Christmas eve and I must make some more marzipan just to decorate the cake, we don't ice as neither of us like it, but we love home-made marzipan, our excuse for making a cake.

It's nice to know that supermarket bosses can take on board comments from customers, a few weeks ago one of our supper markets were selling Organic bacon joints which they were convinced were Irish,  now we read labels very carefully and knew that this bacon was in fact from pigs produced in Denmark and processed in Ireland, we pointed this out to one of the under managers, today we hoped that they might be in stock for Christmas so asked one of the men, oh, you mean the Danish Organic joints, so our comment did not fall on deaf ears, although they don't have any at the moment.

We did have very vague plans of maybe doing a couple of lambs for our own use, however a friend of ours has just done three and has also done his costings, each lamb cost him 134 euro to produce with slaughtering etc taken into account, this is without the cost of fencing, which is a long term pay back. We asked our butcher how much a whole lamb would cost us ,ready for the freezer, his answer between 130 and 140 euro so I don't think we will bother with that idea especially as we would have to completely sheep fence an acre field, so we will stick to poultry which give us a good return and savings on shop prices. But it would have been nice to have sheep again, they are quite fun things even though they can be suicidal.