Author: frieslandfarm

We have, at last, had a decent block of lovely weather, how much more we will get is anyone’s guess but we made the most of it this weekend and worked flat out!

We are still waiting for the second ewe to produce her lambs, meanwhile the first is still in with her remaining lamb April, we cant take her outside because the other ewe would fret so she will have to stay in until the other lambs are born, though I would have liked to put her out in the sunshine this weekend. Little April is doing very well with Mum and is a very contented little lamb.
The orphan lambs are growing very quickly, they start off suckling very timidly and have now worked up to a voracious guzzle, so much so that I have to hold the feeder down so they don’t push it off the rail and they drain it in one sitting, Betty is also doing well in with them and is taking a normal sized feed every six hours. She has very strongly identified to me though, to the point where if I lift her out of the pen she will follow me all around the yard. On Sunday morning we decided to get all the orphans out and put them on a small grass area next to the house, their first look at the outside world was lovely to watch and I have taken some video footage which I will put up on my page. Spring lambs do a funny little jump and all four feet leave the ground, I tried to catch it on film but as always the minute I turned on the camera they stopped and when I stopped they began lol. We have given a couple more some names, the other little girl is called Sweet Pea and one of the boys is called Stumpy. stumpy has had a few problems going to the loo, and so stands quite hunched up making him look short in the body hence Stumpy, we have been giving him vegetable oil to try and get his bowel movements working, it is working slowly and hopefully he will feel comfortable enough to stretch out soon. One of the reasons we took them out is to give them some exercise as this helps with digestion, the stable is big enough for them to run around but it’s not the same as being outside and leaping around.

We still have not put anything in the vegetable garden, until this weekend the ground was still too cold, I think from here on in we will be a lot busier with planting though, the ground has definitely dried out and is no longer waterlogged, hopefully we will have more normal weather from now on which will enable us to get some crops in the ground. For the past few weeks its been like treading water, there is nothing you can do except wait, make plans and keep waiting, which is why at the weekend when the weather finally broke it was all systems go!

The paddocks were our main priority and our eldest daughters boyfriend came over on Saturday morning with his quad bike to do major work on them. First they all needed dragging, this mean attaching heavy chains to the bike and pulling it over the ground in the paddocks. Two things happen when you do this, first it knocks out all the lumps of soil and flattens ground that has been trashed through the Winter months, secondly it pulls out a great deal of thatch, dead grass, which in turn gives the new emerging grass more light and a better chance of growing. Back in the dark months we had bought various gadgets to attach to the bike to make the jobs easier and the next job after dragging was to reseed a couple of the worst affected paddocks. Sometimes it is possible to let the grass go to seed and therefore reseed itself, our worst affected paddock is about three quarters of weeds and so desperately needed seeding which was never going to happen if we didn’t help it. This paddock has now been, mucked, dragged, dragged again, seeded and rolled, we also made some bird scarers so the pigeons don’t eat all our hard work, now all we need on it, and I hardly dare say it, is a spot of rain! Just a spot mind we don’t want a torrential downpour as this will wash the seed into the middle of the field which we don’t want. We also reseeded and rolled the two front paddocks, a lighter dusting of seed on these two just to thicken up the sward that is there already, these also have bird scarers flapping in the wind, I hope they work, if they don’t work you may see a slightly mad women flapping her arms around to scare the birds away!

This weekend we moved the horses to their Summer grazing which is our next door neighbours
field, they kindly let us use it and we save it for the better months so that it does not get trashed. We have to put up quite a bit of electric fencing in order to keep the horses from getting out, not that they were thinking of going anywhere in a hurry when they saw the feast before them, having been grazing on fairly bare paddocks all Winter they have probably been gorging themselves all night. The new Spring grass has not started to come through yet and so last years grass that has gone over Winter will not have too much value in it but it will fill their bellies and keep them busy for a while.

We also fixed the big greenhouse over the weekend, remember how the wind had blown out some of the roof panels and also some of the side panels, out came the glass cutter and it is now all in one piece again and hopefully I can start using it to bring on some seeds. Before I get started though it needs a clean with disinfectant and I thought I might give it a coat of wood preserver, it’s very nearly on its last legs but if I look after it I could possibly get a few more years out of it before it rots through totally.

The chicks hatched out last Wednesday right on cue, however it was a disastrous hatch, out of twenty four eggs only five hatched, two of those were failing to thrive and had to be dispatched, out of the other three that remain, two are cock birds and only one is a hen! Halfway through the incubation period I noticed that the turner was not working properly as it had come off its fitting, how long it had been like that I am unsure but the poor hatch indicates it was quite a while. I think I will leave it to the birds to hatch their own for the rest of the year.

We did take a couple of breaks during our busy weekend, one was to sit and watch the Grand National as we always do each year, betting slips in hand, shouting at the TV, this year the lucky winners in the room were our eldest daughter who had second and her boyfriend who had the 100-1 winner, naturally the second break we took later in the day was down to the pub and the drinks were on him 🙂

Have a great week and hopefully I will have some news about the other ewe by next Monday!

I hope you all had a lovely Easter, ours was very quiet until yesterday when it was all systems go with the ewes. We went out to find that ewe number one had lambed in the afternoon, she had triplets, all girls, sadly one was already dead and the other was cold and nearly lifeless. The third was up on her feet and doing fine so we left her in with mum and took the other indoors, we spent the next few hours trying to warm her up and get some glucose into her for strength. We did try to put her back in with Mum but she rejected it and so our work began. After a very long night of trying to feed her hourly she is nice and warm this morning, has taken her first 100mls of milk and tried to stand up, she is also quite vocal! We gave her concentrated colostrum every four hours and sat her on our laps with a hot water bottle underneath her.
It was a very exciting moment when we realised they had been born and then a mad scramble to get the emergency kit out and administer whatever we could to keep the little one alive. We have named her Betty after my Mum as she was born on her birthday, if the other ewe lambs today and has a boy we will nick name it after our middle daughters boyfriend whose birthday is today!
We still had to keep an eye on the one with Mum to make sure she was doing ok, I soon realised that Mum had not let her milk down and the lamb was trying to feed in vain. Later that evening I took a warm flannel out and washed her teats to try and encourage the milk flow, I was dead chuffed when it worked and now little one has been happily feeding through the night. We need a name for her and as it was the first of April I think we will name her after the month.

We also picked up the seven orphan lambs last Thursday, they are in the stable block and doing well. It is so cold for the time of year, the shepherd told us he had lost a lot of lambs to hypothermia as his ewes all lamb out in the field. The orphans are in a pen with plenty of straw and blankets draped over the side of the hurdles to keep out the draught and though they were cold to start with they have gained strength and growing nicely. It’s just a shame they can’t go outside even for a short time to have a hop, skip and jump around. Only two of the orphans have names at the minute, one is Billy because he looks more like a goat and one of the girls is Daisy because she is rather cute, eventually we will come up with names for the rest of them and I will let you know when we do.

We have had plenty of visitors to see the lambs over the weekend and it is lovely to see small children, see, touch and feed little lambs, the adults are always smitten as you can imagine, more so than the children sometimes! If you want to come and have a look just let me know, afternoon is probably the best time for me and the lambs.

As I have said already the rest of the week has been fairly quiet, we still can’t get on the garden even though we have had a glimpse of the Sun it has still be accompanied by a cold East wind. The seeds my Mum took back to her place have started to sprout, and in the week we planted as much as we could in the poly tunnel just in case that’s the only planting we get to do this year. We put broad beans, peas, lettuce, radish on one side and the first early and second early potatoes on the other side. At the very least we should get a crop from each of those, this prolonged cold spell is not doing anyone any good at all.

All other livestock on the farm are doing fine, the hens and ducks are still laying well and the horses have now been turned out wether they like it or not! I am expecting a hatch of chicks tomorrow, Cream Legbars, which lay the Blue eggs, lol it was bad timing on my part for everything to happen at once. Someone commented that it must be hard work but I replied, I think smallholders thrive on the challenge to be honest, that is certainly true on our part, throw us a curve ball and we will return to the very best of our ability.

I will put some pictures of Betty at the bottom of the blog and see if I can get one of Mum with April, I also have some video footage of when we first bought Betty in and tried to get her a first feed into but I still can’t get that to upload on here so it will follow on my Facebook page.

On the food front, I did not get round to making my hot cross buns as I was so busy with the arrival of the orphan lambs and establishing a feeding routine which was complicated at first due to the fact that they were used to different shaped teats, but luckily my Mum had a go at making some and we went round on Good Friday to have some with coffee. My hubby declared they were the best he had ever tasted and as you can imagine he does not pay her compliments very often so that is a very high accolade indeed! We also had cup cakes made by my young niece which were lovely and a roast dinner out on the Sunday, and of course chocolate eggs, so we did alright considering 🙂

I have a busy day ahead of me so I am off to get a couple of photos for you before Betty wants another feed and then will upload this blog. Have a good week and keeping wishing for the Sun to appear and the east wind to disappear.
The Orphan lambs, mum with little April in the corner and Betty this morning doing well.

Morning bloggers, I am surprisingly chipper this morning despite the continued cold weather, could be because we had practically the whole weekend off, apart from the feeding routine morning and evening we didn’t do very much at all. Who wants to work out in zero temperatures and wet mud, not me, besides there is nothing that won’t wait until the weather turns although that does not look like it will be any time soon.

The veg garden is still untouched, the ground is at saturation and then frozen solid on top of that, not worth putting anything in, it will only rot away. Traditionally, potatoes would go into the ground on Good Friday, I can’t see that happening at all although I have just checked the soil in the poly tunnel and we may well be able to plant some earlies in there, I have ordered some fleece to warm the ground a little bit more so we will see how it goes. My Mum came over one day last week and we set about repairing the one of the greenhouses that was wrecked by the high winds during the winter months. We have put all the panels back in the roof and used wire and bungies to keep the panels on with a bit of luck. We also put bubble wrap all around the bottom half and fleece on the soil in an attempt to warm it up, we are doing all that we can and now it’s going to be up to Mother Nature to pull her finger out and bring us Spring!

We still have something lurking in the roof despite putting bait boxes down, I have refilled it a couple of times so it is being eaten, I can only think that this is a new lodger! I found what I think is the rats nest outside by one of the chicken houses but even though I have put bait boxes in various places they have not been touched so I wonder if that is an old nest and they have moved into the roof instead.

I bought the sheep in at the weekend, not because they started to lamb but because the weather forecast was so awful that I didn’t fancy lambing out in the field if they started, I thought that lambing at the beginning of April would be ideal as the temperatures are usually good, ha, just another one of the obstacles thrown at us, I try not to take it personally 😉 I am beginning to wonder how we will manage the orphan lambs though, normally the horses would all be turned out and we would have spare stables to house them, at the minute that does not look like it will happen in time and so I need to find a space to rig up a couple of pens to put them in. It needs to be fairly wind proof for the lambs and for me, it’s either that or I turn the Shetland pony out no matter what the weather is, and use his stable.
I can’t help thinking about how the cost of everything is increasing as a result of the weather and it will only get worse, we are still feeding large amounts of hay to the horses and the sheep, also straw for bedding, which would normally have stopped on all but the worst of days by now. The cost of veg is looking set to rise a) because of the very wet summer last year and b) the late planting that will happen this year. I know my local farmer has managed to plough a few acres but he was out in his tractor well after dark a couple of weeks ago in order to get it done. It has been a disastrous 12 months for many farmers and I wonder how many will go into early retirement as a result and they will be the lucky ones, I imagine a great many will have been forced into bankruptcy as a result of poor yields and unusable land that is still under water 6 months on. Bleak outlook, and we could really do with some Sun to help bring us out of the doldrums.

Ha ha, I just re read what I have written so far, I started off chipper and am now in the doldrums, it didn’t take much did it! On a more positive note the hens are still laying like billyo, there has been no drop in egg numbers all Winter really and we continue to sell them and make a profit after deducting food costs, we are waiting for the Quail to come back into lay which should be any time time soon, and the ducks are back up to laying a full compliment. The sale of the latter two is intermittent and so I feed duck eggs to the dogs when we get too many stacking up, the dogs love them and it means that we are constantly putting out only fresh eggs.

I was thinking the other day that I should be washing my Winter coats by now and storing them away for next Winter, instead, I am still wearing it and even having to put it on to walk down to the post box. I even ordered new pegs in readiness, plus a new washing line spike, I ran over the other one with the lawn mower last year and mangled it! I also keep thinking, it always used to be cold in March when we were kids, maybe we have just been a bit spoilt with the Spring weather over the last few years, and hopefully what will follow are those glorious long hot Summers that we also used to get, although in reality it was probably only one 1976 I think, and we just keeping pulling that one back to the forefront of our minds lol.

This is how I remember it: I lived in a village in the days when cars only came through now and again, so much so that when playing ‘chicken’ you might have to wait for over an hour for a car to come! We, that is most of the children in the village, except the ones that went to boarding school, played for hours and hours on the local recreation ground, we went out early and came home at dusk, we spent our hours playing ‘houses’ in a little copse by the stream, we fished for crayfish, minnows, and some fish that began with bull but the rest of the name escapes me now. The water in the stream was clear enough to be able to spot the fish then. Lazy summer days when the only noise to disturb us was the lawn mower running over the cricket ground getting it ready for Sundays when many of our Dads would put on their whites, and we changed the scoreboard in exchange for some of the tea and sandwiches prepared by the wives. We often wandered out of the village past the RAF runway and to what was then an old abandoned railway track and station, it is now an industrial estate. We took our sandwiches and squash with us and played all day without a bit if technology in sight. The walk home was dusty and leisurely, tea, bath, bed and do it all again the next day. Sometimes we played in the cornfields at the back of our houses, we knew we shouldn’t but the temptation was too great, rolling around making shapes and patterns out of flatted crops (naughty). We would also stand and watch when the crop was finished and they burnt off the stubble, it often got out of control and set fire to a hedge and the fire brigade would have to turn out to get it back under control. Just before the beginning of May we would walk from school down to the woods and pick Bluebells and flowers to decorate the May cart, we had a wonderful procession through the village and everyone turned out to watch the May Queen and her attendants, that was followed by Maypole dancing, weaving the ribbons in and out to make multicoloured webs of pure delight, I loved that and country dancing, ‘take your partner by the hand and do the dosey doe’ lol, where did it all go wrong, why have we lost so many of our country traditions. Ours all went out of the window when a new head teacher was installed, she had come from London, Londonitis spread slowly through the streams and rivers and engulfed the country folk, gone were the days of making straw dollies at harvest time, the Mummers play at Christmas time, making butter by shaking cream in a jam jar in springtime and collecting walnuts from the tree in the playground in Autumn. We all became part of the rat race, ironically now many of the Londoners buy second homes in our villages, pricing those young couples that choose to stay, out of the housing market because they want a slice of country life! I know change is inevitable but we should have tried harder to hang on to some of the old ways, after all what we have moved onto is nothing to be proud of , binge drinking, credit card debt and a very demanding generation who have more rights than the parents that bought them into this world!

The world as I remember it and as I see it now, could be a whole new blog! It’s Easter this weekend, enjoy your well deserved long weekend, sadly it does not look like the Sun will be coming out, but if you are confined to indoors, why not revive an old tradition just for the fun of it, make a simnel cake, or paint some hard boiled eggs, find a small hill to roll them down, you could even have a go at hot cross buns, not as difficult as you might think, look up an old tradition that would suit you and yours, I guarantee if you give it a go you will have a sense of achievement which will lift your spirits until the Sun makes an appearance!

Happy Easter 🙂

I was awake and up before the alarm went off this morning! Most unusual for me, normally I am still in bed half an hour after it has gone off, however I need to get used to the earlier mornings as we are only a couple of weeks away from early morning feeds for the lambs 🙂

It is a hard frost this morning but that is a more welcome sight than yesterday morning when we were greeted with snow, the wet slushy stuff that just made the ground wet and luckily didn’t settle. We have had a good bit of rain in the last few days and as a consequence the fields are back to being muddy again, the only difference this time of year is that when we a have a few dry days the ground dries quicker, that’s how I console myself anyway. It meant that any plans to drag and roll paddocks, were not going to happen, instead Hubby chopped wood, just as well because we are running out and finding, with the weather all over the place, we still need a fair amount to get us through.

I have set a clutch of eggs in the incubator this week, Cream Legbars, I found an app called ihatch which shows you day by day how the egg is developing and sets reminders for keeping the humidity up etc, today is day six and the legs and wings begin to develop, it takes twenty one days for chicks to hatch , that is a pretty quick growth rate! The laying hens are still popping them out at a great rate, luckily we have sold sixteen hens this week alone but the egg pile is growing daily and now the ducks are also back in full lay I have more than I know what to do with, I think I may have to make a few Madeira cakes, they use a fair few eggs and are yummy for Easter.

The veg garden is the main cause for concern at the moment, it is still too wet to do much, I think we have been spoilt by the lovely weather during March in previous years, most seeds are not due to be sown until April or May anyway so I should stop worrying. The tomatoes and pepper seeds have gone with my Mum to be started off on her windowsill, it’s too cold here, the greenhouse roof is still not back on yet and my windowsills are draughty. I might consider putting as much as I can in the poly tunnel, it might be all we get this year if we have another awful one like last summer.
There is still plenty of tidying to be done and a bit of mending, so for the time being that’s about all we can do, traditionally the potatoes go in on Good Friday but I think the ground will still be too wet, we have a couple of weeks yet so who knows the weather may take a turn for the best for a change. Plenty of signs of Spring, tiny buds on the nut trees, the daffy are still tightly wrapped in green at the minute but I can see they are just waiting for the right day, some of the perennials are beginning to put on some growth so it’s all warming up for sure.

Mia can’t work out why, some days she does not have to have a bath and then other days, sometimes two or three in a row, she is forced into the torture room called ‘bathroom’, she absolutely hates having a bath, she would rather walk around with dried mud clinging to her looking like a street urchin. She has got the the age where all she wants to do all day is play ball, no matter what job you are trying to do she is throwing the ball at your feet, or anyone who happens to be here, she would carry on all day if you indulged her, I wish I had that much energy. It is lovely to start with then becomes a nuisance when you are mucking out stables and she is tossing the ball in among piles of poo you are trying to rake up. She loves the farm life so much though, she spends all day outside, she has a good bond with the sheep that consists of 50% affection and 50% teasing, its quite funny to watch the sheep chase her when they have had enough of her. Normally when I go out to call her she comes pretty quickly but one day last week I called her because I was having hay delivered and didn’t want her in the way of the trailer, I called her and called her, nothing, I started to worry a bit and walked around the from to look in the front paddocks and in next door, nothing, then I heard one tiny yap, she was around somewhere and shut in, I checked all sheds and rooms etc and eventually found her sat in the fox trap, I should have guessed that would be the obvious place to look really!

Halfway though writing I stopped and opened the back door where I saw……….A RAT! I was quite wrong about the squirrel obviously lol, that is the first time ever I have seen a rat here, I checked the bait box and sure enough it’s all gone, so I have re baited them and hopefully there will be no more uurrghh.

It makes such a difference to the start of the week when you wake up to sunshines doesn’t it. Unlike most of the country I actually like Mondays, after what is usually a hectic weekend, it’s nice to get back to routine and quiet!

This weekend has been a busy one and a long one as Hubby had the Friday off from his usual plumbing work, we are still clearing rubbish, the scrap man came on Friday to take away all the bits of metal that have accumulated, we took bags of clothes to the charity shop and also to the textiles and shoe bins, gradually we are clearing everything we don’t want or need anymore.

I am continuing the preparation process and the stable has been cleaned, disinfected and made ready for the event of lambing, I have set up two separate pens in the stable as the ewes will need to have their own stalls so they don’t worry each other. I took a quick look at their nether regions which have gone pink and puffy, I am told that is a good sign, we counted exactly 151 days from a week after they went in with the Tup and the date comes out at 1st April lol I hope it’s not a joke!
I have also rung the farm where we usually get our store lambs from and ordered seven, day olds, they usually lamb at the beginning of April too so we should get a call then to say they are ready to be picked up, it will then be a very busy and tiring six weeks while they are bottle fed four times a day!

We have also discussed this weekend, and more importantly agreed, about where the pig sty should be sited and how it will be constructed, we also decided that we would have two sets of pigs, one in the Spring (although not this spring) then rest the pen for the two hottest months of the year and then have two more to take us through to the end of October when the produce from the garden will feed them and of course any apples that are not quite up to scratch will be great for them to finish on as well.

On Sunday, I had a day off from the farm and went to the NEC to the wedding fair, it was a bit like going to a cattle market to be honest lol. While we were away, Hubby and our eldest daughters boyfriend, did some muck spreading on one of the paddocks. This paddock is normally just full of plantain, not a blade of grass in site, so we have set down a plan to rejuvenate it, first it is fertilised with the muck and dragged to get an even spread, the next step would normally be to seed it and then spray it to get rid of the weeds once the grass was established. We are going to do it the other way round though as the weedkiller used for the first process is very toxic and any muck to come off that field in future years cannot be used to put on the garden, so we will use a gentler, systemic weedkiller, that will be sprayed on the whole field to kill everything off and then seed it. I was not comfortable using a weedkiller that was so destructive, goodness knows what it would do to the horses having to eat grass that had any residue left in it, never mind what would happen to any wildlife. The way I have chosen may not be conventional but certainly safer for all concerned including the sprayer!

I have managed to do a bit of gardening this week although not on the veg patch, we have a ‘lawn’ to the left hand side of the building, but over the last couple of years the rabbits have lived on it and dug holes all over it. Now the rabbits have gone I set about bringing it back to something more than a dirt patch with holes. I raked it over to get out any thatch, then filled in the holes with earth and raked it level again, I also cut back some of the conifers that were beginning to grow out too far and now that little area is all ready for spring, one less job to do later on when the work load begins to increase. I still have plenty more of these areas to sort out, one of the bigger areas is the driveway, I noticed a far amount of litter trapped in the hawthorn hedge which needs picking up and the grass verge has crept further and further onto the driveway over the Winter so that needs chopping back while the ground is still soft enough. I have bulbs that were supposed to go in at the end of last Autumn but never got round to planting them, it’s not too late they will still grow although probably won’t produce any flowers this year. A tray of primroses are also waiting for their time to flower and they will need to go in fairly soon as well. Luckily we are forecast a few more days of nice weather and then rain at the end of the week, but generally speaking it can only get better now, can’t it?

We still have not managed to catch the fox, although I have not actually seen him for a few days so perhaps someone else in the vicinity has had better luck although I won’t let my guard down. The chickens are all still on lockdown and we have sorted them back into the correct runs, I don’t like not letting them out but it is for their own good, plus it does make life a whole lot easier. They will all be moving in the Spring as we are swapping them into different paddocks as soon as the grass begins to get thicker, they will be out in the front paddocks where I can keep a better eye on them. We are also going to move them out of the orchard and give the ground in there a rest for a year or two. All ground needs a rest from having the same species grazing on it all the time, it’s the same as vegetable gardening really, if you leave something on the same ground you run the risk of a build up of pests and disease so it’s good management to give the areas a change and a rest. I wonder if that would work with Humans too, we should all be given a good rest from work now and again, about 6 months should do it, I will begin a petition to send to 10 Downing Street, you never know, if you don’t ask you don’t get 😉

It has been very cold hasn’t it but at least the ground is hard and dry, much easier to walk on, it’s almost like everything has been freeze dried!

Our Fox is still being a total nuisance and the birds are all own total lockdown at the minute, we have tried in vain to catch the thing, even had eldest daughters boyfriend sat inside a hut with a cockerel as bait to lure it but to no avail. It is about all the time though, I had seen it only half an hour before he arrived but it must be a very wily fox, it is appearing at various times of the day, if the dog is out she will bark furiously at it but it does not run until it sees me. Some of the birds have been moved to the front, some are in the stable unable to come out, and the rest are in pens or behind electric fencing. Hopefully it will get desperate enough to want the bait in the trap or move on to better pastures, it is a waiting game but I am determined not to let it get any more birds! The girls obviously don’t mind too much as they are continuing to lay a huge amount of eggs, at one point we had over twenty dozen on the side and that was only a few days worth! Luckily we sold around fourteen dozen in one day so they are not around very long, we have now managed to separate the cockerels from the laying hens, they had got all mixed up when they were free ranging because of the wet, the larger ones will be used to fill the freezer and the others will be fed to the dogs once they have been dispatched.

The frozen ground has meant that I still can’t get on the garden, although I have been doing some tidying up, it is amazing how many broken pots you keep, for what reason, just in case lol. As we have the skip at the minute I may as well make use of it and get rid of anything that is not useful such as netting with holes in or broken buckets etc. Preparation is key or so I keep telling myself, so if I can get everything tided up and ready to go then as soon as the weather is better I won’t be sidetracked by other jobs when the time comes.

The Snowdrops have been out for a while and the daffodils have buds on them so we can’t be far away can we 🙂 quite a few of the shrubs and trees have small buds on them ready to burst into life at the first chance they get and the grass has started to come through, we know this because the horses and the sheep are mostly head down when they are out grazing, a good indicator, this means that the ground is warming up at least, even if the air temperature is not!

Hubby has been busy chopping wood as we seem to going through a lot of it at the moment, the store that we had for next Winter has been severely depleted, hopefully we will get offers of trees that people have chopped down and we have a few very tall conifers to top out at some point in the Spring which should help. The aim is always to run the place as economically as possible and wood is usually a free source of heating and hot water, our next serious investment will be PV solar panels on the stable block roof, this will generate electricity for us and reduced our outgoings further, with the cost of energy rising all the time this can only be a good thing and one I am looking forward to having installed. Saving water will be the thing to look at after that, we are on a meter and its pretty good but there are still ways we could save, we have a large water butt of about 1000 gallons, we use this to provide water to the birds and wash our boots off! We have had a tap that has been leaking and fixed that, it’s surprising how much you pay for a leaky tap, we need to check all the others and check any packing glands to make sure we are not losing unused water. We have water butts at almost every available outlet and there are even some in the fields which provide the horses with rain water, much better for them than tap water, the outside dogs are given water from the butt next to their kennel, so we are doing fairly well but as in many an old school report, ‘could do better’!

The news that horse meat has been found in the food chain has been a constant topic in our house, it’s not the meat that is a problem, if it was farmed for that purpose it would be safe to eat, but it is the criminal activity that goes with this food scare, the fact that many of these horses have been stolen and moved with a false passport means that we have no idea what kind of medication they may have been on and how long for. The implication of this is that we are ingesting goodness knows what along with the horse meat and that is a worry, the constant food scares within the industry just goes to show that the system they are using does not work, it is not regulated enough after the meat has left the abattoir. I am not a great fan of processed foods and prefer to cook from scratch, if I can’t make it, we don’t eat it. There are some things I had not even considered though and that includes stock cubes which are the next item to be tested, I wonder what that will reveal 😦

We are off to visit our cow later tonight and we are purchasing half of another which will also have arrived by then, we have not seen her for a while and I am told she has grown a fair bit over the winter although the feed costs will probably reflect that! The first will probably go off for slaughter in the Autumn and the other will go through the Winter until next Summer. We are lucky to have friends that we can share this with but there are small farms out there that will do the same for you if you fancy investing in your own meat source. It may seem like a lot, purchase price, feed costs, slaughter costs but you get a lot of prime quality meat for your investment, the taste is so much better than shop bought, commercially bred meat, I like to think the added extra is TLC and one to one attention 🙂 if we had more acres it is certainly something I would like to be able to do, maybe one day!

We are getting closer to lambing time and the sheep feed has been increased in order to give the lambs and ewes the best chance possible, I have my lambing box ready and my fingers crossed that everything will go well, we will also be buying in some store lambs to raise by hand so if you want to pop down and have a go at feeding them do come along, preferably for the 6am feed so I can have a lie in 😉

It is glorious outside this morning, just like being on your holidays, fresh but sunny and full of promise, let’s hope it stays like this for a while. There are still very wet and muddy areas but it is beginning to dry up thank goodness.

This week has been a very busy one, mostly sorting out loft offerings from the other house, we have now nearly filled the skip with years of junk, we have a pile to car boot and a pile to keep although we may have to go through that again and be more ruthless. My valentines present was a kitchen that was being taken out of a job that hubby was on, it is now installed in the back barn to use for storage, so romantic lol, very useful though.

We have a continuing problem with the fox at the moment, he is using the hedge line like a sushi train, just picking them off at his leisure. The chickens were out because of the mud and so roaming all around the place, I think the fox has set up home nearby, who can blame him really it is easy pickings. Today they are all kept locked in as a precaution although they don’t like it much, I have given them some greens to placate them for a while. He must be close by most of the time as I can smell him, I though I was becoming a bit paranoid about the smell but each time I got a whiff, sure enough half an hour later there he would be, even hubby saw him on Saturday stood about 3 feet away on the other side of the fence, and he does not run when you shout, hubby chased him across the field but not before he had one of our girls. There are feathers all along the hedge so he has had a fair few over the last week, we did set the trap but as yet he has not gone for the bait so it’s a bit of a waiting game, meanwhile all I can do is protect the birds as best as possible from further attacks.

At the weekend one of our egg customers asked if it would be ok to shoot rabbits in our fields, we said yes if you can find any after the flooding, they came that night and set up in the field for a few hours but didn’t see anything except the fox nicking one of our chickens! Unfortunately they only had an air gun and so were unable to do anything about it. On their way back to the car they spotted a ferret, you never know what is going to turn up here sometimes. It was quite tame and so we were able to catch it, at the moment it is in a cage outside waiting for someone who keeps them to come and collect it. I know nothing about ferrets except that they are used for putting down rabbit holes to flush them out, I guess this one got lost and carried on roaming. It’s quite a sweet little thing but has a punchy smell and I had to ask around to find out what to feed the poor thing, it seems to like eggs and cat biscuits but not fish!

The farm itself, apart from the animals, has been put on the back burner while we sort out the sale of the other house, we left it 4 years ago but left everything we didn’t need behind as we had no room for it here. Every year we vowed to sort the stuff out bit by bit but never did and so now it is a major task to undertake all at once and there is not much time to do anything on the farm. Today’s weather may tempt me to sort out some of the veg garden though, even if its only putting rubbish in the skip, that and burning 20 years of paperwork is all I have done over the weekend I would like a change 🙂
I had a muck heap sauna at the beginning of the week, the pile is working really well at the moment with all the rain we have had and now a bit of sun it is steaming away. I got on top of it to level it out a bit, picked up a heap on my pitchfork and a great gush of steam caught me square in the face, not bad except it stinks and so I was perfumed at the same time, oh the luxuries of farming, work out, sauna and perfume all for free! We have put some rat poison down this week as we thought we might have a rat, not that we have ever seen one, but holes had appeared, on retrospect though it may have been the ferret as none of the bait has been eaten and it has been down all week.

I hope you all had pancakes earlier in the week, we certainly did, it is one of the best days of the year, I like mine with good old lemon and sugar. We have plenty of eggs so it was good to use some of them up, the chickens are laying about 3 dozen a day, it’s amazing, past winters we have struggled to keep supply going but this year they have just kept laying and laying. I am convinced it is because we bought them in before the onset of winter and got them into prime condition before turning them back out, I will certainly do it again next year as a comparison.
Easter is next on the calendar, a lovely time of year, daffodils, tulips, primroses and hints of the trees beginning to burst into blossom, and of course chocolate! Spring will finally be here, and that can’t come soon enough for me this year.

Enjoy your day and I hope the sun shines in, wherever you are 🙂

Apologies for stating the obvious but the weather is shite again! It was just beginning to dry up nicely during the week and one of the afternoons I was even working in a t shirt, but we have gone back to square one with the downpour that occurred over the weekend and now more snow on top. What have we done to deserve this lol, where shall I start! To top it all this morning Rosie has decided to down tools, she is always difficult to get going when it snows but that’s when you need her the most, there are a few pops and crackles coming from the corner now but that has taken a good couple of hours to get her going. I don’t like the usual firefighters as the smell tends to linger long after the fire is going and we used to get the little twists of environmentally friendly wood firefighters but they seem to have stopped supplying them either that or everyone gets a store before winter and there are none left.

I had to give her a quick clean out during the week as we had a small chimney fire, the soot deposits seem to build up so quickly, it does not seem that long ago that we cleaned the flue all the way through. When I opened the damper there was a deposit that was glowing nicely, typically I had just put more logs on and she was going a treat so I had to shut her right down and wait for her to go out so that I could clean her out, luckily it was not a freezing cold day.

The new fencing stakes and electric tape arrived in the week and so I began to make the front paddock escape proof, looks a bit like Fort Knox now but it did the job, not that the horses have been outside much this week. We have turned them out on the sunny days but to be honest in the wet days they just stand in the corner of the field looking miserable so they may as well stand inside in the dry, not so good because they are not getting any exercise but then if they are just stood around outside I suppose the only stretch they get is walking to and from the field.

The sheep also came in for a break from the mud and rain, they definitely do not like being in though but I think as Humans it makes us feel better if we can do something nice for them even if they don’t appreciate it! The chickens are once again wallowing in mud pools but there is not much we can do about it for the time being, I had been letting them out to free range but we had a daytime fox attack on Saturday and so can’t risk it until we catch the culprit. I think Mia would normally keep the fox away when she is running around outside but it was pouring with rain that day and she was shivering while standing waiting for someone to throw her a ball, so we bought her in for a few hours and that’s when the fox struck. Having them in the pens does make egg collection much easier though, when they free range they lay all over the place, in a bucket that is on its side in the trailer, in an old tyre in the hay barn, in the stables, even when the horses are in and even on top of an old sideboard in the back stables, it’s like going on an Easter egg hunt every day.

On the two good days we had I did manage to get a few jobs done, clean and disinfect the dog kennels, clean out the chickens in the breeding runs, scrub all the water buckets, put up the electric fencing, charge up the batteries etc. The trouble was I fell for the false sense of security and thought Spring was indeed Springing, big mistake, I should have known better especially after my battle with the wind on Wednesday. The panels were blowing out of the greenhouse roof at a great rate of knots and I was trying to put them back and make them stay there all while it was blowing a gale, I was losing and the wind was winning, the last straw was when I reached down to get a nail from the tub I had bought out with me and they had gone, blown away in the wind never to be seen again, at that point I promptly burst into tears and had a complete meltdown wondering what the f****** hell I was doing here battling, seemingly without end, against the elements. At that precise point I seriously considered giving it all up and going back to normalville, I was a broken Woman, for a least an hour, after a couple of pep talks with my girls I got up dusted myself off and thought, you don’t get me that easily, so what if the whole bloody roof blows off, we will put it back on when the Sun comes out! The Winter has been long and the absence of a Summer last year has not helped, I guess you have to sink all the way to the bottom in order to start climbing again, I am not the kind of person to stay sitting at the bottom, I am not a victim but a survivor and so I will get back on my ladder and start climbing, until the next melt down anyway!

Our other house is on the market and we have had two offers already, both have been accepted and who ever is able to proceed will get the chance, we won’t get our hopes up too much as we have been here before and people pull out for all kinds of reasons so there will be no celebration until exchange of contracts. Because we have got a little closer to selling we have started to clear out our junk which is still there, the contents of one garage is now sat in our out building here, what a lot of old crap we keep, why do we stuff our garages and lofts full of stuff that will never see the light of day until you move again! Some of the boxes were from the time we moved before which was in 2001, they were never unpacked so we can’t possibly need the contents, I feel a few car boot sale trips coming on so that someone else can hoard our junk!

My seed order arrived in the week and the one place I will be able to start on sooner rather than later is the poly tunnel, I have identified what can be planted early and should do ok despite the lack of warm weather and the soggy ground. We have discussed the fact that we may only be able to grow enough for ourselves this year depending on how the seasons pan out, I really hope that is not the case.

That’s about it for this week, the dog is barking to come in, Rosie has just about got her slovenly arse into gear and it has stopped snowing for the time being at any rate, have a good week, keep looking to the horizon and let me know if you spot the yellow object in the sky that has been missing for far too long.

This last week has been quite a busy one with various jobs finally getting sorted out. The utility room was in desperate need of a clean especially after the dogs had come in from out side covered in wet mud and wrestling in there. There were dirty tail marks on every surface you could see, so I set about cleaning and tidying it thinking it wouldn’t take long, it’s funny how we don’t notice how much junk we pile up and then walk past on a daily basis. Finally after a few hours, everything that had been just put down for one reason or another, had been put back in its rightful place and the area was once again clean and tidy. It was so nice I couldn’t help but keep walking in there just to marvel at the job I had done 🙂

As I was on a roll I decided to defrost one of the big freezers, we have two big chest freezers and two small square ones, the idea is that in times of plenty the two big ones are full and as the food is used up we move down to a big one and a small one and so on as needed. As with most things it didn’t get done when it should have and the two big freezers were both running half full, I moved the contents of one freezer into the other and turned on one of the smaller ones, both are now crammed to the lid! It gave me a good chance to see what I had in them though and have been planning our meals around what I found. The outdoor dogs enjoyed half a pig head each and we had wild duck and gooseberry crumble, everyone’s a winner. I still have a small freezer full of fruit to use up and quite a lot of root veg and fennel to get through so I will be searching for recipes to use them up in the coming weeks.

I also got round to putting my seed order in and they should be on the way to me as I write, this year I have decided not to be too keen to get things going as they are usually ready to go in before the weather is up to speed, though the temptation to get started is always strong for gardeners! I downloaded an ap that will help me to plan the rotation for the veg, normally it is done on paper but the time has come to use technology, beside it highlights problems such as planting a similar crop in the same place as the year before. The Dutch oven arrived about half an hour after I published last weeks blog, together with that I also have a kettle, frying pan and enamel mugs so I am all set to do some cooking out side 🙂
My lambing technique book also arrived this week, it is an excellent reference book, with plenty of pictures to show you how things should look and how they look when things are going wrong, I have yet to read all of it but it filled me with much more confidence than I had before. Yesterday we bought the sheep in, just for a day or two to give their feet a break from the wet conditions, the last thing I need at the moment is a case of foot rot. It will also give me a chance to check the condition of them, using the book I will also try the techniques to find out if they actually are in lamb, they will need to have the back end clipped in readiness if they are.

The wet conditions have been causing problems for farmers up and down the country, they are calling it the 18 month Winter, watching Countryfile last night it was good to see that it’s not just us and we have not been doing anything wrong it is affecting everyone. Yesterday with the help of our eldest daughters boyfriend and his quad bike, we managed to move the chicken hut in the paddock and the pig ark that the sheep have been using for shelter, to drier areas of the paddock, making life much easier for them and for us, they are no longer paddling around in mud although we still have to get through the gateways to get to them. The chicken hut in the small paddock we were unable to move, it was too muddy and the axle has snapped making it impossible to move and so they will have to stay where they are for the time being.

I did shoot a bit of video footage so that you can see exactly what I am talking about when it comes to the mud. Hopefully I will have been able to upload it into this blog if not i will put it directly onto my Facebook page and you can have a look at it there.
We have had a few days of dry weather since I shot the video and it is beginning to dry up an bit, I just hope it carries on staying dry and windy for a few more days so that we can at least regain some sanity!!

I don’t seem to be able to get on this morning probably because I have a lot to do and don’t know where to begin!

The snow has gone and with the torrential rain that came after it is now disgustingly muddy around the farm. It occurred to me last week when I went into town to do some shopping that snow on the ground in town is not the same as snow on the ground in the countryside, in town the paths are cleared and the roads are useable, at the farm we were still trying to get around in 6 inches of snow 5 days after it first fell and the lane was like a rink for that long as well. We don’t clear it because it would take too long without a plough of some sort and we don’t use salt because of the danger to the animals and the fact that it breaks up the concrete, so we just have to struggle around in it until it goes. Once it begins to thaw the mess gets worse, not helped by more rain, I put on clean work clothes this morning and within half an hour had lovely great mud splashes all up my legs. For me the mud is just an inconvenience but for the animals it is a health risk, especially as it does not seemed to have dried up for months now. The chicken pens have, what I can only described as sludge in them this morning, and we are forecast more heavy bursts of rain over the next few days. Trying to decide what to do with them is a difficult decision as the whole place is squelching, we can only try and ride it out and hope that there is better weather around the corner.

I have never seen the paddocks so trashed over the winter, they will come back but the recovery will be longer than we would hope for, this will mean feeding the horses great amounts of hay for longer than usual, not to mention the fact that they constantly keep trying to get out because there is no grass left where they are. The electric fencing has been useless in the cold because the batteries freeze and so don’t have any power output resulting in escapes particularly my little Shetland! We have had so much surface water this winter that it keeps running into the stable block through the walls, the hay barn and feed room have been under water three times already, this is the first year while we have been here that this has happened. I long for the hazy days of a seventies summer, I was young but the summers seemed to be endless, the first year we came here we had a summer like that but it has been all downhill since then.

The egg numbers have picked up again now that the temperatures have risen and even the ducks are laying again. I took the bottom trays out of the small chicken houses so that the muck just falls straight on the floor, this saves me trying to clean them out in this weather, the house can just be moved to clean ground and the nest boxes cleared out. As the weather gets warmer I will have to start treating for red mite again, they can lay dormant for up to eight years no wonder its a problem that is hard to deal with. They reproduce every ten days and so that’s how often you have to treat the houses otherwise you are are on a hiding to nothing, little vampires is what they are, they don’t like the light and come out at night to suck blood from the chickens, yuk. If left untreated they make the chickens very ill and at worst can kill them, it is nearly impossible to totally eradicate them and I have no idea where they come from in the first place because we never had them for over 10 years and suddenly last summer an infestation!

The sheep are less noisy now that the grass has been uncovered from its blanket although they are still on hay every day and a small amount of feed now and again. It appears that it is better to have sheep that are on the lean side when lambing than ones that are fat, it make delivery easier apparently, only time will tell. My lambing kit arrived at the weekend, it consists of lubricating gel and arm length gloves, iodine, colostrum, a ewe drink in case she gets exhausted, umbilical clamps and an emergency syringe of meds for ailing lambs, I also have a lambing rope at the ready, it’s a bit scary but I am looking forward to it no matter what the outcome is.

The veg garden has been mostly neglected all winter, apart from the fact that it is very wet under foot, the cold weather gives me no inclination whatsoever to go out and do anything, I am in essence a fair weather gardener, nothing wrong with that as long as you are prepared to work harder once its warmer. I have ordered a tripod to go over my fire pit so that I can boil the kettle while I am outside working and don’t have to come indoors where the temptation would be to finish for the day. I will also order a Dutch oven which is a pot that hangs own the chain, I like the idea of cooking soup outside and it will be great for BBQ nights if we get any decent weather.

We still have plenty of plans to finalise, we never seem to get very far before the phone rings or something interrupts us, we want to reorganise the front paddocks and the orchard area, the chickens keep escaping because they can jump up into the trees then over the six foot fence. They are then free to roam which is fine in the winter but would be a disaster in the spring when the new veg plants go in. It will also mean that the land would be cross grazed which is much better for the health of the grass and keeps the worm count down for each species that uses it.

I had better go and get on, plenty to do today not enough time to do it as always!