Monthly Archives: January 2015

Weather

2014 Weather Stats

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A few weather statistics from 2014. I’m not sure how useful they are but it’s interesting, well to me at least. We have a Maplin weather station in one of the fields which records wi2014-12-31nd, temperature, pressure and rainfall. The data is processed on a Raspberry Pi using an application called Weewx, which crunches the data and publishes it to Wunderground every 5 minutes.

2014 was a mild winter and hot summer,  July was the hottest month with 3 days over 30°C and another 15 over 25°C.  June and September also had  9 and 8 days respectively over 25°C. As for cold we only had 2 days where the minimum temperature was below -5°C and they were both this December.

Rain: Overall 719mm, just over 24 inches in old money. The beginning of the year was very wet (Jan 120mm , Feb 98mm). The sheep weren’OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAt impressed and looked thoroughly miserable. Our lambing shed had 3 inches of water in it a month before lambing!
September was the driest with just 4.8mmOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA which was just as well as August was miserable, 90mm.

The wind is almost always from the SW, ranging from SSW  to WSW. Sept (SE) and Nov (NW) were the exception. In general Dumblehole is not a windy place however there were 14 days where the wind exceeded 25 knots. As you’d expect the winter months were the windiest, February topped the polls with strongest wind at 34.4 knots and on 5 days the wind exceeded 25 knots. June and September were the calmest.

Hens

A trio of Legbars

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Now hold it girls.....!
Now hold it girls…..!

Here are three of the five hybrid hens I hatched last year from a mating of a White Star/Cream Legbar hybrid cock and pure breed Cream Legbar hens. They lay gorgeous greeny-blue eggs and look like pure breed cream legbars. Their sisters however are white with ginger breasts and one lays a blue egg, the other a pure white one.  It just goes to show a) you never really can be sure what you’ll get when crossing hybrids with pure breeds, which is what makes it exciting and b) just because you see a cream legbar hen, don’t assume it’s a pure breed! However, the other lesson learnt is if you select for egg colour (as I did) you do stand a good chance of getting good coloured eggs from the offspring. I did this mating to see if I could replicate the really good quality eggs I was getting from the Ludlow Legbar hybrids I had hatched the previous year from a local supplier, and so far I have.

Machinery, Pigs

Go Go Weaners

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Joe came to pick up all 8 weaners today. Now moving pigs is either straight forward and it takes no time at all, or it’s a nightmare. Today turned out to be the latter.

Initially we followed defacto plan A, i.e use a bucket of feed and walk the weaners plus Sultana up into the yard where they can be enclosed in a small space. Back the trailer up and walk everyone into the trailer. Normally works a treat. two problems today a)  Joe planned to put the weaners in the back of his truck and b) the pigs didn’t play ball.

Half of the weaners wouldn’t cross the boundary where the electric fence normally is. The others were in the yard and caught one by one to load into the truck. Now weaners at 8 weeks are quite small and you can ‘pop them in the car’, however these are 13 weeks. As soon as one was put in another escaped. Re-think required.

OK plan B, let’s get all the weaners and Sultana back in their paddock and then encourage them into the ark. Once in the ark they’re contained and we can carry them one by one into Joe’s truck. Hmm… the truck isn’t working let’s use our livestock trailer to avoid any more escapees. There’s quite a dip from the yard into the field but the Defender should manage it.

An hour in and things are going our way. I won’t say it was easy catching wriggling muddy weaners but it was working. However it’s a little unnerving being in the ark with a squealing weaner when Sultana comes barging in barking, to see what’s going on. She was very good about the whole thing and a few pounds of pig nuts pacified her.

 All we had to do now 2015-01-06-moving-weanerswas drive out of the field back to the yard. The Defender tried her best but it’s very muddy a steep slope and the trailer is quite heavy. Massey to the rescue. First tow the defender out. Second pick the front of the livestock trailer up on the 3 point linkage; I don’t have a tow bar on the Massey.  Third drive back to the yard.  It all went like clockwork, honestGnome-Face-Wink-64

2015-01-06-massey

Sorry no photos of us with weaners in our arms; all of us were fully occupied no spare hands to take any snaps.