Great view on this morning’s dog walk, couldn’t resist taking a photo. Click on the image for full size photo.
Autumnal Morning
Category Archives: Weather
One Advantage of Overnight Lambing
you get to see the Dawn. To me dawn is so different to dusk particularly when it’s still. After the dawn chorus is so quiet, everything is waking up and there’s a sense of anticipation as to what the day will bring, well at least that’s how it feels to me LOL. And this year we’ve had some amazing sunrises. I haven’t edited these photos this is really what it looked like at the time. The shot with the moon almost looks like daylight, it wasn’t that light the phone has over exposed it somewhat.
Short Days and Plenty To Do
It’s been fairly quiet for a change. The tups went in at the start of October, Spot farrowed and the odd tree fell over in the October storm. It was the rain that caused most hassle in the Autumn, we had our highest October rainfall and November was above average as well. The pasture has stood up pretty well but the pig paddocks cut up quickly and in no time turned into mud soup.
Now we’re into winter the days are short, no sooner is lunch over and we need to crack on with the afternoon jobs before it’s dark. Several groups of sheep need hay plus a little cake for the ewes, then onto feeding the 4 groups of pigs and not forgetting that the dogs need a walk as well. After that there’s not much time to do anything else outside. While the ground is sodden I should be repairing fences, it’s a lot easier to bash the posts in when the ground is soft.
Finally the Hay is in
Like tens of farmers this year I really wasn’t sure we would get the hay in. It was ready at the start of July but it just kept raining 2 days out of 3 and August was no better.
Last Sunday the Met Office and OpenWeatherMap were promising that Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would be dry so I cut the 4 acre field. The grass wasn’t great as it had been standing for weeks but it’ll be good enough for the sheep.
The forecasts were wrong it rained every night and some times during the day. Not too heavy but not ideal, I even tedded in a shower. The forecasters were saying heavy rain on Friday and rain every day thereafter, but Thursday looked OK. If Wednesday was dry we had a chance. Wednesday morning it rained and I thought we had no chance to get it dry enough to bay.
Then the Sun came out mid morning Wednesday and by Wednesday night it wasn’t looking too bad. No rain overnight and although it was overcast on Thursday it was dry enough to bale in the late afternoon. The baler didn’t miss a beat and with the help of 3 friends we manged to get almost all the bales in the barn by 21:30. What a relief.
Maternity Unit is Open for Business
Lambing is well underway, the first lamb was born last Saturday and it’s been a steady week. Very easy so far, a couple of ewes lambed over night and we’ve had to bottle feed a set of twins for a couple of days, both on my night shifts.
Yesterday we let the older lambs out as it was warm in the sun and the rain/snow had stopped in the morning. Weather outlook isn’t great so the lambs will have to stay in until it improves or they’re old enough to handle the wind and wet.
It’s feeling a lot like Christmas
Cold, bright and snow on the ground it does look like a Christmas scene. Very cold this morning -11°C everything is frozen solid. Fortunately we’d taken straw and water butts out to the pigs yesterday. The little weaners were toasty warm this morning and running around. The sheep have plenty of hay and get a few nuts to tie them over. Ryelands are a bit dense when it comes to looking under the snow for grass!
Did I really say it was dry!
November’s not over yet and we’ve had almost 3 times our November average rainfall and 50% more than our previous November high. Which means it’s wet, very wet. The fields the sheep are on are OK as the ground was so dry.
It’s a different story for the pigs though as they’d turned the ground over and with the rain on it it’s like slurry. The good news is that it’s only a few inches deep, although I’m not sure James would agree. We had a night away from the small holding and James kindly offered to feed the pigs for us. I’m not sure he’ll offer ever again!
We just weaned the latest batch of piglets onto fresh grass, how long the grass will last who knows probably only a few weeks.
Wot no Grass
2022 has been an incredibly dry year for us, the brook was completely dry for weeks and the grass stopped growing. Being on clay it took a while before the ground was done dry, however in July we had to give the sheep hay and the ewes needed concentrates as well.
We gave the lambs about three times the normal acreage which meant they had enough grass to keep them going, just. We don’t creep feed, my view is that purely grass fed lamb has better flavour and is less fatty.
By way of contrast in February we had too much rain lol
Summer Grass
After the snow the grass romping away in April and May and then no rain so it all stopped growing. Our soil is clay and so it held onto any moisture for quite some time but eventually it ran dry. It was lucky I’d made some hay as I hadn’t planned to but as the grass got away from the sheep I put a few acres aside. Just as well as I had to feed it to the sheep, the grass had just stopped.
The brook that runs through our fields dried up completely several times during the summer, first time that’s happened since we’ve lived here.
In some ways the summer wasn’t particularly dry if you look at the total rainfall. It’s just that all the rain came over a very short period and hence ran off the fields without soaking in. On 20th September we had our highest daily rainfall total since I began collecting weather data, almost 50% higher than the previous highest.
Lowest Recorded Temperature
Update: 12 Dec 2017 07:21 -11.4C (11.4F) far too cold to take photos! I remember my hand freezing to a metal gate, fortunately I was wearing gloves. Keeping the water liquid for the hens was a every hour on the hour task as it refroze so quickly. We had a run of 12 days where the temperature fell below freezing.
Previous Low: 30 Nov 2016 06:63 -7.5C (18.5F)
This morning 30 November 2016 at 06:38 we recorded our lowest all time temperature -7.5C (18.5F), I’ve only been recording the weather stats since November 2013 so maybe it’s not that dramatic. Having said that last year, 2015, the lowest temp was only -5C on the 20th Jan 2015 and in 2014 it got down to -6.7C on 30 Dec 2014 when we had almost two weeks of really cold weather over Christmas and into New Year.
Today is the third cold day in a row, we’ve been out first thing each morning and throughout the day breaking the ice on all the troughs and drinkers for the pigs, sheep and hens.Wisp doesn’t seem too perturbed she still can running over for a fuss.
The upside is that the sun is out and with not a cloud in the sky it great to be outside and then rush back into the kitchen to sit on the Rayburn when you’re frozen to the core.
The cold weather has slowed up the mole invasion, I guess the ground is so hard it’s not as easy to dig through. In the last few weeks there must be upwards of a hundred mole hills in Kiwi’s field, it’s looking more like a battlefield than pasture.
Dumblehole 