all your machinery under cover, maybe I should have said OCD is …
In case you want to know from right to left, Massey 35 tractor(Jan 1960), New Holland Bayliner 276 Bailer (circa 1976), Mower (2011), PZ Haybob and right in the back a Topper.
Feeding time!
‘Oh no I’m late, I’m never going to get any!’ Now the sheep are due to lamb they are being brought in overnight. However, they have got so used to this routine they now queue up outside the shed from about 4pm. The last one in has to fight for a place…..or she could use her brain and go to the other side of the trough…Ah well, enough said! We have one adorable black ram lamb so far and we are waiting for the other girls to give him a playmate. Not long now……
Best Laid Plans…
We’ve not mentioned the sheep for a while, it’s 5 weeks to lambing then it’ll be nothing but sheep news! It’s Ubi (pronouced ‘ooo-be’) in the photo, he’s our coloured Ryeland tup for 2015. We weren’t going to use him in 2014, but I rate him, so we put him in with 3 of the ewes. You never know we might show him in a local show or two this year. I can’t believe I said that.
Last weekend the plan was to vaccinate and worm the ewes pre-lambing. I’d been exceptionally well organised ordering the right amount of vaccine as it only keeps for 10 hours after opening and needs to be kept between 2-8 °C at all times. It all ran smoothly at first i.e. moved the rams into the orchard out the way, brought all the ewes and ewe lambs in. Identified the ones that weren’t to be vaccinated. Injection and drenching gun at the ready we started. Immediately it went wrong, the drenching gun refused to refill rendering it useless and then the tubing came off the vaccine leaking vaccine everywhere. No worries Countrywide is open on a Sunday I’ll restock. No such luck, no one there was authorised to sell vaccines and no drenching guns. Oh well we’ll have another go this weekend.
Kiwi’s latest litter
23rd Jan and Kiwi didn’t come out for her breakfast which is most unusual, unless the weather is very bad she doesn’t like rain! 
Peering into the ark it was obvious why, she was farrowing a week earlier than we thought. A couple of piglets didn’t make it but five are fit and healthy. It’s pretty cold here so we put plenty of straw down. Kiwi’s been very maternal, every time a piglet comes out she grunts at it and nudges it back in! Two weeks on and Kiwi is letting them venture out of the ark.
2014 Weather Stats
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 wi
nd, 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’
t 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 4.8mm
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.
A trio of Legbars
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.
Old Dogs New Tricks?
Now maybe you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but my 10 year old toller seems to have taught himself at least one.
Now Get off my Bloody Chair Immediately !
Go Go Weaners
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 
was 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, honest
Sorry no photos of us with weaners in our arms; all of us were fully occupied no spare hands to take any snaps.
Sunrise
We’ve had some cracking sunrises and sunsets over the last couple weeks. I don’t think my snap does them justice.
It’s starting to feel like Winter with the temperature getting below zero. The taps in the fields have frozen a couple times so far. If you want to build a stalagmite like mine, then don’t quite turn the tap off overnight.
Kiwi & Sultana take up Winter residence
With the porkers gone we’re free to move Kiwi, Sultana and her litter plus 2 arks to the other end of the field for the Winter. Straight forward you’d think. Plan was straight forward, move one ark, move Kiwi, move second ark and then move Sultana and the piglets. It’s a good plan however remember the quickmud? The quickmud didn’t really want to release the ark nor us once we were in it’s grip. The wooden floor I made and the Porkers never used other than a toilet was wedged tight inside the ark. After 45 mins of pushing, pulling, swearing and Amanda losing her welly(lol), we managed to get it free. A photo or two would have been hilarious but in Amanda’s words “Due to the difficulty of taking photos whilst trying to lever a large ark out of mud, without a) releasing the ark so that you have to start levering all over again and b) loosing your boots which are firmly stuck in that mud, we have only one rather uninspiring photo of lots of bits of wood under the ark, which in no way convey the sheer frustration of trying to move the bloody thing, or how long it took!” …not a happy bunny.
While all this was going on Kiwi was happily grazing, rattling a few pig nuts and she was in her new quarters. Ark number two was a lot quicker, without a floor and less mud it was down the other end of the field in no time. All we had to do now was to walk Sultana and her piglets down. Shouldn’t be a problem after all the piglets will just ‘follow Mum’ … err no that wasn’t what they or Sultana had in mind.
Sultana thought it would be fun to round up the ewe lambs and put then in the lambing shed. Meanwhile the piglets went in all directions except the direction of Sultana. More pig nuts and we have Sultana back with the piglets, temporarily at least. No matter what we tried we couldn’t get all 8 to follow her. Eventually we had 5 and Sultana following the bucket and off we went. So what about the last 3? Fortunately with some ‘sushing’ they went into Ark number 3, perfect. Amanda backed the Landrover up close by, then one by one we caught the piglets without letting the others escape and bundled them in the back of the Landy. After short drive to the other end of the field they were re-united with Mum and their siblings. Time for a shower and a cuppa.
Dumblehole 