Tag Archives: Featured

Sheep

The Tups are in

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We’ve put the tups in a week earlier this year on 26 September, not because we particularly wanted to lamb earlier as I prefer to turn the ewes and lambs out onto fresh grass.  But everyone was getting restless and it just seemed like the right time. With  two distinct flocks it can get a little complicated and this year it means there’s 5 groups. Sam is with one group of Ryelands and Uhoo with a second. With Sherlock gone Ubi has all the coloured Ryelands, lucky boy. That just leaves this years ewe lambs and ram lambs, hence five groups in total. Surprising it only took a couple of hours to split and group everyone.

IMG_0897We don’t raddle the rams, instead we just mix the coloured marker with oil and smother it on the ram’s chest. The first year we breed Amanda used olive oil as it was ‘all we had’ apparently!

It’s all going well, after a few days a good percentage of the girls have been tupped already, hopefully the rest will follow and we’ll have a tight lambing like this year.

Sheep

Sad News

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SamSherlockUnfortunately we lost Sherlock one of our coloured rams last week. He got a taste for chicken food and broke into one of the hen houses and munched his way through 6kg of layers pellets overnight.

PaddingtonReally upsetting, however hopefully his genes will live on in his ewes and rams. In particular Paddington who is a Sherlock ram lamb from this year. Paddington isn’t his official name but apparently he’s sooo cuddly that he’s like a teddy bear.

Machinery

Haymaking 2015

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Mike Mowing the 4 acre field.Cutting the hay

Well it’s happened; we’ve made our first lot of hay. Mike mowed on Wednesday and then turned it Thursday and Friday and we watched the weather forecast with great trepidation. Rain was forecast on Friday night.  There was nothing we could do except hope it didn’t rain here and thankfully it didn’t.  So Saturday morning Mike rowed up and then checked a couple of hours later and we were on: he said  “I shouldn’t need any help till we’ve got a few bales ready” and then I had an SOS call….the baler simply wasn’t baling. I understand this is typical baler behaviour; it had been wonderful baling the day before at a neighbours, but now didn’t want to play ball. So I spent a couple of hours re rowing bales that were only half tied up. It was incredibly frustrating (not to say tiring) and with proper rain forecast for the night we were under pressure to get the whole lot inside.

Needless to say I didn’t get any photos of Mike actually baling because we were all too busy getting the bales under cover.

We were very lucky in that the above neighbour and her husband came with their trailer and another villager came and helped me with our trailer and we managed to get the lot in the barn by 6pm.  Tea and cake were supplied as incentives.

Lessons learnt:

1. Make sandwiches and a flask of tea so that the person baling and number one helper (me) have some lunch.

2. Make sure you have booked help: we could never ever have managed 400 bales all on our own.

3. Book the whole of June and July off from work in case the weather’s good and the grass is ready. This is of course completely unrealistic as there’s always something that stops you getting out exactly when you want. But we will remember not to go away for 2 days during those months because that did make a difference to the amount of pressure we put on ourselves.

4. I have always thought our farmers have it tough watching the weather and as ex sailors I remember the attention we paid to the forecast. But this was different as there’s a great deal of effort going into haymaking and to think that can be wasted by the weather isn’t good for morale.

5. Hard work but goodness it’s worth it! This is a photo of the hay in the barn:Hay in the barn

 

Sheep

Best Laid Plans…

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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.

Pigs

Kiwi’s latest litter

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2015-02-02-Piglets223rd 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! 2015-02-02-PigletsPeering 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.

Little & Large
Little & Large
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.