Great view on this morning’s dog walk, couldn’t resist taking a photo. Click on the image for full size photo.
Autumnal Morning
Tag 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.
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.
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.
Dumblehole 