March 2014

Contrary to folklore, this year March came in like a lion and went out like a lamb, and – oh – how good it was to welcome the end of the wettest, warmest winter on record! I haven’t really taken stock of the damage done to the fields as a result of months of continuous rainfall, but as the grass is now getting off to a very good start, I think we can safely assume that nature is already in the process of her amazing regeneration trick!

We’re always busy at the start of March getting the ewes vaccinated, treating any lame ones (a few this year, mainly due to the mud and wet ground), twice daily feeding and ‘crutching’ ready for lambing. As we’d also decided at the end of March to bring them into the lambing shed early to get them off the wet fields, we had additional work filling hayracks and bedding them down night and morning. The main benefit of this is that the ewes become much more used to our presence, resulting in a much calmer lambing shed and ewes that are more accepting of help, if help is required at lambing.

As we have an Entry Level Stewardship agreement, we only cut our hedges every two years and deliberately keep them fairly tall and thick to provide lots of habitat for birds, insects and small mammals. However, the wet weather had prevented us getting any heavy machinery anywhere near the fields last autumn, and leaving more than two year’s growth can make it almost impossible to cut, so I was really pleased to see Geoff, our ‘Really Helpful Contractor’, bowl up in his big red tractor on the 8^th – just as the ground firmed up and well before any birds would start to think about nesting.

The arrival of a bit of sunshine was all I needed to get out onto the vegetable plot and start sowing seeds – so, in the greenhouse we have butternut squash, cucumber, salad leaves and 3 types of tomato, and in the raised beds the broad beans, cabbage, beetroot, carrots, leeks and parsnips – all starting to sprout nicely. We’re still harvesting last year’s crops of purple-sprouting broccoli, onions and garlic fresh from the garden, as well as squashes, potatoes and onions stored from last year.
Our hens are now all in full lay, and this is the ideal time to pop a few eggs into the incubator with a view to continuing the supply of eggs in late autumn when the older birds go off-lay. I’ve always liked the traditional breeds, so decided to hatch 6 Dorkings (one of the oldest breeds, white eggs) and 6 New Hampshire Reds (rare breed, tinted eggs) – then just as I was about the set the incubator I popped in another few from our Speckled Sussex hens, hoping they will be fertile from the Welsummer (-type) cockerel: could be an interesting mixture!





As we’re at last getting into gear with our ‘Poultry on Your Smallholding’ series, I’ve recently attended a specialist poultry health-training day with Minster Vets in Leominster. The course was designed for vets who are seeing more and more poultry in their surgeries, and covered poultry health, production and disease in-depth. It was a fascinating day, the highlight of which had to be the practical chicken post-mortem session – a real eye-opener and a really useful way to gain a good understanding of chicken physiology.







And finally, April Fool’s day dawned with the birth of our first lambs this year! I knew from my 4 a.m. visit to the lambing shed that lambing was imminent, but was slightly thrown to find one ewe nursing a big ram lamb, and another ewe (who was in the early stages of birth but had obviously not had a lamb yet) nursing its sibling! Thankfully neither ewe seemed put out by the mis-mothering and mother and son were happily reunited while the temporary foster-mother got on with the job of delivering her own whopping ram lamb! A happy outcome, and a lovely start to this year’s lambing!

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