The
end of the month brought some very welcome warmth and sunshine, and
there’s definitely a hint of spring in the air. I often refer to various
aspects of our changing climate in this diary, and in line with many
recent reports, it strikes me that spring is arriving a little earlier
than in the past. My birthday is the 28th of February, so I
have had reason to recall this date going back over a number of years.
As a child, my birthday was always quite a wintery affair, and no one
expected to see signs of spring for a good few weeks ahead. But this
year Twitter was alive with ‘tweets’ marking the new season’s first
robin’s egg, the first buttercup, and the first frogspawn – all
seemingly marking the remarkably early arrival of spring.
Here
at Green Farm we’ve been impatiently waiting for the mud to dry up.
Three fairly wet winters in a row have caused the water table to remain
high, so any heavy downpour leaves parts of our ground looking like the
Somme (ably reconstructed by our two big horses, Georgie and Jamesey).We can easily measure the height of the water table by simply lifting the stone slab that covers the old stone well; this used to be the sole source of water to the farm kitchen until the mains arrived in the 1960s. It’s only every dried up once in the 12 years we have lived here.
Spring is already transforming our farm and the surrounding countryside, birds are certainly pairing up and seeking nesting sites, and I’m desperately trying to resist the urge to get all my vegetable seeds into the ground, knowing that it’s far too early and we can still expect to see some sharp frosts.
The
hens are looking plump and are laying well, though we sadly lost an
old, re-homed Sussex-type hybrid to egg peritonitis. This is basically a
disease of old age, where the oviduct starts to fail and the egg isn’t
expelled, ultimately causing internal poisoning. There really isn’t any
cure, as it is likely to recur, so the best course of action is humane
slaughter. In the case of a much-loved hen it may be worth having the
vet give an antibiotic injection, but as the condition is likely to
recur, the prognosis is poor. Our bustling ‘Starr’ is buried beside her
sister (who died of the same condition), amongst the snowdrops.
