Out and about over the weekend and we saw lambs in a field near to Whitby. They looked in good health and it's a nice sight to see. Come the 1st April we'll have the first of our lambs.
The hedge laying gangs were here on Saturday and watching the weather over the week, we all thought we would be swimming, but someone must really love us all, as Saturday was a dry, sunny and calm. We could not believe it and we managed to lay 12 meters of hedge. It was a great day. The land is still very wet on the common land and collecting all the hedge trimmings did leave some very muddy track marks. At times it was easier to chuck the hedge trimmings into the adjoining field and as this field was dryer than the common land, after lunch all trimmings went that way. I've got to arrange more hedge laying days in February, March and April and hopefully we will get it finished.
One of the hedge laying gang had a phone conference with his work on the state of the weather and the severe weather warnings that had been issued by the met office. As he said, sat on a tree stump in the hedge in the sunshine, the phone conference did seem a little surreal!!!
The only down side, was we could not get a fire going to burn the trimmings, the wood is so wet, which made it great to lay, but not to burn. As usual the evening meal was in our local pub The Black Bull where you never leave hungry. Though we did get some friendly banter from the kitchen staff, as none of us had our usual order of Surf and Turf (scampi and steak).
Deefa is absolutely "cream crackered" as you can see from the photo. He spent all day "supervising" the relevant gangs, the one laying the hedge and the one collecting the trimmings, to make matters worse, the scrap man called and he had to be "accompanied" off the premises. Holly of course watched all of this from the bedroom windows. MI5 has nothing on these two.
Today the weather was back to normal, wet and low cloud. We finished off delivering Business Pages around the villages, this will definitely be the last year we do this, though we say this every year!!!
The sheep are demanding flippers on their hoofs, it's so wet, but apart from that they are looking very well. What is worrying is Brazil is looking rather large and she's not due to lamb until the middle of April!!! We know that she can have triplets, so is she going to do the same this year!!!! In some ways I wonder if it's worth getting the ewes scanned to see what they are having, it helps with the feeding, but I know we would worry too much as to whether they were getting enough feed and we don't enough land to separate the ewes into lambing size groups.
This coming week I need to arrange the inspection of Hector, our Shetland Ram, so he's accredited, the pick up of some more Stalosan (disinfectant to sprinkle in the barns and shelters) and the delivery of more straw, we have none. Hopefully it will stop raining, but the forecast is not good!!! More next week from Meadowcroft Swamp!!!!!
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