Author Archives: dianaashworth

Hill Farming, Lambing

05/04/16 — 04/04/17

New Finelambcial Year —

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Beginning of our farming year.

Yesterday our first lamb arrived — not under the hedge where all self-respecting Welsh Mountain lambs are supposed to disembark but in the back of our nice dry barn into which her mum had sneaked before dawn and where I nearly fell over them when, just as the first birds were waking, I went in to fill the hay cratch.  You see — the God of the incompetent-elderly over-reacted to our recent pyro maniacal episode by damping everything down with unnecessary thoroughness so that we are now back in our quagmire.

First steps

Undaunted (sheep hate being on their own) and as soon as I had re-organised everything to provide a lamb-friendly, hazard-free environment  with fresh Lenor straw, buckets of water and concentrate in her own private accommodation, this young mother took her lamb out into the rain and tentatively tippy-toed through the  mud that surrounds the barn to show her off to the other ewes, now shut for safety’s sake on the other side of the fence. As it was several ran up to the fence baaing ‘Is that my lamb?’

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Now we wait for a play-mate.

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Humour, Lyrical

Easter Elephant

Today I walked up the muddy track to feed the sheep, it was overcast and grey until suddenly the low sun broke through from the East, switching on the fluorescent grass and transforming the underside of the otherwise thick cloud to the colour of bilberries — I half expected a David Shepherd elephant to charge over the hill from Staylittle, bellowing against the forbidding sky. It did not.  The sun went in and there was a bluster as the phantom passed and a little flurry of hail, thrown up by the thundering beast.

 

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Thanks to Brittany H. for elephant ears (CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

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Ecology

Taking the lid of a habitat

 

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Thanks to oldbilluk for this fantastic Barn Owl (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Our recent wild-fire damaged the Barn Owl habitat — here is how it should look — tussocks of grass growing through a thatch of the previous years’ hay.

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After a dry week this loose weave of hay had dried out surprisingly and fire spread rapidly.

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Aftermath of the grass-fire

From the other side of our valley you can see (in the bottom/left) where the flying ember ignited the hay on the opposite side of the track — then it spread in minutes across the fifty yards or so of rough grassland, up the hill (to the top/right of the picture).

Where the weave is trodden in the animal runs, trampled by badgers, foxes, rabbits, squirrels, hares, domestic cats and dogs and the occasional stray sheep, the drying and, in consequence the burning is less. Now you can clearly see evidence of the frenetic activity (mainly nocturnal) that shapes this landscape.

But look more carefully.

The fire has taken the lid off the vole habitat

Before — lid on
After — lid off!

The fire has exposed the labyrinth of  passageways, burrows, tunnels and store rooms beneath and within the sward — vole sized ones and tiny shrew sizes scamper-ways, occasionally enlarged by pursuing weasels or torn open by buzzards.

I have found caches of lightly roasted hazel nuts, larger ones presumably hidden by squirrels but fortunately no bodies — it seems the fire moved quickly and superficially and, I guess (well, I hope), the residents fled to their basements!

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This little chap (vole deceased!) was not so lucky — photographed by Tom Brandt (CC BY 2.0)

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Hill Farming, Humour

Un-Call the Fire Brigade!

Have you ever tried sliding up a slippery pole – it’s not easy, and that’s why you can’t un-call the fire brigade. Once they set off – bells ringing and sirens wailing they are totally committed and it would be churlish to stop them.

Yesterday we had a grass fire – unbelievable after six months of incessant rain, but I’ve always said that Mid-Wales is well drained and we’ve had a chirpy breeze in the last few, sunny days — we’ve even generated a little electricity. We’ve been out and about, trimming back the hedges so they don’t poke you in the eye during lambing, and sweeping up the moss that the ducks have been conscientiously collecting since October – a good time for a bonfire!

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One little splutter from the heart of the fire – that’s all it took, perhaps a superheated egg that slipped in with the straw from the chicken coop or an ink cartridge that tumbled from the not too tidy desk into the waste-paper basket with all the bank details that have to be burned. Anyway there was a bang and something small and very hot flew from the fire onto the bank.

The next thing we knew there was a pool of low level flame engulfing my stamping husband.

‘We need water!’ shouted Alison, who has come to stay, for a rest.

We fill up a bucket then realise that the fire is near the stream so run towards it with buckets – we make a human chain – but it only has two links and angina rapidly ensues as we run up and down the steep bank, up which the suddenly stiff wind is wafting the flames with amazing enthusiasm.

Alison’s partner who is stamping and beating the flames with a branch is now disappearing in a pall of choking smoke and the other link in my human chain is chasing her dog who has come to join in.

‘It’s out of control!’ shouts Ali.

Now there’s a moot point here – she could have meant that the dog was out of control. But the situation looked pretty dire to me and the temptation to have a little run on the flat was too much for my bursting chest so I ran to the house to call the Fire Brigade.

‘Emergency – which service do you require?’

‘We’ve got a grass fire, out of control!’ I pant.

Do you require the police, ambulance or fire service?

‘Why would I want the police or… Oh yes. Fire service!’ (You can tell I’ve been trained to deal with crises.)

Now I had not consulted before taking this action. I am usually a team player and I admit that this was not a simple oversight – I knew that my husband would have argued against involving a third party – even as he was being transported from me on a cloud of smoke he would be saying, ‘Nonsense! It’ll be fine.’

I had taken a unilateral decision for which I would be chastised for the rest of time… Especially as when I returned to the scene, the men had equipped themselves with spades and the large yard broom and at last appeared to have the advancing edge of flame under control – although my broom was smoking.

I ran back to the house and that is when I discovered that you can’t un-call the Fire Service.

All I could do was put the kettle on.

(Seriously though, our Fire Service is voluntary — they came very quickly  and we are very grateful and sorry if I wasted their time (and please note the personal pronoun).

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Humour

Bomb Scare!

Bomb Scare!

The Trannon Valley in Mid Wales is just about the most peaceful place you could find – the most violent living things, the trees (with all their pent up energy), have been known to lash out under provocation from a chainsaw, and knock a man off a step ladder or into the river and a gang of ram-lambs has been known to go on the rampage – generally though, ask any young resident, it is excruciatingly peaceful.

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Last week the sun came out and a lady in the village decides to have a clear out – her late husband had been a hoarder, by all accounts, as had his father. She is sorting through the memories – the wrong-size golf clubs and walking sticks, a pith helmet, belts and brasses and carved knick-knacks, a box of strange looking bulbs that don’t fit any known socket and keys with no locks, of cars long sold and of cases left in foreign parts. Here’s a brand new cricket ball and what’s this? It looks like a hand grenade. It is a hand grenade!

Now the lady is very sensible – un-flappable. She doesn’t throw open the bedroom window and lob the grenade into the field behind the house (where a grazing cow of a curious and determined disposition can pull the pin out a few moments later). Neither does she do what I would do which is put it in the bread bin or into the oven (where we put all precious things that cats and dogs are not to chew) and flee. No, she stays calm and looks around in case it has a mate (she’s lived abroad) and, sure enough, there it is in the bottom of the box.   It’s a mystery how she knows there might be two as she had never seen them before. Then, with all the sang-froid of a lady who sleeps with a pair of grenades under her bed, she calmly telephones the police.

That’s when things get exciting (because the emergency services run in packs these days) and that is how the cordons and the road blocks and the exclusion zone around our sleepy village arrive (although they miss Wenona, next door, who is having a nap). You can’t blame them for getting carried away — it is enormous fun for the entire constabulary – a team building day out – and one thing we do well in Wales is cups of tea and cake.   There aren’t many officers in Mid-Wales and they don’t get out much.

A local land owner is consulted and a sight is chosen for the controlled detonation — this enterprising farmer dismisses the opportunity of sorting out the badgers once and for all (perhaps too near his nephew’s house) but how about a pond, how big will the crater be? What’s that in gallons? Perhaps we could do one a little higher and the other down there and then we could have a waterfall, maybe even a turbine… We can claim subsidies for habitat creation and green energy.

Meanwhile the Bomb Disposal team are rumbling up the bye-ways from Cheltenham or was it Colchester – it is a long way away.

To everyone’s great disappointment (except perhaps the lady), the experts having made their examination, proclaim the grenades are dud – drilled and drained and filled with cooking oil by a spoil-sport or a practical joker sometime between 1915 and now and… Somewhere above our sleepy village someone is chuckling.

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Hill Farming, Humour

Bailer Twineology

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This gate is modern but not up to the specification required to withstand a rampaging pensioner in a six-ton digger.  It should be taken off and straightened (by a pacified person in a mended digger) and rehung by newly welded hinges on a brand new post without a rotten bottom but….

It’s winter, it’s cold, the ground is very wet and it’s getting dark etc.

So, in the short term we are thrown upon the traditional method…

Bailer twineology…

Actually its a’fusion’ technology — using nylon twine in the traditional way — although don’t forget that nylon has memory (which is more than you can say for the farmer) — It remembers how to undo itself so you should lock the knots — ironically that means reef knots and not Granny knots!

Substitute lower hinge
Gate shortened, opening enlarged — substitute fastening
God-knows-what-knot

The farms around us are particularly tidy and I fear that they are losing the ancient skills!

Here is a detail from a grade two listed traditional sheep fold — note the use of growing, self reinforcing, timber and many different technologies — all with their own integrity!

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Corner of Grade two listed sheep pen!

We try to keep these skills alive in a modern context  such as the algae-prevention modification of our rain water harvester!

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Wrapping the white plastic tank in black plastic prevents algae growth.

 

I am most proud of my four-minute-cratch (patent pending).

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It was erected in four minutes in a hail storm when snow was forecast.  I am particularly pleased with the use of grass collection bags from the lawn mowers to stop the sheep getting their feet stuck and injured when trying to climb in the ends.  The back is formed by the fence, the front is a hurdle and the top is half the oak door of the old pig sty, all held together by, guess what?  Bailer twine!

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Humour, Uncategorized

Sunday Craik – the pity of it all

God spends quite a lot of time in the pub — sometimes he’s there when he’s supposed to be at chapel — that’s what I say to friends who ask where we are bound on a Sunday afternoon when the good folk are heading down the valley to the chapel.

Yesterday there was an added incentive (for the pub, not chapel) — Liverpool were playing Man. City in the League Cup.  It’s not that Alan supports Man. City (he would warm to anyone in competition with Manchester United  — it’s an underdog thing.  The landlord is an avid Liverpool supporter which adds to the fun enormously.

‘Can we have the Rugby on?’ asks Alan as we arrive.

‘There isn’t any!’ snaps the landlord.

‘Wasps are playing against ‘Quins on BT Sport,’

‘Can’t afford BT Sport with the pitiful amount you drink!’

‘Do Wasps have a ‘B’ team? asks Ikey, ‘Bee team’, he repeats, at which point a man in an overcoat, a knitted Balaclava and thick scarf runs into the bar and sexually assaults several ladies, it is the muffled titter running around the room — a tribute to My Dad — it was the only joke he knew!  No one takes any notice — they never did.

The landlord asserts himself by switching on the commentary.  That way he can follow the action despite all the distractions we can throw at him like the full glass of Stella I knock across the domino table due to the excitement of a penalty — it misses Alan almost completely.

As the match progresses the joy of winding up the landlord is irresistible — people who normally have no interest in football whooping with every Man City  tackle and berating the ref for every decision that favours Liverpool —  carried on a wave of affectionate teasing — warmed by our own mass action.  But Liverpool were never meant to lose.

If we want any more beer we had better shut up — during the penalty shoot-out there is a respectful silence — we have probably already gone too far.  The instant the winning Man City goal hits the back of the net the sound is switched off and program turned to Countryfile and someone says how Adam is a ‘really good farmer’ so everyone, relieved to change the subject, can discuss why he never has mud on his boots and where the puddles might have gone and why doesn’t he get a move on and swing that lamb.

 

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Sheep farming

Gladys is a metaphor

You remember Gladys —

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Left for dead but, given half a chance, she grabbed life by the teat and refused to die.

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  She’s still with us.

SONY DSCShe is at the bottom of the pecking order but is fearless and curious  (or bemused).  She is always last.  She’s the one that is missing, when one is missing — caught in the fence, or with her head stuck in a bucket, or wound  up in brambles, or trapped behind the gate, or stuck in the mud, or on the wrong side of the stream.  I’ve told you before that if you turn a sheep upside down it stops working,  shepherds call  this ‘being caste’.  Gladys falls over and becomes caste and frightens me to death, thinking she’s dead with her legs in the air.  I turn her over and off she trots.

When a stray dog approaches their field and the young sheep run together uphill (that’s the way to go) — Gladys runs the other way.

In Nature, she’s the one that would be picked off by the predator.  That’s  her role, her niche — she’s the sacrificial lamb .  I’ve told you before — sheep are biblical.

She’s different.  She’s the loner — the innocent — the vulnerable adult (just).    It’s my job to look after her.  She’s top of my list.

She is the unpromising success, the unlikely survivor, the loveable underdog, she is Kettering Town winning the FA Cup and a cat with nine lives.

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Travel

Soggy Situation

There were three days last week when it didn’t rain all day (think about your syntax) — when  it rained, but not all day!  Otherwise there has been precipitation, all day, every day since the end of October.  That is why this blog has been so quiet of late — incessant moaning about the rain when you have chosen to live in a temperate rain forest would be tedious.

As wave after wave of weather drives down the valley smudging the view and the streams and rivers roar, it’s hard to get excited about the waterfalls when the lens of my camera is wet and the image fogged, is that just condensation or  camera-wobble due to shivering, anyway the shutter’s jammed — will it ever work again.

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Last moment of respite from the deluge — in the Autumn.

There is a beauty, a vividness, in all this wetness, but lately it eludes me.

In the face of impending seasonal affective disorder we thought we’d have a little holiday, so off we set (not to somewhere warm and sunny) to Rossendale and Darwen in Lancashire — the home of the dark satanic mills of yore!

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Darwen photographed by A F Buck in 1948 — note the air pollution!

We stayed in Hurst Green and mooched around Rossendale, to old haunts, now-derelict pubs of youthful exploit, new housing estates where cotton-mills and shoe factories had stood last time we visited. We were visiting the county archive, researching this rapidly disappearing industrial heartland and it’s characters, perhaps 10 years too late, but the archive was very helpful.  In the evenings we were cosy in the Shireburn Arms where the food was excellent and dawn in the  Ribble Valley was stunning.

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We’re home now and guess what?  It’s raining!

 

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Hill Farming

Predator Proofing

Last night, late, we arrived home from a weeks holiday in Cornwall so, only now, it is safe to mention the feverish activity that preceded our departure for the far south-west.  It’s not that we feared cyber initiated incursions during our absence; it is that we do not believe in tempting fate.

Fox by Julian

Creative Commons Licence [Some Rights Reserved]   © Copyright Julian Dowse and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Now we are back I can risk telling you that we were predator-proofing.  We struggled in the torrential rain to make the poultry fox-proof  and badger-proof before entrusting them to a friend to tend daily.  We erected 8 ft high double fences with embedded roof slates buried and wired around the base and heavy scaffolding poles also fixed at the base to discourage tunnelling.  Alan vetoed the purchase of electric fencing — God forbid — that is plan ‘B’.   Phase Two will encompass the netting roof which will be necessary when we have chicks — to keep out the magpies and buzzards (but I haven’t mentioned this to Alan yet).

Poultry run

Poultry run

The cats had not left home this time and were in-doors waiting for us on our return  — the one dubious benefit of heavy rain.

I immediately donned my wellies and went out to shine the repaired torch through the chicken-wire window of the new coop.  The chickens were on their perch, one with its head cocked quizzically to one side and a brown egg smashed on the floor beneath her — ‘point of lay’ but still hasn’t got the hang of it quite.

The ducks were also on the floor of the coop, carefully preening the last of the day’s mud from their feathers in a scene that reminded me of our bathroom on a  Friday evening when our five children, then teenagers, were still at home.

Outside the coop in the new predator-proof poultry run something strange has occurred — a 25 foot square enclosure of pasture has undergone some sort of cold fusion.  There is, it seems, a complication of keeping predators out and it is keeping poultry (especially ducks) in.  In one week, two ducks have carefully liquidised the chicken run.

Puddle Ducks at work

Puddle Ducks at work

Carefully ducked ground

Carefully ducked ground

They meticulously probe the soft soil for grubs and wriggly things, repeatedly washing their bills in any standing water they can find — puddly land becomes a morass in no time — they are very conscientious!

Compensation!

Compensation!

This morning, bright and early, I  counted the sheep huddled by the fence and found one too many —  that’s odd!

There was one stray sheep on the other side of the fence trying very hard to blend in with ours — they do so hate to be alone.

In this wet weather sometimes, in the dips, the tension in the wire fences lifts the fence posts right out of the ground and some of the ewes are quite clever at encouraging this process, particularly if there is nice grass on the other side.  This seems to account for our new ewe — she has been returned.

Casually hoofed mud -- quite different

Casually hoofed mud — quite different

 

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