It’s still very dry although we did have a drop of rain over Thursday and Friday nights which produced some puddles; something of a novelty. The Environment Agency have started to put out drought warnings. All worrying, but we just carry on and assume that things will adjust. In 2010, we brought the herd indoors during the last […]
I photographed this sycamore, Acer pseudoplatanus, last winter and have looked at the perfect sycamore shape on screen and on the farm, regularly through the summer, and found myself pondering about how trees become tree-shaped and how or even why a sycamore is sycamore-shaped whereas an English oak, Quecus robur tends to be oak-shaped. I know there’s loads of variation within […]
Until last weekend I’m not sure I believed in mangelwurzels. I’d heard of The Wurzels and was aware of hearing people refer to roots as mangles; but now I know the truth. A mother and son team in the village who grow vegetables to an olympic standard and scale called recently to offer us mangelwurzles as cattle […]
Here I go again – droning on about the weather. It’s a cliché I know; but if the weather doesn’t actually rule our lives, it’s a pretty powerful aristocrat. The spring of 2011 was hot and dry around here, which meant our cattle were out on grass without danger of poaching soft ground. However, the grass […]
After a great deal of frustration over the last two weeks, with a chainsaw that wouldn’t start, I finally got going with the last piece of hedge coppicing in our Countryside Stewardship Scheme, this morning. We cracked on despite a stiff breeze. At least the wind was coming from the west and would in theory […]
It may be a cliché, a British farmer discussing the weather, but it has been strangely hot this week. Actually it’s been beautiful – high 20s celsius, often with a breeze and not too humid. But now it’s October, the leaves are turning, it’s dark by 7pm and we’re still wearing T-shirts – strange […]
There’s a great deal of cow stuff going on at the moment. We’re moving most of the herd, very slowly around the farm in an anti-clockwise direction so that by tomorrow afternoon they will be in the field with a barn from which we can easily get a steer into a trailer. He’ll go to the abattoir […]
I saw a small group of very graceful birds flitting around the cattle on Friday. There were five in all and they seemed to be picking insects out of the grass and from the air; no doubt enjoying the cows’ usual and no doubt tasty companions. I immediately identified them as yellow wagtails but then remembered […]
Nearing the end of the guided walk last Wednesday, we stopped the group of 30 cpre members and gave them a parting round up, thank you and another plug for beef sales, as suggested by all the best training manuals. And I realised that this was very genuine. Of course it’s always a pleasure to talk about yourself, but […]
After two months spent with some lovely looking cows on the Shuttleworth Estate near Biggleswade, Admiral arrived home on Friday and seemed pretty pleased about it. Like any youngster one hasn’t seen for a while he seems to have filled out in those few weeks away. He may be a bit disappointed with the relatively sparse grass we have […]