The grass is riz ....

And we really do have proper grass now, particularly around the fruit trees, rather than the swathes of nettles we had to negotiate before. Yes, of course, we will have clumps of the nasty stuff, but they are coming up in isolated clumps, and not covering large areas.

Sean likes to say "hello".

This is mainly due to one of the new sheep - Sean. He's one of nature's enthusiasts, always liable to come up behind us when we're working in the fields to see if there's anything interesting. And he eats nettles, when they're old, at least.

Last autumn, we'd regularly hear some munching in the undergrowth, wait a minute or two and he would come out backwards, covered in leaves after one of his one-sheep search and destroy missions on nettle patches. The other sheep, having previously been a bit sniffy about eating them suddenly got the taste. So we now have, as said above, much less to strim.

Having eight of them probably helps keep the grass down as well. Not to mention the fact that it's still a bit chilly. Just stops the vegetation going mad. Though it also means the fruit trees are a bit slow in starting as well.

Spring is sprung ....

And all animals have noticed. The sheep especially have been sunbathing for a while, now. There's very little that can get as flat as a recumbent Soay.

It's quite hard to get a picture of them at rest, because if they see a human they think something's up. So this picture's a little blurry, having been taken from the bedroom window with a not-very-wide-angle lens.

We also have newts in the garden pond and butterflies around us.

Reports on plant life to come.

Wondrous machine

This is the best buy we've made in the last year, by miles. It's our Hay Rick On Wheels, which we sought out after seeing one at the Cotswold Farm Park (home to many Soays). It would stop the hay from getting damp and mean we could put several days supply in at once.

It took a bit of doing - we needed to get a product name just from the look of the thing. But after a lot of intensive research (aka Googling words like "hay" and "wheels") we found it in the product list of a few agricultural suppliers. 


Problem was, they weren't close enough to deliver it - too heavy to make it worth their while. Then, completely by chance, we found one in the yard of a local firm. We'd been scouting them out for just to get a general idea of what they stocked, but not only did they have the very thing we'd been looking for, and would deliver, it was also the last of their stock so they wanted it off the premises and gave us a discount. So thank you, TCS

It's one of those things that does exactly what it sets out to do - it's a hay rick that you can move around the place. And last winter, with all the rain, that was critical - hay would get very damp an inedible otherwise. And the wheels are so well designed that they didn't chew up the very wet ground that we had last year.

Marvellous thing.

Wildlife news

Well, that was summer. Sun, rain and then more rain while we put our woollies on suggests we're well into the colder part of the year.

So where are we in the orchard? Some trees are growing well, others need encouragement. There's much less nettle coverage. Still plenty of the plants around, but we've only needed to strim the field a couple of times and the sheep are keeping most of the growth under control. And when the ground's wet, we've been trying to pull them up and see satisfying yellow gnarled clumps of root system come out of the ground. So this feels like progress.

Most interesting this year is the other animal life. We've seen a fox a couple of times. There have been plenty of butterflies - not quite the glut of last year, when there were carpets of beautiful peacock butterflies, but possibly a bit more variety. We've seen Large Whites, Meadow Browns, Small Heaths, Speckled Woods (unusual since we're open space and not woodland) an other fritillaries. The odd frog and slow worm has also been seen.

But most obvious is the population of rabbits, some of whom have worked out that near the sheep is a safe place to be. We'll often see one or two rabbits munching grass with the Soays. There's a little herbivorous community developing there. Bet they've been drinking the sheeps' water as well.

Growing, growing .....

Lots of stuff growing in the fields, mainly undesirable. Nettles, of course, are there all the time, though we feel we are now making some spaces of pasture that they are retreating from. But otherwise there are new pests every year. We thought that this year's main problem was going to be ground ivy, but that has paled into insignificance by the triffid-like march of the thistles. Not the variety we've had up to now, but huge great things, the size of a small child and just as awkward to handle. With Scottish-national-emblem flowers on top.

So most of this weekend was taken up with a thistle-chopping programme. Why not use the strimmer? Two reasons: it's not functioning at the moment and in any event chopping them off at ground level one by one is a surer way of getting to them.


But the other thing that's growing is ...... our very first fruit! 

A rather small Worcester Pearmain on one of the trees that's doing well (i.e. hasn't had it's growth delayed by sheep getting at the foliage). There are one or two more on this 
tree, but there won't be any more on the others.

But we know we can get fruit produced.

Back on line

A long hiatus, filled with lots of events concerning sheep, some upsetting. The most cheerful thing is .. we have three new ones. There are two wethers and one ewe (that's two boys and one girl). There was some alarm from the older girls at first, but after a bit of bottom-sniffing they all decided they had better be a flock together. 

Suspicions on arrival allayed by bottom-sniffing.

There's had to be a change of diet - no more ewe nuts because, as their name implies, they're for females only. What's replaced it is Coarse Mix, which looks rather more like muesli. Amazingly, this is just as popular, and seems a bit better for them. We had a worry when we found green bits in it. But, rather than it being a sign of things going mouldy, it seems they are meant to be there. The stuff includes pulses as well as grains. Just the stuff for junior sheep who are spending their days exploring.

There's had to be a change of diet - no more ewe nuts because, as their name implies, they're for females only. What's replaced it is Coarse Mix, which looks rather more like muesli. Amazingly, this is just as popular, and seems a bit better for them. We had a worry when we found green bits in it. But, rather than it being a sign of things going mouldy, it seems they are meant to be there. The stuff includes pulses as well as grains. Just the stuff for junior sheep who are spending their days exploring.

More soon about the new paddock, the growth of trees, and, mainly, this years plant pests.

O warmes, warmes sonnenlicht

Lack of posting recently, partly because of medical circumstances getting in the way, and partly because there was nothing very dramatic to report.

After periods of drought, followed by deluge, followed by a long, cold winter, the weather recently has been incredibly uneventful. Periods of sun, followed by a bit of rain, followed by a bit more sun, and temperatures just about normal, everything just, well ....... nice. The trees have grown a bit more. The grass has grown, with the sheep keeping it under control. The nettles have grown, of course, but a bit of strimming now and again keeps them down.

Until this week. Now it's hot. Certainly hot enough for the sheep to take to their shelter and start shedding wool in great clumps of the stuff. They are being careful not to run about too much during the day, and we are trying not to disturb them because the presence of a human is likely to make them run about.

Carrot, looking shorn

What has happened is that the most junior sheep, Carrot and Custard, shed their fleece quite early. It's probably the first time they've done this. The others are in varying stages of deshabille, and are looking a bit like part-shorn poodles (with horns, obviously). 

Sheep and shelter - not shared around!

What tends to happen is that volume of fleece tends to denote status: Blodwen, the bossy one who stamps her hoof if the ewe nuts aren't being put out fast enough, has the most wool, and the youngest ones have moulted the most. The younger pair are also sometimes outside the shelter, when the others are inside, which seems hard.

The trees, let's not forget them, are being given extra water, in case the current conditions last longer. You have to think ahead. It's really warm sunshine, so here's the prisoner's chorus from Fidelio that's even better than the well known prisoner's chorus on the subject: