Tag Archives: Tups

Food, Livestock, Produce, Sustainable living

Our first homebred hogget

18th December 2018 Dans 5 Comments

*TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES* There are pictures on this post but unfortunately they aren’t showing up. Please let me know if you can see them, as it’ll help me fix this.

Our first homebred lambs were 18 months old in November. Cisco was a really lovely ram in looks and a good temperament so was traded to another smallholder in exchange for Django, our new ram. Cisco has 6 girls of his own and I’m crossing my fingers that we hear of some lovely lambs from him next year.

The shearling ewes were put in with Django along with our 3 mature ewes. If everyone lambs then we’ll have a lot of sheep on our 2.5 acres, especially if the shearling ewes have twins. If that happens then I think we’ll be looking at selling some ewes with lambs at foot. We could also sell some stock at weaning. Everyone has been covered by Django at least once so its a wait and see what we get now.

That left Crichton and Crais. Although Crais had done a lot of growing he was still smaller than Cisco and his horns weren’t quite growing in the right direction. As he was kept intact there was no option of him being a friend for a ram. Crichton was lovely and friendly but that also made him a bit dangerous. He thought he was people but he was also most likely to butt you. He did it a few times to me through the fence if I wasn’t scratching his chin right. Both boys were destined for the freezer.

From left to right, Cisco, Crais and Crichton

The night before they went, after they had been penned up safe, Sam and I had a discussion about meat. We raised these lambs. Crichton was so friendly. Could we eat them? Did we want to eat them?

The answer to the latter for me was yes. I am a meat eater, I don’t see that changing, and with the way my gut is, meat is one of the few things I can eat without trouble. Despite being a meat eater I also care passionately about animals. Some people find that hard to marry but I believe that it’s ok to eat animals if they have had a good life and a good (quick, low stress) death. I’m not completely there yet but I’d like all my meat to come from animals we have raised or have been raised by people we know. As to the former question, I feel that if I can’t eat meat I have raised then I shouldn’t eat it at all. I guess I believe that I should be aware of the animal and the life that was sacrificed.

The hogget from our homebred sheep wouldn’t be our first homebred meat. We have eaten chickens that we have bred. Sam felt that the sheep were closer to us, more relatable and that made it more difficult. We both went to bed with slightly heavy hearts that night.

One thing that came out of the conversation was looking at our consumption of meat in general. As a family we eat a lot of meat. We also have a lot of meat on the freezer. We talked it through and realised we were saving our homegrown (and other smallholder grown) meat for ‘special occasions’ and sharing with friends and family. Whilst it’s nice to share, doing this was keeping us away from the aim of only eating meat from known sources. We need to stop ‘saving’ meat in the freezer. We also decided to make an effort to reduce the amount of meat we buy in. I am working on buying only 2 fresh dinner meats a week. Everything else should come from our freezer (or kievs and pizza – our meals for overwhelmed days). Lastly, we decided to reduce down our consumption. See about meals without meat where we can and reducing meat portion sizes where we do eat meat.

A mutton shoulder from last year that we decided to stop ‘saving’

When we got the meat back I have to admit I was nervous. As they were intact rams which were living close to the ewes I was worried about ram taint. I didn’t even advertise the meat for sale in case it was inedible. As soon as I got the meat into the fridge and freezers I cut a bit of us and fried it. I’ve never sniffed meat with such suspicion. Thankfully I needn’t have worried. It was delicious and we tucked into fried chops that night.

Despite not advertising we sold 3 halves by word of mouth. Selling always worries me in case people aren’t happy with what they bought but everyone reported that the meat was the best they’ve had. It’s a wonderful feeling producing good meat.

We got the horns and skins back as well. The skins are salting on the polytunnel and will be sent for tanning in the new year. The horns are outside waiting for nature to work it’s magic and the cores to come out.

One of the skins pre-salting (it was very dark by the time I could work on them)

All in all I’m feeling very positive about the whole thing. Now that Django has covered the ewes the ball is rolling for the whole process to start again.

Dans

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Cisco
Django sniffing out the girls

Illness, Livestock

Crichton’s brush with death.

2nd June 2018 Dans Leave a comment

Well we have now had our first large animal scare. This is a pretty long post about Crichton. Sam went out last Weds to mow some grass after work and thought Crichton didn’t quite seem himself. He let me know and went about the mowing. Another check once he had finished revealed that Crichton was lying down in the hedge, shivering and non-responsive to food or much else but at least conscious.

I facebooked my vet friend (not sure what we do without you Cassie!) whilst calling the vet. We had an extra slight drama as the vet said they had reduced the practice boundaries and we were no longer covered so he can’t come out, he did give phone advice though. We managed to get Crichton into the polytunnel and gave him some antibiotics (the first dose was subcutaneous though as I was panicking and both vets advised a second intramuscular dose). We also gave an intramuscular dose of ivermectin wormer in case he was carrying a high burden or had haemoncus. He was very pale in his gums and eyelids and very sluggish although at least he was standing in the polytunnel. Checked his temperature and it was 35.6C, sheep should be 38.5C ish so things weren’t looking good. The vet advised to keep him warm and call in the morning if the sheep is still alive.

We set him up a pen on top of an empty veg bed with straw, hay and water and put a fan heater nearby (but not too close) to hopefully help him warm up. The vet said painkillers might help but as we didn’t have any don’t worry. I went back in after a bit and he had moved off the straw to be closer to the heater so I covered him in the straw and moved the heater a bit further in the hopes we didn’t set fire to him overnight.

It wasn’t a good night. I tentatively went into the polytunnel in the morning not sure if I would find him dead or alive. Opening that door was nerve wracking. He was alive though. He had also been eating the soil, it was between his teeth. I stood him up to take his temperature which was up at 37ish, so much improved. Once up he went over to the water and had a little drink which made me feel much better, I got him some nice fresh green hay which he had a bit of then lay down again. I took Chi off to nursery at this point and called the vet for advice. Apparently we were actually still clients, it had been a mix up and the vet would call me back when he could.

The day started heating up, Crichton seemed to get more lethargic and the polytunnel was getting hot so I led him out to the orchard where he just stood whilst I moved the hurdles to pen him there. He ate a bit of grass then lay down again. The vet called back in the afternoon and said he could come if I wanted, 10 mins away. He agreed that Crichton looked very depressed and was very lethargic. Checked the guts in case there was a blockage but everything felt and sounded fine. He was very pale so he gave an intravenous vitamin and drew some blood at the same time. Actually got a really big clot from that so despite being pale he wasn’t very anemic. He gave the painkiller and Crichton did stay standing for a bit more. He got the ultrasound out of the car and checked the guts with that, absolutely fine, checked the liver and it was pretty huge. The bile ducts were quite enlarged and fibrous too. His best guess was that it was either plant toxicity or fluke, with the slight possibility of haemoncus still on the table as it can be ivermectin resistant. The good news was it was unlikely to be clostridium as Crichton would probably be dead already so it wasn’t the delay in heptavac.

The vet left us with some painkillers and vitamins and recommendation to get an adult flukicide (closantel based) as he didn’t think it was juvenile fluke. I got my microscope out and did a quick (well longer than I wanted) fluke count on the sample I had grabbed from Crichton the night before. Absolutely no fluke eggs but a lot of worm eggs. The fluke test is a sedimentation test, you don’t normally see worm eggs in there unless there is a very very high burden, so the amount I saw in Crichton’s sample was surprising. I called the vet to see if the diagnosis was still the same on the basis of a 0 fluke egg count. Unfortunately I didn’t get a reply. I could have headed out to the agri store but at that point Sam was eyeball high in work, I would be rushing to get there before closing, I was beyond shattered (had said to Sam on the Weds afternoon that I needed some really good rest or might crash) and Chi hadn’t napped, if she napped at 4:30 we would get no sleep that night. Crichton was looking better so we made the decision to wait until Friday morning for the wormer and hopefully the vet would get back to us. He didn’t.

I made the decision to go with the closantel based wormer despite the 0 fluke egg count. It should also kill the haemoncus if the ivermectin didn’t and was a different class of wormer that I could use on the others as we wormed with ivermectin last time. Unfortunately they only had a £66 bottle which made me cry slightly but not much I could do about that, other than calling the day before so they could order in a smaller one. If I hadn’t been so worried about Crichton I could have gotten them to order in a smaller, injectable closantel based drug that would cost a lot less but it wouldn’t get there until Monday (which I doubted as it was bank holiday) and it’s an hour’s round trip if you don’t get stuck at the level crossing and don’t count the time spent there.

Sporting his shaved side and looking better before the closantel drench

Once home we saw that Crichton was doing a lot better. He was loose in the polytunnel with a grassy area penned off outside as it was a cooler day and he was much harder to catch (although still not difficult). He had his daily jabs and the wormer. He kept on like this for a couple days, each day being a bit harder to catch, standing up for longer and eating more. He is still very thin but he is back out with other boys (went back with them on the Monday) and seems to be doing well.

My only guess is that when the grass was low in the other field he ate something he shouldn’t have, or a higher quantity of something he shouldn’t have. None of the others seemed ill, though we gave them all a closantel wormer anyway based on Crichton’s count. The BCS of all the others is pretty good, even runty Crais is looking much chunkier than Crichton. My July sending for meat has been pushed back due to the wormer and I also don’t think there will be much on Crichton at that time. We may have to hold onto them for longer and just hope we manage the grass ok. Maybe a Jan sending off, we’ll see. The ewes are in fighting form, literally, I have bruises from worming them and straddling them to do the wormer was quite difficult, they are solid girls. I think my sheep wrangling days are getting numbered too as bump is getting bigger and making bending hard. Hopefully just to heptavac them sometime this week and then again in 3 weeks time for the ewe lambs and that should be our wrangling over for the summer. Debating treating for flystrike, we were fine last year and we check the sheep quite regularly, but it would give us a bit more peace of mind.

Dans

Food, Livestock, Setting up

Livestock update

27th September 2017 Dans 2 Comments

I had been trying to do posts on different topics here, but things pile up, I find myself waiting to post until a particular project is finished and finding lots of other things that I’m wanting to talk about but feel I should wait until the earlier stuff has had a post. So I’m going to try forgetting about all that and have a go at doing a post once a week on the various goings on. I can always do a special post on a particular project/adventure when they occur.

So I guess I’ll do a bit of a catch up starting with the livestock. All of the chicks are going like weeds. We found Alice randomly joined the flock one day and had no inclination to go back to her chicks so I guess she was done with motherhood. Her chicks (the cross breeds) will be joining the flock in a couple of weeks. We managed to get 3 definite hens and 2 that I think are cockerels but they have no tail feathers to speak of so far.

The Derbyshire Redcap (DRC) chicks are so flighty that we are having a bit of trouble keeping them contained, they just fly over the heras panels, but we got 4 hens and 2 cocks, 1 of which is really quite stunning so will try selling him. We are about a month of having them join the flock. I was a bit nervous given how much trouble the DRC pullets had given us but thankfully they are all now going into the house and have even started laying (had to wait until 30 weeks!). Just waiting for the eggs to increase in size a bit and then we shall hopefully start having eggs on the gate again. We’ve been in a bit of a low patch and I’m pretty sure we have an egg thief/eater. We’re getting a camera set up in the house to have a peek.

The lone chick (Ixworth) is starting to feather up now, I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a hen. It won’t be ready to join the flock until Christmas time though. Not our greatest hatch ever but Aurora is happy with her chick.

We also had some surprise hens. A neighbour is moving away and had 3 hens that she wasn’t taking with her. We agreed to take them in so have 3 Rhode Island Red hens that were born in 2016. They are laying well so should have their eggs in our boxes soon. We’ll introduce them to the flock at the same time as the cross breed chicks. They aren’t a rare breed but I’m a bit of a sucker for taking in animals.

We lost Boomer, one of the Cuckoo Marans, about a month ago. Like Aino we have no idea what happened. Happy and healthy in the run up, no marks, no swelling and a good body weight. I guess it will just be one of those things. So we started the year on 8 hens and a cockerel and now have 23 hens, 3 cockerels and 3 possible cockerels. I have a lot of naming to do! The chicken house had a bit of an update so we have more space and better perching in there for the birds. Just need to update the poop trays and nest boxes.

The geese really are growing like weeds. They are huge. Really huge. They still have a couple of their baby feathers but are well on their way to adulthood. There’s at least 1 gander, possibly 3. They have just started making adult noises so we’ll be watching for their behaviour and sounds to attempt sexing them. The two white ones are destined for the butcher but I would like to keep the other 3 if we can. We are just in the process of getting them some new housing built (our first real building project) but for now they are in the trailer, safe from foxes at least.

The sheep are doing really well. We have just separated off the lambs from the ewes, and the ewe lambs from the ram lambs and Cisco was having a bit of a try with one of the ewe lambs. Really hoping we didn’t leave it too late and aren’t surprised by lambs in January! They have all just turned 4 months. It’s a bit noisy out at the moment but that should settle . Once the ewes have dried off we will put the ewe lambs back in with them.

Ram lambs (left to right) Crais, Cisco and Crichton

Three of the ewes are off to slaughter at the start of next month. I’m quite nervous but so far things are coming together. We have people interested in the meat and will hopefully secure the orders and get deposits before they go off. I’ve talked to the butchers about cuts, the food safety officer should be coming around soon to give us our hygiene rating for selling the meat, I’m looking into distance selling as one buyer is quite far away, I’ve applied for our registration to handle Animal By-Products so that we can get the skins and horns back and been in touch with the tannery so they can process the skins. I’m also doing my food safety course, although we won’t actually be handling the meat. There seem to be a lot of different plates spinning with this but it should be a good learning experience. The abattoir is a small one, attached to the butchers and there has been some good feedback about it so hopefully the girl’s last journey will be as smooth and non-stressful as it can be.

So I guess that’s a very long way of saying that despite being quiet on here we’ve been busy busy, and that doesn’t include all the harvesting and processing. More on that in the next post!

Dans

Livestock

Sheepsies

28th March 2017 Dans Leave a comment

Wow, looking back I haven’t updated about the sheep since early January. In a way not much has changed. They spend most of their time munching away, including eating any bushes and trees they can reach. However we are in the run up to some big changes.

If I stand on 2 legs I can reach higher!

At the start of February we took Akbar back. He served us well covering all the ewes in the first 2 cycles and, as far as we could see, none in the third cycle. We only had the orange and green raddle paint though so we mixed it to a brown, and as we didn’t get any covering in the first half of the cycle we didn’t top it up. I was quite daunted by the prospect of loading him up, but we made a makeshift race and Sam loaded him up no problem. We did the drive and unloaded him easily. It’s another one of those smallholding tasks that has worried me, it’s a short list that is pretty much built around the places we could really go wrong in animal welfare. It includes loading and transporting animals, killing our first chickens and all that follows, lambing and booking an animal in for the abattoir. We’ve now done two out of that list.

A week and half after Akbar left we had the Scanning Lady come to scan our girls. It was a couple weeks earlier than the suggested time for when Akbar went in with the girls but it was the best we could do due to her availability. She made quick work of the girls and we scanned as 1 twin (Aeryn), 2 singles (Alanna and Arya), 1 single that might have a second (Arha – the lam she was certain of was still small) and 2 empties (Anya and Aelin).

The plan when we were first thinking of getting sheep was to get 3. Then we thought maybe get more and eat those that don’t get into lamb. When we found out we had 2 empties we thought ‘great, we’ll be eating lamb (well hogget) before 2018 ‘. Then we looked at when Akbar left we got a bit worried that the Aelin and Anya might be in the very early stages of pregnancy. Unfortunately there’s no way to tell now until they go past the latest possible lambing date (5th July) and I would feel absolutely awful sending them off to slaughter only to find out they were pregnant. So we shall be keeping them and sending them off in July if they haven’t popped.

I’m feeling pretty certain that they aren’t in lamb (pregnant) though. The two of them are hopping and skipping around the field and picking fights like teenage girls. I took a little video (well it’s a bit long in places) that shows their behaviour standing out. They are starting to really butt the in-lamb girls though so we may have to separate them if they don’t calm down.

Of the girls that are pregnant, Arya is due at the start of May followed by Alanna, Arha and Aeryn all at the end of the month. I am both terrified of lambing and utterly excited. Hopefully we shall soon have some happy tales to tell and lots of pictures.

Dans

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Children, Livestock

December catch up part 1: Baa Ram Ewe

9th January 2017 Dans Leave a comment

Wow December was a hectic month. There were the usual suspects; Yule, Christmas and New Year, which we tend to start the prep for and feel the pressure of at the start of the month.

Our first big smallholding related job of December was finally going to collect our tup. We had decided to hire a ram lamb, but as the time came the owner was a bit worried that the ram lamb was on the small side and may not be up to the job. We changed the plans then to hire the ram lamb’s dad when he had finished covering his ewes. It pushed lambing back but, with everything that was happening with sorting out my stepdad’s funeral, pushing it back seemed right. We had been hoping to collect him mid November but it just didn’t work out until Dec 3rd.

We decided that taking Chi up to Sheffield and coming straight back would be too much, so Sam braved our first animal transport on his own. When he got here he unloaded no problem and was promptly wormed. He was a little nervous, especially of cats for some reason. The intention (this post seems to be full of intentions!) was to have him in for 3 days, like we did with the ewes, so that the zolvix could work it’s magic. His wool was full of burrs, so I planned to cut them out and do his raddle paint on day 3 before we let him out. Akbar, the tup, had other ideas though!

I was driving home on the afternoon of the second day and saw a tup wandering about our smallholding! Thankfully he hadn’t got in with the ewes yet. Sam managed to get him out of our veg patch area (not yet made thankfully) and into a sheep area. From there we managed to pen him up with only one half hearted attempt at butting us and painted him up orange. In fact Akbar has proved to have a lovely temperment and, apart from that first running round trying to catch him, he hasn’t even attempted to butt us. Sam has found penning him up a piece of cake. As far as we could see he used the hay rack to get over the hurdles as the hay rack was only hanging on by one hook. I’m still nervous as to what effect it will have on our worm burden, but 2 days may have done the job.

The girls were initially very wary of him, running like hell whenever he approached. I started to worry that we weren’t going to have any lambs, but sure enough one morning we had an orange bum. In fact any coloured bums we got were spotted first thing in the morning. December was a very foggy month and I think he used the combination of fog and dark to catch them overnight! For those that don’t know, I should probably explain the paint. Sheep have a 13-19 day cycle, with an average of 17 days. Commercial flocks will use a harness with a raddle crayon on it so that when the tup covers the ewe he leaves a paint mark on her bum. Then you know when she was covered and can estimate lambing. After a cycle you change the colour, if the ewe is coloured again then you know that the pregnancy didn’t take the first time. There’s some possible reasons. Ram didn’t get a go? Stressed ewe? Infertile ewe? Infertile ram? A lot of the native breeds are too small for the propper harnesses (raddle), so we mix up some raddle paint and smear it onto his breast instead. For Akbar he needed a top up half way through the cycle as they started getting a bit pale.

He covered 4 of the girls in the first cycle, then we painted him up green and he covered a different 4. So everyone has been covered at least once. He’s due a repaint again tomorrow, so fingers crossed he doesn’t cover anyone this time. Our lambing will be late, May currently, but possibly June if he covers in the third cycle. I’m a bit nervous about that but it is what it is. We are thinking about seperating him from the girls but we have no-one to keep him company if we put him far from them and I’m a bit worried about him escaping back in with them anyway. Now to try and arrange a scanner to come and check our girls are actually in lamb and start prepping for it, but more on that later!

I started this as being one post covering all of December but it got very long, so later this week keep an eye out for part 2: Bird flu

Dans

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Children, Growing, Livestock, Setting up

Parenthood and smallholding

2nd December 2016 Dans Leave a comment

I remember back when we were still in the early days of planning for smallholding, reading everything we could, and spending a lot of time on The Accidental Smallholder (TAS) forums. One of my many questions there was about babies and smallholding, would I be mad to start both at the same time?

In my utter inexperienced view I figured I would be pregnant and be working away at the land and whatever house we were renovating until the late stages. Then, as new born babies sleep a lot, I would continue working on things after baby was born but with baby asleep in a sling or pushchair. As baby got older I’d just use a play pen or something wherever we are to keep baby contained and occupied. Then when I have a toddler I’d incorporate them into what I was doing and all would be fine and dandy.

Oh how differently things turned out. I got quite bad SPD during the pregnancy which had me on crutches from 20 weeks. It took me a fair while to be able to move freely after the birth, talking 4 or 5 months before I could move like I could pre-pregnancy. My new born did sleep a lot, but on me and we didn’t get along with the whole baby wearing. I did manage to get her down in the pushchair but only for a single 2 hour nap a day. During the summer I used those two hours well, working away on some project while she dozed. If she woke mid-project I’d often try and carry on whilst holding her.

All hands on deck - even if you only have one free! — All hands on deck – even if you only have one free!

As she got older and was tottering about I tried the whole play pen but my Chi is very *ahem* strong willed and independent, she needs to be doing what you are doing and doesn’t like to settle for pretend ‘baby’ things when you are doing the real thing. Apparently very similar to me as a baby… Unfortunately, she isn’t quite at the stage of being helpful. We did manage to get her picking red tomatoes, but she had a tendency to throw them into the basket, and she would stay in one spot, pick the red ones, then the orangey ones and then start on the greens unless you quickly diverted her attention to a new patch of reds.

Don’t get me wrong, starting this smallholding with Chi has made it so very special. It’s an amazing feeling to see your 12 month old watering the veg beds, your 13 month picking tomatoes, your 15 month old digging for potatoes and your 17 month old sorting through the windfall apples and pears. She even baaas at the sheep now. Seeing her interacting with the animals and land, knowing the food she is eating is fresh and seeing her get involved with preparing the food (she can now peel leeks and garlic) makes me think ‘Yes, this is why we are doing this, this is what it is for.’.

But, and there is always a but after a ‘don’t get me wrong’, sometimes I do think we were mad to do smallholding and starting a family at the same time. The past week Chi has been down with the flu which has gone to her chest. I’ve been keeping her in and looking out the window wistfully at the apples on the floor, the shed that needs work, and (when I do a quick morning or night run) the beds in the polytunnel that need sorting. I tried taking her out the other day for her nap and she just kept being woken up by a coughing fit, only seems to be sleeping at the moment whilst lying on me.

It’s not just when she is ill either, sometimes she is just too inquisitive to take out when she is wide awake. I can’t have her running around in the goose area whilst I’m tackling the brambles that are swamping their house and she gets too frustrated awake in the pushchair. Or it’s raining and no matter what rainsuit I buy she always seems to be soaking if we go out in the rain. Or, as has been the case the last few weeks, it is just too dark. I felt really disheartened the other week as Sam had the day off and we prepared the polytunnel for the tup. We were really getting into the swing of things and making progress. We were about to start another job but we checked the time. Half an hour until sunset, time to have one of us do the night run for the animals and then we head in. 3:30pm. If we didn’t have Chi with us we would have got the lights out and worked in the polytunnel after the night run but just no can do with Chi.

Tonight I’m feeling slightly disheartened again. We have to drive up North, over to Sheffield way, to collect the tup tomorrow (so late I know). Sam made the suggestion that I should stay with Chi. It’ll be 3 hours there, load him up and do the paper work, then 3 hours back, unload him and get him settled. Chi is still ill and grumpy and crying over everything. 6 hours in a car seat, eating lunch in the car, will not be pleasant for her, or for us. I feel like I should be there, I have been talking with the guy to arrange this hire, I’m the one who wants us to have sheep, I’m the more physically able. But it’s not in Chi’s best interest, so I will stay, do what I can here and have a cup of tea and dinner ready for Sam when he gets home.

I was reading an article in Country Smallholding the other day about a family that are doing flowers on their smallholding. They had started with animals but it was too much work with young children. The lady said that when they are both in nursery/school she might get the animals back. It reminded me again about thinking we must be mad to try and do it with Chi and be thinking about baby #2 at some point. It would all be so much easier if we didn’t have Chi, if we had set everything up before her, or waited until she was older to set things up. But writing this post and looking through the pictures of her on the smallholding I don’t think we are mad. We’ve made it harder for ourselves for sure. It certainly isn’t as easy and rosey as I expected, but seeing it all through her eyes, seeing her interact with it all makes the delay in getting everything done worth it. I’m still banking on her being really useful in getting things done in a couple of months though!

Dans

Brewing, Growing, Livestock, Produce

Smallholding and ‘life’

13th November 2016 Dans 1 Comment

Life has a way of getting in the way of living sometimes. You don’t speak to friends and when you do you apologise because ‘life’ got in the way. With having a little person around 24/7 and a husband who works full time I often find that ‘life’ is getting in the way of smallholding. We try and limit our trips away and make sure we have a few weekends a month to get on with the tasks.

This autumn though ‘life’ hit us hard. My stepfather, Paul, died suddenly. I knew he wouldn’t live forever but I thought we had at least another 10 years. He had been instrumental in my life, he even bought our smallholding for us whilst we sold our previous house, thankfully we paid him back in full a few months ago. My family was hit hard by his loss and as he died abroad the burial proceedings were drawn out. It ended up being a month from his death to his funeral. In that month I was home maybe 2 or 3 days a week, the rest of the time spent with my mum in London. Sam was home a bit more but for the majority of the time we got sitters in.

In terms of the smallholding it wasn’t what I wanted at all, every time we’ve been away previously we’ve had someone staying over. The sitters were coming in for the morning and night runs, checking up on the animals and doing food and water. When I was home I would do the cleaning out of houses, water buckets and some harvesting.

Literally just before we found out about Paul I’d been really happy about how we were doing on the holding. My vet friend Cassie had been over for a weekend and showed us how to trim the sheep’s feet, we’d put up the first of 2 fences to subdivide the sheep field and I was filled with that feeling of pride you get when you see your holding through someone else’s eyes. It felt like we were finally getting on track, I had some things to plant in the polytunnel, our local garden centre was selling old stock of organic manure dirt cheap and a trip with the trailer was planned and the apple and pear harvest were approaching. Life was good. I came in to do dinner and Sam did the night run, as he stepped in the door the phone rang and the world fell apart for me.

On the times we came back to the smallholding we did what we could but you could literally see things falling apart. The first time back after a week away the polytunnel was heaving with fruit flies all over the tomatoes and the peppers, the onions that I thought were ok still in the ground had started to sprout green stems again, the fruit trees we’d impulse bought in our garden centre’s sale were looking worse for wear, the felt roof of the goose shed Paul had helped us build was flapping in the wind and I didn’t have the energy to make the calls needed about our incoming ram lamb.

I felt awful about it. Paul had been so proud about what we were doing, he’d boasted to people at my daughter’s birthday in June that nothing goes to waste here, but things were. All in all the smallholding survived. The animals were ok. I guess that goes to show that whatever is happening life does go on, and that my gold standard of care for the animals can slip in emergencies without the world ending for them.

Now we are back, have been for about 2 weeks, and we are ‘cracking on’ as he would say. We’ve done the second fence in the sheep field so we now have 3 areas to rotate around. The buying of the ram lamb has been replaced with the hire of 3 year old tup as the owner isn’t sure the ram lamb is up to the job, we’ll buy him in the spring and not use him on his half sisters. We are trying to get on top of the apples and pears but a lot have been lost. We did two large batches of pear wine (neither worked) and 2 batches of apple wine (both very tasty) last year. This year I don’t think we will have enough fruit for wine. We also stored cooking apples through until the new year but we currently have about 3 that are ok to store. Tomorrow we are back out on the land so we’ll be focusing on apples and pears, hopefully I’m just underestimating numbers.

I guess I’m feeling disheartened by the loss that I have seen around the holding in the last month. Or maybe that’s part of the depressed stage of grief. I keep reminding myself that what happened was rare and in such times as ‘life’ gets in the way in such a massive way things will slip. I learnt a few lessons:

~ The smallholding can be managed in the short term by someone coming in morning and night.

~ ‘Life’ will get in the way sometimes, and that is ok.

~ Life is too short – I think we will be going on holiday more than I had originally thought.

~ I do want to do this – sometimes I have thought that smallholding isn’t working but I want to succeed at this. Paul put effort into helping me get into this way of life and was proud of my achievements so far. I want to keep making him proud.

Maybe this is more a personal post than a smallholding post but I am sure this will happen, and indeed has happened, to other smallholders. Before it did I wouldn’t have thought it would be possible for me to be there for my family whilst I had the holding to look after but it can be done, sometimes ‘life’ is important enough that you have to allow it to get in the way.

Hopefully more smallholdery posts soon.

Dans

Crafting, Livestock

A wooly adventure

17th June 2016 Dans 2 Comments

I’ve not been very good at keeping this up to date have I? I’m currently putting that down to a toddling terror with a love of laptops and a questionably understanding of the word no (I’m pretty sure she understands but ignores). A new rule that Mummy can have her laptop at breakfast might help.

So what’s been going on at Six Oaks? I’ll update you on the sheepy front this time.

The sheep have been shorn and ended up looking more like deer than sheep. It was a real adventure getting them in for that. We had to get them out of the field they had been in and then through the next area with long grass and willow trees, down a 12 foot wide strip of good grass between the leylandi and the polytunnels (aka Polytunnel Way) and into the open polytunnel. To start with they didn’t want to go past the gate of their existing field and a drop of the bucket on the other side meant they got a fair amount of the food without getting them very far. But we got them in and the gate closed behind them. Success!

Except it wasn’t, we got as far as Polytunnel Way and then refused to go further. I guess it was narrower and they could see that the end of it was blocked off. The bolted off in a series of kicks and jumps and found the willow which was then far more interesting than the coarse mix Sam was shaking. We gave up on the carrot approach and went for the stick. There’s a hedge going through this area and with an unsuspecting volunteer (Kay) we tried walking them down the gap between it and the fence to get them into Polytunnel Way. We soon found out that the hedge wasn’t as thick as we thought when they started jumping through it!

We gave up, stuck some hurdles up a little way into Polytunnel Way so that we didn’t have sheep wandering all over the place and put their water there. We had dinner and thought about shearing the sheep ourselves (shearer due first thing in the morning).

Of course when we went out to lock up for the night the sheep were happily in Polytunnel Way munching on the grass. We opened the hurdles and tried with the bucket again. It worked and we got them penned up just before it got dark. Of course both our phones were dead at that point so no victorious photo. The only bucket we had with us at that time was the chicken corn though as we were quite surprised to find that they seemed to like that even more than the coarse mix!

The shearer came and went with little event. We had the sheep penned up in the open polytunnel with the ends of the polytunnel blocked off just in case. Turns out that was a good idea as one sheep got loose at one point and was running around the tunnel.

The fleeces were so tiny! It didn’t help that a couple of them were really shedding so had the fleece coming away in pieces and half gone anyway. I may need to get them done earlier next year or learn how to roo them. My plans to make a couple of rugs from them went out the window when I saw the size so instead I have sourced some white fleece and I will do some peg loom rugs with brown and white wool. Hopefully more on that soon.

We then had a go at treating the sheep with clik to prevent fly strike. A lot of people say to do it a few weeks after shearing but our vet advised same day and I trust her, plus we were still mentally scarred from having tried to get them in that once! We managed ok, and it was only the sheep that got sprayed so pretty good going for newbies I think!

They are in their new area now, eating the grass down to a manageable height, taking shelter under the willows and looking very much like deer. The field they had been in is looking lush and green but I want to rest a while before they go back there. I also want to split it into three areas.

Sam with the sheep in the new area (well 12ft strip) — Sam with the sheep in the new area (well Polytunnel Way)

Not much else to report on the sheepy front. We did have our first wound to deal with a while back when I went out and saw one of the sheep had a bald patch. Turned out that 28 had an abscess on her head, but thankfully after a squeeze from the vet and a long acting antibiotic injection that healed up without event.

Now to start thinking about tups and how many we keep over the winter. We’ve got use of a neighbour’s half acre field now and the grass is looking really good so thinking about keeping all the girls and maybe selling some with lambs at foot next spring, but I know the grass will slow over winter and I may come to regret that. Lots to think about!

Dans

Our Good Life

Tag Archives: Tups

Our first homebred hogget

Crichton’s brush with death.

Livestock update

Sheepsies

December catch up part 1: Baa Ram Ewe

Parenthood and smallholding

Smallholding and ‘life’

A wooly adventure

A journey into smallholding