Jim Webster's Blog, page 30
March 6, 2018
Has Spring Sprung?
Well somebody seems to think so. At 7am yesterday morning I did my usual wander round the lambing shed to see if anything had happened. As I came out of the shed three big skeins of geese flew overhead, heading north. Obviously somebody has decided that time is pressing and the north is calling them. …
March 4, 2018
Colder than Charity, and man, that’s cold
It’s been an interesting few days. Ewes have slowly started lambing, but they’re hard work at the moment and even when they lamb out of the wind, it’s awfully cold for a small wet lamb. Luckily today’s a lot more reasonable. Mind you it’s OK for some, once lambs get a bit of size; they …
February 27, 2018
Making haste slowly
What you soon learn when lambing sheep is that it always starts with disaster. When you stop to think about it, this is probably inevitable, because you have a lot of sheep reaching late pregnancy together. With a dairy herd, calving tends to be far more spread out, so triumphs and disasters come at random …
February 24, 2018
Mixed signals
I know, I know. If I start putting pictures of flowers on the blog people will be expecting Latin names and all sorts. Me, I’ve a stockman, or even more precisely a cowman. So looking at these flowers from a bovine perspective, they should perhaps be called, ‘piquant, with a slight peppery aftertaste’ or …
February 19, 2018
Buying hard work in
We had a bit of a tidy up, which will doubtless be followed by a ‘throwing out session.’ That’s when we found the old hay knife. As you can see it’s effectively an electric jackhammer with a blade for cutting hay or silage. Basically back in the late 1960s we had one silage pit which …
February 12, 2018
Roe deer and Herdwicks, oh my.
This afternoon the weather had somehow overlooked us. So far today it has neither rained, snowed nor pelted us with hail. Given that yesterday had managed all three plus thunder and lightening, we were really expecting fog or perhaps a rain of frogs today. So mere weak sunshine seemed something of an anticlimax. Still I …
February 10, 2018
Running in high heels
Not something I’ve ever tried to be honest. I’m tall enough as it is and my legs, decently clad in working trousers, are too utilitarian to warrant being exhibited to a dumbfounded world. And at the moment it’s not the weather for high heels. As I sit on the quad in the rain, watching the …
February 3, 2018
Fear and Greed
Feeding sheep this morning and I took some tub to a dozen gimmers (ewe lambs kept for breeding; these are nearly a year old). They had been chewing some grass off elsewhere but are now closer to home. I walked in with the bucket, shouted to them and rattled the bucket. They looked up, saw …
January 28, 2018
Drought?
One day I will write a blog about how hot and dry everything is, how the dust hangs in the air, and the sun beats mercilessly down on us. But today is not the day. It’s still wet. In fact it’s beyond that, if you’ll pardon my French, it’s sodding wet. You know when a …
January 18, 2018
But we left him alone with his glory.
There are days when whatever you intended, other stuff just sort of gets added to the agenda. I had to go down to London. Virgin did their best, the train was swift and arrived on time and I drifted into London. It was expensive; my Kindle had just failed so I was forced to buy …
