Jim Webster's Blog, page 7

Just fix this

Spend much time in farming and you’ll end up dealing with agricultural engineers. There is only so much you can fix with baler twine. In my time I’ve seen steel bars ‘reinforced’ by having heavy pieces of timber strapped to them using string. I’ve seen somebody get a tractor home, steering with the independent brake …

Let a hundred flowers bloom

Last year somebody obviously had a bit of a clear-out in their garden. They dumped a lot of bulbs onto the dike cop and left them there. So I went down with a spade and just sort of dug them in. Now I’m not a gardener. If anybody asks, I’m a cowman and can get …

Lads

I remember an old farmer commenting about lads ‘helping out.’ “One boy is one boy. Two boys is half a boy, three boys is no boy at all.” I know of a couple of farms round here that used to get a lot of lads ‘helping out.’ With village farms where the village was a …

A Lifesaver…

Originally posted on Sue Vincent's Daily Echo:
Mothering Sunday. There are your favourite huge lilies in a vase, filling the air with the perfume of heaven. White and pale lilac blooms wait with the chocolates, destined to fill another vase. Your granddaughters have made beautiful cards for you… and invited you to Sunday lunch.…

About this lockdown thing everybody’s talking about

Six days shall you labour and on the seventh rest. Except when I took this photo it was Sunday morning, and we were pretty much guaranteed showers tomorrow and heavy rain on Wednesday. So the reseeding has to be done now. And time off in lieu? That’s not an agricultural term. After they’d finished ploughing, …

Hedging your bets

Well it’s done. Another hedge laid. Not a long one by any means but the amount of stuff that had to be cut out of it was phenomenal. In fact when the weather was freezing, I just went down the line of the hedge cutting out the stuff that I didn’t need or just wasn’t …

Watching the world burn

On the twelfth of February (or thereabouts, as the land agents say) a friend of mine posted a quite spectacular photo of a fire on Dartmoor. The difficulty is that this is an accident waiting to happen. Winter wildfires are not unusual. At the same time firefighters were tackling a fire near the Cogra Moss …

Well you try these things.

I’ve always had a memory for stuff that intrigued me at the time. I can still remember one old chap talking with my Dad. They got talking about growing what the old chap called ‘kibble corn’. That to him was mixed wheat and barley. There was nothing fancy about how they (or anybody else round …

Spreading clean water and still getting complaints.

I came across this almost certainly apocryphal story. Apparently a town gets its first 5G phone mast. Almost immediately all sorts of people develop medical conditions. A protest group against the mast is formed. The local council arrange a public meeting and bring in the representatives of the company that erected the mast. In it …

Farm Assurance Schemes

Are they worth it and if you’re not a farmer have you ever even heard of them? I was lucky in that when they were coming in, I was out of dairy and was buying calves and selling store cattle. So I managed without the extra expense. I did finish a handful of cattle but …