a dry time

There is a saying the ‘the weather always pays its debts’ and so it seems this year. The past three summers have been disastrously wet causing as many problems for farmers as it has for the local tourist industry, but this year it seems to be all change. We haven’t had much rain for over six months, meaning that the ground water level was already low, and for the past six weeks it has been hot and sunny with hardly a wet day, so the fields are already beginning to ‘burn’ (go brown)

The adult sheep cope amazingly well with short dry grass during the summer, but I can already see that the growth of some of the lambs has slowed down. It is this time of the year that we make hay and silage to feed through next winter, but so far the fields that have been mown have yielded far less grass than expected. We’ll have to try to cut further fields over the rest of the summer.

I guess that farmers always moan about the weather and we certainly have moaned about the last three summers. If it is true that ‘the weather always pays it’s debts’ we could be in for a long drought this summer, so there could be a lot more moaning to come!!

Sheep grazing on a very dry Morte Point