dry stone walling

added by David on Sunday December 19, 2010 at 11:21 pm

With the sheep work up to date the early winter is the time to try to catch up on fencing and a few odd pieces of of stone walling that need to be repaired. I certainly wouldn’t claim to be an expert at dry stone walling, but it is a job which makes me feel in touch with generations past who worked the land at Borough Farm. On one occasion, while widening a gateway, I found a glass bottle of creosote embedded in the earth in the middle of the wall. Creosote was a cure for foot rot in sheep used long before antibiotic treatments were available, and was probably left by a shepherd treating his sheep at that very spot.

Looking at the miles of stone walls that weave through the farm, it’s obvious that my forebears had rather more skill at walling than I do. I also suspect that they had rather more time, indeed it must have been life times of work to create the walls that divide the fields.

Still I finished my little repairs in a couple of days and when I stood back to look at my work, I decided that, provided that you don’t study too hard, they blend in well with those walling experts of long ago.

Building dry stone walls always reminds me of a poem by Pam Ayres

I am a dry stone waller,

I  build dry stone walls all day

Of all appalling callings

Dry stone walling’s worst of all

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new rams

added by David on Sunday October 17, 2010 at 10:00 pm

September is the time to start thinking about the breeding season ahead, about which ewes are in the correct condition to breed for another year and which rams need to be replaced. The rams will join with the ewe at the beginning of November and will be required to serve (mate) about 45 ewes each, so they need to be in tip top condition. This year I needed to bring in four new rams, and have decided to pursue a slightly different breeding approach for the next few years.

In 2009 I experimented with a couple of ‘Blue Faced Leicester’ rams on my Romney ewes. The Blued Faced Leicester is a strange breed as it is amongst the ’softest’ of  sheep (meaning that it takes a lot of looking after, and can easily perish in bad weather) But when crossed with other breeds, usually hill breeds,  it produces ewe lambs that are prolific and produce plenty of milk, whilst being reasonably  hardy.

The experiment seems to have worked as I’m pleased with the ewe lambs that we have produced, and even the lambs male lambs have sold well in market. So this year I decided that all of the rams coming into the flock would be ‘Blue Faced Leicester’ It feels like a big decision to make as the poor grazing around Mortehoe and the harsh winter weather mean that I do need to maintain the hardiness of flock, but this new cross should produce more lambs each year, and can be crossed back the the hardy Romneys in years to come.

Blue Faced Leicester rams

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some sheep!

added by David on Monday September 6, 2010 at 1:00 pm

Not all sheep are the same…. thankfully!  Most behave in a predictable way,they follow the flock and they have a vague idea of self preservation. However there are some exceptions. For the past couple of weeks there has been an awkward old ewe grazing on a piece of land on Morte Point known as the three cornered island. I say awkward with good cause, she’s good enough at evading capture to still have her lamb with her a month after the rest of the lambs have been weaned.

The three cornered island is not actually an island, but one side is particularly inaccessible, where the sheer cliff turns into a perilously steep grass bank and it was here that the ewe in question had decided that the sweetest grass on the point could be grazed. However having led her lamb down to a grassy ledge, there was no way of getting back up, so when I spotted her on the morning round on bank holiday monday, it was obvious that she was going to need some assistance.

After rounding up a few unsuspecting members of the family to assist (visitors for a quiet bank holiday weekend!) we returned with rope in hand for what I considered  should be a fairly straight forward ‘catch and hotch’ back up to level ground. Unfortunately our errant ewe had different ideas. The very sight of my arrival on her personal ledge had her scurrying further and further down, jumping ledge to ledge far happier to risk a fatal fall than to risk capture. Her lamb was easily caught and with not too much effort carried and dragged to the top of the cliff, in the hope that it’s mother would attempt to follow, but she was having none of it. Even when eventually I caught her, she made no attempt to assist her own ascent, and it took a full hour of rope heaving from the ‘quiet bank holiday weekenders’, to pull her back to the top, passing straight through the middle of a bramble patch on route!

Once reunited with her lamb the old ewe wandered away without a care in the world. Sheep have short memories, so I shan’t be surprised to see her stuck in exactly the same place in a few days time. It’s just as well that not all sheep are the same as 700 like her might be enough to make me give up sheep farming!

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weaning the lambs

added by David on Friday August 20, 2010 at 3:03 pm

The dry spell of weather that lasted through much of April, May and June has well and truly passed and with some welcome rain so the grass has started to grow again. But even with a new flush of grass, the lambs and ewes soon find themselves in competition for the same grazing, and by the middle of July they are better off separated from one another.

Weaning tends to be a slightly chaotic job. Although the gathering of the various flocks is straight forward, once in the sheep pens the  dogs push them single file through a long narrow sheep ‘race’. At the end of the race I switch a gate from one side to another putting ewes into one pen and the lambs into another. As more and more sheep pass through the race the din of bleating ewes and lambs increases, until we end up with the flock split completely in two. The ewes are easy to return to the fields as they will run in search of their lambs assuming that they will find them back in the fields from where they came. These adult sheep need little grass for the rest of the summer, so I chose the barest fields to return them to.

Lambs require a little more attention, and this year they received a worm dose, their second vaccination against clostridial disease and  a bolus containing selenium and cobalt (a bolus is a heavy solid lump about the size of the end of your little finger, which lodges in the stomach and dissolves over 5 months) Each of the lambs takes thirty seconds to treat, and this year we weaned 800 lambs!

The lambs can now have the best grass for the rest of the summer, but driving newly weaned lambs is not straight forward. It needs lots of dogs with lots of energy, so this year it was the turn of  Mist, Eddie and Fly, with a little from Fern (when she could be bothered!) Fly is really proving herself, and has absolutely boundless energy. But the lambs feel leaderless and swirl and split and break in all directions, so driving over four hundred lambs through the track in the woods was quite entertaining! It took nearly an hour to drive the lambs to their new pasture. By that time the dogs were deparate for water and rest. It’s a great reminder as to why I need to keep young dogs coming on to join the team.

For twenty four hours both ewes and lambs break the tranquility of Borough Farm, with a chorus of bleating, but the fresh grass soon proves a distraction and peace returned to the valley.

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sheepdog displays

added by David on Thursday July 15, 2010 at 10:32 pm

It’s the middle of July and we are already well into our season of Sheepdog and Falconry displays at Borough farm. Although the weather has been much better than it has the last few summers  (in fact I’ve been hoping for a little rain to make the grass grow) for the last couple of weeks, Wednesday seems to have been the only wet evening of the week!

However, it’s given us a chance to try out the new barn as an undercover seating area, and I’m pleased to say that it works really well.

But we’ve had enough rain now to freshen the grass and even to put a little water back into some of the ponds again, so I’ll be quite happy to see a return of the sun. As an old farmer said to me recently when I commented that we could do with some rain ‘be careful what you wish for, it might not know when to stop!’

the first display in the new barn

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a dry time

added by David on Wednesday June 30, 2010 at 12:31 pm

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

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treating the lambs

added by David on Wednesday June 9, 2010 at 11:00 pm

We hardly seem to have finished lambing, when it’s time to get the lambs in for their first round of treatments. It’s been a difficult spring for the sheep, the long cold dry spell meant that the grass was slow to start growing and although the ewes were fed extra pellets, they didn’t produce as much milk as normal, which in turn causes the lambs to nibble at the grass earlier than they usually would. So the first treatment round in the second week of May included a worm dose for the lambs, together with a second dose for another internal parasite, coccidiosis, and a vaccination against pasteurella, the disease that is the biggest killer of sheep.

With over 900 lambs to treat it’s a big job, completed over four days. The noise from the sheep pens is enormous as every ewe calls to it’s lambs and every lamb responds. Once back in the fields it take several hours for the ewes and lambs to mother up again and peace and quiet.

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lambing open days

added by David on Thursday April 29, 2010 at 10:47 pm

We’d been planning for some time to open the lambing barns to visitors this year, and with the interest aroused by the BBC’s ‘Lambing live’ programs it proved a great year to start our lambing open days.  With the lambing in full swing it took a huge effort to ready the barns for visitors (we put up nearly 100 information and safety notices!) but with the help of all the family we managed all the preparations and on April 3rd we opened the doors for the first time. I must admit to being slightly nervous about inviting visitors in at such a busy time, with no control over when lambs might be born, or what sheep problems might arise. In the event I needn’t have worried, the viewing gallery that we incorporated into the new barn proved a great success, and the sheep delivered lambs right on cue. We had some lovely comments left in the visitors book, so it now looks as if lambing open days are likely to become a regular part of the borough farm calendar.

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the lambing season

added by David on Thursday April 29, 2010 at 10:25 pm

The lambing season began on 21st March this year and was hectic from day 1. The first 8 days saw nearly 300 ewes give birth and right in the middle of that first week the weather to turned  cold and wet. We were forced to keep the lambs in for an extra couple of days, which uses up every inch of space and creates a lot of extra work. Fortunately the cold spell only lasted for 3 days, after that we could turn ewes and lambs out to the more sheltered fields. With plenty of good sized double lambs born and no more than the usual lambing problems, it’s been a good lambing season and we’re now back into a more normal routine and catching up on some sleep!

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first lambs

added by David on Friday March 26, 2010 at 11:51 pm

It’s always good to see the first lambs of the year, and on Sunday evening the first lambs arrived in our new lambing barn. With most of the flock looking very heavily in lamb,I knew that it wouldn’t be long before the rush started, and on Monday no less than 50 lambs were born! We’re now with the sheep for almost 24 hours a day, and hoping that the weather will dry up a little so that we can turn ewes and lambs out into the field. Sometimes lambing seems to be so busy that you don’t know where to turn next, but as a I was once told by an old shepherd ‘they only have to arrive once’. And much as I love to see the first lambs of the year, it’s also pretty good to see the last!

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