April 2004

There's some rather misleading talk among some of the farming fraternity around here that life gets easier when the cattle are turned out... we beg to differ. In the winter we have a nice regular routine... feed the animals, scrape the yards, lay clean bedding, defrost pipes to troughs, get digger to pull tractor out of mud... that sort of thing. In summer, it feels as if the accelerator pedal on our lives has been pushed to the floor and we find the daylight hours (remember there are more of those at this time of year) filled to bursting with electric fence testing/fixing/reworking/moving, cattle rotation, water trough checking, ditch digging, gate mending, silage and hay contractor negotiations, silage and hay cutting/turning/baling/collecting/stacking, worming/fly management, hoof trimming, barn clearning, muck spreading, compost making, farm sales to attend for bargains... on top of this Brandy is having another phantom pregnancy and has taken to adding to her nest anything that's not nailed down... no wonder we're a bit tired!

In case you're wondering, no, we wouldn't really have it any other way... just perhaps a little slower!

So April saw the arrival of 3 more calves. Patsy gave birth to Wind Flower, a beautiful little white calf on the stormiest night of the year so far. We had to go and check them around 11pm (having waited for what we hoped might be a "quieter" window). Mark and I donned our wet weather gear (well, Lorraine donned hers and Mark wished he had about 5 yards from the back door!) and the scene was reminiscent of a sit com with prop staff just off camera throwing buckets of water over the main players to represent a storm! The rain was horizontal as we fought our way to the maternity wing. We shone the torch into the blackness but all we could see was rain, so over the gate we went, and a good thing too. Patsy had taken refuge, along with her companions, under the shelter of the barn, but little 3 hour old calf was stranded in slushy mud and muck with her front feet one side of a step and her back feet the other side. Like knights in shining armour, we grabbed an end each and rather unceremoniously delivered this very soggy bundle back to her mother. Patsy bellowed thanks (we presume) and we swam our way back home. Needless to say, she (and the weather) did eventually dry out and she's currently racing around the field with the rest of her contemporaries.

Daffodil was the next. She arrived to the delight of a crowd gathered at the wall of the barn one Tuesday afternoon. She's called Daffodil because she was bright yellow when she arrived. It took her mum, Welsh Rarebit, a few days of conscientious licking to remove the tinge completely.

And finally (for now), Sunny, the boy of the trio. Morning Glory just got on with it one very sunny afternoon whilst Mark was in Warwickshire teaching and I was in Shepton Mallett spinning (wool). Sunny is a huge calf and is still finding his legs a bit unwieldy, not unusual apparently for a big calf who has needed to be especially tightly folded in the womb! He's spending a lot of time sleeping, but Wind Flower and Daffodil keep checking in and are looking forward to a playmate who can keep up!

We turned the young stock, our heifers and yearlings for beef next year, out into the fields during the first really dry patch. The day after, the heavens opened and we had some thoughts about bringing them in again, but never quite got around to it. They seemed happy enough and indeed have grazed the top off the field we'll turn the horses into. We moved them a few days ago to our top field, their summer pasture. This proceedure is always a bit of a worry as we don't quite know how the animals will react the other side of the gate, and which direction they will take off in! We don't have enough electric fence to just string a pathway and corral them in the right direction so we tend to enlist the assistance of any willing volunteers around at the time. On this occasion, there were none. We opened the gate and hoped for the best. The aim was to have them go straight across the centre of a square field of some 25 acres or so and straight through the gap in the hedge at the top. It worked like magic... off they went, all in the right direction, first walking, then trotting, then at full gallop and straight through the gap, almost without stopping. Mark and I didn't travel that fast - electric fence energiser, battery, extra posts and bailer twine in hands - and by the time we were half way across the field, the cattle had circumnavigated the top field, were back at the gap again and on the return journey! By the time we arrived they had gone back and forth a couple of times and a small possy was off to check out our precious woodland (I don't think so!). We rounded up the few stragglers with surprising ease (perhaps we're getting better at this), secured the fencing and turned the energiser on... and they were all still there the next day... result.