Looking Forward to Spring
We’re poised, ready for action!
Lambing should start at the end of February and last for three weeks or thereabouts! Anything born earlier will be unthrifty and despite an immense amount of management input, unlikely to survive.
We have the lambing gloves, gel lubrication, iodine for navel treatment which prevents infection, milk substitute to rear triplet lambs if there’s no chance of fostering’s, and ear tags to identify progeny and pedigree breeding. There are buckets for individual lambing pen watering, coloured sprays for long distance visual numbering, disinfectants for hygiene and disease control!
Hopefully the weather will remain mild because extreme conditions, as experienced in early February, leads to cold lambs, frozen water and frozen shepherds!
The aim is to get ewes and their lambs out to grass and grazing as soon as possible, so some reasonable early grass growth and dry conditions are needed. Last year, the extremely wet weather meant all the sheep had to be kept in the straw barns for an additional month before conditions favoured their moving to the big outdoors!
The winter months has seen much building and development work on the farm, mainly relating to the workshop letting side of the business. With spring approaching there will be a need for timeliness in terms of arable operations and change in work emphasis as we progress throughout the year.
Weather permitting, there is still a slight window for planting a late crop of winter wheat for milling purposes. Failing that, we will switch to a spring sown variety of wheat which will meet a biscuit making market. Fertilising of the autumn sown wheat and barley is due soon and we look forward to a dry spell to start that job!
Our beans, planted in November last year, were looking well before the recent sub-zero frosts and solid ground conditions. Currently they are looking hammered, but expectations are they will perk up if we get a prolonged mild spell.
To say that farming is weather related is therefore an understatement!
We are now card-carrying vaccinated people, awaiting the call for our second top-up jab! With little (and big) grandchildren wanting to visit us and the prospect of some easing in restrictions occurring, we can only look forward to spring and the chance to start socialising again!
It will be great to have the luxury of a holiday again, but with the prospect of lambing, we’ll be locked down for quite a while yet! Hey, Ho!
DG