The ladies-in-waiting are still waiting and I feel extremely foolish for announcing we’d have piglets last weekend, however I was guided by the date the vendor gave me for the Tamworth. I really hope one of them will oblige in time for our Open Farm Sunday next weekend.

It is another lovely sunny day and there is no sign of rain. Three hours of rain is all we have had this week and although we all love to work outside in the warm and the dry conditions it has actually been very windy and this combined with the lack of rain is now becoming worrysome.

We are waging war on the pigeons, who have homed in and attacked our well grown brassicas and netting the long strip may be the only answer. Jethro has managed to reduce numbers by shooting a few of the pesky things, but  then others come. I wonder how pigeons tell each other where the tasty greens are so that more and more come? Jethro  has even tried out a farm scale battery powered noisy bird scarer. The effect of this weird noise [like a wonky burglar alarm] was to simply upset all the sheep in the field opposite, cause the fattening cattle to stampede and irritate us and the dogs so much we eventually had to turn it off.

The beans and the squashes still need planting out hopefully today and tomorrow. Food production, we still love it but as always it remains challenging at times.

There was a new lamb last night, and there can’t really be many more to come. The lambs look well [a dry year always suits lambs] and the sheep and lambs have had their dose of clik to prevent flystrike. We had had two sheep mildly affected by maggots, and they were treated with insecticide to kill the maggots and eggs. As we deliberately lamb late in the season there is always a balance to keep between leaving the sheep in peace or rounding them up to apply the Clik. Rounding up sheep with small lambs is not easy. Every year is different but the sunnier weather has hatched a lot of flies.