What a day we’ve had – weighing lambs and pigs and selecting the best for boxes and a farmers market, vaccinating cattle with all manner of other visitors coming and going all day on farm business. No wonder we struggle so much with the shorter day length at this time of the year.

Last night haircuts were fitted in for the men after an early supper and our hairdresser’s life seems currently every bit as crazy as ours. Is it the planets or something else causing such chaos and too much work in all our lives?

Swift’s remaining three horseshoes were removed today too, just as well as it looked like whoever shod him before had tried to make his feet fit the shoes rather than the other way around. The trimmer was very patient as Swift is not yet very used to having this done. We got there in the end and although he sometimes puts his foot down sharpish a few times there was no malice in him whatsover. She will be back in three weeks time to properly trim his feet and we hope in a few months with regular trimming and work that his feet will harden and he will be able to remain ‘barefoot‘.

We also fitted in a sausage tasting this week to choose another variety to sell at our upcoming public events. Eight new  varieties of seasonings were made into patties and fried… remembering which is which on the plate as we taste them around the kitchen table is quite taxing and we all ended up with scribbled diagrams at the side to give us a clue. Everyone’s taste is so different but we eventually chose a new variety for lamb sausage and another new one for pork. We never have trouble selling bangers,  it may be a cliche but variety surely is the spice of life, or rather sausages. 

It is national sausage week this week but we were not able to have any events on to coincide. Perhaps next year we will make it fit with all the big promotions?

We received a frantic  telephone call this afternoon… three pigs causing havoc in a lovely garden and heading towards a very well tended cricket pitch with their noses primed in the dig position.

We asked for a bit more description of this terrible sounding trio and then we breathed a huge sigh of relief, they were not our pigs. Some quick telephoning to other pig keepers in the area produced a mobile phone number and a name and eventually the pigs were corralled [not sure about the spelling] and then owner was traced.

The relief to know it was NOT our problem was huge, that in itself is a teensy bit worrying!

Swift is getting used to large machines, the loader full of planks and old doors has gone past his byre several times this afternoon. The barefoot trimmer comes tomorrow to assess his feet, and take the remaining 3 shoes off. He has only had one set of shoes on in his life, and he has lost one this week and I am going to try to keep him ‘barefoot’ while he is only in light work.

I rode him again for a short while in the Dually halter after long lining with a friend’s help for half an hour in his field.

Well, we managed to dust the pigs last night in their stable and waking up today to such a wet and stormy morning means that there is absolutely no sign of the white powder on these girls anywhere. I should have photographed them last night as they were really WHITE! Let’s hope it’s worked and relieved their discomfort, hard to tell so far as nothing ever puts them off their food!

It is so wet and so windy the trees seem to have lost half their leaves overnight and are  now piled on what pretends to be a  lawn no doubt the rest will follow by nightfall? Still it is 1st November and the leaves have lasted a long time this year. It is however still mild.

Swift is happy enough out in the field in his waterproof rug, no riding today on account of the storm, not a good idea on a young horse. I will change his rug for a drier one later on if the rain persists all day, but he is ok for now. He is still wearing the thinnest weight rug, I tried him in the warmer one when he got so wet yesterday but it is too warm and he sweated up underneath it which was no good so I changed it back.

So I shall retire to the kitchen and have a baking session: pasties, cake and some other delicious goodies to see us all through the week. It will undoubtedly cheer Jethro up when he returns very wet and bedraggled [a certainty today] from his daily sortie to check all the animals in all the fields. Sunday remains a working day on a farm, but a glance at  the Sunday papers and a roaring log fire to keep out the damp will make for a pleasant few hours after lunch until it is feeding time for the livestock once more.

4.45 pm Here is the photgraphc evidence of my labours in the kitchen.. a case of now you see it, now you don’t delicious… mmmmnn. “Any more” said Jethro?

Gone in a moment.. but golly they were good!

Animals! The wordly wise know very well never to work with animals.. but we are somewhat stuck with hundreds of them.

The latest  problem is the young sow, no use to us for breeding anymore and shortly destined for sausages has gone down with lice or mites just a few days before she was due to be sent away.  

This is a big problem. We cannot give her the usual veterinary treatment for external and internal parasites as there is a 28 day minimum meat withdrawal on this stuff. [We always go well over the minimum]. She must go this week as we need the sausages for a market later in the month.

We have consulted with our vet and collected from the vet’s an organic herbal powder  [similar to this] with which to anoint her with. There is no withdrawal period on this as it is made with natural products and it should help considerably. The only problem is we will need to use a whole lot of this powder to take effect and will have to don goggles and face masks in order not to suffocate ourselves in the process. The pig as you can imagine will not like this particularly and not stay still, so I expect a complete whiteout, or a re-run of the black and white minstrel show, but much more pungent. At least we shouldn’t catch any bugs.

PS Swift and I had a 15 minute ridden meander in the field today. So far so good.

The back man cometh, well actually he goeth. Today Swift has been sorted out in a big way and I hope to ride him really soon. I think the horse must have been playing Twister as he was in a bit of a mess. Now I will get the saddle fitter out as soon as I can, I had not done this already as I was not sure how long to give Swift off while his sore back was mending.

I know the saddle is wide enough, but because Swift has sadly already had a back issues, I want to be really sure that the saddle is just right. Of course he may get fatter and thinner depending on the time of year and how much work he is having, but my saddle has different width plates for the gullet and air flocking in the padding which can be adjusted by the specialist fitter and we have one quite close by, which is one of the reasons I originally chose this saddle.

In the meantime we have done more leading out and investigation of big machines, tyres and other typical farm hazards. Some times he takes a minute or two to relax if there is a lot of noise but on the whole appears to have an ‘am I bothered’  type reaction which is great considering he has only been here just over 2 weeks, although on account of his age he is still rather green. He is unmoved now by the pigs and looks over the wall at them while they sleep. When the pigs wake up they study each other in depth, the horse over the wall and all the eight pigs looking right up at him, it is too funny to watch. Swift however is totally relaxed as he does this, which to me is the most important aspect.

The back man is returning on two weeks to sort out one of the suckler cows who we think is not quite right and he will just check Swift again to see all is still well.

Jethro is nursing a very sore leg, he was charged by a ram yesterday when he went to feed them. There are no bruises or unusual swelling but I think the sheep caught him right on the iliotibial band on the outside of his thigh. This can be an extremely sesnsitive part of the body and the ibuprofen is helping a lot. Luckily it was not worse.

A damp and dreary morning does not help us adjust to the time change. Why do we find it hard to adjust in October and March?

I collected the cattle vaccine yesterday from the vets and we will have a busy week vaccinating all the cattle against respiratory disease. This is because last winter we had a terrible outbreak in the animals of sniffley noses, coughs and fevers after housing the young cattle and treating them all and looking after so many large animals was very hard going.

We have more groups of young visitors coming to the farm soon and I hope they have waterproofs to go on the farm walk. I have finally perfected the art of buttermaking  to an audience, so that will be part of what they learn about and will be able to taste. I have to buy pasteurised cream as we are not allowed to use our own raw milk.. crazy but true. So I demonstrate the buttermaking and then later on in the visit we demonstrate the milking of Ruby followed by the cream separation as it works best with warm milk.

In the meantime I must have had over 20 phone calls from AOL about the internet subscription package we have been on, seemingly for years. It is becoming a total pantomine, they want to speak to Jethro, he is never in!  They won’t talk to anyone else about it and are ringing form some far flung place which sounds as if it is bathed in sunshine. They seem to find it extremely hard that I don’t even know when Jethro will be available… and refuse to divulge any details to me .. I have just told them that this scenario will continue for several more weeks unless they give me the details of the deal they are offfering in order that I can tell him.

Data protection is surely just a useful foil for total lack of common sense.

Must dash,  the cattle are calling.

I don’t think I can blame the lack of blogging just on the shortening days but I wish I could! The clocks change this w/e and I wish we could stay on BST rather than switching to GMT as we much prefer it. We would rather have darker mornings and lighter evenings, but I know there are huge debates about this issue every year. 

It is just so very busy with the autumn arable drilling thankfully finished today, and now the livestock work is upon us with a vengeance. Perhaps, methinks, this is why mixed farming became unfashionable, because with such a spread of enterprises on the farm there is never ever a respite?

It is not just the routine of daily feeding and checking of pigs, sheep and cattle, but the annual tasks of sorting the ewes into their groups to meet with the rams. And the time of the year when the vet comes to castrate the bull calves, time also to vaccinate the cattle against respiratory viruses, and then after 2 weeks following the vaccine, time to bring the younger cattle in for the winter.

We must be mad, as well as this heavy workload, and the meat sales, we have 5 educational visits in the next month for primary school children, teenagers, and one half day visit which encompasses all ages.

Thankfully, the puppy is not here at the moment, education is vitally important to all of us and since the actual owner of the dog is away studying for a degree in Agriculture at a top University, we thought a bit of proper education for the dog would be useful too. Both students are doing very well, especially the dog, who should be back home next month wagging her tail, walking to heel and always coming back when called!  Training a 9 month old puppy was just too much on top of everything else for yours truly to consider.

Every generation in this household has now either been trained in agriculture and/or land use or is in training. This fact actually makes us quite rare nowadays, and clearly shows that we are also quite, quite mad. However farming clearly runs in the blood [probably no choice with a name like Tull] and cannot be ignored, despite various members of the family trying to do other things along life’s winding journey.

There is more training to be done here too, that of the horse…. Swift arrived 10 days ago, and is being looked after by us. He is a young gelding, who hustled the mares too much in his previous home, and was a quick sale. I happened upon him by chance and was first in. He was not expensive but came without a vetting, as a gamble.  His teeth have been sorted, they were really bad, his overgrown molars had lacerated the inside of  his cheeks on both sides. The vet sedated him while the horse dentist worked.  His back has been found to be tender and tight and is now being sorted by professionals, using chiropractic methods and Equine Touch  amongst other things which I will tell you more about about another time. I was not expecting this, but I am sure he will be fine.

Swift has a very sweet nature and in a few days learnt to cope with the house cow [ he is now THE boss of a very bossy cow], some of the sheep and the pigs in the yard, oh and he has had his first encounter here with pheasants too. All these are vitally important attributes for a farm horse. On Sunday we walked slowly around to inspect all the large machinery in a quiet and deserted yard.

I am in no hurry with him and will take as long as it takes to get him used to what we expect and hope for. If his back needs a rest then he will learn his way around the farm from the end of a lead rope. If I need extra help with his schooling I have friends who will be able to help me. It is extremely therapeutic for me to escape the ringing of the phone and almost never ending streams of emails that pour into the farm office,  for an hour every so often.

I may not be quite so thrilled when it starts to rain and never stops. We have had so little rain we are worried about having enough grass to last the stock through the winter and with the number of acres we have and the low stocking rate that should never be a problem, but this year unusually it is.

this is the puppy who worried the steers

This is the puppy who worried the steers..

this is the steer who chased the cat

This is the steer who chased the cat

this is the cat who killed the chicken

This is the cat who killed the chicken

this is the hen who laid the egg

This is the chicken who laid the egg

this is the egg that Jethro had for breakfast

This is the egg that Jethro had for breakfast

To be continued……….

I am not talking about  a visit to the dentist - although that is one of my great real life phobias – but the burning question that is on all the minds of arable farmers after almost 2 months with no rain at all.

The ground is so hard that there is no way on this difficult land that a suitable seed bed can be prepared to sow the seed into. Yet the autumn days are quickly passing by and the risk of too much rain arriving all at once and making the land equally unworkable but in a different and equally challenging way is a very real threat. 

Jethro’s machines are ready, the men are ready, and the seed is in bags waiting to be loaded into the drills.

We do have a passable oil seed rape crop [ called canola for those readers from across the Atlantic] however and I am posting a picture. This was drilled in August in a manner which conserved as much moisture as possible in the seed bed. If we can keep the pigeons from stripping it all it later in the winter it may be an ok crop, which will be great.

As I write this post early this morning the first lambs, and a few pigs are on their way to the abattoir as we start to sell some of this year’s livestock ‘crops’.

We have taken the opportunity at the same time to wean the lambs – to take them away from their mothers – and give the ewes time to recover before the breeding season starts again for us in November.  Next week we will sort through all the lambs again, send any more that are ready away to the abattoir, because like fresh seasonal plums lambs do not keep well once matured. The remaining 300+  will be given a dose of wormer and put onto fresh grazing and then weighed again in a fortnight..

The ewes will have 2 weeks to dry up their udders and then they will be carefully sorted through and any really old girls will be taken from the flock to spend a well earned retirement on some conservation grazing. Last year’s oldies will go away on their final journey soon but we have a customer looking for old bloodlines amongst our pedigree flock and he will come and pick some first.

The rest of the flock will be checked carefully for their condition: too fat or too thin [and their diet adjusted accordingly], their udders to see it is still in full working order [no good a ewe having 2 lambs and only one side of her udder working] and finally their mouths to see they still have a full set of working teeth [ no dentures here]. The whole flock will then be sorted and treated accordingly: extra grass, less grass or a red splash on the back of the head which is their one way ticket to join the ‘old girls’. A shepherd’s year starts in Autumn and once you understand the process I find the work has an enjoyable rythmn to it, well it would only be fair to say that I have  worked with sheep for many, many years!!

The harvest is almost done, we are just waiting for the oats which were simply too green last week to cut. However we seem to have hit a sudden rainy patch so Jethro’s idea of going to the Great Dorset Steam Fair next weekend may not happen. It is absolute heaven to him to spend a day amongst the soot and the fumes watching others tinker with old machines. A few years ago he had the same idea as harvest seemed to be progressing well and guess what it rained then too. We only need 2 clear days when the oats are ready but I am not planning anything until it is all in the barn.