Surely the rain must start to ease soon???? I’m sure like many of you we are hoping for some drier days as some of our fields are so churned up, we are starting to wonder if they will ever look the same again. And with our lambs & foals due very soon, we are hoping that there will be a decent field to put them out onto! With the shire horses that we show, we have been keeping them inside the last month or so to protect their feet and their feather, but that means more work with exercising and feeding them as well as all the mucking out!!!
So, we have had a couple of things to celebrate this last month. I had a proud Mum moment when Jamie won the Young Handler class at the National Shire Horse Show recently. Our black yearling colt Boris who we’ve been training up for showing came fifth out of a class of eight at his first time out and Isabella stood third in her class behind the Champion and Reserve Champion females, so a good day out. We have also celebrated winning an award at the annual British Pie awards. Our bakers Sue and Claire and Mark went along to the Awards Luncheon and came back with a reserve for our new homemade Steak, mushroom & cracked black peppercorn pie.
It was wonderful a couple of weeks ago, when Denise, Steves sister who lives in the US came back for a visit and all sisters and ourselves were reunited for the first time since loosing Steve. We had some lovely food, prepared mostly by Val with her amazing baking and we had plenty to catch up on!
We’ve also been busy planting new hedge plants where some of them failed over the winter, so our new hedges grow nice and strong for the future. We’ve had to photograph every stretch of hedge planting, and fencing to submit for the Countryside Stewardship grant at the end of the month, so fingers crossed we’ve done it right!!
Looking forward now, we are planning some new events at the farm. We have our Easter craft activities with feeding the lambs in the Easter holidays, Bushcraft activities on 16th May, our annual Open Farm event on 9th June and a new event..a family dog show in July, so look out for more information on those.
Time to feed the ewes now…as it’s the vital two weeks before they are due to lamb and this is the time when they grow the most. Our ewe with the quads inside is looking rather large and uncomfortable so we are paying particular attention to her at the moment. I’ll update you on the next blog!
Kay x