Still wet - The Accidental Smallholder

Posted: Sunday 10 January, 2016

by Rosemary Champion at 3:16pm in Smallholding 1 comment Comments closed

IT’S SO WET! And dismal. However, I was looking back some old diary entries – last winter 14/15 was dry. I had written that we had one wet week in November but had been mainly dry. In December 2012, I wrote that I hadn’t seen it wetter but that there may have been more precipitation in the winter of 2010/11, but mostly it had been snow. I said almost those exact same words to Dan yesterday, in relation to this winter.

I know we’re much luckier than many. Our house and buildings, the vegetable garden and the courtyard are all fine but the Home Paddock and the Orchard are underwater. The hens in the brown house have formally requested scuba gear L

Sheepfold is our driest field – and it is pretty dry – so that’s where the sheep are. It’s muddy around the hayracks and there’s precious little grass, but the ewes have hay and a molassed bucket and at least the other paddocks are being protected.

Last night, it was bucketing down and I couldn’t sleep. In the wee small hours, I decided to reduce the number of laying hens to just enough to supply the house. I also decided to reduce the number of sheep. In the cold light of day, I’m not quite so certain but we’ve been chatting about it today. Dan put more pallets in the pen of the brown house to give them some dry standing – and to be honest, the hens seem less bothered about the conditions than I am. And the egg sales do give us a nice, regular cash income. I won’t make any decision about the sheep until the scanner has been.

In many ways, the cattle are easier because they are housed – at least the cows are – and the steers have the wood. But I won’t be thinking about any changes there until after the nano-dairying course.

It was strange looking back through the diary entries.  It’s hard to believe it’s over three years since we got our cat, Penfold; it’s almost a year since we got Diesel. The years go very quickly when each month passes in a couple of paragraphs.

Angus, our friends’ Springer Spaniel, is here for a few days. Bryn’s exhausted as they were out in the field next to ours, which has tall grass and a lot of wet, so he’s had to “bounce” rather than run and he doesn’t have the legs to mimic a spaniel bounce. That said, he’s yipping “come play” at Angus again, so maybe it’s just me who’s exhausted watching them.

Oh, my peg loom arrived the other day so I've had a wee shot of that. I used some tapestry wool we had in a bag to see how it worked and I've got some handspun Coloured Ryeland wool that I'm going to play with this week. Beats watching the telly fro sure.