Christmas on the farm

We did it! Our first event on the farm! I don’t think we have ever worked so hard!

We now understand first hand all the stories LEAF farmers tell us about sweeping the sheds at midnight the night before Farm Sunday or a farm visit….so where to start….our landlord the Northmoor Trust ran a lovely Christmas Fayre and we put on tractor and trailer rides down to the barns for people to see our sheep in their winter bedrooms. We had brought in our 50 girls who are due to lamb in January on Friday and we decided to bring our replacement flock in as well (about 60). These are the sheep which if they have girls we will keep to breed from, and we couldn’t forget 2 of our rams too who we penned up and ran a competition for our visitors to give them names! We are busy deciding the winner at the moment we had some great suggestions!

We had set the barns up ready for all of them and bedded them down with straw, they looked so cosy! Our neighbour Andrew had kindly brought some of his Hereford cows over including his handsome bull! And Chris Parker from the Northmoor Trust had his 4 little piggies outside for people to see.

On Saturday Brian arrived to shear the sheep and Roly’s stepfather Stephen helped him out. Everyone loved watching and Brian was brilliant with our girls, so gentle as we were concerned with them being pregnant that they need to be carefully handled. We had carols playing in the background and Bobbie our lovely neighbour from where we used to live lent us some of her farmyard resources for little ones to play with. We also had Delilah the cow, kindly lent by Virginia Deradour and the Henley Agricultural Society who the children loved milking! On Saturday my brother Mark was driving the tractor, Roly’s sister Tetta and Mum Sarah (Camilla’s godmother Anthea helped Tetta on Sunday) were busy selling our yummy lamb burgers and lots of friends turned up in support. At the end of the day we all came back to our cottage and drank lots of tea and had a full debrief! We were discussing what extra activities we could do the next day…more sheep dog demonstrations with Meg which had been popular and making more of the bedding up and feeding, we went to bed exhausted but all fired up for the next day.

We woke up to howling winds and rain on Sunday morning and thought oh no! but someone was certainly looking after us as it all cleared up by about 10am. We arrived at the sheds to get things ready and we had the biggest surprise…..our first pair of lambs had been born overnight! So amazing, talk about perfect timing! One of our rams must be rather good at opening gates! They were already doing really well and had suckled and felt warm. Their Mummy was looking after them so well. Chris Lee, who used to manage the flock before us, happened to be there and showed us how to protect their navals from infections using an iodine solution and then we penned them up and they were the star attraction of the day! Their Mummy was so good and patient with everyone looking on all day and us picking up her babies to show our visitors. Our lovely vet Adelle was also around both days and Jennie and Janet joined her on Saturday. They were showing people the machine they use to scan the sheep to check to see if they are pregnant or not, it was fascinating. The good news for us is that all of our girls who are due to lamb in January are having babies. As they are pretty late in pregnancy we couldn’t see how many they are going to have but still good to know they are having some!

We just want to thank everyone who helped us over the weekend, we feel so grateful and couldn’t have done it without you.

We have already had some interest from visitors in becoming Cropsharers which is really exciting.

More soon

Camilla, Roly, Boris and Meg

Dusty build up to Christmas on the farm!

We have had a busy couple of weeks! We have our first event on the farm on the 5th and 6th December – ‘Christmas on the farm’ and we would love you to come and join us – more about that below.

It is Camilla writing this blog entry – I came home one evening last week from LEAF and Roly said, ‘we’ve had an incident with a dog loose in the sheep’. It was the flock of sheep who are due to lamb in January. It was hard to take in, it is the one thing every farmer dreads as it stresses the sheep so much and there is a high risk of lambs aborting. We hope this hasn’t happened and will know for sure when we have them scanned in a couple of weeks. We will keep you posted. The phone then rang and it was a lady in Long Wittenham telling us she had a sheep in her drive! We jumped in the truck and headed off in the dark and came across this sheep nibbling this kind lady’s lavender! We managed to get her into the back of the truck, with Meg in the crate, they didn’t know what to do. The sheep was stamping her foot and Meg was growling, they were in such close proximity, it was such an unusual sight! We stupidly forgot to take a photograph so we will have to ask you to use your imaginations!

We had some feed mixed for our sheep to help them get through the winter months. Our kind farming neighbours Bill and Hannah Woollen helped us arrange it, we had some of their peas and barley which arrived on trailers at the farm. We had booked a mixing lorry which then mixed and ground them altogether and helped transferred them into our feed bins, called hoppers. Roly got absolutely filthy! It was so dusty! Great job done and now our girls have got lots of yummy food for the winter.

Now then more about our event, please come and join us!

"Christmas on the farm" and "Christmas craft fayre" - 5th & 6th December
Come and visit us for our special "Christmas on the farm" event - Sheep, cows and piglets in their winter bedrooms; Sheep Dog demonstration by Meg (aged 10!); Sheep shearing (Sunday only) and spinning; Christmas farm trail; Tractor and trailer ride; . . . and lots of fun activities for children. As well as Christmas on the farm, there will be a Christmas Craft Fayre organised by the Northmoor Trust, including - Father Christmas, local Christmas crafts and gifts, locally produced Christmas food, donkeys, storytelling and music. DON’T FORGET TO WRAP UP WARM!

There will be a small entry charge of £1.50.
Timing – 11am until 4pm

We look forward to seeing you.

Roly, Camilla, Boris and Meg

Blooming marvellous!

Our landlord, The Northmoor Trust have been really busy over the last few days restoring lots of the meadows our sheep graze with wild flowers! The aim is to increase the diversity of the wildflowers in the meadows that are currently dominated by a few species of common grasses, and with them increase other biodiversity such as butterflies and bees. This is a really exciting project.

If you visit the farm and are out on the Clumps you will notice a significant part of Round Hill, and also areas of Church Meadow and the top of Castle Hill have been disc-harrowed. This is an essential part of the process - to give the wildflower seed a chance of germinating the ground needs to be broken up and stop the dominance of the grasses.

More to follow soon

Camilla and Roly . . . and Boris and Meg!

Tupping time on the farm

Quick update from us - we have been very busy! We have been at farmers markets in Oxford, Wallingford, Abingdon and Henley and we are at Wantage this weekend. The first one we are doing together which will be great and we will be selling our first mutton too!

Roly has met our vet Adele from Wallingford who has been out to see us. Meg continues to be a little star helping us sort the lambs and move the sheep. She is happy on the back of the quad bike now and she is being far nicer to Boris too which is helping family relations all round!

The Oxford Times have been round to see us and were interested in Meg responding to Italian commands! albeit with an Oxfordshire slant to it.....fingers crossed we get some good publicity.

The other major news is our boys...the rams....are busy doing their stuff with the girls so we hope we will have lots of lovely lambs next Spring when we will be opening the farm with the Northmoor Trust for two lambing weekends. Each ram has roughly 50 girls each! We had an amazing journey over with the rams in the quad trailer, they seemed to know exactly what they were off to do, so funny.

We are busy planning a Christmas event on the 5th and 6th December, we will keep you posted...

More soon..

Camilla and Roly, Boris and Meg

Welcome to our farm

Hello and welcome to our blog - we are Camilla and Roly from Little Wittenham in Oxfordshire and this is our blog about our amazing farm! Just to set the scene a little, we have recently taken on a tenancy from the Northmoor Trust who have given us a wonderful opportunity to fulfill a lifelong ambition for both of us to run our own farm. We are so excited and as we write we are just at the beginning of week two and we're surviving . . . just!

Week 1 highlights were picking up our 10 year old sheepdog called Meg who has come to help us out and show us what to do. Our friend David Seamark has very kindly loaned Meg to us until our other sheepdog (also called Meg...) has graduated from sheepdog school in a few months time. She has settled in really well but doesn't think very much of our other four legged helper called Boris....Boris is a staffordshire bull terrier and full of beans but is not interested in sheep!

Other highlights have been seeing all the amazing wildlife that we share our farm with from buzzards and red kites through to the yellowhammers we have seen in the hedges not to mention lots of rabbits!

We have 250 ewes (female sheep) 50 of which are expecting lambs in January, we will keep you posted on our lambing weekends we will be organising with the Northmoor Trust so you can come and see them for yourselves.

We have our first farmers market on Thursday this week, this is where we sell some of our lamb as well as supplying mince to a local school and other local pubs and restaurants. It is so exciting meeting all our customers and telling them about our sheep and how we take care of them and what they are eating. This is sometimes delicious wild flowers or clover or grassland alongside the River Thames, not a bad view! We have a lot to do and can't wait to find more local businesses to supply. We will let you know how we get on.

We moved some of our sheep last weekend, this was quite an exercise! Having taken some of our friends around the farm in the glorious sunshine on Saturday, Sunday it poured with rain and this was when we decided that some of our girls needed some fresh grass and a change of scene. We planned our route and identified every single gap which could be a potential escape route....Meg sat patiently on the back of the quad bike looking slightly bemused at all our efforts, as if to say 'leave it to me guys...' which we duly did, although I (Camilla) took a while to trust Meg as I was brought up on a sheep farm where we never had a dog! My brother and I were the sheepdogs! After all our work (4 hours in the rain...) we took the plunge, Meg was incredible and brought the sheep around our route, even gathering up some stragglers at one stage, we were at the front on the quad bike looking at this amazing scene taking place behind us. Once we had reached the field we couldn't believe we had done it! Our first sheep move was a success and we had big smiles on our faces and the sun had finally come out to mark our efforts. It was such a great feeling.

Handing over to Roly now....Today started off perfectly, for the first half hour anyway. What should have been a simple and quick whizz on the quad bike around the farm checking all the sheep almost turned into chaos. Having be led into a false sense of security yesterday when Camilla and I moved 60 ewes (female sheep) from one end of the farm to another, I made the mistake of not leading the sheep but standing in a gateway...they came charging past me and had their own plans....I had to sprint to keep up with them and just about managed to head them off before making their way into the local town, Wallingford...I regrouped with Meg, shut them in an emergency field and perservered...Meg and I then managed to lead them to the right field via a nice man walking his spaniel...what we haven't told you yet is Meg does not like other dogs so I was worried what she was going to do when she saw the other dog! No time to think I had to get the sheep back, luckily we managed it but Meg was nowhere to be seen...! I raced back and saw her herding this poor man and his dog into a corner, fortunately they were ok, I was so relieved!

Vet coming tomorrow, which we are really looking forward to. All these lovely people we are meeting to help us. A big thank you to all our amazing families and friends and farmer mentors who have helped us prepare for the day when Roly and Milla become farmers! Nick Emmett, Sally Bendall, John and Julia Sargent, Chris and Rachael Lee, Robin Hobson, Paul Hill, Sue Nix, David Seamark and Jake Freestone.

More soon!

Camilla and Roly, Boris and Meg