Proud parents!

Our last entry we said we would be in touch with some lambing news...well we had our first lamb on Tuesday bang on time! We both had the 12th January in our diaries as our January lambers due date and we couldn't quite believe one of them arrived on time!

We arrived up at the sheds at our usual time of about 6.30am and noticed one of our girls was behaving a bit strangely...suddenly everything we had learnt in our lambing course the week before was making sense. She had isolated herself from the rest of her friends and was busy trying to make a nest for herself in the straw, in between lying down, leaning her head back and licking her lips! We kept a close eye on her whilst we fed the others and after a while we thought we ought to give her a hand. We could see two front feet and a nose but she was making slow progress on her own. We managed to catch her and with a bit of a pull out came her lamb! He was a big lamb, no wonder she was struggling on her own. After a little while we moved her into her own pen so she could 'mother up' with her new baby. We are pleased to say they are both doing really well and we have since moved them into a nursery with the lambs who were born at our Christmas event who are now enormous!

Our next surprise was on Wednesday morning when a pair of twins arrived. This time she did not need any help at all and had them all by herself. We were a little concerned about them as they are on the small side but we are happy to say they are doing really well and suckling well off their Mummy. Today is Thursday and there has been no new arrivals today....yet!

Some of you in the Oxford area may have seen us on the front page of the Oxford Times today, what a surprise! We were thrilled and hope it might encourage people to contact us to buy some delicious lamb, arrange a visit or come along on one of our open lambing weekends (20th & 21st March and 27th & 28th March - keep an eye on our website for details).

Before we go, we wanted to take this opportunity to thank all our friends and neighbours in Little Wittenham, Long Wittenham and Brightwell cum Sotwell (in particular Sue at the Red Lion) for supporting us when the Oxford market was cancelled due to the bad weather.

Thank you for reading and we will keep in touch on the lamb count!

Camilla, Roly, Boris and Meg

179%!

"179% . . . not bad" said Bob Blanden. Who's Bob?! Bob came and scanned our girls who are due to lamb in March. It was so exciting, we collected them all into a large pen and then put them up a ramp and through a little trailer where Bob was sat with his ultrasound gadget. Our friends Jenny and Rob came and helped, Jenny herself expecting literally any day now!

In the end, the final stats were -

• 13 are expecting triplets
• 149 - twins
• 37 - singles

. . . and 10 were empty!

The reason we scanned our sheep was so we can now feed them the right amount of food in their last 6 weeks of pregnancy. Sheep are a little different to us, they really do have to eat for their young, especially the closer they get to having their babies. We then spent Sunday sorting them all into their appropriate groups.

All very exciting! Plus our other 50 girls should start lambing tomorrow, yikes!

We also want to thank our farming neighbour Angus Dart who has kindly given us some dairy cow colustrum in preparation for our newborn lambs. Colostrum is the first bit of milk the lamb gets from their Mummy after they are born, it is so important as it full of antibodies and lots of goodies to help them get on their feet and be warm and strong as fast as possible. Sometimes lambs need that little bit extra and colustrum from dairy cows can fill this gap. Our freezer is now full of measured out quantities to defrost should we need to, will keep you posted!

More soon, perhaps with some lambing news!

Roly, Camilla, Boris and Meggy

Fresh Tracks

We woke this morning to yet another white covering . . . and more frozen water pipes! Everthing was just so beautiful, the trees, the hedges and the fresh animal tracks.

The first job was to bucket water to every water trough and then give all the girls (ewes) in doors fresh hay. Then we jumped in the truck and went and fed all the sheep out doors, finding them in the snow was a challenge.

We then had a call from the organisers of Oxford Market saying tomorrows Farmers Market has been cancelled. This was not great as we'd had six lambs butchered and packed especially. We then sent an email out to all our local friends and neighbours to see if anyone wanted to stock up their freezers! Luckily the orders came flooding in . . . although we still have one fridge full of lamb left.

Brian is all booked up to shear the rest of the ewes on Friday, but he has 1500 of his own sheep to look after and with all the snow his workload has also tripled, so the the best laid plans are in the hands of mother nature . . . which can't be a bad thing after thinking about how beautiful the farm has been today. Just a shame about the frozen pipes!

Bye for now
Roly, Camilla, Boris and Meggy

Happy New Year!

We have had a busy couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year. We now have all the girls in the sheds with only the four boys (rams) and some of our 7 month old lambs outside braving this freezing weather which still seems to be hanging around! We spent all of Saturday bringing all the girls (ewes) in from outside and they are now all busy eating all the yummy hay we have for them all to keep them fed over winter. It is a nice feeling having them all inside on their cosy straw. No more surprises on the lamb front but some of the girls who are due to lamb in a couple of weeks are looking pretty big! Our last farmers market of 2009 was at Henley on Christmas Eve. We arrived at 7.15am having driven through a lot of snowy countryside and the market was frozen solid with ice. We and all our other market friends set about clearing it so we could start trading, it was hard work! But all with a fun Christmas spirit. We spent two days in Kent with family and our friends John and Julia Sargent very kindly looked after our girls for us while we were away.

New Years Eve was spent vaccinating the girls against abortion risk which was really important to do before we headed over the Wittenham Clumps on the quad bike to the Red Lion in Brightwell cum Sotwell to celebrate New Year! Sue and Bob who run the pub have some of our lamb every week.

The forecast for this week is still very cold, we are so pleased that the majority of the flock are now indoors . . . although the frozen water pipes and troughs are not so fun! Farmers markets start again with Oxford on Thursday (7th) and then we have Brian coming to shear the girls we have brought in on Friday followed by having them scanned to see how many babies they will be having in March, we will let you know!

Thank you for reading and happy 2010

Roly, Camilla, Boris and Meg

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!