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Snow days....and moving home.

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I'm currently in a pregnant pause....we're a week or so prior to lambing starting; a week or so till we move back into the farmhouse, and less than a week until the Easter holidays begin. I tried my best to separate these major events in our lives...however, funny as life is, it's now all happening at once.  Like the proverbial London bus - either nothing at all or they all come at once! The builders have been thwarted with snow days, bad weather and challenging times.  I got fed up of waiting 'to be ready' and just picked a date that seemed reasonable to book our removals to bring our possessions back from storage.  I want to be in before Easter, as this heralds the start of lambing. Lambing is an intense time for all involved.  The 'Ologist and I will be going it alone this year, so the two of us will be single handedly taking care of our ewes.  That means covering 24 hours of the day between us, mostly spent in the lambing barn.   And I was hop...
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A re-introduction to life at Westyard...and the discovery of the egg thief.

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Team Westyard So, to begin the year I thought I'd reintroduce ourselves and the animals that make up our smallholding farm.  We live in mid Devon, between Dartmoor and Exmoor, on a 22 acre farm which we are slowly and lovingly restoring.  We are in the middle of an enormous building and renovation project that involves building two holiday homes and renovating our Victorian four-square farmhouse.  We are hoping to open our holiday home business later this year and invite people to come and stay on the farm and enjoy the rural Devon countryside and all that it has offer, as much as we do. First; the humans.  Me, the Small Girl and the 'Ologist.  We have been living on our farm for three and a bit years and have made quite an impact in our short time here. Our first few months involved cutting back hedges and trees that were 40 years overgrown and making piles and piles of wood.  Ever since we have been collecting and processing that wood. layed...
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Farmageddon...and of being cheated.

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Our summer holidays can be summarised in three words.  Far. Too. Short.  We were cheated.  Well actually, the truth is, the small girl changed schools.  The old school finished quite late, and the new school started back quite early.  As a result we lost about two weeks.  Never mind, we'll probably catch up in the future.  As a result we packed quite a lot of holiday stuff into our five and a bit weeks.  Lots of trips to the beach; a trip via Exeter Airport (we are so lucky to have an International airport on our doorstep!) a bit of swimming in our pond, and of course lots of time at home on the farm just kicking around as we do best.  An old school friend invited us to hang out with her and her children on the north Devon coast - it was just a few days but we made memories.  The weather was lovely, the evenings were warm and bad Mummies that we were we couldn't resist sunset on the beach one night.  This was...
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Demolition...and jumping into deep water.

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Three months have flown by since my last entry.  Much has happened.  Lambing came and went in a flurry of days that seemed to blur into nights.  Three of us were on duty and at times we were all standing watching when the action hit, marvelling at nature in its purest form, witnessing the birth of lambs.  It was good fun.  It was elating. Tiring, and at times sad.  But that's the nature of Mother Nature, cruel and kind in the same breath.  On the whole it went smoothly and we had a good success rate, with lots of cute bouncing lambs at the end of it.  The scanning helped enormously and allowed us the confidence to know exactly what to expect...apart from one ewe that was scanned as a single but had a double.  The small girl was very good; lambing dominated her Easter holidays and as a result we didn't get out and about much at all.  Instead, we lived between the lambing shed and the farmhouse kitchen consuming flapjacks and lots...
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Orange is for two....green is for one.

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Times they are a turbulent.  In every way.  Our building project has us swinging on both sides of the emotional scale; one minute jubilant with ideas and the next crushed with the reality of the mounting costs.  The winter storms have been in full turbulent swing, helping the demolition on with sheets of metal and plastic roofing flying off at high speed and landing in adjacent fields. Our sheep are expectant, fully rotund and due to lamb at the end of the month. We are currently in a stage of re-design with our building project.  The design doesn't fit the budget.  Either that or we throw more money at it.  The danger of 'value engineering' is that the quality can be compromised.  It is a fine line between cuttings costs and down spec'ing.  All the time being aware that we are beholden to an ecological timetable that gives us a short window of opportunity to get the farmhouse roof off, and back on again before May - whe...
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Of mud..and having Faith

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Our great oak now stands clear of surrounding debris, banks of rubble and random intruders.  The landscape is beginning to take shape while the earth is sculpted and scraped around it.  Amidst its roots the drainage pipes have been laid.  Now the snowdrops will have sufficient light to grow.  Followed by the bluebells in the spring.      Its been a productive but increasingly muddy few months on the farm. We've had a flurry of activity in the fields, clearing the cut wood, processing it and then moving it to season in the barn. Thank goodness we were talked into using a processing unit – a magic piece of kit that has saved us days and days of back breaking cutting and splitting. At one end you feed in cut and cleaned off straight tree trunks. It gets sawn, in our case into 12” chunks, then it gets split and then via a conveyor belt spat out into a trailer. We then dump it and stack it and hey presto....an hour of work c...
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