Duck Island

Duck Island

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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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Toes, Teeth and Teats.

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Probably something all women of my age should attend to on a regular basis.  Toes, Teeth and Teats...   Toes....having a pedicure means you are forced to sit down and put your feet up for at least 45 minutes, an hour if you are lucky, to let your nail varnish dry - a luxury rarely indulged in these days. Teeth - always important to look after your teeth.  Regular flossing and good mouth hygiene means less painful or expensive trips to the dentist. Teats - need I say more.  Regular checks for lumps and bumps is a preventative measure to avoid the dreaded. But it's not women I refer to.  The Shepherd coined the phrase as it was used by his grandfather who taught him everything he knows to do with sheep.   So, the three T's is what we've recently completed on our new flock of sheep.  Since they arrived at the farm we have been actively involved with them checking for all the things we need to check.  Sheep, I'm reliably informed by...
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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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