A Word from Westyard

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...

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...

I sat down over a week ago to start this blog. It was all about making the most of the last week of the summer holidays before the small girl goes back to school. And ZAPP...its like someone pressed the skip button on a remote control and BAMM, a whole week flew by in an instant. Its a bit of a concern.  I know there are theorists out there who are convinced time is speeding up. And I know I'm not alone in experiencing this time warp momentum that is jogging us along at a pace that makes me just slightly uncomfortable. An American biologist has devoted a large part of his life studying this subject and doing experiments to see if time really is speeding up. He has concluded, along the way, that the older we get the less accurate our judgement of time is, therefore a minute when you are twenty seems longer than a minute when you are forty. So, what is the answer – I'm always solutions driven....be a Buddist and 'live for the moment'...there again there are the time...

When I first sat down to write this, we had officially just passed the longest day.  It has taken a few weeks to catch up and finish off.  Long days feature quite high currently, mainly due to waking up very early.  I think it must be the birds.   It's not so much a chorus as a symphony at dawn.  I was looking out of the bathroom window a few mornings ago, the clock said it was 4.26am.  The bathroom faces north and there was the most amazing stripe of orange running across the sky from the church, which is in the east.  I realised that I was at that moment witnessing the crack of dawn.  I couldn't go back to sleep so I headed to the garden and got busy taking cuttings and doing all sorts of other things I can only do productively when no one else is around.  Having worried about the lack of foxgloves, I had to laugh to myself as we were surrounded by triffids of them along the hedgerows and everywhere else you looked. All they needed was s...

Is it just me, or is this time of year utterly jaw-droppingly beautiful?  Perhaps it is just living in Devon.  The rolling countryside is waking up from spring in a wondrous way and if you stop and watch you can literally see the ferns unfurling their fronds all along the hedgerows.  The wildflowers are getting into their stride and we're seeing more than just green and yellow now.  Our drive to school this week has been hijacked by foxgloves.  I have to stop when we spot an open one.  They are the perfect kooky hangout for fairies so we have to see if one is at home!  The red campions are singing their song (Silene dioica aka the cuckoo-flower.)  They remind me of my paternal grandfather who taught me this wonderful poem as a young child - it is anonymous and has a few different versions.  I love that for a country ditty, there is much truth and sense behind it.   The...

The Easter holidays came and went and seem a blur on reflection.  Even though we are well into the new term already, we are all still a little tired from the all too short but rather feral downtime. We are such homies.  We have to remember sometimes that there is more to life than our lovely farm and green fields.  We sometimes even force ourselves to venture further than the end of the lane. One amazing holiday excursion worth a mention was a day trip to the Jurassic coast.  The small girl had a class topic last term of dinosaurs...the Ologist, well, the clue is in the name.  This was a trip down memory lane for him. As a young student of Geology he was sent here for the day to explore and came home with a prize ammonite that he carried for about two miles to the bus (and still moans about the weight!)  It sits proudly at the entrance to his father's cottage and is a great reminder that if you really want something it is worth the sweat and tear...