A Word from Westyard

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...

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...

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...

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...