#NoLambWeek

Lamb Prices have crash this year and are down 30% on last year and reached the lowest price in six years. The supermarket  prices don't reflect this though and their prices are only down by 6%. 

To put that into what you pay in the supermarket its £13 per kg compared to the farmer receiving £1.36 per kg. 

Is this fair?

Someone is making a lot of money somewhere without putting in any of the effort and as anyone who keeps sheep will tell you there is a fair bit of effort involved! 

So from the 1st of August to the 7th across England there is a #NoLambWeek being staged. It's not going to change the world but it is a statement, hopefully farmers will stand together and not sell any lambs during the first week of August. 

Find more information here.

It turns out to be a bad year to get back into keeping sheep! 

Moving Sheep

Saturday evening, after work, I moved the sheep. I had planned on doing it Sunday but the forecast look awful so I decided that doing it at 9 on a Saturday night was better than doing it in the rain! 

I've moved them all onto my smallest field. The plan being that they'll eat this off and get the field fairly bare within a week or so. 

I'll then separate out the lambs to wean them. The lambs will go off to another field with loads of grass and the ewes will stay on the bare field, having minimal food will allow them to dry off, hopefully without getting mastitis in the process. Doing this will mean I then start to sell the lambs to try and bring some money back in off them (instead of it going out) and then I can think about getting the ewes into condition for tupping - I also need to buy a tup fairly soon as well!

Tour Of Mum's Garden

This is a very picture heavy post! 

Mum has finally opened her garden to some local gardening clubs and the NGS next year. She has worked on the same garden for over thirty years, although it has taken many forms in that time. 

When my brother, sister and I were young she used to grow much more vegetables and we had a big lawn to play on with swings and even the climbing frame that our primary school chucked out as they deemed it unsafe! 

Now the garden is divided up into different areas, with two ponds, a stream, BBQ area, raised beds, parterre, even an area for the grandchildren with a sandpit and a veg bed for them to grow things in. 

BBQ area added last year, we built the patio years ago using the old slabs that used to be the floors inside the house

The fencing I put up earlier this year - looks really lovely with things growing up it now.

The pond was added about 15 years ago

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veggies in the raised beds

Children's area

Parterre

The Brick garden shed that took a few years to build and finish - finished it last year but started it about 3 years ago! 

The stream - mum added this some years ago and everyone who sees it thinks it's natural!

Second pond at the bottom of the stream

Stream with the oak bridge that my brother made for her

Greenhosue and lawn

The walled garden area was built to separate the farm yard from the garden

Thirty years of hard work and constant design and development have created a beautiful space, she spends every spare minute in there and it's not difficult to see where my passion for growing has come from! I like the fact that each year she adds something new whilst maintaining everything else, 

Let me know what you think.

Six Years Ago Today

I got married to my beautiful wife. 

Time flies! 

Tree Milling

I've been working in the village this week and where I've been working they've had a mobile saw mill in to cut up a collection of fallen trees they've got.

 One is a massive seqouyah they had to fell last year as it had died and was becoming unsafe. The tree is huge so they had to first cut it up with a chainsaw mill before moving on to the diesel driven bandsaw mill. The boards don't make very good structural timber but it does make great stable cladding. 

A Slab of Sequoyah 

 It's interesting to see how they approach milling these trees and how much wood they can get out of each one. After three days they've pretty much got through the large number of trees they had collected over the last few years on the estate, such a better use than logging it for fire wood.

Milling some larch

Some of the timber stored drying.

I'm quite jealous of their stack of timber and what they can do with it all, in fact I'm planning on buying some Sequoyah from them to use as cladding on a project I'm planning.

Seeing these guys in operation makes me think that many more people should re evaluate what they do with fallen trees and they shouldn't just see it as fire wood. It means a long term investment as you have to pay to mill the wood years before you can use it, store it for years to dry it and then process it the other end, but you gain a much higher value product for your efforts.

Who else has milled their fallen trees instead of cutting it up for firewood?