Farm Life- December 2018
I’d say December is one of the quietest months on the farm. The rams are still with the ladies. Most of the ewes will have been serviced by now but we leave the rams just in case there are some missed.
Winter has definitely arrived so I have dusted off all of the bird feeders and we are all enjoying the array of garden birds who visit us each day.
The farmer went to market with some of this year’s lambs and, probably due to Christmas and Hanukkah, we got quite a good price.
We have been watching Our Yorkshire Farm on Channel 5 each week and so, to replicate their children going around the farm, our farmer bought a trailer for the back of the quad bike so expect photos of us all in the back of that over the Christmas holidays.
The biggest news this month is a bit of a sad one. After the fox visited my hens a couple of months back, we must have annoyed them closing the coop every night. So they have been back during the day.
We had seven left after the original attack and then, when I noticed the numbers had gone down again, there were four, then three. One day there was one dead in the field and one alive. The third was nowhere to be seen.
Thankfully, for the last hen, my friend runs a hen business and was coming for something else. I messaged her and asked her if she would take the hen. Bless her, she did offer me two more to keep it company but I felt the chicken would be better off with her.
We left the coop open so the fox could see there were o=none and then we shut it.
I still look into the field as I drive up to the farm, expecting the two legged nutters to come running over but, for now, my latest chicken keeping exercise is over.
Don’t worry, it’s not a permanent exercise. Even my eldest son has told me what colour cockerel he wants next year (along with turkeys, “gooses”, ducks and chicks) so as soon as Spring arrives, we will be hot-footing it to the nearest feather and fur sale at our local auction.
I might make deep cleaning the coop into some fun activity over the Christmas holidays.
It might be quiet over Christmas, or not. From experience, sometimes it is quiet before the storm.
