BY RICHARD TORY

This cold spell has certainly caught a few people out this week.

Sometimes you take for granted your day-to-day routines, and the beast from the east has caused a few issues on the farm this week.

We have about a hundred head of store cattle on the farm as a going concern.

I usually feed these first thing in the morning and then bed them with straw, usually finishing this by eight thirty. The last few days it has kept us busy well into the afternoon due to having no water to the cattle houses - due to frozen pipes.

We have one tap on the farm we have managed to keep running (our pipes to the house are frozen too!), so each morning we are having to defrost this tap and fill a 1000 litre water bowser, which we are then taking to the cattle sheds and filling each shed’s water trough with the bowser and some drainage pipe running the water to the trough. It is a very basic system and one we don’t want to be doing for too long, but needs must and we adapt! Hopefully we will have running water soon.

All work on the fields has currently come to a stop due to the snow, however James did beat the snow and managed to drill the spring barley last week.

Hopefully this cold weather will wipe out some of the diseases that effect the crops later in the year. Usually a cold snap helps for this and kills some bugs and bacteria.

Our sheep are currently keeping the grass down in the festival field, before Teddy Rocks Festival in May.

They will soon be moving to fresh ground and are hopefully due to start lambing from the 1st April. We will have them indoors for lambing to keep an eye on them and then the ewe and lamb will go back to grass within a day of lambing. This always seems to feel like the start of spring is not far away. We also passed our inspection of the farm, to host licensed wedding ceremonies. This adds another dimension to our diversification and allows couples to have the whole day – or weekend with camping- at the farm.

It feels like a progressive step forward and allows us to offer more to guests.