My best guess.. not for those of a sensitive disposition

I'd said on Friday that I wondered what I'd find the next day...
Well. Here it is. On the huge rotting engine beam that has been taken out of the round house as part of the barn restoration and put in the ram's paddock. The big patch on the right is about six inches high.
First thought: "the ram's been sick".
Second thought (polite version): "the ram has ejaculated".
Third thought: "It could be some sort of fungus?".
I don't think I'm congenitally suited to being an ecologist. Too dirty-minded. Well, it was Saturday morning.

Farm craft 2

Following my fanciful forays into farm pyrography, I thought I should try my wobbly hand at something else. The entrance to the farm is a pair of ugly breeze block and concrete pillars, cracked and weathered, from which a cattle gate hangs, vital for keeping the livestock and dogs in.
Attached attractively to the gate by cable ties is (was) a plastic laminate-on-ply sign asking that people keep the gate closed at all times; well, they can open it to get in and out, of course...
I had promised myself that when the barns were finished, posts of old stone would replace the current stanchions, but as their worst is covered in ivy that might be something that never gets done. Either way, it was about time I sorted out the gate sign and produced a farm sign to match.
So I nicked a couple of slates that had come off the old barn roof and sat and sucked my pencil end whilst I worked out dimensions, spaces, fonts and so on. Hoorah for computers; I printed out various font sizes 'til it looked ok and then started to copy the lettering in pencil before painting them in with the eggshell left in the linhay by the previous owners.
I'm not one for perfection or patience, so it's kind of uneven. But I like it.

Slow, slow worm

There it was, minding its own business when someone (me) came along and picked up a few stones to make sure the mower wouldn't crash and burn later in the year.
This is the first slow worm I've seen on the farm. It was all knotted up like a Celtic tribute. It eyed me as an interfering force, so I put the stone back and left it to its curled comfort.
I love how there is so much going on around us and that just sometimes we catch a glimpse of what is there. It was new and exciting to me, but to the slow worm it was just another minute in its day.
What might I find tomorrow?
(If you click to enlarge you can see its eye and nostril at the bottom of the photo).

Hedgerow life

So many wonderful things to be seen if you walk rather than drive. Yesterday I found an early-purple orchid on the verge as I walked the outer boundary of the farm, and today I spotted a bright blue egg in a hedge, tucked behind gorse. I think it belongs to a song thrush. And then I noticed that a lot of the ferns are starting to unfurl; they look like ammonites.
What did you see today that gave you a thrill?

Protection racket

For 31 days one of the geese has been sitting on a clutch of eggs and yesterday just three out of about ten, hatched. Whilst she has sat she has eaten practically nothing, although I put a bowl of fresh corn by her nest each morning. She gets off the nest once a day to grab a mouthful of water and a snatch of grass, and she is back to the job in hand.
Geese lose an enormous amount of weight during this period; their fat reserves gone, their feathers go dry and brittle, and there is none of the usual chubbily overfilled nappy effect dangling between their legs.
Two other geese have also been laying eggs in the same hut, but have not started to sit as yet; they might if the new births don't distract them permanently.
Today, the goslings came out of the hut, down what for them must be an Everest of a ramp, and onto the grass which they pick at in curiosity. The sitting goose is surprisingly not central to the outing; she is off, heading for food, like the starving animal she is. Instead, the eldest goose seems to have taken charge - that's her, tattered head, sitting proudly as matriarch. The tattered head is the result of amorous gander behaviour; he's obviously keen on the old lady as her battle scars are worse than those of the younger geese.
But now the goslings are here, the gander will forsake fornication and take up position as prime protector. Each time the goslings wandered through the stock fencing he nudged them back with his beak. I couldn't get any nearer without risking a major pecking and a blast of ear-drum shattering honking , so the image is taken from a distance.
The extended family of the goose is something to admire; a whole army of aunts and dad to keep you safe, and the hand that brings the chick crumbs and fresh water at bay, or at a safe distance. I suspect the rest of the eggs will go to waste as the excitement and duty rota created by the new babes takes precedence. But at this young age, I'm not counting my goslings; even with the best protection racket in the animal kingdom, there may be none left by the end of next week.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Enough of lambing and spring. Let's leave the pastoral red in tooth and claw world for some rat race sneering.
I don't know anyone like the competitors on The Apprentice. I have no idea if they are actors or one-offs or clichés of a group that I just haven't come across (other than in the zoo perhaps). They lie without compunction (have they forgotten that they are being filmed, watched and noted?), have the kind of bitter rows I've only ever seen within families, and are, each and every one, vile on a surfeit of ego.
Can you imagine announcing to anyone let alone to the whole BBC viewing public, that you have a high IQ? Serious chips on shoulders and inferiority complexes going on there. Or perhaps you'd feel happier emphasising some part of a self-perceived brilliance? No. The narcissism is of truly Greek proportions.
It makes for extraordinary viewing and tells you everything you need to know about how not to manage people. Not one of the current crop is a simply nice, intelligent person with good or interesting ideas; they are all deeply flawed humans. They will all be fired because of their hubris, human frailties and the will of the gods - aka Siralan (is that one word or two?).
I wonder how they would fare being put in charge of the lambing shed? How would they divvy up the shifts, make sure they had the right equipment and skills, collaborate in a life or death situation, ensure cleanliness and good husbandry? If they can't run a pub grub night effectively (otherwise known as a piss-up in a brewery), they wouldn't stand a chance.
Horrid tykes the lot of them. I watch it through spreadeagled fingers; it's almost unbearable.

Yodelayheee!

You learn something new every day. Have you ever heard of a Tyrolean flicker gun? Yes? Well it's a first on me. What with the Bernese Mountain Dogs and tools more familiar with lederhosen than American workwear, this is turning into mini Switzerland; all it needs is edelweiss and cuckoo clocks to complete the cliché.
Splat, splat, splat they've gone all day, coating the external cob with lime render, smoothing (not too carefully, the base isn't MDF ) the splats so that the limewash will take.
And there may not be edelweiss, but there are marsh marigolds and wood anemones dangling at the waters edge. But I do have a cowbell hanging from a hook in the kitchen that gets shaken to call the workers in for refreshment.

Fluff

There are times (like now) when you can have enough of sheep. Two ewes are left to lamb, one of which is more a shipping container than a mere box of frogs. It is completely wild, and has no concept that the sheep is a domesticated animal, bred for centuries to be farmed. No. This sheep is a wolf, a piranha, and as I discovered this morning, a battering (ewe) ram.
My left tit (ok, TMI) is all purple bruise where this particular nutter took a flying leap at me, having given itself a considerable run up first, and launched into me full tilt like a bowling ball at a skittle. I managed to stand my ground, but only just, and the pain!
I know that a flock can have its flighty moments, but I've never known anything quite like this, particular at lambing time when my close and constant presence is at its most acceptable. The old girls positively welcome me helping out if they are having a little trouble and will come up to me if I'm sat on my stool observing, to give my hand a sniff. They crowd round me when I have a bucket of feed, and just a glance of me has them trotting over to see if there might be something good on offer. But not the flying ewe. I hope this one lambs on her own and needs no assistance; the consequences of having to help her could mean serious injury... to me!
So, to take my mind off sheepy things, and in line with the remaining quality of brain I have left, I have buried myself in fluff. I'm not recommending the Jilly Cooper romances for anything other than helping you drift off to sleep on those occasions when counting sheep is more likely to send you into an anti-farming frenzy, but Bella, Imogen, Prudence, Emily, Harriet and Octavia, although not bearing any literary examination, have kept my head quiet, a fictional morphine if you will, over the last couple of weeks. Jilly makes me chortle. It may be hogwash, but sometimes a hog can help you forget a sheep, bruises or no bruises.

Families and solitude

At 6.30am feeding time, all the sheep and their lambs rush alongside me to get noses first into the feed troughs. It's loud, it's fast, it's physical, it's a race. Two hours later, having finished my other animal duties, I come back to check all is as it should be and the scene could not be more different. With full stomachs requiring most of their energy, all are now sitting or lying in lone parent groupings, chewing the cud companionably as if they were at a Gingerbread meeting. The lambs have given up their games of group chase and snooze next to or on top of their mothers. Siblings rest together. It's a wonderful, peaceful scene and a chance for me to check that each family group has bonded as it should and that no lamb has been abandoned or is in trouble.
In the next field the llama looks morose, and sulks, if a llama can sulk, disliking his solitary situation. In a few days all the sheep will join him and he will nose each lamb, adding them to his stock of extended family smells.

A big (barn) day

Yesterday was a big day, barn wise. Although there is much to do still on the cob barn, the main roof is now on and looking gorgeous; reclaimed local rag slate and hip and ridge tiles were used, so there is nothing new or shiny about it - it just looks in good shape for an ancient building.
It makes sense to swap effort to the threshing barn to get its roof on too, and then all the joinery and finishing can take place on both barns knowing that the structures are secured and weatherproof. Finishing sounds posher than it is - external lime render and limewash is the sum total of that; these are barns, not holiday homes.
So it was back to demolition mode again, removing the treacherous stone that sat above the huge rotted beam that originally supported the horse engine in the attached roundhouse, and taking down the areas of failed cob. But new cob blocks also went up, so destruction to construction in one day.

Snowstorm

Out bleary-eyed at 6.30am to find small polystyrene pellets clinging to my hair. I find a beautiful pair of big ewe lambs have been born since the last check, the first birth I think that has gone unattended; the ewe must have gone from nought to sixty swiftly and easily.
I feed and water everything accompanied by excitable bleating. Now the majority of the ewes have lambed and are outside, they bellow at me to get a move on as I walk through them to the feed troughs. They try to get their noses into the bucket as I move fast to avoid being tripped up by their eagerness. I iodine the new lambs, feed the llama, let out the geese and the ducks and fill a haynet for the ram. The polystyrene balls are turning to flakes, thick and heavy, and start to settle. I grab my camera and as the sun comes out to melt the snow, take a record of the morning's chilly beauty.

Box of frogs

Mad as a box of frogs is a choice description that my neighbour generously contributed to my vocabulary. Box of frogs is now the name for any of the first-timer Torwens who don't realise they are lambing, drop their burden from a standing start and run off, relieved that the tum and bum pains have finally stopped. You have to corner these skippity creatures and herd them into a pen where their wet lamb is waiting to be licked into the world. The bonding is fine once the ewe gets her first sniff and taste; the problem is getting them to realise that the pain and the lamb are in any way connected. Expecting them to appreciate that they are in lamb at all and therefore shouldn't be leaping over feed troughs, straw bales and each other is an unwinnable battle, and the older ewes just look at them with disdain: "keep your strength for later, young'un".

Deadheading the farm

The dogs are desperate to be taken for a decent walk, so today as the unlambed ewes seemed intent on retaining their burdens for some while, I indulged us all and walked the hedgelines with Mopsa and Fenn to check on spring.
Notwithstanding my fears that all the chopping, laying, banking, coppicing, fencing and general mauling about would lay the place to waste, spring has made long bacon at me and burgeoned regardless.
It seems that a farm is not dissimilar to a rose; you hack it back with some care, and it will burst out with new growth, knowing better than I that it will survive and thrive on drastic treatment.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

Rage! Blow! And please be done with it quick smart before any of the lambs succumb to hypothermia.
I haven't yet been carried off across the Cornish border by the determined gales, the menagerie is still intact, and the fires haven't gone out, but it's not nice out there.
It comes in flurries; the trees sway and bend and the wind howls round the buildings, then suddenly everything is quiet, the trees stand straight, before another determined whoosh that rattles branches onto the barn roof, makes the loose straw skip, and parts the fleece on the outside ewes. Worse, a few bits of corrugated tin on barn roofs and walls that were thought to be well secured are being persistently jiggled about and I suspect will be ripped from their moorings before the weather settles; it is far too dangerous to do anything about it in this wind.
The house is in a hollow and naturally well protected, but as soon as you walk away from it to check the sheep, jackets flap, hats sit askew and dead leaves and other detritus eddy across your path. This should be a day for baking, reading the weekend papers or a Jilly Cooper, but instead it's on with the outdoor gear and up the hill every hour or so.
Like the wind, lambing comes in flurries with two lots of doubles in the last twelve hours - a break from the dreaded triplets - and more looking interested in producing some of their own.

An unexpected phone call

The morning round complete, I check emails and start work. The phone rings and an unfamiliar chatty, chilled Totnes voice says she hopes I don't mind, but she's just been googling "cob barns", seen the farm website and wonders if I can help.
She has a friend, a Buddhist monk, who is looking for a cob barn to buy for hosting educational children's workshops. I'm so stunned by this that I don't hear that much of the rest.
Just last week I gave short shrift to a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses who thought they might convert me on my doorstep, but not even I can be rude to a Buddhist monk or their putative friend, even though I was beginning to think "scam". Perhaps I jump to negative conclusions too quickly - actually there is no perhaps about it - but when she mentioned that her monk had charitable funding to buy said barns, the tone was set. Ivana, she said her name was. And yes, the STD she left was indeed a Totnes code.

The lambing quickstep

It's all slow, slow, manic, manic, slow on the farm at the moment. You wait for something to happen, then everything hits in a rush (heaps of triplets, all night vigils, donning the long plastic gloves for an up-the-sheep moment), and then it's all quiet again.
It's as emotionally exhausting as being a young girl at her first disco, hugging the wall for a few records, being whizzed around for ten minutes by some overly hormonal partner, then rejoining the other wallflowers.
The sheep with lambs are now out in the orchard, enjoying the sun on their backs and the fresh grass. I go up with the bottles and top up any triplets that aren't getting enough milk. It's always a relief when the lambs turn back to their mother once they've had their fill, rather than follow me around - I'm not looking to be a full time surrogate mum!
So, I will waltz, slowly, up the hill to see if any ewes are doing the lambada.

Five minutes peace

I can't believe how tired I am, and lambing has only started and there are just a couple of dozen ewes to deal with; how friends with 500 manage, I can't even start to imagine. Either way, you're in and out of the lambing shed like some crazed self-winding clockwork toy, checking behaviour, changes in eating patterns, signs of water bags, general atmosphere, and topping up one set of triplets with bottled milk as their first time mum hasn't really got enough of her own. Neither me nor far more experienced farmers I know have ever come across a first-timer having triplets - what was she thinking? Luckily the lambs are evenly sized and full of energy and survival instinct, so no larger bully is benefiting over the others.
Mini and major dramas are enacting themselves all over the place. The first batch of incubated goose eggs are starting to pip, so I am hoping there may be goslings under the heat lamp in a couple of days. One of the geese is sitting on her own full nest, au naturale, as proud and protective as can be. An Aylesbury duck suffered from a prolapse of the oviduct, so she has been dispatched, plucked and is in the freezer, my clean lambing Dickies boilersuit now covered in white down. A ewe gave up trying to lamb after some sterling effort, and intervention brought out one malformed lamb that had blocked the cervix causing another perfectly good lamb to die, leaving the mum with one good healthy ram (this run of triplets is ridiculous - that's three sets so far). Saddest of all, the matriarch, Mrs Longtail, succumbed to pasteurellosis, something the flock had never suffered from until last year when two ewes were also lost to it in the final stages of pregnancy. They are all vaccinated against this lethal pneumonia, have been well fed and are in a well ventilated barn, but you can't avoid the inevitable stress to the body caused by lambing or stop cold windy weather. I'll have to discuss future planning with the vet.
My old cat is getting scrawnier, but still eating, drinking, purring, strolling, mock-hunting, and as you can see, happy to share a bed with Mopsa on a filthy welly-boot dirt strewn kitchen floor. And I am off to check on the ewes, again.

It's started

...and it's triplets! Not entirely something to celebrate really - a ewe only has two teats after all, and triplets rarely do as well as doubles.
Not the best photo, but at less than 12 hours old they are uncooperatively fixated on breathing, eating and investigating rather than posing. Oh, and they are ALL boys. This is one of the prettiest ewes in the flock, nicely marked and with delicate features.

Easter egg hunt

If you look closely, you will see one of the crème eggs from the handfuls poked into various hidey holes in and around the barns for the builders to find, this last morning before their Easter break.
I used to love treasure hunts, the kiddy sort rather than those beloved of suburban families in cars during the seventies and eighties that I remember from summers in North West London.
I left a note stuck on the window of the converted shipping container the builders use as an office, attached to one egg, that said there were nine more to find. There was a chuckling but plaintive response asking whether there were really ten in total. One egg is still sitting untouched in one of the dovecotes. It's really hard not to look at it and give the game away.

I'm a llama - let me out of here

No, this is not an image of the remaining traces of an escapee llama. If you walk along the fence line there are numerous catches of his hair where he has stretched his extraordinary neck to chew on some succulent shoot in the hedge.
The fence also has rubbings of fleece - black from the Torwens, white from the Torddu. And now I am finding a different kind of black, white and chestnut fur where it shouldn't be.
Fenn, the young Bernese Mountain Dog, has decided that she is in fact a steeple-chaser, and is leaping five bar gates and barbed wire fences with impunity. All physical obstacles put in place to dissuade her from this potentially dangerous feat have failed. The cast iron spike by the preferred "show-jump" has been wrapped so that she doesn't impale herself.

Horology

There I was, minding my own, when from between my wellies was a reminder of fleeting hours, weeks, month, years. And it was already starting to disintegrate. Thanks.
And then I looked at the calendar, and it told me that clocks change in less than a fortnight.
I know I said I wanted lambing to hurry up and start, but now I've changed my mind. Just SLOW DOWN will you?

It's oh so quiet...

It's oh so still in this grey, watery run up to lambing. No tractors are out and about - the fields are too sodden to take the strain, everyone is dealing with indoor tasks, sorting their paperwork and tackling VAT returns. Farming seems on hold apart from those with dark shadows under their eyes from nights in the calving pens and lambing sheds.
I feed the sheep and check their udders and girths. In theory they could start lambing the day before Easter Sunday, and one or two look like they might oblige, with swollen udders and teats becoming more prominent. The lambing shed is all ready, old straw and muck removed, pens set up and fresh straw scattered, water buckets and haynets on hand and gloves, lube and iodine in place.
Lambing has been happening since Christmas round here, so the wait seems particularly extended and I feel the urge to get going on this most exciting and exhausting occupation in my farming year. More than anything I want the rain to stop and the sun to shine, encouraging fresh shoots of grass to welcome the new arrivals.
Even though they are brought in at night and many lamb between dusk and dawn, inevitably, some of the ewes will lamb outside during the day and I don't want them to drop their young into puddles. I'll be going up and down between the house and the orchard where the expectant mums spend their days to make sure nothing untoward happens and my calf muscles will build their April shape. I've been known to take a stool up there and watch a ewe determine her lambing space and go through the whole process, and when the lambs are up and happy, take mum and offspring into the lambing shed to iodine the navels, feed and water the mum, and give them up to 24 hours in there before giving mum her first pedicure in five months and sending them off into the sun.
But for now, it's the quiet before the storm.
Tomorrow I'll try and take a photo of the heavily laden ewes between downpours.

Wishing for otters

From time to time when there are no sheep in Second Lower Moor (no, not an inspirational name, but historically correct), I let the dogs play there by themselves whilst I slip through the gate into the adjacent copse and check out the otter holt. I peek into the entrances and lightly poke about the area looking for trails or spraint.
I get a physical surge of excitement just at the prospect of otters choosing to live on the farm. I have seen very few wild otters ever, the sightings don't yet make a handful, and I have yet to see one in Devon although I have smelled their presence just a short stroll from here. So when I saw the picture of Lotty in this Saturday's Western Morning News, I was to be found stroking the newsprint in a quite pathetically wistful manner.
I now have the cutting pinned on my noticeboard, next to my computer, and I gaze at the seven week old beauty, with her black button nose and her black button eyes with something akin to adoration. I wish she'd come to stay.

The elements

I wondered why the barometer manufacturers had bothered with those extreme gradations so far below the "bloody awful weather" category. Now I know.
I kept waking in the night, hoping that willpower alone would keep the half finished barn roof in place. Having three chimneys in the house, the wind whistles and hoots through its trio of echo chambers just to make sure the inhabitants have plenty to keep them wakeful and worriting.
The blustering is as bad as ever and it's not yet safe to go and check if any trees are down or for any other damage. The sheep are ok and the dogs will have to be content with poking their noses and behinds briefly out of doors; no walks today.

Snipe

It's been raining in short, hard bursts, and the lower fields are soggy and soft. As you sploosh your way through, there is a stirring and a whirring, and a plumpish shape or three or thirty rise noisily and move off for a while. Skewers with wings, these extraordinary birds love the wet rushy pasture, but are incredibly shy and I only ever see them making their getaway. A couple of years ago I saw a parent and a number of young in a field ditch, but they too took to the air as I unwittingly disturbed them. I only wish the snipe would have let me take this photo.

Women in Farming

This evening I was mingling with artists and farmers at the Phoenix Arts Centre for the exhibition resulting from the Women in Farming project put together by Aune Head Arts.
It's a topic close to my heart and in the press too, this week.
The work was beautiful, honourable, moving, familiar and unfamiliar. Framed by mounts of felted fleece and adorned with gold plated copies of their ear tags (made by Louise Evans), Jennie Hayes' photographs of the sheep on Sue Peach's Dartmoor farm made me want to wrench the images off the wall and take them home with me. I was drawn again and again to look at the detail of their heads, their gaze, their ear tags, their carefully shorn necks, every inch as imperious as any senior politician sitting for their portrait.

Swaling

There has been swaling. Because the culm hasn't been grazed by cattle this year and needs the thick thatching cleared to encourage fresh growth, a carefully controlled burn has played gently over about a quarter of the purple moor grass tufts in Moor Wood. The ground is very wet, and so romping flames are unlikely here, although on Dartmoor where the gorse is swaled to keep its spread under control, they have firemen on standby. Now, why didn't I think of that?

Prehistoric mini monsters

And so the clumps of spawn are increasing. I honestly don't ever remember seeing so much of the stuff; it seems that the frogs are in hyperactive mode and as each nucleus grows from a dot to a dash, more eggs are laid just to make sure. And in the warmest spots, there are tadpoles, those strange black spermy wrigglers that headbutt each other in their frenzied acknowledgement of life.
It's incredibly hard taking a decent photo of tadpoles - not just because they are in constant movement - but because the surface of the water reflects the photographer from most angles in preference to the beasts below. But there they hover, in primordial gloop, safe from the jam jar if not from natural predators.

Let there be light

Yesterday the scaffolders came and removed all the internal scaffolding in the barn which was starting to get in the way of the roof works and the patching of the walls. Wow.

Treasure trove

Winter is the season for major farm earthworks. Whilst the grass, trees, and hedgerows sleep there is heavy machinery at work remedying the trauma caused by decades of sheep and cows trampling at will through supposed boundaries and barriers. Devon hedge banks are strange ramparts, topped with hedgerow plants and trees, but unless they are kept steep sided with a thick palisade of thorny and spiny growth, lambs and sheep will bounce all over them, walk through them and create huge gaps that become livestock thoroughfares.
So, as this year's five chosen banks have had their hedges laid and the earth beneath them scooped by the digger magician back into shape, fencing follows swiftly before the sheep are allowed access; it's not only lambs that like to play King of the Castle.
As a consequence of all this work I have become ultra familiar with each bend, slope and growth on these boundaries. I have walked back and forth, back and forth, fencing tools in hand, gazing first at the ground where the slumped earth has been removed and remade into banks, and then at the banks themselves. Once the early spring rains start, the soil will be quickly, naturally covered with grass and wild flowers, so this is the time for revelation.
The largest objects I find are several ancient ploughshares in fields that it was thought had never been ploughed. Covered in soil, something about the shape of that small piece above ground (too straight for a stone perhaps) makes me stop and tap with whatever tool I have to hand; then I tug and yet another large, heavy piece of carefully shaped metal comes into the light. I drop the ploughshares by gateways. I refuse to throw them out and like to look at them as I go in and out of a field, wondering how the place was peopled and worked in the past.
The banks are the places to find misplaced tools. I find a wrench of old design, clogged with soil and rusted solid, no doubt carefully placed on the bank whilst a back was stretched or shoulders rolled, and then forgotten in a moment of distraction. It reminds me to double check that all the fencing tools are brought away as we move from section to section.
And sometimes I find something more intriguing; shards of pottery with the date of George VI's coronation still clear or hand made thick glass from some bottle of liniment or beer. And just occasionally I find whole bottles; my favourite has the legend "Corner's Oils for Sheep and Cattle" moulded along the body.
The bottles stand on the high mantel over the fireplace, and again, make me wonder each time I glance at them, about the people on the farm in the past.

I'm officially wild....

The wood on the farm is now an official County Wildlife Site, "due to the presence of Culm grassland and wet woodland, both rare and declining habitats in Devon; although the areas are relatively small they are of sufficient quality and wildlife interest to meet the CWS criteria." So says Devon Biodiversity Records Centre.
I'm rather excited about this recognition plus having responsibility for managing the wood sympathetically, knowing that there are fabulous and rare species to be enjoyed within the farm itself, developing knowledge about the various species and the ooh aah factor. Especially the ooh aah factor. That happens when you count a dozen more orchids than in the previous season.
Four other sites across the farm that were also surveyed are "not currently of CWS standard, though with time and continued sympathetic management there is clearly the potential for them to improve further in quality and ecological value." So room for improvement then. I like a challenge.
If you want to hunt through the history of this process, click on the culm label at the bottom of this post.

Five hours of high quality culture a week for kids

I have been churning and turning this issue over in my mind for days and just can't get to grips with it. As someone who has spent all her working life in the arts I should be cheering and clapping my hands, imagining the crocodiles of children snaking past exhibits, crying in theatres and snapping eagerly with cameras, but instead I can't help feeling more than a little bewildered.
How, exactly, are children going to get the equivalent of an hour a day, five days a week of high quality cultural activity? Are artists going to be the new teachers? I suspect that the only people who get 5 hours of HQC a week are art critics, and they have to watch/walk past/read through many tens of hours of dross to attain this. And what is it with the government and the target number five?
Now, I'd love to think that I could spend an hour on Monday having a go at throwing a pot with the help of a fabulous local potter, Tuesday bursting my lungs with contemporary song, Wednesday touring the region's best art gallery and museum instead of munching on a lunchtime snack, and on Friday using up my last two hours on a thrilling performance. But I know that this just isn't going to happen. And on a rural note it'd take at least ten hours of my time to get to these things; not everyone lives near city amenities.
Are we also being ridiculous in expecting this "Find your Talent" scheme to produce hundreds of thousands of artists that wouldn't otherwise exist because of some lingering idea that Cool Brittannia was a real concept and accessible to all?
Yes, I want schools to incorporate music and art and literature and new media and drama and every aspect of the arts within the school day. I want arts organisations to enable people of all ages to engage in their work in thrilling ways. I want people, including children to feel proud of their artistic and cultural achievements, and to have opportunities to get hands on with things they couldn't do at home - I always wanted to have a go at sculpting with stone rather than fiddling with potato prints. Professional artists working alongside communities and individuals can and do deliver extraordinary life-enhancing experiences.
But should this activity be circumscribed and headlined by a highly improbable numerical target? I suspect that rather than creating real, new, extraordinary activities that the most routine will be included by this number crunching daftness. Spent Sunday watching the telly and caught a bit of the latest period drama because your Mum insisted on watching it? Tick. Double period drama class on Thursday afternoon? Two ticks. Eng Lit on Friday morning? Tick. Recorder lesson? Tick.
I really don't mean to sound like a killjoy, but if we want a vibrant, culturally aware population it should be for everyone, not just a few pilot geographies in competition with each other (that post-code lottery thing). And all the pressures that stopped teachers taking pupils to the theatre (cost, overburdened curriculum, transport fears, excessive responsibility etc) and strangled peripatetic music services (too expensive, natch) is the stuff needing tackling. Humph.

It's a matrix with its very own jargon

You may recall that I was a little nervous of asking the builders when the first slates would go on the cob barn roof.
The massive oak trusses went up so quickly, and since then a veritable crisscross of timbers with their own precise taxonomy is being added so that by the time the roof is ready for the slates to go up, the rain will have to dodge a great deal of wood before it can splash to the floor.
Across the trusses are the mighty purlins, and today three quarters of the roof is covered in vertical rafters. I worry for the ancient cob walls, but am reassured by the structural surveyor that they will happily take the weight without groaning to a heap of cobby rubble.
In the bonus February sun the builders perch like happy parrots all over the roof, hammers and tools strapped firmly into their belts.
I suspect that by the end of the week the mass of horizontal battens will start to go up, and then it's just a matter of putting the jargon in a place where my brain will retain it for further recall, and it will be slate time.
Oh, and I did ask, and the answer is within the next fortnight.

The boy's so good...

...it's enough to put you into a permanent slump. It isn't that the plot is so magnificent or that the characters are particularly original, it's that the writing is just so damn good.
Andrew O'Hagan had me on page one - truly gripped and completely relaxed in the knowledge that I was in the hands of a master for 278 pages of brilliant prose. Whether it was the "smirr of rain", "the lipstick smile" or the "windows the size of bibles" I groaned with appreciation of the originality yet appropriateness of the phrases.
There are life changing experiences for various characters. When the housekeeper finds an ancient note tucked deep under the mattress by her husband telling her "I DON'T LOVE YOU ANY MORE", I found myself startled on her behalf, not by the fact of the lovelessness but by the bitterness that must have led him to put the note there in the first place. To imagine finding such a note is to wish yourself permanent despair.
The priest tells of his school's tradition of pupils and staff wending their way to the annual picnic at Gormire Lake by any means of transport possible, and how he made his journey by elephant accompanied by cheers, and in so doing realised that imaginative impulses can be made real.
And then there are the comments leisurely chucked into the brew, that speak with painful honesty and admit to singular snobbery, such as the advertising hoardings speaking "of other people's choices" - don't they just?
Even a blogger wants to shape words in a way that creates interest, and Be Near Me is surely a prime example of the good stuff.

Yet more firsts - some good, some most definitely not

Last month I was counting off the various firsts of the year to date. Now there are more to add to the list.
This morning there was a heap of straw in the goose hut, pulled and picked into a comfy doughnut shape by one of the geese. I parted it carefully, and yes, the first goose egg of the year. Traditionally they start laying on Valentine's day, so if it was laid before midnight, she was spot on. I'll wait til there are enough eggs to put in the incubator and then let them do their thing by benefit of electricity, leaving the geese to sit naturally on another clutch.

There was the first flush of blossom in the orchard. It is on the unknown tree - I think it is a plum but don't really know - and the reason as to why it never fruits and reveals its true nature is clear; every year it blossoms far too early and the frost will kill off any premature buds. Looks like it's getting it wrong again.
Then there were the two nuthatches eyeing each other up. One of them, the male I guess, was displaying and trembling his tail feathers for all the world as if he was a bird of paradise; never seen that before.
And then on Wednesday I came in to find my first ever ominous recorded phone message from the animal health department of Defra announcing that the farm is in the newly enlarged Bluetongue surveillance zone. To be honest, the chances of doing anything to prevent my sheep getting this disease is nil, and the temptation to bury my head in activity is strong. I know only too well that some midges and mozzies have survived our warm winter. What a way to welcome the lambing season.

Up she goes

A duck's eye view of the magnificent erection, showing the back end of the barn, still hidden by heaps of mud. But you get the general idea, I hope. By the end of what was a gloriously sunny day all the roof trusses are in place, and a sprig of oak has been attached to the right hand truss for luck. As night falls and the builders feel rightly proud of a good day's work we all celebrate the topping out by downing some fizz - in this case sparkling cider made from the 2006 crop of apples.
Next day and the builders are perched on the apex, fixing the sections that will create the hipped ends. I haven't dared to ask when the first slates will go on.

War Horse

I spent a lot of yesterday afternoon with tears splashing down my face and trickling down my neck. I was with a thousand other people, many of whom were dabbing uselessly at their eyes or struggling to keep juddering shoulders under control; it was practically full house for the penultimate matinée of the current run of War Horse at the National.
I'd come up by train from Devon, travelling for five hours, just to find myself right back there, but now the countryside was animated by extraordinary lifesize puppets of horses, crows and geese. I sat there wishing all my friends had been in the audience so that we could have shared this astonishing experience.
Michael Morpurgo wrote the book on which the play is based, just a few miles from here in Iddesleigh. For me, the Devon roots of the story added further poignancy to this tale of love, family, war, bitterness, violence, humanity and the ties between man and beast. We see the wrangling sale of a young colt and the bond between growing horse and growing boy seasoning. Humanity in its black, white and grey sides is blatantly portrayed, with both the loss of feeling and the fervent hold onto emotion and kindness when faced with the impossibility of war.
The overwhelming horsepower on stage was so strong that I could almost smell their sweat. Utterly horselike, the puppets were completely convincing as proud cavalry mounts and withered broken-mouthed starvelings; the deaths of horses as desperate as that of men.
Critics who have mocked this piece as a bit of flagrant anthropomorphism have missed the point; the puppetry is masterful, amazing, pure theatre at its most magical, but it is the capturing of the emotional journeys through appalling wickedness, and the death and simultaneous survival of the spirit, human and animal, that had us all weeping.

Love is in the air

Cole Porter was on my lips even before I read the Guardian's Saturday Poem. I was composing and humming a lewd farming version to myself, whilst admiring the gander's ability to copulate with three different geese in the space of ten minutes. Putting the ducks to bed later the drake couldn't even go the distance from paddock to hut without a quickie en route with his favourite bird.
The ram, now in sweet seclusion having done his thing during November and December, is still feeling distinctly amorous and I had to remonstrate with him quite firmly that no, constant head-bashing of the gate was not going to lead back to the harem.
The ewes, on the other hand, are heavily in lamb, with just six weeks to go. They spend their time eating and lying down, mating a distant memory.
All of which leads me to this week's bad joke. At some point in the next few days there should be a magnificent erection; the roof trusses are due to go up on the cob barn and a crane is on order. Pictures will be taken.

Fabulous sea creature habitat

Back to the wonderful Northcott Mouth today to get a winter fillip and celebrate the neighbour's dog's birthday (any excuse). It is the most amazing place.
But what is this stuff? It looked like sesame seed snaps, extruded into cylinders and clumped together in massive boulder size lumps. Click on the image to have a really close look at the structure.


Postscript: it's honeycomb worm! Even the name is fabulous.

Putting in the floor

Work stopped on the West Barn temporarily as the builders wait for the oak to be delivered that they will make on site into the roof trusses.
Not leaving hands idle seems to be the order of the day and an immense amount of readymix arrived at 7.30am to be poured over the damp proof membrane in the threshing barn. The conveyor belt was unfurled from the mixer and went in the main doorway, through the full width of the barn and out the other side to fill in the footings for the roundhouse before being retracted to fill the main floor area.
And the oak finally arrived today, courtesy of old wingnut himself.

Self-cleaning dogs?

Last night the ever watchable Kevin McCloud was in architectural heaven over paint that literally shrugs off dirt. He was as gleeful as a six year old boy as he dipped and re-dipped a piece of board coated in this clever stuff, and no matter how many times he submerged it in a vat of liquid mud it came out sparkling whilst the non-coated back was thick with gloop.
Yesterday I was on my hands and knees; that's on HANDS AND KNEES, with damp J-cloth wiping Mopsa's muddy pawprints off the stairs, landing and bedroom floors.
The building work + the weather + the season = unavoidable heaps of mud. Unbelievably copious amounts of the stuff. You open the front door and it pushes into the house unasked and unwanted like an evil relative or a z-list celebrity contrarily selling Daz. Footprints and pawprints are swabbed off the kitchen floor weekly; more often would be pointless - you might as well do it every half hour and die of boredom and drudgery. At least that can be done with a mop, the floor being covered in lino. But the stairs, landing and bedrooms are all ancient floorboarding of varying widths - the mop is not for them. So, hands and knees it is then.
Mopsa watched Grand Designs with me last night. She cast a baleful eye of recognition at the vat of mud.
I sit up in bed this morning and see the trail of huge mucky pawprints polkadotting what had been the beautiful clean wooden floor. I cast Mopsa, who is sleeping on her soft mat by the bed, my own baleful glance, wondering if it would be possible to have her coated in Kevin's miracle paint.

Five minutes to the Himalayas

Driving to Okey today, the Himalayas were spread out in front of me; a panorama of snow capped mountains.
Well, no, it was the tors and hills of Dartmoor that had been dipped in clotted cream and whipped meringue just to remind us it is winter. The banks by the side of the road were crystalline with sparkly icy slush, but the snow was all kept specially for the heights of the moor itself.
I didn't have my camera with me, so this is pinched, and you can bet the snow will have melted by the time I head that way again.

Sharp sight and blurred vision

This morning, leaning into the wind, I called the llama to come and get his feed. Normally he waits for me by the gate but he was sheltering behind the high hedge and although he turned to look at me, wouldn't come. What with the howling weather, I was keeping my head down and my fleecy beanie had slipped partially over my eyes, and not being madly attentive to what was happening around me I was hoping to deliver a quick feed and achieve a swift getaway.
And then a scrawny and not particularly lithe dog fox lolloped across the field, heading away from the llama and the sheep and towards the pig paddock and the ducks. I skidded after him as a frightener, and although he kept away, his less than chubby state makes me think he'll be back.
Later, walking Fenn through the wood we disturbed a red deer stag with soft, velvety antlers, about a foot or so in length, about half their potential size. The stag bounced towards me and then veered off, easily reaching safety whilst Fenn panted by my side in excitement.
Coming out of the wood I noticed that one of the Torwen ewes was in the wrong field. She was quite happy, chomping on the rushes and new shoots of grass. If she had been one of the normal flock she would have been in a state of panic, separated from the others, running back and forth alongside the gate or pushing at the hedge to get back with the rest. But one of the Torwens, although otherwise healthy, is blind, and she seems happy enough although she spends some of her time away from the rest of the flock, usually eating close to the hedgelines out of the wind. As the ewe was so quiet and clearly not bothered it was obviously her. She must have dropped through the small gap in the hedge from the field above as she wandered along; the others wouldn't attempt this jump unless there was no grazing or hay in their field.
She was unhurt, and easily encouraged up to the gate and put back with the others. She might find her way back out tomorrow of course, but the sheep can't be moved elsewhere at the moment as the newly laid or coppiced hedges in their main fields need to be kept untouched by animal until the banks are earthed up and fences erected, all of which will happen in the next few weeks prior to lambing.
Careful watch will need to be taken with this ewe during lambing; she will be brought in early and checked regularly. If she fails to mother her lambs she will need to be culled. Otherwise, all that seems to be required is watching out for her particularly diligently to ensure she doesn't put herself in danger and that she gets plenty to eat.

The blog as book and the book as blog

The phenomenon of the blog being developed as a book is not new; publishers' attention has been drawn to blogdom for a while, and some have created an entire business from this approach. Bloggers in print often include a list of their published peers in their blogroll and the lists get longer and longer; a great way of finding new blogs you might really want to read.
And I may be very slow on the uptake, but I hadn't clocked that there are now books being published that read as if they were, in fact, blogs; a strange twist in the order of things.
I'm currently indulging in Nigel Slater's Eating for England, and it seems to me to be a food blog stuffed between hardcovers. The tiny chapters of 100-500 words are perfectly sized blog posts. There are more potential hyperlinks in it than in Wikipedia; every old fashioned biscuit and sweet, core brands like Bisto, Ribena and a hundred others are begging for realisation in a manufacturers or enthusiasts web window. You want the missing You tube links to bring to life the mock eroticism of the Cadbury's Flake and the boy scout jollity of the Jacob's Club. There are frequent references to farmers' markets, gravy, mock chocolate, toast and a host of other recurring food memories, all waiting not for a footnote but yet another link to where that ingredient was vaunted previously. And then there is the glorious cover illustration; a magic blog header if ever I saw one.
All that is missing is an array of readers comments: "I adore bourbons too", "What's wrong with tripe anyway" and "I dream of faggots every night".

See Nigel talking about his book here. If he's not related to Alan Bennett I'm a jaffa cake.

Lichens and fungi

This weekend I have thrown more weighty logs and chunks of tree trunk onto the trailer than my back appreciates. I did remember to bend my knees, but we are talking the equivalent of heaving the weight of hundreds of smallish persons here. Imagine carting every school child and all their teachers at your local primary school, and you just about have it.
I took lots of standing still and admiring the view breaks, and sat in the tractor cab as I drove from one heap of logs to the next for longer than was really necessary. I also gawked at a couple of extraordinarily beautiful specimens of lichen.
The vibrant purple one was hiding at the bottom of the log pile, really damp and dark. I worried that exposing it to light might mean the end of my aspirations to be the next Alexander Fleming, but as I don't own any petri dishes I took a photo instead.



The one that looks like orange ears is some sort of cup fungus rather than a lichen; my hunt for elucidation suggests it might be scarlet cup fungus.





And then there was this nifty little trio; as poisonous looking bunch of fungi as you would wish, all phallic and starting to develop a gelatinous sheen.