While the country remains on lockdown, there are some things that don’t stop, including the running of our farms and gardens. With animals to tend to and crops to harvest, the work of a farmer continues.
Farmer Kate from our Gloucestershire communities is keeping a blog of what’s happening down on the farm – in between her busy lambing responsibilities!
9th April 2020
So lambing is going pretty well – it’s our first year lambing Cotswolds sheep and they are proving to be great mums – very attentive and lots of milk (when the lambs can find it under all that fleece!). We had a set of triplets over the weekend and have decided to leave all 3 on mum but are offering extra milk if they want it. The local organic dairy farm has been fantastic in giving us plenty of fresh full-fat milk to give to them.
We have had one pet lamb so far – he wasn’t doing too well with his mum in the field so we brought him in and have started to bottle feed him.
We did a ‘Sheepstake’ for people to guess which ewe would lamb first – the grandson of one of our support staff won and decided he would like to name the pet lamb Thor!
We’ve about 7 ewes left to lamb – hopefully by the end of Easter weekend, we should be able to relax a little and maybe get some sleep!
And of course, there is still all the other jobs of the farm to do – we turned our pigs back out into the fields after a winter in the yard – it was the first time the piglets had been on the grass and they are definitely enjoying racing each other up and down the field.
Our hens are starting to lay plenty of eggs and we are still able to provide fresh eggs to all houses and staff every week.
And the warmer weather has led to an explosion of salads in our greenhouses – our growing team are doing a fantastic job harvesting every day and sending bags of salad to the houses. They have changed their growing plans for the year so we can make sure we’ll have even more fresh and tasty vegetables for all of our residents in the coming weeks and months.
