THE weather on Christmas Day turned out to be far from festive. he temperature did take a dive, which gave us a frosty morning and evening. The day itself was one of glorious sunshine and not a cloud to be seen over Manor Farm. However the rest of the week followed the usual pattern , with plenty of dull, damp weather giving us another 20mm of rainfall we could do without .

Christmas day was spent at the home of Kevin’s parents, where we all tucked into a hearty traditional Christmas dinner, not forgetting all the trimmings! Christmas pudding has to be one of my favourites, especially accompanied by lots of brandy butter (and for me a dollop of cream as well).

Before going for dinner Melissa, Natasha, Annabel and cousin Zak took the ponies (decked in tinsel) for a Christmas hack. Whilst I made the most of the sunshine, walking to see the cattle enjoying their Christmas breakfast in the large barn on Manor Farm. The birds were also making the most of a beautiful day, appearing to be very busy searching for food, preening or just enjoying the sunshine. Around the barn I saw pied wagtails, green finches, blue tits, a robin, sparrows, great tits, blackbirds and the ever present pigeons. On Boxing Day morning, while having a delicious breakfast of ham with a poached egg and some toast at Melissa’s home, their resident kestrel sat on a post a short distance from the window.

Kevin and Ian put all they could in place to make life over the Christmas period just a little less hectic, as when there are animals about they always need attention. Ian has cleaned all the manure from our loose housed Angus calves and re-bedded them with plenty of fresh straw. The 800 main flock ewes, brought in a short time ago were pregnancy scanned. The results of which were quite pleasing, not carrying quite the number of lambs possible but more than last year and all the ewes looked extremely well. They made sure the ewe lambs were safe from floods. All the wethers, castrated ram lambs, were moved to a barn at Chiverlins Farm, to give space for the ewes to come in, as the early lambing ewes which are due to start giving birth in 2 weeks time are in a barn split into three groups: singles, twins and triplets. The wethers will now be the responsibility of Francis (Kevin’s father), who will feed, water and bed them up. The number of wethers is reducing as more are graded fit for sale and collected. Unfortunately the light lamb trade has recently dropped due to strikes in France , but hopefully this will pick up soon.

Kevin noticed that the housed ewes, now on a diet of grass and maize silage, are not eating enough of this forage mix. He decided the reason for this is that the maize silage is very dry, so the ration has been altered. It did contain 50 per cent grass silage and 50 per cent maize silage, but is now 66 per cent grass and 34 per cent maize, which will hopefully balance the intake to provide more protein .

Continuing with the Marlborough Downs Nature Enhancement Partnership AGM from last week, where we were given a presentation by Richard Pywell, who heads up a four year research programme working with farmers to find sustainable solutions to reduce environmental impacts, he spoke about increasing predators such as ladybirds. Increasing ladybird numbers would help as they eat aphids. Some of the challenges with doing this are degraded soils and pesticide resistance.