A catch up from Rosie
Hello!
We can only apologise for our silence on this blog for quite some time now, I am shocked to see it was October last year that we last blogged! Ridiculous! Time just flies past us...so here is a brief update for now, with the intention to blog more frequently moving forward.
The past academic year of school visits has been absolutely fantastic, we finished with a total of 50 visits throughout the year which was a real blessing to host. We have enjoyed every single one of them and are continuing to connect with schools further afield. We even hosted a 'Warburtons' visit which took a slightly different stance to most of our visits but was enjoyable nonetheless. Moving forward, we will be partnering with 4 or 5 schools from September and will also host occasional day visits for others. We are looking forward to the new term and all the excitement that brings!
The weather - since last October - has been a massive challenge and very interesting to farm in. Thankfully, the sheep were indoors throughout the difficult snowy winter we had and although we lambed earlier and therefore in the 'beast from the east' we managed to keep most alive and well! The hardest time came when they had to go outside because our indoor space was exhausted and the rain kept coming! We were very fortunate to have two student lambing helpers on the farm throughout those tough months and will continue to look for students in the coming years as they proved invaluable! Then the dryness from 27th May - 27th July! We did not have a drop of rain for 2 months! Again, we were very fortunate not to have any fires but it presented challenges such as finding enough food for sheep and lambs and the electric fence holding our lambs in didn't seem to work as well! All is good now, the weather is as expected for a British summer and we are just coming to the end of this years harvest.
Harvest has been earlier than usual due to the lack of rain and given the circumstances we feel it has gone well. As I speak we are harvesting some spring barley and we have just one field of wheat left on the farm to bring in. After that, it is not time to put our feet up, we will be straight into drilling (planting) our winter crops. They will be planted throughout September and October and grow steadily through the winter.
Finally, our offices are mostly full. We have one space left if you're looking for some office space but we are glad to say on the office front everything is going well.
Look out for our next open day, do come and join us on September 29th, until then I will try to do another blog post but don't hold your breath just in case!!