H&C

19
Feb
2010

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Scanning sheep and earning a Wii with eggs

The high snowy peaks

"The days are getting longer, or so I keep reassuring myself! It is now light at 7am and not dark till nearly 6pm and that fills me with hope. In fact today it’s lovely and sunny but frosty. I think it was minus 6C this morning first thing. Though we no longer have snow around the house it is doggedly staying on the hill, and any rain falling down here falls as snow up there, where the levels of snow seem to be increasing - at least that’s the case above 2,000ft. There is probably a good 3ft of snow up there with drifts a lot deeper.

On the bright side, the salmon fishing season has just started on our river, and though we won’t have any fish this far up the river yet, it is an incentive for me to dust off my fishing tackle and get ready for the forthcoming season. It also probably means I’ll find an excuse to go and buy some more tackle that I am "bound to need” this season. One never seems to have enough flies!

We’ve just had the ewes scanned. We do this to tell if they are in lamb or not. Despite the very extreme cold and snow and the fact that we bought them down country and moved them up into the Highlands just before tupping they seem to have done alright. They scanned at about 120% which in other words is an average of 1.2 lambs per ewe. This is OK for Black Face sheep in the terrain we have. We won’t lamb till late April whereas further south they will be lambing already, and will achieve much higher rates of lambs to ewes of 2-3. This will be my first season of lambing my own sheep, and I am excited to learn more about by the experience. I have an expert on hand in Peter, thankfully, who lives in the glen and has been helping me by looking after them over the last four months.

The chickens are beginning to think it’s spring too! They have started laying eggs in earnest again after a long winter break when we were lucky to get 5-6 eggs a week we are now getting that per day. We let the chickens out during the day so they roam all over the garden and they are definitely enjoying the longer days, and the sun getting higher in the sky. Having game keepers means we don’t (or shouldn’t!) have foxes so the chickens are fairly safe to be out of their pen but they do go back in to roost at night and we shut them in to be safe.

Last year my two youngest children Daisy & Archie sold all our excess eggs at the end of our drive and raised enough money, (after paying for the feed of course), to buy themselves a Wii. It was a really good lesson for them, and they were very enthusiastic in getting up every morning and putting a container with boxes of eggs and an honesty box at the end of the drive. Thankfully no one ran off with any eggs or the money - luckily people are very honest up here!"