It’s been a while since I wrote a seasonal, farm newsletter. Winter is slow, and also laboursome. Short days filled with the monotony and physical demands of farm routines, trudging across the hill through the mud and ice twice a day with feeds and hay. The cold. The endless grey. Keeping fires stoked and draughts out, us and animals fed and bedded and dry through torrential rain, howling gales and a bitter freeze.
The sheep are hungry now and they mob me for the half bale of hay and bucket of beet that I haul down to them morning and eve. They’ve been working on the lower slopes since late November and they’ve eaten just about all there is to eat. The heather and the low growing, western gorse down there are bare now (intentionally so—we want pastures to come back there). And the ground is thoroughly mulched with seedy, summer hay that I’ve been hauling down to them and spreading to seed new pastures over the old. I carry as much as I can, but soon they will have to move to a fresher,…
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