Coming up short

Everything's growing. The chicken babies are getting bigger; some are foraging without their mothers now. Others are big enough to go to roost at night. Pheasant and partridge chicks are spending the warmer days and even nights now in their outdoor runs. Their adult feathers begin to grow and make their wings hang down which give them a slouchy teenager walk. The lambs are so fat it's almost obscene. And the horses have round spring bellies.

The only thing that's not growing well is the grass.

It doesn't matter what you farm: sheep, cattle, even alpacas. You are only ever a grass farmer. Everything depends on grass. Lactating ewes need it to make milk to feed this year's crop of lambs. Lambs and calves need it to graze. Even deer need the long grass as cover to hide their young.

A cold winter and a dry spring mean the grass has been slow to grow. Most of my time at the moment is spent moving grazing animals to any available patch of grass, even if I have to stand there with them as they eat it. Sometimes I'm patching fences with whatever I can find in the back of the truck: wire, baling twine. I had to tie two gates closed on a paddock this morning with the horses' bridles so they could graze the best of the grass in there.

The permanent pony paddock is left of the fence. It's horse sick and needs fertilizer and time to grow without being pestered by two gluttonous horses. I have let them onto the track the other side of their paddock, to let them eat what they can from that small piece of field, and for emergency fencing purposes ---

I blocked them in with the truck. The ingenious part of the plan was that I brought my knitting and a flask of coffee and was able to sit there and have an hour to myself.

The local farmers have a saying "Fog in March, Frost in May, isn't any good for hay". Which is exactly what we had. This means that hay is going to be short again this year. We need to get bales made, or bought and stored, before the end of summer.

We've just about come to the end of crow trapping season. I will pack up my traps by 1 June. I was surprised to see what was waiting for me in a crow trap this morning -

It's a fox cub. He climbed into the trap and got himself caught.

He might look like he's being cute in this picture, but he's actually hissing and snarling at me. This cub is the sign that it's time to trade in my crow traps for a gun, and do some fox control in the evenings. They get bigger alongside the pheasant poults. The foxes will have their share of the pheasants before pheasant shooting season.