Polar Vortex

I'm not a meteorologist, but I don't think the polar vortex has come over as far as Wales. However, we woke up to the coldest morning of winter yet. No snow, but the frost hasn't lifted all day. I had to bucket warm water to all the lambing ewes, chickens, dogs and horses. Even the little birds got some warm water in their bird bath. Dehydration can be a big problem in the cold, for livestock and wild animals alike.

Motivated by the cold weather, I spent a few hours restocking our wood piles. The boys log it and bring it back to our already crammed full barn. I use the log splitter on the back of the tractor to split it-

If you don't know, a hydraulic log splitter is almost as luxurious as a lambing barn. No swinging an axe, no problems with tough gnarly logs either. The axe head is pushed down by hydraulic, tractor-driven force and pops open even stubborn wood. And it has safety measures so you don't pop your fingers off your hands.

With a good audiobook in my ears and a mug of hot chocolate, it is one of the more rewarding jobs. Definitely better than hauling buckets of water, that's for sure.

The underkeepers' cottage is heated solely by wood, so the boys go through quite a bit over winter. You can always see smoke chuffing out of their chimney. Mike and I have a log burner in the living room, but we also had a Rayburn put in last year.

It burns solid fuel, so wood or coal. It has two hotplates on top, a hot oven for cooking and a lukewarm oven, which farmers' wives traditionally used for warming up hypothermic lambs. I used mine last winter when a ewe delivered an unplanned lamb in weather much like this-

He survived and had a sister.

It's only a second hand one that came out of an estate cottage, when they upgraded to oil heating, but it has been a godsend. It's in the sunroom which was previously uninhabitable after October. She's like another member of the family, so we gave her a name: Bernie.

I can leave a kettle on the hot plate, and there's always hot water for tea (or defrosting troughs). If you put the hotplate covers down, you can warm your folded pyjamas on top, so they're toasty when you put them on. A bottle of red wine can be warmed up for drinking if you stand it on the corner of Bernie. And a sheepskin in front of the Rayburn is a dog magnet -

Send more sheepskins!!

Mike just checked the weather update, and it seems that we're expecting snow overnight. The milkman seems to agree - he brought tomorrow's milk delivery this evening as snowy lanes would be treacherous for him in his milk van. Tomorrow is the last day of shooting season,  but inclement weather may stop the day. I'm not sure the dogs will mind much if I keep Bernie full of wood.  And the milk's arrived so, with a hot chocolate at the ready, neither will I.