Where has March gone? Is it just me or has March flown by? Today has been one of those days where my blood run cold when I realised we are already heading rapidly into spring and we are nowhere close to being where we are supposed to be. Although lots of the essential stuff has happened on the paperwork side such as planning permission for change of use on our red barn to a small event venue and the creation of a our new none profit organisation/ social enterprise that will be based in hedged area of Potters Farm called the Growing Project North Norfolk. The aim of which is to provide an outside space for people grow produce and access the support they require without having to travel all the way to Norwich or Kings Lynn. I will fill you in on more details as we develop but just to say both bits are so exciting.
As for the practical side of things we have had a busy few weeks. The plan was to move the lazy ewes up here a couple of weeks ago but due to Storm Gareth that was delayed a bit giving us time to rethink. As the lazy ewes are notoriously disrespectful of electric fencing (our fault we never trained them properly when they were lambs), basically if their head fits they are through! Coupled with the fact that we don't yet have complete exterior fencing robust enough to retain water and thus sheep we chickened out, despite me spending an afternoon setting it up. Instead we have looked at the state of all the grass and decided much to my joy to bring the horses home and leave the sheep where they are as the horses are way more respectful of the thin white line. So for the first time ever I will have my childhood dream of having horses at home although the size of the paddock and the size of my horses its likely to be only a couple of weeks. That hopefully will give their summer meadow, which is a flood plain, time to dry a little bit more. Mid week I was so excited to read on the village FB page that a Sea Eagle has been spotted in the area. Now I am no Twitcher but even I might be able to spot that one as it is the largest bird of prey in the UK with a wingspan of almost 2.5 mtrs. As my horses can get startled by a pheasant I cant wait to see what they make of that, well as long as I am not on board!
Other outside news is the new chickens arrived and I completely cocked up! So they were free range farm chickens that the owners wanted to re-home as they were eating their garden. We waited until the high winds had eased and then tempted them into a barn at their old farm. We then waited until dusk so they were suitably roosting and docile and then my friend ingeniously caught them up with a child's fishing net and clipped their wings popped them in the box. Once all 8 were caught we traveled home and transferred them to their new quarters, shut them in with water and left them till this morning. Now our existing chickens are one side of the farm and the news ones are were right over the other but as we let them all out the Cockerels crowed and they were like magnets to each other. Withing minutes the cocks were locked in mortal combat only separated by me in my brave pants and a garden rake. How anyone ever finds or ever found cock fighting a sport I shall never know it was blindly brutal and not a bit enjoyable. Anyway everyone survived and the boys sulked off back to opposite corners of the farm, Bert our young cocky yellow boy and the Captain the veteran cockerel we had just acquired (apparently he is definitely older than 8) both escorted their flock to opposite ends of the farm where they are currently observing a noisy truce.
As spring feels more convincingly sprung this weekend its been an utter pleasure spending time outside. The Growing Project area has been cultivated, the chickens are laying well and today we were lucky enough to help a neighbor with a little bit of lambing cover which included a bit of bottle feeding, moving recently lambed ewes and lambs into pens and just generally keeping an eye on everything and in the sunshine this afternoon it was fab.
The plan this week is to hopefully get grass seed down on those great expanse of mud that surrounds us, horses moved and muck pile moved now we have sussed out how to tip the trailer, let just hope this lovely weather continues.
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