WINTER SUN

It's all about the timing - amazingly we've had a few dry days. Today we've had glorious sunshine from dawn to dusk. Xmas shopping or tractor driving - no contest!  I spent a happy couple of hours on our ancient little red tractor harrowing another field.  We're on chalk, so we dry out very quickly, thank goodness.  The field is just under 2 acres and it's had 22 females with their crias on it for about 3 weeks, that's an awful lot of poo, way too much for me to attempt to hoover up and after all the rain we've had would be too heavy and stuck in the tube. Life is just too short to bother!

We have a lot of moss here and giving it a really good thrashing with the harrows drags all the dead grass and moss out , as well as spreads the poo about.  So dressed for the arctic, complete with woolly hat under my ear defenders and a blanket to sit on - off I went.  Round and round, up and down, backwards and forwards, the odd swirly bit here and there just for fun (!) until it had all been harrowed at least 4 times in 4 or more directions.


The sunshine kept me lovely and warm, I actually quite enjoyed it, diesel fumes not so much, or my ears being squished by my radio defenders.  I had someone keeping me company most of the time. One of our resident buzzards sat in the tree watching and then landed right in front of me to catch something, ate it and then flew back up to the tree. I managed to get a snap of it with my phone - you'll have to look really closely.

Poo has vanished, wonderful, field now one hell of a mess, but I know how much good it'll do the grass and from experience I know it'll recover within a very short time. The forecast is for sharp frosts this week and then rain the following week, so by then hopefully most of the parasite eggs will have been killed off and the rain will have washed field clean again. On our rotation I don't have to use the field again for about two or three months.  Job Done.

Buzzard - look for shadow on ground then up a bit!

Here's one cria I'm really looking forward to ... Meon Valley Ardingly, The Sorcerer's sire, over Meon Valley Treasure a Tulaco Centurion x MV Toffee Apple daughter - should be lovely but what colour????  Bit of fun but 7 months to wait!

And for those with a sense of humour like me ...