It’s snow joke looking after our flock

spots remaining frozen solid, making moving around tricky at times. Just as the flock overcame their hay phobia the thaw came, and they were able to graze again.

With the West Dorset Magazine being a monthly publication now, there is so much to catch up on. We took a road trip to Chard to pick up a new piece of kit to treat the sheep’s feet. The idea being that we build a race (an enclosed line of fencing) and run them from one end to the other.

As they run through their feet soak in foot treatment on the special spongy mat, getting into all the nooks and crannies, and we do this as often as we can.

Hopefully this will stop my Disney princess from hobbling around on three legs, causing much concern to everyone that sees her, different story when she sees a bucket of cake, mind. The weather has certainly played a huge part in our smallholding jobs over the last month, we have gone from mud similar to a bad year at Glastonbury, to Baltic conditions which saw everything freeze for over a week, and back to warm winter sun.

The big freeze hit us suddenly, one minute the sheep were grazing happily, the next the paddock was covered in the white stuff, and they had nothing to eat, or drink, as the water froze too.

A game-changer for us, we had been supplementing with a bit of sheep cake as we still had a fair bit of grass, but then it was gone. The irony was not wasted on me that the bales that we cut in the summer, the ones that nearly caused my collapse due to heat and exhaustion, I was now lugging back up the paddock to where they had come from, slipping on the icy snow and still muttering about the blasted things. I smugly convinced myself that the zero-carbon footprint was the way to go, cut it, bale it, store it, then take it back and feed it. The sheep did a double take at the newly arrived bales and promptly turned up their noses at which point I turned away and left them to it.

The icy conditions continued in our village for over a week, it has its own micro-climate, the shady

We are still lugging up bales as the goodness has well and truly left the grazing now and it is almost time to move them off and back onto spring grazing, resting the paddocks that they have over wintered on. Humphrey has clearly done the deed and the ewes are looking for a bit on the chubby side, and not through eating hay. We will be scanning mid-February and hope to bring you the photos and exciting news in the next edition. We took the decision to lamb late again, which paid off last year and provided us with some very strong lambs. Today has been sunny with watery winter sun, and those strong lambs from last year have been skipping about their paddock as though it was mid spring, I really hope they are right… no more snow please!