A Spot of Baking

“This is rather therapeutic”, I thought to myself as I *properly* greased and base-lined a cake tin. As a busy mum of two who generally speed-bakes Victoria sandwiches, my usual method is to rip a bit of greaseproof paper off the roll and jam it into the tin, using the weight of the cake mixture to keep it in there. Cake doesn’t last long in our house, especially now that my youngest child, with a limited vocabulary, has learned the word ‘CAKE!’ along with vehement pointing! I’m no show baker either, so the odd few creased edges don’t matter. It was quite nice though to cut out a circle, stick it in there with a bit of marg smeared on the bottom of my loose-bottomed tin, and then cut strips and stick them around the edge. The children were playing nicely together (for once) and not clamouring to help or attempting to eat massive spoonfuls of raw egg-laden batter. I filled the tin with cake mixture (https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/11695/raspberry-bakewell-cake to be exact, although I substituted jam for the fresh raspberries) and popped in the oven.

My bliss was short-lived however, as I started on the shortbread. As soon as I started up the mixer I was showered with sugar. By the time I wiped down surfaces, dumped a little extra in the bowl to make up for the shortfall, and then got a mop to clean the floor, my feet were beginning to find themselves glued to the floor. By this point the children had gravitated out to the garden, I was beginning to make their tea, watch the cake already in the oven and, erm, yeah, that’s enough to be doing in one go. As I gently squashed the shortbread into the tin (this time the greaseproof paper was just rammed in there, no time now for cutting out bits of paper!), I heard some commotion outside. I was greeted by the sight of my older child sprinkling handfuls of compost over my younger child’s head. Her hair and clothes were full of grainy little bits that wouldn’t simply brush away. I ordered them in, attempting to remove as much soil as possible. A small black trail was left in their wake, all the way down the hallway…

The cake tastes great though!

Shearing, and an announcement

We finally got our sheep clipped last week. After a few weeks of bad weather, it stayed dry enough for a week to get them done. The original plan last year was that I would do them myself, but as I am currently 8 months pregnant it was out of the question! We got a local contractor and his friend to come and clip them for us, and as we only had 40 that needed clipping it was all done in under 2 hours, and they did a good job.

Here is one of the guys in action. I think that particular ewe actually gave him quite a bit of grief, she decided to fight back!!

I think they were relieved to be rid of all that wool, it had been so hot that week, and they look much happier now (though it has rained for days since!) It was one of those jobs that’s weather dependent and we were waiting on someone else to have the free time to do it for us, hopefully next year we can do it ourselves when we want, which will take the pressure off a little.

With it being the middle of summer, the grass is growing like crazy and we now have too much, we’ve had to borrow a mower and ‘top’ a couple of the fields (basically mow it so there’s only a couple of inches of grass left on the field, instead of knee-high stalks!) just to try and keep it under control. What with the lambs and some more sheep that we’ve bought in, we have about 170 sheep in total, and we still can’t keep up with the grass growth. Come winter though, we’ll be paddling in mud and talking about buying in extra feed…. you can’t win!

Next month is just routine work really, basic health checks to make sure everything’s healthy and not having issues with lameness, as we’ve finally finished all the rounds of vaccinations. We’re also weighing the lambs every few weeks to keep track of their growth rate, and to see when they’ll be ready for market. The next big job is going to be weaning all the lambs at the beginning of August, to give the ewes a rest before it all starts again, with tupping in November and lambing again next April.

In other news, we finally have our website up and live. D&J Hay Mutton and Lamb We’re still tweaking it a bit but after months working on it, it’s great to finally have it running. Big thanks to my Dad for sorting it all out for us!!

Slow Roasted Leg of Mutton

Here it is, our first taste of our own roast mutton, in all it’s glory. Well worth waiting for.

Choose a good joint, not too fatty, but a bit of marbling is good. Both leg and shoulder joints will benefit from slow roasting, you can do them both with this method. Weigh the joint first, you need to cook it for about 40 minutes per 450g at 150C. This monster took 4 hours.

Pop the joint in a roasting pan (ideally a lidded one, but foil will do if you don’t have a pan with a lid). Add a sprig of rosemary, and if you like, make a few slits in the meat and stuff with a couple of cloves of garlic. Pour about 250ml of red wine over the meat (I didn’t have any so used dark ale), cover, and roast for the required time.

Bring it out and left it rest for about half an hour before carving. The juices make amazing gravy, I put the roasting pan on the hob, added some gravy granules and brought to the boil until it thickened. There was a bit of clear fat resting on the top of the gravy but I poured most of it away and mixed the rest in. The alcohol gives the gravy a really nice flavour.

My dad declared it ‘very nice’, my mum and I decided we preferred it over lamb, and my husband, who when we met only ate chicken and sausages, had thirds.

This is what was left, and I am taking a break from turning it into a meat and potato pie to write this!

Well On The Way

We’ve been keeping pretty busy over the past couple of weeks, nice and steady so we’ve not been overrun with new lambs but enough to keep the days filled. We now have 54 lambs and about a dozen ewes left to lamb. It’s all gone a bit quiet, no lambs for 2 days so we’re all having a breather!

Considering it’s our first year and we’ve been finding our feet really, having no experience of lambing outside, we’ve not done too badly. We’ve lost our fair share of lambs, some being born dead or not surviving the first few hours, and more recently we lost 3 to a fox. Unfortunately death comes hand in hand with life, and you see a lot more of it at lambing time than any other time of year. Sadly we lost a ewe the other day, so we have decided to hand rear this little guy.

He is about 3 days old and we have called him Eric. The littlest scatterbrain loves bottle feeding him. We have just acquired a friend for him as it’s not fair for him to be on his own, so this little girl has come to join us from another farm.

We’ll keep them in the garden for the next few weeks until they’re old enough to graze and rejoin the flock.

Spring is still taking her time to arrive, we have a beautiful warm, sunny day where we sit in the field and watch a ewe giving birth, or the lambs playing in the evening, and then we have days where it rains and the wind comes in sideways and you really hope there’s not much going on in the field so you don’t have to spend ages out in the cold and wet. The grass is growing, the hedges are full and green, and the tractors are busy out in the fields so things are drying up and improving. The little one is a proper outdoors boy, and throws a tantrum when we make him come in, so I am really looking forward to the days when we can just leave the door open and he can spend as much time in the garden as he likes.

In other news, this is waiting to go in the oven for our tea tonight.

Our own leg of mutton. Can’t wait to taste it, and will try to get the results posted here before too long!!

It All Kicks Off

We are due to start lambing tomorrow. However, we have had a few little early surprises.

On Wednesday morning this little lady had already made her entrance into the world by the time we got the the field.

This might look like a pretty tiny, cute thing but it is a huge thing for us. She is our first ever lamb. The past 10 months of spending what feels like shedloads of money, spending time working with the ewes and on 2 occasions watching them die and being unable to do anything all boils down to this. We finally have something to show for it all. Mr Scatterbrain has announced that we are keeping her. Luckily, being a she, she has a long future ahead of her but I think she will always have a special place for us.

The next morning we came out to this –

Even more of a surprise, triplets! They are 2 days old now and doing really well, their mum is looking after them perfectly and thankfully has enough milk for them all. Triplets generally aren’t good news for shepherds as sheep are really only designed to rear 2 lambs, but on this occasion I think we’ll be able to leave them all with their mother. We are keeping a pretty close eye on them to make sure they stay strong and well-fed and if it becomes necessary we will hand-rear one, but mum’s always best.

This is always my favourite time of year, the weather is getting warmer, the days are getting longer, the sky is blue and the grass green, and everywhere you look there is new life. After many months of seeing dry, brown, skeletal hedges along every roadside, it is a welcome sight to see them filling out with fresh green buds. The birds sing as they nest, the lambs play in the fields and the first few cows are being turned out to graze. After surviving a cold, wet, muddy winter, this feels like the reward for hanging on. It makes me glad to be a country girl.

Waiting

Winter is slowly turning into spring here. Lambs are gambolling in the fields, snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils are beginning to poke their heads out of their warm winter beds and the birds are becoming more active as they plan to start their new families. We still have about 6 weeks before our ewes start to lamb, and we are ticking off the days, beginning preparations such as making sure we have all the necessary drugs and supplies, getting all the ewes vaccinated so that they and the lambs stay healthy, and working out which fields each group is going to go to! I am also waiting to find out what’s wrong with my knee. I had the MRI scan last night, so hopefully we will get some answers in about 2 weeks. Whether the news will turn out to be good or bad remains to be seen, but at least we will know what’s actually going on and hopefully have an end in sight.

To keep busy, I’ve started making my own bread. I’d tried in the past and never had a huge amount of success, but after the bread we normally buy went up by 5p a loaf we decided it would be cheaper to make our own. My husband was talking about getting a breadmaker, but I’v had my heart set on a stand mixer for a long time and as they cost about the same (2nd hand) and have far more uses, I persuaded him that was the way to go. I quickly found on, fairly locally, on a preloved selling site, at a decent price and with a huge number of attachments, which appear to be unused and in their original boxes. A few days later, armed with my new mixer and the necessary ingredients, I set about making my first loaf of bread. It had been my birthday recently, the mixer being a sort of birthday present, and my parents had bought me a new set of scales, the type with a dial on the front that weighs in kg and lbs, and a dish that sits on top to hold the ingredients. I put all the ingredients in the mixer bowl and set it going. ‘It shouldn’t be this wet’ I remarked to DH, watching it slop around in the bowl. ‘There’s no way it will be handle-able, maybe the recipe was written down wrong or I shouldn’t have put all the water in’. ‘Just dump some more flour in’, he helpfully replied. I poured in enough extra flour to make the dough at least bind together and hoped we’d get something edible as the result. It rose quite nicely, but by the time it was baked it was about 3 inches high, the flattest loaf of bread I’d ever seen. Despite being more crumpet-like in appearance, with large air holes in every slice, it tasted so much better than the shop-bought loaf. I decided to try again in a day or two but with a difference recipe.

As I sat at the table enjoying a hot cup of tea and reflecting on the bread making experience, I was idly looking at the scales on the table in front of me and thinking that there was a slight design flaw. The kg are marked around the outside and the lbs are marked on the inside of the dial. The needle that points to the weight is fairly wide at the middle and narrows down to a point by the time it hits the kg markings. The only problem is that it is still a bit wide where it points to the lb markings, and it can be hard to see exactly where it is pointing. ‘Well that shouldn’t have been an issue today’, I thought. ‘The weights were all in kg’. A pause, and then, ‘No, I can’t have been that stupid!’. I stared at the scales, thought a moment, then grabbed the half-used bag of flour and weighed it. That confirmed my suspicions. I WAS that stupid. Instead of using a kg of flour, I had used a lb. No wonder it was so wet!

I tried again once we had eaten all the crumpet-loaf, making sure to use the correct amounts this time, and got some sensible, normal bread. I still maintain that my underweighed bread tasted better! We are still in the trialling stage at the moment, but all the bread has been perfectly edible, tasty in fact. The little one actually eats more of the home-made bread than he ever did of the bought stuff. It will take a lot of saved 5p’s to pay for the mixer, but long term I think we’re on to a winner.

Winter

Winter is slowly passing, and the time is ticking by. It’s the time of year when everything slows down as you wait for spring. Tupping went well, but we won’t know just how well until the lambs start appearing, so I guess it’s best not to count our chickens (or lambs) just yet.

There are a few jobs to be done over the winter, sorting some fencing out being one of them. This winter has been quite damp, but a couple of weeks ago we got a spell of dry, cold weather. As we had a day free from paid work, we loaded up and headed down to one of the fields we rent to get some fencing done. The field is surrounded by hedges so in the summer it’s hard to see just what state the original fencing is in. With it all having died back a bit, we can access most of the existing fence and shore it up. It was a chilly but bright day, so we took soup, tea and sandwiches with us and had a bit of a picnic down there too. Despite the fact that we were working, it was nice to be together as a family, enjoying the sunshine.

Daddy & T admiring our handiwork

Last week we were gathering the sheep to move a few to some new grazing when one of the biggest ewes ran into the side of my knee, knocking me over. I was rolling about in the mud holding my knee as my husband and the dog hovered worriedly over me. I went to hospital the next to have it x-rayed, and there was no break, but I was referred to an orthopedic consultant who has booked an MRI scan of my knee. He suspects a torn ligament. I am currently sporting a hi-tech knee brace and am off work until we find out what’s going on. It could be another 4 weeks before I get the scan and the results. We are counting down the weeks to lambing time… It could be a baptism of fire for my inexperienced husband. Best way to learn I suppose, being thrown in at the deep end!

 

Bacon-wrapped Fish Fingers

My husband dislikes fish, but as it’s healthy and I’d like our son to have a varied diet, I insist on feeding them both fish at least once a month. It seems that fish wrapped in bacon is acceptable to all parties. I suspect most men would eat just about anything if it was wrapped in bacon. DH has made these 2 or 3 times so far, I have yet to actually make them! Easy peasy recipe, here it is:

White fish (if using frozen fish, defrost before use) allow 1 fillet per person

Streaky bacon – about 3 rashers per person

Cut the fish into about 3 strips per fillet – or into as many strips as you have slices of bacon! Wrap 1 slice of bacon around each strip of fish, and place onto a baking sheet lined with foil. The foil just makes cleaning up a bit easier. Pop into the oven for 20 minutes at 180°C. If you like your bacon a bit crispier, put them under the grill or in the frying pan for a few minutes to finish off.

Very tasty, and men and children appear to like them!!

The Start of the Breeding Year

Paddy

This is our new dog, Paddy. He’s from working stock and has plenty of natural enthusiasm, but he’s a work in progress right now. Hopefully at some point in the future he will be able to round up and move our sheep for us, but right now we’re still having to do most of the work ourselves.

On Wednesday we put our tups in with the ewes. This is pretty much the most important event in the sheep farmer’s calendar. If they don’t do well now, due to the tups not performing, or fertility issues with the sheep, then you won’t get many lambs, which affects your profits when it comes to selling them all. Once the job was done and we stood watching one of the boys meeting his girls for the first time, we felt quite a sense of excitement. This is where is all starts, any successes or failures in the next year hinge on the next few weeks. So I’ll walk you through what we were doing on Wednesday.

Our flock

With a bit of help and a lot of hindrance from Paddy, we penned up our ewes. We have two tups, so we needed to sort out which ewes were going with which tup. Some were staying here, the rest were going to a new field, so we had to load them into the trailer and take them to their new home.

Foot trimming

One of them was a bit lame so I turned it over and trimmed it’s hoof back. A few of the ewes are a bit overweight, but on the whole they’re looking fit and healthy, which is what we need at this time of year. The boys are pretty big too, but they tend to loose a lot of weight during tupping, as they have more important things to be doing than eating.

Teddy

Once the ewes were moved, we went to fetch the boys from their summer grazing. We loaded them in the trailer and spread raddle, a coloured paste, all over their chests. When they mount the ewes they spread it all over their backsides, so if a ewe has a brightly coloured bottom we know they’ve been served, and can hope it will result in lambs! This is Teddy, sporting some lovely yellow raddle. He’s an Easycare, as are some of our ewes, so we hope to breed some pure lambs from him.He took a couple of days to settle in, but this morning we found 3 yellow bottoms, so the girls have obviously accepted him.

Max

This is Max, our Texel tup. He’s a big lad, and his hormones have been getting the better of him recently so he’s been a bit nasty. He was raring to go though, and he had already tupped one ewe before we’d even left the field! He’s also tupped 3 so far, so we’re getting off to a nice steady start.

The raddle rubs off over a few days, so we have to keep re-applying it. We did both tups this morning, and next week we’ll change colour so it’s easier to keep track of which ewes have been newly tupped. Hopefully, by the beginning of April, we should have some lambs gamboling about. We’re expectant and excited to see how they do, and it’ll be good to see some actual results from all the money and work we’ve spent so far. As they say, ‘the future’s bright, the future’s … erm… yellow?’

 

One Year On

Tonight is the eve of T’s first birthday. This year has flown by, I can hardly believe our little boy is 1 already. Tonight as I cuddled him and kissed his toes at bedtime I was remembering the events of one year ago. I didn’t even know this gorgeous little man; he was still a mystery to us. I would talk to my bump, wondering aloud who it was going to turn out to be. Little did I know it would be a cheeky, independent, funny, absolutely gorgeous little boy.

You can read books, articles, talk to people, attend all the appointments and classes, buy baby equipment, pack hospital bags, ready your house, cook huge quantities of freezer meals, but you are never really prepared to become a parent. I had no idea exactly what being a parent would be like. I thought I knew, but the reality is so different. It is totally consuming, you don’t ‘switch off’ like you do when you come home from work in the evening. It’s 24/7, even when you’re away from them. You discover what it’s like to REALLY love someone. As much as I love my husband, and I can’t imagine life without him, my child is part of me, and I love him more deeply than anyone. You find joy and pride in such simple things, like him getting a spoon into his mouth by himself, or peeing in the potty. You see life through the eyes of someone who is discovering everything for the first time. Becoming a parent is a life-changing experience. Children are such precious gifts, and their childhood is so fleeting. In 5 hours, it will be 1 year since things kicked off and I knew I was finally on my way to meeting my baby. This year has been incredible. Tough, challenging, but amazing and so rewarding. I’m looking forward to seeing what the next year has in store, and enjoying my family.