Cutting hay at Ty'n Y Coed

The nature conservation highlight of late summer was making hay on the third field at Ty’n Y Coed; an ambitious young farmer from the village took up the challenge! He got stuck several times in the middle rushy and boggy field bringing out big bales, but all is safely home. Now, the ponies have arrived. They’re here to graze the middle field and will move into the rough later in the winter.

Ponies at Ty'n Y Coed

This year we have focused more on reducing our energy loss in the house than ‘trying to be self sufficient in food’. We have tackled this by installing PV panels; these are generating lots of power — so the meter tells us!
The log shed used to store all the wood from our fallen beech trees is under construction, which is just as well; we still have our two log burners! We also have the potential to harvest enough timber from the farm to be ‘self sufficient’ and give up the coal habit!
On top of sorting the heat sources for the hours, we have commissioned 12 new double glazed box sash windows to reduce the heat losses. These have now been installed and should keep more of our precious heat in the house.

Putting in the sash windows

The post 2013 CAP reforms may well have implications for how we farm and what plans we make for the future but this winter we will be ‘having an easier time’ with less livestock.

After the ups and downs of calving and lambing, things settled down and we were able to concentrate on the refreshed vegetable garden. Barrow-loads of home-made compost were added to the freshly turned soil and well dug in; we planted potatoes in the new raised beds (see the last entry) and started harvesting asparagus from the poly tunnel.

Early salad was welcome, with the rocket going mad in the poly tunnel, and lambs lettuce cropping up all over the garden. Come June, the broad beans and new potatoes were ready, followed by mange tout and cabbage. The carrots have done well – hardly any root fly in evidence – along with beetroots and swedes. They’ve certainly filled our plates!

Onions and Carrots in the veg garden

The solution to the devastating rabbit problems was to erect an electric fence around the whole vegetable garden. So far, it’s worked a treat…!
The strawberries have been good, and the blackcurrants and gooseberries fed us and the birds! The cold
winter and the dry start to the growing season has really sorted out the pests so with the improved fertility of the soil, we’ve had a fantastically productive season.

The big event in June was taking a young bullock for slaughter. As we are part of the Anglesey Grazing Animals Partnership, we look for opportunities to work with other members whose animals graze wildlife rich land. We had hoped to use the Group’s newly acquired meat trailer for hanging the two welsh blacks and the cutting facilities at the local food technology centre but dates did not quite work. In the end, we opted for a family run slaughter house and butcher in Denbigh. We used the AGAP trailer to bring home the meat; all carefully packed. We have not had home produced beef for a couple of years so are enjoying the succulence and flavour of grass fed meat, especially the steaks!

AGAP Meat Trailer

The next challenge was to slim down our cows and get them into calf. The solution came in the shape of an offer from a friend in the Nant Ffrancon valley; the cows could go up to the ‘hafod’ for the summer. ‘Hafod’ means the higher hill pastures, with haf being Welsh for summer. The cows will slim down as they will have to work harder to find food and will also ‘do time’ grazing conservation land. They seem happy enough up in the hills and love lying on the road, holding up the tourists!

The Welsh Blacks at Blaen y Nant, Dyffryn Ogwen

So the last tasks of the early summer were to prepare for the annual Soil Association inspection and shear the sheep! No time to relax!

The winter checking and feeding routine was easier this year due to dry weather. The animals were kept under cover during the snowy weeks but all of them were desperate to go out and check for green grass.

The sheep were the first to go outside, but only after one ‘first time’ ewe had produced two black lambs.

Two new black lambs

The cattle had to wait a bit longer until calving was over. One of the two three year old heifers gave birth easily, the other had to ‘be helped’ and found it hard to bond with the calf. We had decided to use semen from an Aberdeen Angus bull as this is supposed to make for easier calving…!

Our oldest cow, Babi had problems with her sluggish bull calf but eventually it was up on its feet. The last calf to arrive was a pure Welsh Black heifer.

In keeping with tradition, they have been named after the A,I,T and R in Waitrose – as in ‘shopping trolley from Waitrose’, so they are Arian (Silver in Welsh), Islwyn (after Islwyn Ffowc Elis), Telyn (Harp in Welsh) and Rhosyn (Rose)!


The last one will get a pedigree certificate and become Adda Rhosyn. All of them get their passports from the BCMS ( British Cattle Movement Service) and eartags to match!

A new born calf at Tyddyn Adda

On the horticultural front, the vegetable garden has been re-shaped. We have replaced grass paths with slate ones, reduced the number of beds and put in two raised beds. The soil has been turned and home-made compost incorporated to restore fertility.

Laying Slate Paths in the Veg Garden

Now, we wait for warmer weather and some rain. We installed an electric fence to deter the rabbits, fingers crossed it’ll work this year! The asparagus has started shooting in the poly-tunnel, and we had to clear the ‘year round’ forest of rocket in order to find it! Rhubarb sprouted under the empty beehives and fresh food can now be married with the frozen in the freezer.

Roll on spring!

After a dry October, and a cold but dry November with some snow, December broke records, both for the amount of snow – two weeks of continually lying snow, and fourteen days on which it snowed – and for the temperatures: it was the coldest December for more than 30 years.

What a time we picked to visit our son in Australia, leaving the farm in our daughter’s capable hands. She struggled with transport, towing her car to the end of the lane with a tractor and parking it at a neighbour’s house. The vegetable garden was ‘stripped’ by hungry wildlife and given a thorough sterilisation!

The cattle struggled to get water, as all the pipes around the yard were frozen, and they had to be let out to drink from the stream along our boundary. The fields have a trampled look, but the stock are well, indeed they seem to be healthier and fitter than in previous winters.

Animal health has been much in our minds, with the now annual TB testing routine, maggots in the sheep in October – the latest date we have known this horrible problem to occur. We had a really lame cow – our oldest, Babi, could hardly walk but it transpired she has a vicious piece of blackthorn embedded in her foot!

The blackthorn spike may have been the result of hedge-trimmings left lying in the fields. We layed another hedge all along one side of the drive and top pruned tall field maple hedges; this will give more light and air to the orchard which again produced a bumper crop of apples and plums. The passing redwings and fieldfares feasted on the rotting fruit and we stocked up the freezer for the coming winter months.

Landrover and the Silage

Other jobs have been affected by the weather, particularly sorting access to our far field at Ty’n Coed, Cae Gwaelod and getting ponies onto the rough land beyond.
Regular walks through the field have been ‘spiced’ by clouds of common blue butterflies, damsel and dragonflies over open water and bright splashes of purple hardhead and blue devil’s bit scabious.

The AI (artificial insemination) concluded at the end of August, after eleven attempts to get seven cows and heifers into calf, four being repeats (when cows or heifers show they have not taken by bulling again). However it looks likely that at least one, and possibly two of the seven are still not in calf. A bull certainly seems much more reliable! We’ll just have to wait and see how successful AI proves to be.

The rabbit population is still expanding, especially in the fields around the farm; our carrots have been their favourite target in the veg garden. Voles have been eating the potatoes, birds have pecked tomatoes in the polytunnel and the broccoli has been stripped to the leaf ridges by slugs, so we have been sharing our produce! On the other hand, bats have a nursery roost above the office, swallows have been breeding in the cow shed and frequently come into the shippon to fly about and twitter familiarly, and a young buzzard is hanging about the orchard calling incessantly in a squawky voice.

The beeches that came down early in the year have provided an amazing amount of work for chain saw, log splitter and axe. The result is equally amazing. We have never had a wood store like this before – it rivals anything we saw in June in Slovenia. Almost worth wishing for a cold winter!

The log splitter with one of our stacks of wood

We put in a new piece of road-side fencing at Ty’n Coed, which has gone in well despite the lack of rain, which makes knocking in posts a challenge. At the beginning of June the cattle all came home, ready for visits from the AI man; by the end of the month, three cows and three heifers had been given semen from two bulls, a pedigree Welsh Black for the cows and an easy-calving Aberdeen Angus bull for the heifers.

The AI man remarked on the condition of the cows – their coats are shining and they look a picture of health; but also raised a note of caution: their diet, especially come winter, needs to be carefully regulated so that they don’t get too fat.

On the sheep front we had an aggravating loss, partly due to a mix-up over who was checking them. One ewe was unable to get up after heavy rain had soaked her fleece; she seems to have had a heart attack. A second ewe got stuck a few days later in identical circumstances, but we got to her in time. As a result of this tragedy, shearing was brought forward, and the sheep now look cool and a great deal thinner.

This has been the sunniest June, and two of the warmest, sunniest months I can remember, which has played well with the livestock, poorly with the grass, and variably with the vegetables. Two fields have been cut for hay, but the crop is very thin, so we hope we will get a decent crop off two more fields to tide us through the winter. Rabbits have decimated peas and cabbages, but we are now enjoying good crops of garlic and early potatoes.

Putting in the new trough

We have been getting fences and troughs ready for the arrival of our organic grazier’s cattle on 01 May.

Our cows and calves went into a large, grassy field, while the rest of the herd went off to our land a mile away to do some important ‘conservation management’, clearing the old grass from our flower-rich hay meadow and grazing a rush ‘rhos pasture’. This part of the farm has been the scene of some spectacular feats in fencing! Contractors supported by the Anglesey Grazing Animals Partnership (website) have secured the boundaries of the rough so that the plant communities in need of grazing can be grazed; the idea is that the meat from these animals will be marketed as ‘wildlife friendly’.

The asparagus in the poly tunnel is producing about half a kilo of spears a day, and it is stretching our imagination to find new things to do with it! But we haven’t tired of the flavour or the luxury of having our own organic asparagus straight from the ground to the fork via the oven. As we failed to eat all the beetroot last winter, it’s still in the ground. We have discovered that the shooting young leaves are delicious in salads, to go with the abundant rocket and early lettuce.

To go with the asparagus and salads, we have had rabbit! They are very pretty scampering around the vegetable garden but very tasty on the plate. Unfortunately none of us likes converting them from the former to the latter but we had them casseroled, barbequed and diced!

We have dug out an old length of flexi-netting and fixed it around the vegetable garden. One rabbit ran straight through it, but at least it keeps the chickens out. One solution would be a rabbit-hunting cat, and we have seen a neighbour’s cat stalking rabbits near the house; the count of rabbits in the chicken enclosure each morning is currently four. If it drops to two or less, we can relax, perhaps because the cat’s been at work.

Finally, work on ‘dismantling’ the two fallen beech trees continued after we bought a tractor mounted log splitter. We now have multiple piles of logs ready for next winter.

Log splitting

Throughout the month, we managed to catch up with some much needed maintenance. At Ty’n y Coed, two lengths of fence have gone in along an old, previously unfenced boundary so that ponies can be moved in to restore our wonderful ‘rough’, which had been heading towards a bramble jungle in recent years. At the top of Ty’n y Coed, a mature roadside hedge has been re-laid, leaving several robust-looking Wych elms which we hope will escape beetle-borne Dutch elm disease.

At Tyddyn Adda, a hazel hedge which we planted seven years ago has been laid for the first time and a small plantation thinned.

The animals all look well. The sheep are thriving, with none of the foot troubles and signs of stress so common in pregnant ewes – having a year off has done them a favour. The cattle are in their end-of-winter state, and it will take a good bite of fresh grass and a couple of weeks outside to restore their coats to shiny perfection. The hens are laying well, and getting everywhere. We will have to do something about the rabbit population, which has exploded.

Spring is taking its time, but the daffodils are now well out, along with primroses on the banks and the first violets and chiff chaffs.

A good, cleansing winter with hard frosts is very welcome in the vegetable garden, knocking back slugs and other pests; beetroot and parsnips continued to keep well and the leeks were superb, tightly furled and free from splits.

When the ground was dry and hard, we opened the gate and let the cattle kick around in the field. In recent years, we have become accustomed to seeing several inches of lush grass growth by the end of February, but this year the fields did not even look green.  We are low on hay, and high on muck!

We were faced with sorting out the aftermath of ‘the fall of the giants’, when the winds blew down two huge beech trees. We had to take down two more for safety reasons and ended up with a huge piles of chippings and logs for several winters. We collected a large trailer-load of chippings, which we tipped above the cattle shed and shovelled onto the floor; this has given the cattle a warm, dry bed and reduced the amount of old hay and straw we need to spread to keep them dry.

Fallen Beech

Brussel Sprouts

Apart from routine jobs about the farm, this month seems to have been all about keeping warm and cooking really sustaining meals. Plums have come in handy; stewed and added to hot porridge and cream for breakfast, with a sweetening of maple syrup or a sprinkling of sultanas. Beetroot and parsnips – dug when the frosts allow – regularly accompany roast lamb; leeks have lasted well, supplementing the stored onions, and the Brussels have benefitted from the anti-rabbit netting. We are nearly through the sprouts and have started on the tops, so our own greens are in short supply.

Cows in the snow

On snowy days we felt sorry for the sheep and gave them a couple of scoops of organic nuts to warm them up; they now expect it, sounding off and running up to the gate whenever they see us, until they get their breakfast. A week or two or dry weather allowed us to let the cows out, which they really appreciate. The calves are belting around the field, enjoying the really good leg-stretch. The massive pile of big bales and the huge haystack (which we thought we’d never get through) have both dwindled to very modest proportions. Egg production has slowed but not stopped. Snowdrops are now in full splendour, cheering the spirits after what seems to have been quite a long winter already.

A sprinkling of snow