Lambing on the Preseli Hills

April is lambing time for our little flock of Lleyn ewes. This is the story of this year's lambing time and the characters that make up the flock.


The 30 ewes (and a few hangers on, more about them later) came into the barn on Good Friday. They were quite pleased about this! They actually wanted to come in sooner, but we have to wait for a dry day so their wool is dry when they come in. If we brought in sopping wet sheep they would steam, the water vapour would hit the barn's metal roof and then it would spend the rest of the lambing period 'raining' on the poor sheep (and us) below. It could also cause problems such as pneumonia. So they have to be dry, then they can come in.

There then usually follows a period where the sheep laze about on piles of soft hay not doing very much while we consult the calender, consult the ram, scratch our heads, count days and wonder when the first lamb is going to be born. Mum checks them every four hours, I check them between 11pm and midnight. Invariably, as they are fed at 5pm, they will lamb at 11pm, but it could be any time.

Here's the first lamb. This is One Spot and his brother. One Spot was born first, on April 3rd, then the ewe went off to have her second and forgot all about him. When we reminded her, she refused to believe he was hers and wouldn't feed him. Aargh! We thought. Great start to lambing. Mum, who is In Charge where sheep are concerned, gave him some colostrum and now he is bottle fed. His mum has agreed that she should look after him... sort of.

It went very cold again just after lambing had begun so we found the heat lamp. One Spot broke it, so another bulb was bought and the lamp positioned out of lambs' reach. They love it.

After One Spot was born the rest followed on in dribs and drabs. We had a few problems, but nothing serious. The main problem we have is when they get their legs tucked back a bit, so you get a nose and two hooves, instead of two hooves, a bit of leg and a pair of knees, then a nose. What we have to do then is pull gently on the hooves until the knees come out. I try to get one leg longer than the other as this offsets the shoulders and makes the lamb narrower for the ewe's pelvis. The most stuck one arrived one day when Hannah and Rosie had friends round after school. They watched agog as it took both mum and I to pull out an enormous lamb. The children had been astonished to see the lamb's face poking out of the back of the ewe, with its little tongue sticking out, looking rather blue. But we delivered it quickly and it was soon up on its feet with its tongue back to a more normal pink colour.

One thing about having a closed flock (which means we don't buy in any new ewes, we breed our own replacements and just buy a new ram once in a while) means the ewes have very strong family ties. These two, above, our records confirm, are twins. They lambed within a few hours of each other and refused to be penned separately. They spent one night taking their pens apart so they could be together, so we gave in and they now have a double room.

The mother of these two is across the yard in the stable which acts as a holding area before the ewes and lambs go out in the field. She may have a new set of lambs to look after, but she's still keeping tabs on these two and her new grandchildren. One reason that lambing is so noisy is that the various families are bleating at each other from waiting pen, to lambing pen, to stable, to field.

This is Chops, our pet sheep, one of the hangers-on. He was fully intended to be chops, joints, mince etc, and when he was being bottle fed we made it clear to everyone, including my children who were then aged two and four, that he would be on the dinner table one day. They were happy about this. Then we gathered up that year's bunch of lambs to label up the ones going off to slaughter. Chops was duly labelled with a big blue dot on his head. Then the others were a pain to catch. Chop is easy to catch. In fact the difficult thing is getting rid of him. He actually helped me catch the others, then, as I was sitting on the floor trimming the woolly backside of one of the others, Chops came over, put his head on my shoulder, leaned, nuzzled and cuddled me. So we put a big red cross on his side to say "not this one" and he has stayed. Who could eat a sheep this cute? Not me!

Other hangers-on include a couple of hoggets (yearling sheep) which failed to finish as lamb last year and will be sold this year instead or kept on for another year as mutton. There's also a bunch of ewe lambs who won't have their first lambs until next year.

This is the daddy. This is Baary, our Lleyn ram, who arrived, many years ago as a ram lamb and did a great deal of baaing, hence his name. He's a lovely benign old chap now, but we can't use him next year so we have to either take the heartbreaking decision of sending him off for slaughter, which seems very mean, or find someone to swap rams with. Needless to say, we'll be working on the latter.

This is our other bottlefed lamb this year. This one's called Timmy because she (I know!) is tiny and sounds like Shaun the Sheep's little dummy sucking friend. The mum's a bit young and clueless and should not have had a lamb this year, but oops, these things happen.

This lamb always sleeps on his mum's lovely soft comfy back. I'm not sure the ewe entirely approves! The arrangement is fine until the ewe decides to get to her feet...

Once the lambs are clean, dry and strong and have fed well they get rings on their balls (if boys) and on their tails (if girls), the ewes get their one and only dose of wormer, as approved under our organic agreement. We're Soil Association registered organic and don't routinely worm. Instead we have a strict grassland rotation plan and we select for ewes which don't get worms. The lambs then have to be tagged - double tags for the ewe lambs, single tags for the rams - which gives them an odd lop-eared look as the tags are too big and heavy for their ears, but the government says we must do this, so we do. Then they spend a few days in the stable in a small group, waiting for a nice bit of sunshine so they can go outside in the field.

So that is the story of this year's lambing. We still have three left to lamb. They're getting a bit disgruntled with us as we keep peering under them at their udders to see how close to lambing they are! It won't be long, then they'll all be out in the spring sunshine eating the new grass.

Food for Thought

I had the enormous privilege last night of listening to Monty Don speaking on the importance of local food.

Monty was guest speaker at a meeting of the West Wales Soil Association in Ciliau Aeron, near Lampeter, hosted by Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, who farms locally.

Patrick warned the audience about the impending oil crisis – Peak Oil – where oil production will peak, then decline. He suggested that rising oil prices would force the economy towards a tipping point which means that they way we live now, with our dependence on oil, cannot continue, particularly the way we produce and buy food. He then introduced the guest speaker describing Monty, who now has a farm on the Black Mountain, as a vital bridge between gardening and farming.

The meeting was packed, of course, with everyone from enthusiastic amateur gardeners and smallholders to the leading lights of the organic industry, including Rachel Rowlands, founder of the hugely successful Rachel’s Dairy.

Monty began with an anecdote about his recent travels around the world filming for his TV series ‘Around the World in 80 Gardens’ when he managed to collect the wrong suitcase and, when the suitcase was opened, instead of his suits it contained an array of pink saris and beaded cashmere jumpers. He was four days down the Amazon with only the suit he was wearing.

“That’s how I feel now,” he told his audience. “And I’m still looking for a tea picker wearing a suit.”

He described how his trip to the Organiponicos in Cuba had so inspired him. These areas of horticulture within cities produce an incredibly high standard of fresh food for the inhabitants. It was, he said, an example of how people in the cities can produce their own local food and a model, perhaps, for our own future in this country.

Monty continued that theme describing how small producers in Cuba, the Amazon, Mexico and India used traditional, organic, techniques to provide food for their own needs.

He warned that the UK’s fondness for cheap food meant that we paid for it in other ways, with our health, for example, and said that in this country people have forgotten how important and special food is. Families no longer prepare meals from scratch and then eat them together around a table. He spoke about a gardener he had met in Italy where, despite no shared language, they shared a total enjoyment in the quality of the fruit and vegetables he was growing.

“In the UK farmers are regarded as producing ingredients for the food industry,” Monty said. “We have lost our pride in the food that we produce and farmers are not respected as they should be.”

He also spoke about his project to introduce drug addicts to farming, documented in the TV series and book ‘Growing Out of Trouble’. This project is ongoing, with some failures, but mostly success and Monty said he had been astonished at how the addicts did not know how to eat.

“They would take their food and go and eat it by themselves,” he said, turning into a corner behind him to demonstrate. “When they had food they were effectively turning their backs on everyone else when they ate it. They did not know how to sit around a table and share food with others. One told me that she had never sat down to a family meal and when I asked them to lay the table for a meal they had no idea what I was talking about. They had never done that and they did not know anyone who had either.”

He said the project had its most successful times when they all sat down around the table together and shared food. The participants even began to bring in their own food, such as cakes, to share with everyone else. That was something, Monty explained, that was an important part of their rehabilitation, as was getting up at 5am to pick produce to sell with pride at the Ludlow Food Festival.

It was a wide ranging and inspirational talk in which at one point he even dared to tell the assembled organic farmers that organic was not the most important thing, local was prime and that they should beware of remaining in a situation – a ghetto almost – where they talked with each other, but did not invite other parts of society into the discussion. There were a few intakes of breath, but also murmurs of recognition and agreement.

The talk fired up members of the audience who then took part in a question and answer session with Monty and Patrick. Could the UK, or the world, feed itself under these terms, one wanted to know. Others wondered about how the Soil Association could label air freighted foods as organic. Education was discussed, not just of children, but also of adults who had lost their connection with food and the land. Supermarkets bore the brunt of the blame for the loss of a connection with what we eat and how it is grown. But, as Monty pointed out, as the oil prices increase, the cost of food distribution will go up too, so supermarket food prices will rise, making local food more competitive.

After enjoying Patrick’s delicious chocolate brownies and coffee and the meeting formed into small groups, each discussing and issue that had been raised by the talk. Issues raised included that Farmers Markets should be held more often, farms should twin with cities, more co-operation was needed between growers, particularly micro-producers who currently find it difficult to get their excess produce on sale and those new to food production should be offered more help. Allotments and their increasing popularity was another point raised with Patrick Holden and it was suggested that the Soil Association, which already does so much for farmers and gardeners, should find some way of including them. The meeting broke up reluctantly and everyone went home with plenty to talk and think about.

It was a fascinating evening and it was a privilege to have been able to listen to Monty and Patrick’s views on how we are to feed ourselves as a nation in the future. But it was frightening too; we cannot continue wasting food and the planet’s resources with the profligacy that we have become accustomed too. We must take more responsibility for feeding ourselves and not rely so heavily on supermarkets. It was certainly food for thought.