The summer as has been documented was one of the worst growing seasons in living memory. Most crops have been between three and four weeks late right through the season. In my experience most crops catch up by mid summer but this year crops stayed behind for the whole season which effectively meant three weeks lost from the season.
Surprising for me was the fact that Leeks that need lots of daylight were early compared to last year, nothing is straight forward with organic growing. Most of our various crops are or have been harvested but production is generally much lower than previous years.
The Ram is in with the ewes and has done his job on 3/4 of them. We are looking at lambing from the end of March onwards. At the Hill Radnor show and sale I sold all the ewe lambs except one and they fetched a reasonable price. This year will see the last of the other breeds of sheep on our farm and we will concentrate on Hill Radnors.
Following the loss of my sheep dog Millie we bought a trained dog which we've called Shiv. A mature dog who initially was very shy and nervous, she was unsure of everything so was 'sticky' when working and hesitant taking instructions. Now after four weeks of back to basics training she is starting to show what she is capable of.
The bees have produced about a quarter of last years crop which in itself was poor. The main concern though is how well the colonies will winter. The poor summer will have meant patchy mating of queens which could result in high losses during winter due to queen failure. There is little we can do to influence this we just have to wait and see.
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