The Cow Pad has taken a bit of a pounding this week as we have had a lot of rain and today has been particularly horrendous. In places now the mud is winning the battle as the water ‘attacks’ from both above and below. The 4-acre field is our driest field and beyond the inevitable soggy areas by gates and field shelter entrances, it is holding up pretty well. We do get a run-off from Denis’ field above us (inevitably) and in creating the Cow Pad, we now get a run off from that too BUT fingers crossed we can get through the rest of this month without things getting much wetter…. We have a bit more rain to come on Monday and then ‘they’ tell us it should be drier and colder. For the moment we will continue to top up the Cow Pad with woodchip to stop it becoming a total quagmire and make sure the field shelters are full of LOTS of dry straw. Fellow Dexter keepers had a look at our set up and were very complimentary. They out-winter their cows (but they have a lot more cows AND a lot more land AND, so they tell us, a LOT more mud!!).
The current plan is that as soon as the weather warms and we start to see the grass growing a bit more (hopefully early to mid-March), we can get the sheep and alpacas back in the top 3-acre field and then we can let the cows out into the 4-acre one. We will put electric fencing up so they don’t have access to all of it and that way, we can strip feed them as we did when they arrived last September. This will ensure that much of the field really gets time to recover from the winter grazing AND it will give the cows fresh grass every week or so, which they of course will love – the grass really is always greener... for them!
Despite the bad weather, we are starting to see that spring is on its way: we have snowdrops, emerging bulbs, catkins and the onions have started to sprout in the potting area.
Fast forward five or so weeks and we may have our first lambs too: an amazing thought!!!!