Morning Milking and finding a wagon for Pokey the goat

24th November 2011
Oh my dear friend Ulrike… I don’t know how you talked me into this.. surprisingly easily in fact.. But this morning I found myself doing morning milking on a farm that is no longer mine…So, good old Botton Farm herd….Oh how I missed you girls. Cherry, Damson, Rose, Belle, Lady, Laura, Queenie, Royal, Maypole, Ruby and Socks! But I digress, E.U. (As I now have to refer to the villagers..)was serving at the Church, so someone had to stand in for him in morning milking and I stood up to the mark. Had a rather good cup of coffee made by Ulrike, payment for getting me out of bed at JEZUS o clock, and breakfast in New Botton Farm, very nice to be “home” or what still feels a little like my adopted home.
After breakfast it is work as usual. Tom found a wooden hand trailer cart thing behind the barn, and we had a good clean of it, pumped up the tyres and oiled it all up and decided it was too heavy for our initial plan of making Pokey, the resident goat on the farm, pull the wagon. With no other purpose for it two of the villagers pulled each other around the yard during tea break time… And then we popped it back in the barn. I do have photographs, but am not allowed to post them for obvious reasons as you can recognise who they are. I tried masking their identity, but then it looks like a Special Ops photograph….So I shall not post it.
Instead, the cat, Ninja, brought a dead rabbit into the boot lobby:


25th November 2011
Sadly I didnt take any pictures today as some of them would’ve been purty! We were down in the lower fields by the beck cutting down overhanging trees and loading them up onto the trailer. The sun was just setting over the back of the dale, and casting beautiful shadows, and with the blue clear sky it was really nice. Very cold though. Evening I had my scarf, bookmark and dog tags stolen and hidden under the kitchen table by a very cute kid. The dog tags got slightly chewed as well, just as well they’re metal eh… And then I had a great conversation with Miss De Boer . 

Been a bit lax of late…

So, the last thing that happened was that we had a new calf on the 18th of November (2011). It’s been nearly a week since then, and what a lot has happened! A lot of stuff is going down here in Botton with the new manager, but I am not at liberty to discuss any of it, so last weekend was a bit of a “Oh your god is this really happening” weekend. Always nice to know I came home to a battlefield.

But, what has been going on on the farm (Would you put 2 “on”s there?)

17th November 2011

So, on the afternoon of the 17th we shifted a bunch of reeds that were cut in one of the fields. The aim of this was simply to clear it all off so the grass could grow underneath. They’ve been lying there for so long now that some of the grass is dying under. We were supposed to be clearing it by hand, around 2 tonnes of the stuff… Maybe 1.5T… And initially that’s what we were doing. The farm trainee, Tom, went and asked a guy working on the drains in the field, “Steve” if we could borrow his dumper truck on tank tracks, but he said no, so we carried on. After lunch, the main farmer (Gilberto) came down to the field, up came Steve and offered his dumper truck Tom was not best pleased.

So, we shifted the piles in one afternoon, rather than a few days, and got them all squared away by the walls to pick up with the tractor later. During milking I found out how to make the bull do this rather amusing thing with his nose:

I did know the name of this as I did a project on cattle behaviour in my 2nd year of International Wildlife Biology, might post it up at some point….

18th November 2011

In the morning I figured out how to upload blog posts from my phone… Hence the calf post, which was actually written on  the 14th of November 2011.

We shifted all the reeds from the wall where Steve had stacked them with the dumper, and we picked them up on the trailer. Steve gave us a hand again with the digger to get them into the trailer…Little bit of overkill… Tom had his first go with driving the trailer, though not officially….

19th November 2011

Farmers market! Didn’t take many pictures here as I was kind of busy. In true farmers market tradition (As the ones I’ve been to before were in the summer….) I had an ice cream… It was about 4 degrees C… Still, tasty ice cream…

In the afternoon Ulrike and I went for a walk up onto the moors to eat chocolate and take photographs:

These were all taken with my dive camera, so I’m rather pleased with the results

20th November 2011

Just a normal Sunday… Relaxed, had lunch, played with bows and arrows in the forest with Ulrike…

I wish they’d put my LG Viewty camera in an Android phone…

21st November 2011

Didn’t really take that many pictures, just one where all the cows were sleeping in the same way:

Even the calves:

I think it must be inate.

22nd November 2011

Mucked out the barn using the front loader, the field was so slippy, so when I was emptying it onto the muck heap I really tore the field up….

So, and now it is the 23rd….

New calf - another one!

Last cow of this year, furrow, had her calf, another heifer, got about 7 now, excellent!

Game released: The Elder Scrolls Skyrim

So, today is the 11th of November, 2011 (11/11/11, in Day Day/ Month Month, Year Year, not Month Month Day Day Year Year… Nothing goes big, small, big it’s silly… Stop using that system USA…)  and on 11/11/11 Skyrim was released. I’ve been preloading it for a couple days now from STEAM, and this morning I got up at 6 to play for a couple hours before work. And may I say, what a couple of hours it was! OOOOOOhhh my I love The Elder Scrolls games, and so far Skyrim is no exception. DRAGONS!

But yes, I am looking forward to playing this game properly on the weekend. Gonna close everything running and slam the settings up to max
Anyways, enjoy your day,
Skipper

The carrots are done!

So, we moved the last box of carrots into the cold store yesterday. This isn’t actually it… I moved it in with a fork lift truck, this is one of the first to come of the field last night, with Hans driving the front loader. But yes, we got a very decent haul from the field, not sure exactly how many boxes there were, I heard 18 half tonne boxes, but I think there were more.

Another thing we did last night was peppers. I dont claim to know what it’s all about, but peppers seem to be burned seeds of weeds and thing, these are then sprayed on the field, and apparently stop weed growth… Not sure how… Maybe they ask nicely. But ours is not to reason why….

So, I made a pretty awesome fire I have to admit, and they put the seeds in an aluminium tray. This went onto the hot coals and the seeds burned. Though the aluminium tray also melted… And half the seeds fell into the fire. Ah nuts.

Gilberto, my Workmaster, went to find something else and came back with a coal bucket, which is meant to hold cold, unburned coal next to a fire, and put it in the fire…

….The paint caught fire and made some nasty fumes…..

Oops again…. Anyways, was an overall success. So, today I have a first aid course, and in the evening I’m going to see Johnny English with New Botton Farm in Middlesbrough. Should be fun!

Carrots!

This is a slightly better quality than my phone

This was a little weird, saw it while taking the cows out, all the walls and muck heaps were covered in spider webs, which were themselves covered in dew. Looked very cool.

Anyway, in the afternoon we were harvesting carrots again. Got 4 full half tonne boxes, and 4 partially full ones, not a bad haul. Anyways, I got the forklift job, unloading them from the trailer and stacking them in the cold store. Oh I do like heavy machinery.

Didn’t do a bad job of stacking them either.

Fireworks! And shopping

So, on Saturday evening (5th of November) it was Bonfire Night in the UK, and High Farm went on a house outing to Helmsley to see the firework display.

Fireworks! Yes… my phone camera sucks… I wish they would put the LG Viewty camera into other cameras… That was the best phone camera I’ve ever had, it was awesome! And an actual Xenon flash! I digress! But yes, LG Viewty, my favourite old phone, if it ran Android… I’d go back in a flash… Geddit? Oh dear…

Fireworks! Yes! Anyways, it was good, love the really deep “BOOM” ones, the slightly higher pitch common bangs were a little too much like rifle fire, not that that’s a bad thing, I just wanted something bigger, artillery, 120mm cannon shells.. that kinda thing! Was good though, enjoyed it. The food left something to be desired, was hot dogs with MRM sausages, or Mechanically Recovered Meat, which, when you’re used to high quality organic meat in Botton….. Well, it left something to be desired.

But, before that we had a normal morning on the farm, a normal morning is basically:

First off, if the cows are out in the fields (They’ll be coming into the barn soon for Winter) we take them out to the field.

Then we come back and clean the barn, the yard gets scraped down and all the muck collected. The standings, where the cows stand when they’re eating (I’ll make a drawing of this at some point to show what it looks like… Or just take a photograph) also get scraped down. Soiled bedding is taken out and fresh straw put down. The feed passage is cleaned and fresh hay put down. The bull pen also gets mucked out and bedded down.

After this, if we have time any other odd jobs get done, tools are washed and cleaned, and the place is basically tidied up in time for the next week.

After lunch in High Farm I headed back home and introduced one of the young coworkers to an Xbox 360, not sure she was very impressed… Especially by my rather limited choice in games…. Halo mostly….

And in the evening, yea, I went to watch fireworks!

On the Sunday, currently my day off doing much work, I took someone to the train station in Middlesbrough, and then went shopping, spending far too much money on 2 fleeces and a cup of very expensive, but tasty coffee… White Chocolate Mocha from Neros… Ohhhhhh you need to try it, so good! With whipped cream… mmmmmmmm

 

Yes, anyways, that’s all from me today, tomorrow we’ll probably be harvesting carrots again, so goodnight!

-Skip

New Calf on High Farm

So, one of our cows, Rose gave birth to a beautiful heifer.

Though sadly my phone camera sucks!

Anyways, I seem to be going down with some kind of cold again… Something that has been going through Botton recently, kinda a cough and a sore throat.

So, this morning after we took the cows out into the fields……

….

We had to switch all wood around in half ton boxes as they were in the smaller vegetable half ton boxes, so we switched them over to the log boxes, which have larger gaps, so they’re unsuitable for carrots, but fine for logs.

After lunch one of the calves got it’s head stuck in a fence, and was really really stuck, so we head to cut away the fence to get it out. It has bruised around it’s eye and was looking pretty poorly, but in the evening it perked up and was much more like its self.

We then moved around carrots in the root storage shed with the fork lift and a little pushy around thing… There are like 26 half ton boxes in the root store, so it was rather a lot of manual labour. When the villagers went to get the cows in they reported that Rose had had her calf, so I drove out in the little blue tractor above and we put the calf in the link box on the back. I then drove it back to the barn from the field in the pouring rain with Rose running along behind, and sometimes in front of the tractor.

Aside from feeling rough, an overall good day!

-Skip

First 2 days on High Farm

So, this summer I was working on Botton Farm, but when I dropped out of my Masters Degree (Msc Marine Biology) and applied to Botton they did not have space on Botton Farm, sadly. So, I got posted to High Farm, see map:

View BottonFarmAndHighFarm in a larger map

It is a very different farm than Botton Farm. Smaller, but a newer building. The milking parlour is very small, still a 4 cow stall, but the stalls are at floor level, so you’ve got to sit on the floor to milk, compared to Botton Farm where the cows climb up a step and stand with the udders at elbow height when you’re sitting on the step, which is more comfortable. At the moment there are only 2 buckets, so when you milk with two clusters you’ve got to detach the entire set up to take the churn into the dairy to weigh… Little things like this make me mildly apprehensive to start milking. That and I’ve got to learn the names of an entirely new herd.

 

On the bright side, the cows are very friendly! Definitely the friendliest in Botton!

Anyway! What have I been up to?

Day 1: My first day on the farm, a full day this one. The morning I spent moving young stock, walking up HUGE ASS HILLS, and mucking out the barn.
Aww Pretty trees

In the afternoon we harvested around 1 and a half tonnes of carrots over at Honey Bee Nest, which was cool. In the evening was a supper for all the Young Co-workers, of which I am now one of, and following this was a craft group. I was in the pottery group as most of the others were full, and I didnt fancy making gnomes…

Played with clay for about 30 minutes, until it was totally dry, and useless, annoying the guy who was running the group. I then asked to have a go on the wheel to which he said “Well, just in case you achieve anything…” Why thank you good sir! Your faith in me is unbelievable!

 

Day 2:

The morning was the foundation course, which this time was Eurythmy, which I have come to the conclusion of being very weird, followed by a health and safety meeting on lifting heavy things…. Oh joy! But the lady in the video they showed was rather amusing as her eyebrow were so high it looked like she was constantly surprised…

In the afternoon we returned to the carrot field, and filled 6 Half Tonne boxes, which is rather impressive as the grand total they’ve harvested is like 2 tonnes over their expected yield, and we’re not even finished yet!

Anyways, it’s late and I’m tired, so

Goodnight all!