Rain stops play again (From Craven Herald)

Rain stops play again

10:43am Friday 22nd June 2012 in From The Farm By Liz Hird

It’s Sunday afternoon and I am sitting in the Land Rover in Commercial square in Leyburn waiting to meet up with our honey supplier. We are short of honey, in fact we have run out and it is my fault because I badly underestimated how much we would need for this week’s production. At least it’s a better day than yesterday, it’s fine and quite warm and even though there are very few shops open now there are still quite a lot of people wandering around. I have three buckets to collect and I am borrowing a warming box as two of the buckets are still quite thick and grainy and we can’t use it like that; hopefully by tomorrow morning they will be just right.

Yesterday (Saturday) was a lousy day; I went down to Wilmslow farmers market and Stuart went to Richmond and Eddy, Jess and David went to Buckden Gala. The journey into Cheshire is a long one (86 miles) and calls for an early start. I had quite a good run down (motorway for a good deal of the way) and got set up just before it started to rain; it then proceeded to pour down for about three hours solid... I’m not surprised that the streets were deserted. Trading and weather conditions were similar at Richmond; all in all it was quite disheartening.

I’m back home now and I have just been out to bring some washing in (whites for tomorrow) and in the space of about six minutes, I have just about been eaten to death by midges.

From the office window I can see there are very few sheep about on the bottom of Raisgill Hagg, they are well up the hillside where the air is fresher and there is a bit more of a breeze; they know where to go to get out of the way of the little black blighters.

The housemartens have completed the build but have yet to come home to settle in for the night; they are currently engaged in impressive stunts of aerial acrobatics as they hunt for insects – shouldn’t be a difficult job this evening!

We have four nests, two at the front and two at the back and from what I can remember of the old wives tale – they are supposed to bring good luck; let’s hope so in case not! Eddy is outside spraying some thistles in the back croft and Stuart is up on the wood trying to finish a gap, but I can hear the bike so looks as though the midges have got the better of him as I was not expecting him for another hour or so.

One of the quieter months, June is usually a time to get caught up, walling, spraying, straightening up after lambing time and getting ready for clipping and haytime or silage. There is quite a lot of land cleared already, a lot of activity up and down the dale – we have a few weeks to wait yet, but it looks as though we are going to have a lot of grass; let’s just hope that we can get it good as well – makes a big difference to the winter feed bill if we can.