You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
All travelling between the islands, and most going back and forth between villages and houses, around the Bocas archipelago is carried out by boat. Dugouts, hardly visible above the waterline, holding a single Indian, a cluster of children or a whole family are paddled skilfully and silently along the edges of mangroves or across open bays where they glide with hardly an inch of freeboard alongside occasional pods of dolphins, rays and leaping fish. Read the rest of this entry »
Busy, busy, busy. I’ve been catching up on all those little problems that happened whilst I was away.
Ginny developed a bad foot the day before I arrived back (foul-in-foot) and needed treatment. Several of the cows and the bull have a nasty case of mites and are driving themselves crazy with itching. It’s extremely contagious and the whole herd has to be treated – similar to children getting head lice. So this afternoon I had great fun trying to aim 40mls of the appropriate chemical along the backbone of all the cattle, who were convinced that I had devised a homecoming gurgle-torture…they are paranoid about white plastic bottles that gurgle!
This morning after a prolonged feeding, tidy-up and general check over of all the stock it was onto the bobcat for a-shifting and a-building of the dung heap in preparation for mucking out the cows on Friday in readiness for calving.
The dogs are dillirious with excitement at resuming their daily walks with me, and even the deer in the wood sounded their wierd ‘dolphin-barks’ as I passed by.
And what a gorgeous day! Cold, but dry with sun from dawn to dusk. Desk work will have to wait till tomorrow.
panama post 23rd january
Today’s my birthday! We celebrated with an early morning swim. A full moon white and bright played hide and seek behind low streaked clouds whilst the sun erupted above the horizon changing the smoked-glass sea into an oil smooth mirror. Kingfishers craaked noisily skimming low over the water. Herons, silhouetted against the pale sky, flew with long steady wing beats. Far out in the bay a dolphin breaks the sea glass, leaping fast and furiously chasing his morning breakfast. I slowly glide out into the bay reveling in the sensuous warm silk of the water. Robert signs - come back, come back! I shrug my shoulders – why? ‘Predators’, he mimics, ‘this is the time’. I lazily pull homeward enjoying the flipper-like feeling of my limbs and instinctual harmony with the sea and swimming. As I near the landing stage I feel a long-past remembered tingling sensation along my arm – jellyfish - a million minute stinging cells shed as she drifted past left to cling and sting tender white northern skin! Read the rest of this entry »
Weary, travel-worn, a bit tattered and sore around the eyes, but nonetheless well, hail and hearty! Arrived back this afternoon after a very long, but relatively painless and uneventful, flight or rather flights - three of them to be precise. Read the rest of this entry »
The flight was long; well, not the actual flight but the four hour transit in New York, three of which were taken up queuing for US security, immigration and custom procedures. Frustrating, tiring and seemingly pointless considering we were not even exiting the airport! Settled into our friendly, helpful, B&B we spent the first day exploring the contrasts of Panama City. Poverty mixed with overt affluence, the city is one of contrasts, half American, half Latino in nature.
I’m sitting thirty six thousand feet above the Atlantic. Yes, you’ve guessed I’m in a plane. A rather cramped one.
You may remember that in my Jemima Calves post I mentioned that we were going away, hence my relief Jemima had calved. So here I am, gone and many thousands of miles away from Locks Park Farm. Read the rest of this entry »
Jane has asked for my opinions on set-aside. So here goes, not, I’m afraid, a terribly sexy subject!
Set-aside was originally put in place in the early nineties as a production control measure to take around 10% of arable land out of cropping; it was not an environmental scheme. I can remember the huge outcry from the farming community as some of England’s good arable land lay fallow. Apart from letting the land revert there were specific things you could and could not do to manage the land; these requirements changed over the years. Back at the beginning, for example, you could grow fodder legumes (lucerne, vetches and clovers) and graze at certain times with goats, camilids and horses (hence the exorbitant prices alpacas and lamas commanded back then and the start of the huge surge into horsiculture). These things stick in my mind as I was running a milking herd of goats that benefited from a neighbour’s lucerne hay and some herb-rich grazing. There was some talk of environmental opportunities missed, but the increases is farmland birds and rare arable plants that followed was incidental, not a planned benefit. Read the rest of this entry »
He’s bonny, bright and doing just fine. Despite his mum being a little over excited at his first clumsy movements, they have bonded well and Jemima is turning into an adoring, gentle mother. Read the rest of this entry »
jemima calved early this morning
Jemima is a young first calving heifer and the daughter of Desiree one of the herd’s senior high-ranking cows. I wrote about Jemima back in the summer, in the Social Life of Cows, explaining how she was beginning to take on some herd responsibilities and appeared to be turning into a scout cow – the animal the herd relies on to find new and better pasture; this, in their domesticated state, generally involves making their herdsman, me, know that the grass is getting short and it’s time to move on. Jemima was always a friendly happy-go-lucky youngster though has taken her new responsibilities seriously and as many young upwardly-mobile heifers, became slightly more aloof to humans during the course of the summer. Read the rest of this entry »
farming has devastated the environment?
‘And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ (the Bible Genesis 1:28).
Shouldn’t it be so? Shouldn’t the earth be used to feed the starving in any way she can? A recipe for global disaster! We need the Earth’s diverse and complex ecosystems to support life, give as the oxygen we breathe. Don’t we need it too to inspire us and bring us wonder? Read the rest of this entry »
Gill asked if I could write a post on the economic side of farming. Wow what a subject and one I don’t feel I’m fully qualified to write on. But I can maybe give you slightly more understanding.
Farming is in a state of change and flux. It could be said that’s always so, but never more than at this present moment. Farming will survive for as long as we need food, it’s knowing what form it will eventually take. Pressures come from society’s changing needs and perceptions, new laws, free trade and the influences of climate change and depleting energy sources. It’s certainly a tough and unknown path to be trod but I believe there are opportunities for those that can see them, though I also think the casualties will be great. Read the rest of this entry »
Apologies for being absent - my lurgy morphed wildly and weirdly. It became a huge swollen head, or that’s what it felt like, with severe shocks waves running from hip to ankle.
“Aha” said Olly “that’s because you’ve given up tea”. Read the rest of this entry »
We were like a cartoon characters – exploding out of the duvet, sitting bolt upright, eyes wide open and hair seemingly standing on end. The colossal crack-bang-clap of thunder shocked us awake, the simultaneous lightning flash floodlit the bedroom in a bluish light, the heavens opened and hail hammered down, pounding at the windows and ricocheting off the corrugated roofs of the barns. Wow! Robert leaped from the bed and ran round the house franticly turning off all sensitive probably-blasted-to-the-heavens-by-now stuff, bounded back into bed, snuggled down and pulled the duvet over our heads as we waited for the next explosion, and waited and…waited. That was it, just the one mega blast.
“I think we should wean the calves today” I mumbled from under the duvet
“What?”
“The calves…wean them…today”
“Yes, I heard, but why, what?”
“Well it came to me. Suddenly. Just like that. In a flash of lightning!” I giggled.
So we did.
Damn, blast and bugger…I’ve succumbed. Yup, I’ve caught, completely and with no mistake, the ‘thing’ deftly between my two ears and a little between my ribs too. The ubiquitous, the compulsory, the obligatory, the very one…yes - the seasonal lergy.
Well, what could I expect? I have been shut in a house for the past two weeks with most of the family coughing, sneezing and snorting so I guess the good old immune system was a bit fed-up with being Mr Strong-and-Aloof, therefore deciding to step down off his pedestal and join in the general furore. The problem is that they’ve all gone and I’m left coughing and spluttering on my own (apart from husband and Olly). Read the rest of this entry »
With the family are still clustered around the home fire, we were able to bring in the New Year together and even better celebrate Ben and Berengère’s engagement! Read the rest of this entry »
