Charlie Armstrong is fending off the pigeons

Jane has been busy making breakfast, dinner, tea and supper for about 10 of us for the past three months now, but as lambing is now officially finished and all the lambing staff have gone, we have the house back to ourselves. Two kiwis have stayed to do some fencing – they are making lots of small fields about half an acre in size to be used for lambing next year.

We have baled and wrapped a lot of silage now and this ground will either be cut again or sown into fodder rape. We have already sown 150 acres of rape, which we are desperately trying to keep the pigeons off. When it does rain and the pigeons bugger off we have some turnips to sow on top of drills.

The first of our lambs were sold on 5 May at 5.75kg for 90 – the dearest ever. It’s only a shame it was not 9,000.

About 2,000 lambs are being offered creep feed, which has worked well in the past couple of years, and it will prove invaluable if this drought continues.

A wool press is being used this year to try and reduce the number of woolpacks. Let’s hope it works and saves money on haulage as our wool will go to the wool board again this year. And with high fly strike pressure, I can see we will have to treat ewes with a preventative soon.