Category: 2. February 2022
-
Barn Owl Box
Exciting weekend on the farm with the installation of our new barn owl box by the wonderful Broxton Barn Owl Group. We have seen barn owls on the land recently and certainly think they should thrive in the surrounding habitat. We have all done our bit so it’s now over to the barn owls to…
-
Wigeon cafe!
As if to emphasise the point from our previous post, the above photo shows quite how much the wigeon have enjoyed grazing our winter wheat! Wigeon were certainly not something we had expected to see on the farm being a duck we had always (rightly or wrongly) associated with wild open spaces and the coast.…
-
Pink feet!
Enormous skeins of pink footed geese, often many hundreds in number, are now a common sight over our farm and across the winter skies of the Cheshire plain. It was not always so – with historical records suggesting only occasional winter visits to Cheshire even as recently as the early 2000s. Their increased prevalence in…
-
Why here? Why now?
We bought our farmhouse in Cheshire during the summer of 2021 – the culmination of a hectic three months that also involved selling our house nearby – a property we built from scratch 10 years previously and home for almost all our time together as a family. While we had long aspired to own land, at…
-
Why not the Cuckoo?
Why not the cuckoo? As the local street name suggests until recently, in Cheshire and elsewhere across England, the onomatopoeic call of the cuckoo was among the most familiar sounds of late Spring in the English countryside. No more. With a single exception on a local nature reserve, it has been more than 10 years…
-
Signs of Spring
After two days of roaring winds and pouring rain, a walk up to the Newt Pond produced a surprise. The previously plain green field was suddenly dotted with dabs of colour… on closer inspection, daisies were flowering, some red dead nettle had bloomed and a patch of chickweed was preparing its flowers… (Have you ever…
-
All Full Up and a Valentine’s Day Treat
Exciting news – the test wader splash pit is full to the brim! The 6 inches of standing water in our test pit suggest that the winter water table is clearly high enough to support a wader scrape, no doubt helped by the thick layer of clay underneath our land. While we probably won’t start digging the…
-
Wader Scrape Test Pit and… Lapwings!
A miserable Sunday afternoon in February with rain pouring down – what better time to investigate if our plans for a wader splash in one of our wetter fields might actually work? Out with the spade to dig a small test pit – approx. 6 spade widths wide, two across and 1 down. Early signs are…
-
Test Results are In…
…its looking good for the meadow project ! A quick cross reference on the internet to understand what all the numbers mean show that soil fertility levels are low and pH is good – providing a better than expected starting point for our proposed new species rich meadow that we have planned for a small…
Hope for the Lappinch 