One week into lambing and everything is going well. As any shepherd will tell you, lambing is all about the weather and the last seven days have been wall-to-wall sunshine. With only a couple of hundred ewes to lamb this year we decided to do most of the work on foot (as opposed to roaring around on the quad bike). This means we are keeping the expectant ewes in just a few acres and moving them out one-by-one onto fresh pastures as they lamb.

This has been very pleasant, with the worst problems being heat stress for the birthing ewes and sunburn for us!

A few years ago we moved the date for the start of lambing forward to about the 20th April from its traditional 1st April start. This was to ensure that as organic farmers (without the option of pushing the early grass with nitrogen), it would have warmed up enough to get the spring growth well under way. Well global warming has made a nonsense of this decision (despite the fact we only implemented it a few short years ago) and now I have to consider moving it back a few days each year.

Once we have moved the ewes and lambs out of the lambing field we leave them in a small holding field before ‘ringing’ them. This involves using a special applicator to stretch open a small rubber ring, through which the lambs tail can be threaded. Once in the right position the ring is then slid off of the applicator and sits tight around the tail, stopping the flow of blood. After a couple of weeks the portion of the tail below the ring will simply drop off and leave the lamb with a shorter tail which will be much cleaner and so less prone to fly strike.

If you are male and over the age of 13 you might like to look away now, as exactly the same method is used to castrate the boy lambs. The ring is simply slid over the testicles and ‘pinged’ shut thus stopping the blood flow. 14 days later and the two nuts in their sack simply drop off and are picked up by passing crows looking for a tasty snack.

All very neat and relatively painless – only please don’t try this at home!

Last week we were away enjoying a kid-free weekend on the Isles of Scillys. Our first visit to these sub-tropical havens was brought about by a Christmas gift of two plane tickets by my kind and generous sister-in-law.

Now I have often written about the evils of flying with regard to global warming, and came in for a fair bit of stick from family and friends about taking to the air for our weekend break. However I can’t imagine that the two tiny engines strapped to the wings of our 8 seater sky-bus would contribute much in the way of emissions – indeed they barely looked large enough to power a small car and the whole (flimsy) plane rattled and shook as they sparked into life.

Lands End airport is in fact a strip of grass which ends with a steep cliff and from our seats behind the pilot (and I mean just behind the pilot – cough and you spat on him) we had fantastic views of the cape of Cornwall as we took off and even more dramatic views of the short runway at our destination on St Mary's. Cathy isn’t the best flyer, but she pulled bravely through the 15 minute flight and only really wobbled as we passed over the wreck of last weeks' sky-bus, which had crashed on landing and now resides in a farmers' hedge to the right of the airfield.

The islands themselves are a world apart. Our B&B was just a short walk across a couple of fields from the airport and the main town of Hugh Town was another 10mins down the road. In fact the whole of St Mary's (the largest island) can be comfortably circumnavigated on foot in three to four hours – which indeed we did.

On the other day we took one of the many ferries over to Tresco and spent a couple of hours in the amazing Abbey Gardens. These were planted in 1834 by Augustus Smith and have been maintained by the same family ever since. It was his grandson who introduced daffodil planting to the islands and these have been the mainstay of the agriculture for over a century. However a combination of climate change (which means that the advantage of an early crop over the mainland has been lost) and the fact that there is no where to accommodate the small army of Eastern European cheap labour which keeps the Cornish crop profitable has meant that the rows (& rows) of flowers are now merely for show.

Meanwhile the increase in tourism has resulted in several new swanky restaurants all demanding local meat and dairy products. This will be quite a challenge, which amongst other things means reintroducing livestock and setting up a small abattoir and butchery. I look forward to flying back in a couple of years and seeing how they are getting on.