June too soon,
July they die,
August you must

So goes the old saying with regard to controlling thistles in your fields, and there are basically three methods you can choose from. Chemicals, topping and pulling.

On Thursday evening I was asked by a neighbour to slip over and humanely dispatch a young foal that had been hit by some idiot speeding on one of our moorland roads. As we drove through his fields I noticed large areas of his hedgerows were browned off and dead. “Round up?” I asked. “Yes” he replied “and d’you know, ever since I did it I’ve had a terrible sore throat”.

And there you have it. Use a pesticide and you will not only decimate wildlife and leave unsightly scars in the greenery, but will also put your own health at risk to boot.

Alternatively, nearly every pasture farm has a topper. These are robust mowing machines that are designed to kill the thistle while leaving the grass intact. Our earliest machine was a ‘finger mower’, and these machines were universally acknowledged to be the best tool for the job all through the ‘50’s and ‘60’s and still have their fans today.

Two 4’ arms with sharpened ‘fingers’ down their length would be lowered to run perpendicular to the rear wheel of the tractor and a complex array of wheels and belts would drive an apple wood shaft (it had to be green apple wood for the perfect combination of strength and flexibility) which would guide one blade over the other as you went along. Where these fiddly beast score over more modern machines is that as the blades ran to the side of the tractor, you didn’t run over (and flatten without cutting) the weeds you were trying to prune.

However my favourite method (and not surprisingly, the least used by far) is pulling. If you can pull out the individual thistle root-an-all it will never come back. In this I am aided by a fantastic tool called the Lazy Dog, which was designed by a firm in North Yorkshire with this specific job in mind.

One of the best eighty quid I have ever invested on the farm. It gives me an excuse to spend an hour or so each day in some of the quietest corners of the farm with just the dogs and the view to keep me company. Better still, you know as you tear each thistle’s roots from the soil with a satisfying ripping sound, you are saying goodbye for ever.

www.lazydogtools.co.uk

The second weekend in June is always marked by the Royal Cornwall Show. One of the last true agricultural shows and also very ‘royal’ this year with the presence of Prince Edward. He opened the show on the Thursday and so we sensibly chose to pull the kids out of school on the Friday.

The ‘early summer monsoon’ (and I kid you not – this is a recognised meteorological event) had occurred a week earlier - thus washing out half term - and so we were blessed with wall-to-wall sunshine for our day out. We also had added excitement this year, as we had arranged to see a bull, with a view to purchasing him to introduce fresh blood, (and indeed a fresh breed) into the herd.

We currently have a small herd of 20 Black Galloways on which we have been ‘working’ a pedigree Black Galloway bull. This is fine & dandy except that after three years we are now faced with welcoming daughters of the bull into his harem. For obvious reasons this doesn’t make good breeding sense and so we have decided to keep the Galloway bull for the older cows and buy a Beef Shorthorn for the heifers.

The Shorthorn has a long and distinguished history as shown by this extract from the breed society’s web site

“In the late 18th Century two brothers, Charles and Robert Colling started to improve Durham cattle using line breeding techniques established so successfully by Robert Bakewell on Longhorn cattle. In 1783 Charles Colling found four particular cows recorded as Duchess, Cherry, Strawberry, and Old Favourite among others, and at the same time his brother Robert had noticed the superiority of calves in the local market bred from a bull known as Hubback, which he subsequently bought for £8.

It was a combination of these bloodlines, which led to the birth of the bull Comet bred by Charles Colling in 1804, and later sold at the Ketton sale in 1810 for 1,000gns. This was the first 1,000 guinea bull ever recorded, but the wisdom of this bid was later to be justified by his progeny and he has since become a legend in cattle breeding.”

1,000gns in 1810 equates to £54,705 in today’s money. We shook hands on the bull at a much more reasonable £1,500, and then had plenty of time to introduce Churton to the wonderment of Candy Floss.

Last weekend we hosted a trial on behalf of the Cornwall Sheepdog Society.

Bill (pictured) – who has been running the sheepdog training courses on the farm over the winter – came the day before and set up a deceptively simple looking course while I fetched 140 odd hoggs (young ewes) to be left in the field overnight to acclimatise themselves to the gates and hurdles.

“We’d better test the course” said Bill once we had set up, and promptly let his dog Splatt loose on a half dozen sheep who proceeded to guided them expertly up the field and neatly through one of the ‘gates’.

“D’yer wanna hav’ a go?” he innocently asked.

Why not, I thought. There’s nobody about and I was sure I could detect a certain smugness in Bill’s amiable challenge. We let another 6 sheep out of the pen and I fetched Morag from the truck.

The gates for sheep dog trails consist of two hurdles with a 7 yard gap between. Now this might sound easy but the nearest gate was at least 200 yards from me and (without my glasses) seemed just a blur in the distance. I let Morag of the chain and she chased the startled sheep up the field at her customary 168 mph, while I hollered at the top of my voice in a vain attempt to direct her left and right.

Call it a fluke, call it luck or call it divine intervention but the sheep galloped up the hill in tight bunch and straight through the gate.

While Bill picked his jaw back up off of the grass, I nonchalantly called Morag back and tied her up in the back of the truck saying, “You know, I might well give it a go tomorrow.”

By 9am the next morning, 40 local dogs were all lined up ready for the off. The running order had the most inexperienced dogs first and Bill took the first spot with a very young dog that , like Morag, had never competed before.

For the trial, we stood at the top of the field, while the sheep were let out 5 at a time from a pen at the bottom - some 300 yards away. Poor Bill couldn’t even get his youngster to find the sheep, let alone drive them and after 5 mins of cussing and shouting had to withdraw defeated. Well if Bill didn’t mind looking the ass then nor did I and I entered Morag’s name at the end of the novices.

I was confidant that she would be able to collect the distant ewes and bring them to me and this she easily managed, only missing the first gate by a dozen yards. Having now run over ¼ mile, she had slowed her down sufficiently to be able to control her enough to get the sheep away from me down to the second gate on the far right of the field.

Here it all went wrong. One ewe strayed from the pack and Morag pounced, giving her a healthy nip on the hind quarters and sending off to the far corner of the field.

While I was shouting at her at the top of my voice, I felt a gentle tap on my shoulder. It was the judge asking me politely to withdraw. Apparently, this sort of rough behaviour is strictly against the rules and no amount of pleading that they were my sheep anyway was going to make any difference!