Pleasures yet to come

Every season brings its own joy and pleasure. Being blessed with four seasons and the changes we experience are impossible to explain in words.  Spring is full of colours, flowers, fruits, birds and festivals. Summer is the warmest of all the seasons, yet it has a lot of attractions with long days and short nights. 

Winter is the coldest season and brings heavy snowfall in some regions of the globe. Leaves fall to give the space to the new ones in autumn.  Colours, attractions and beauty are different in all of the four seasons.

People enjoy festivals and events according to the season and have so many attractions that can make your time fun filled. 

When the ice melts and the colour of flowers brings a smile on the faces, when the trees lose their leaves and brings an impact of sadness, we can say that it is how time changes.

Nature has blessed us with so many beauties, so let’s bring a smile by enjoying and sharing funny jokes about spring, summer, winter and autumn

Best marketing

with pic.

Just prior to Easter two Welsh livestock farmers made the trek to London to take part in promoting fabulous home produce.

Luke Winton and Daphne Tilley, as well as representing opposite ends of the country, could not be more different in terms of their experience in the industry. But they share a passion for their animals and for producing high-quality sustainable food.

Daphne, 77, is famous for selling PGI (Certified country of origin) Welsh Lamb directly to some of London’s top food outlets and restaurants, sourced from her own farm in Henllan and also those of her neighbours. She has been awarded an MBE for her services to the industry, and this month linked up with Hybu Cig Cymru - Meat Promotion Wales (HCC) at in-store tastings of Welsh Lamb in the leadup to Easter.

Luke Winton is just 21, and hails from near Cardiff. With his childhood ambition of becoming a footballer thwarted by a knee injury, Luke turned to his other love - animals.

He was given an opportunity to try out agriculture at the Amelia Trust Farm in Barry, and is now working at Abi Reader’s Goldsland Farm in the Vale of Glamorgan, learning the craft of sheep and dairy farming.

This year, Luke is one of 14 young farmers invited to take part in the Love British Food campaign to enlist a younger generation of producers as ambassadors for home-produced food, particularly on social media.

A fortnight ago he attended a special launch event in London with Secretary of State, Michael Gove, and many leading food industry figures.

Luke told me: “Welsh farmers produce fabulous food, and it’s great to have the chance to tell that story as part of the Love British Food project.

“I very much enjoyed the trip to London to meet government ministers and key figures in the industry.

“I look forward to doing more over the coming year to tell consumers what great products we have to offer.”

Daphne remarked: “Many of the top shops and restaurants in London are proud to serve PGI Welsh Lamb. Consumers enjoy hearing about the natural and low-intensity way our lamb is produced, and their reaction to the samples was fantastic!”

HCC consumer executive, Elwen Roberts, confirmed: “It makes such a difference to have the farmers who produce the food as part of our campaigns. Consumers love meeting the producers, hearing about the low-intensity and high-welfare way that food such as PGI Welsh Lamb is farmed, and gaining an insight into the passion that they have for their animals and their industry. Luke and Daphne are terrific ambassadors for Welsh food!”

CAPTION.

Fully traceable, from farm to fork, prime Welsh lamb is constantly in demand

Life in the ‘fridge’

In her Skomer diary, RSPB visitor officer Sarah Parmor tells me that the first two days of March will live long in her memory for being the coldest and snowiest days she has ever experienced on Skomer - the temperature on the 1st did not get above -2 and dipped as low as -6.

It felt just as cold and the wood burner was on all day. There were four hot water bottles in our bed that night.

My colleague’s previous post ‘life in the fridge’ touched upon conditions that day, the ponds were frozen and birds were visibly starting to struggle.

The next day was still very cold and it was clear the conditions were harsher than we, with our wood burners and hot water bottles, could truly appreciate.

Thousands of Redwings, Fieldfares, Lapwings and Golden Plovers passed over trying to escape the frozen conditions.

At around midday it started snowing harder and kept it up into the evening.

The entire island was covered in snow and in places the snow drifts were knee deep. This may not be unusual in Russia, but it is here. I took my camera out and although the lens kept getting wet and the light was bad I tried to capture as much of the spectacle as possible.

I had thought maybe I would have an exciting and relaxing couple of weeks settling in - (including a visit from the BBC Countryfile team who eventually failed to make it!) before the season really started…exciting it was, relaxing, not so much!

As the extreme cold weather subsided, multiple burst pipes left us with major flooding in the hostel accommodation.

Water poured from the ceilings and down the walls and due to an unusual configuration of pipework in the loft it proved a challenge for us to fully cut off the water supply.

Now I understand why ‘problem solving’ is an essential skill required to work on an island where we don’t have the luxuries of things… like plumbers! In the end, we used some old hosepipe, silicone and electrical tape to make a drain out of the loft into one of the bathroom showers until we could get some skilled help. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

After this brief spell of slightly milder weather, came another big freeze… ‘Beast from the East, Part II’ or ‘The minibeast’ as Ed liked to call it. It didn’t feel very ‘mini’ to me and we were all walking around trying to work wearing anything up to eight layers of clothing, gloves, woolly hats and scarves… and that was just indoors! It’s at times like these that you realise how tough the birds and wildlife are surviving in these extreme conditions.

As all this was happening, my visitor officer training continued, which included tractor driving. Anyone who knows me will know I am of the petite variety and this is not conducive to driving tractors… but I had excellent teaching from Bee (like me, smaller than your average person) and I already feel more than comfortable plodding up and down from the Farm to North Haven on the tractor - the benefits of a slow vehicle are that it is also a good opportunity to do a spot of birdwatching!

Talking of which, of course Skomer is a wonderful place to see a diverse range of birds and wildlife. Even this early in the season we have had some lovely sightings. The short-eared owls are already active, we have a couple of hen harriers hunting and roosting on the island and have already had the first manxies and puffins back from their winter migration.

Sarah-Kay and I spotted a manx shearwater trapped in some bracken only yesterday. They are true seabirds and are vulnerable to predation when out on land in the daytime so we tucked it away under a wooden board in our garden until it could safely leave under cover of darkness later that night.

Sarah-Kay and I have put up some housemartin nestboxes up at the farm and hopefully we may get some breeding birds in there this year. On the nestbox theme, we are currently constructing some artificial manx shearwater nestboxes. There is stiff competition for natural burrows with over 316,000 pairs breeding here and given the success of these nestboxes for our neighbours on Ramsey Island we hope to get some breeding birds using them over the next few years. We will keep you posted on the shearwater nestbox colony.

So, we’re all set for a new season, I’m looking forward to seeing how things pan out for our wildlife this year and fingers crossed that it will be a good year.

A late Spring

There can be no doubt that, in the countryside, Spring is quite a bit later than usual this year. The following are a few amusing definitions:

“Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party!’”- Robin Williams.

“Winter lingered so long in the lap of Spring that it occasioned a great deal of talk.” - Bill Nye.

“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.”- Doug Larson.

“Spring is the time of the year, when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.” - Charles Dickens.

“In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.” - Mark Twain.

“Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.” - Al Bernstein.

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” - Margaret Atwood.