Storm Damage, Organic Milk, Stained Glass

Following last evening's beautiful flamingo-tinted skies at sundown we have a lovely clear frosty morning which cheers everyone up after the seemingly endless miserable weather that we have had to endure for months. Daffodils are flowering everywhere and the snowdrops are beginning to show their cool-white streaked with green in patches around the farm & on the verges and hedgerow bottoms & birds are singing. However, we must not think that Spring has arrived, February & March can turn out to be harsh and cold. We shall just have to wait & see.

At the beginning of the week we were battered by Storm Imogen which resulted in the second polytunnel being badly damaged, though the plastic sheet did not fly off the frame but was ripped and pulled away from its anchorages. It will be a fiddly job to get it back and patched up which we must do otherwise we have nowhere to bring the sheep in for lambing at the the end of the month having lost the whole sheet on the other tunnel in previous storm. The Farmer is just waiting for a calm wind-less day to put the replacement sheet on. Unfortunately today though dry is not without a breeze.

As from the beginning of February we are now full members of OMSCo, (Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative)(www.omsco.co.uk). We ended a 56 yr contract with First Milk (formerly the MMB)along with 40 other organic milk producers across the country to become part of OMSCo who have been buying our milk through First Milk for anumber of years anyway. It just seems to make sense that we sell directly to them as full members rather than as associate members. They supply milk to Yeo Valley Yogurt amongst other organic dairy processors & are doing lots of good work in the USA with British manufactured organic cheese, Kingdom Cheese, which is proving popular.

Yesterday I spent a lovely long day at Cariad Glass (www.cariadglass.co.uk), a local stained glass studio, making a rather pretty, though I say it myself, coloured glass hanger. It is very intense, satisfying creative process from choosing glass from a huge library of incredible colour, variety & texture, to cutting out the shapes, and then leading them into place. It was my second time on a Cariad Glass course and so I was able to make a rather more complicated design than my first one.