The last few weeks have flown by as we prepared for lambing and tried to get on with ploughing albeit the extremely wet ground conditions made things difficult.

On the arable front, we managed to get liquid fertiliser onto both oilseed rape and winter wheat crops last week, the rape in particular was desperately needing it. We have again applied all of our liquid fertiliser onto the wheat in one go by applying it with an inhibitor.

Dad and I had a set-to about doing this, opposed to three smaller applications, as I had been advised the one big application may not work well if conditions turn wet, and with the price of fertiliser the way it is, I didn’t want to risk any of it being wasted.

But as it worked well for us last year, dad was adamant he was doing it again as it would save a lot of time applying it all in one go. We will see how the season goes and hopefully I am proved wrong and it works effectively.

Winter crops also received their first fungicide applications so it is good to have this out of the way before drilling kicks off in earnest. Wheat crops have wintered very well, the rape has been mauled by pigeons in places though unfortunately.

We drilled one field of spring barley on April 1, which is essentially a raised beach which has been in grass for the last four years. The dust was blowing and it was good to make a start to see the sower was working correctly.

Carrot harvest is due to kick off in the next week to 10 days, which is less than ideal timing as we will be trying to get drilling done but we will just have to get on with it.

Lambing has kept me extremely busy over the last 10 days, mam and I are in survival mode – sleeping while we can, though the last few nights have been much better since the night lamber arrived and got up to speed.

Both our lambers this year are from the US – one from Arizona, who is a vet student in London, and another from Virginia, who is getting experience before applying for vet school. They have both been hugely helpful, interested and great fun so far.

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Their ‘super positive’ American attitude is definitely rubbing off on us Scots, with the atmosphere in the lambing shed as good as its ever been. I am not moaning about being tired and mam isn’t moaning about her arthritic knees – what a boost!

We spent a bit of money this year putting water troughs into every big pen of ewes and this had made a huge saving in time and physical effort, we also got more feed barriers and walk through feeders making the feeding job easier too.

My new lamb adoption method has been hugely successful so far this lambing and with half of the 50 triplet bearing ewes now lambed, I only have six pet lambs.

I have tried various twinning techniques and sprays over the years but lambing the ewe and putting both lambs in a bucket of warm sugary water has 100% success rate so far, even with some of our very unmotherly Texel ewes.

I tried a similar method last year but with salt, however we didn’t find it worked that great, my ewes must have a sweet tooth, like myself!