Running a smallholding seems to involve a lot of muck shovelling. Especially during the winter when the little darlings spend much of their time mooching around the shed, the paddock and the hay feeders.
With the increase in hoof-fall, these areas soon become very mucky. So, every afternoon I pull on my gloves, my wellies and my dungarees, get my bucket and rake and have a good clean up. I collect the dung from the shed and the area around the feeders. Then I scoop up any large deposits left around the paddock. Finally, I scatter bedding down around the shed and the feeders.
This is all quite labour intensive, but I do it willingly because there are loads of positives.
Obviously, there’s the welfare factor in keeping the sheep areas clean. The sheep don’t enjoy trudging through muck any more than we do. But over the years we’ve found that (in particular) keeping the area around the hay feeders clean has resulted in our teddy bears having hardly any foot rot. No more limping and no Alamycin jabs, hooray! When we started out as smallholders we often had foot problems during the winter. We thought that was just how it was with sheep, but we can really see the difference now.
The other positive is that garden is happy. We have a large heap of manure in the corner of the garden absolutely bursting full of worms. The roses and veggies can’t get enough of it and it’s really satisfying knowing we can feed the garden ‘for free’.
Last year however the badgers got lucky and found the muck heap. For the last few months they’ve been making regular nightly visits to the ‘worm buffet’ and having a lovely time, scattering manure in all directions. On several occasions on the morning dog walk we’ve even spotted a badger curled up in the shed next to the heap snatching forty winks after late night shenanigans.
In the autumn we decided enough was enough and we made the painful decision to move the heap. We were fed up with cleaning up after the badgers. Furthermore, they were decimating our precious compost worms. Given the size of the heap and that we had more than enough for our own uses we decided to create a communal heap half a mile down the track which our neighbours could use too.
So we hitched up the trailer and made several journeys back and forth from the old heap to the new. But no matter how many trips we made the original heap still seemed enormous.
Next, Adrian set up two large compost bins next to the veggie patch. Several trailer loads later we’d filled the bins but still the pile of manure loomed.
Not to be deterred, we mulched the polytunnel and the veggie patch which took another couple of weekends and several more trailer loads.
Last weekend we rolled up our sleeves and mulched along the track where we have 30 hungry roses. We piled it on thick, not just to keep the roses happy, but to smother the grass and weeds growing up around them.
At long last and about six months after starting this mammoth task, we’ve made a dent in the heap. It’s about half as big as it was originally, but the best news is that with all the disruption, the badgers have decided to go and party elsewhere!
