New Gimmer

H

Hen-Gen

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Island of Fetlar, Shetland Islands
Bought a gimmer (young female sheep) (a Zwartbles) last week and she arrived on the big ferry yesterday from Orkney. She's the second sheep I've bought this year as I bought a Black Welsh Mountain ram in Scotland. Can't wait for the breeding season - or tupping time as these sheep farmers call it but I see no reason to talk in unintelligible patois! She's gone in with my Rouge x Zwartbles ewes.
As with chickens I love cross breeding to get exactly what I want which in this case is a big, black, prolific, milky sheep with good carcass conformation! Ah well, a man can dream! :D
 
They're fine looking sheep those Zwartbles, bet your ram can't believe his luck.
 
Fine looking sheep that breed , saw some at a country show and admired them. Looking forward to the progress reports later on
 
Hen-Gen said:
Can't wait for the breeding season - or tupping time as these sheep farmers call it but I see no reason to talk in unintelligible patois! :D
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I think it's called tupping time here too HenGen, because although I know nothing about sheep in general, and have never been a farmer, I would have said sheep breeding time is referred to as "tupping time" too! When I was small, we lived in the wilds of nowhere, among farmers, so something must have sunk in! My dad worked for the Electricity Board and waaaayyy back then he was working on the Rural Electrification Scheme, going around trying to persuade farmers and others in rural Ireland that getting in "the electric" was a good thing! I remember him saying that often, what swung it for them was having running water in the barn! :D And sometimes, that's ALL they would do. They'd get electricity connected just to run a water pump to the barn! It took ages before they could actually see the advantages of having running water in their house, and then, sure, electric light would be a lot safer in the barn. And, gradually, they came to realise that if they had electric light in the barn, one or two light bulbs in the house might be a good idea! :D My dad was still working on this when I was a young child, and I'm only 56!! How quickly things have changed!!
 
"Tup" is actually a Middle English (14ht Century) word.

I'm reminded of the little boy in Sunday school being told the parable of the Good Shepherd. When the teacher asked the children why they thought the shepherd turned back to look for one sheep when he had the other 99, the little boy answered, " 'appen it were the tup".

Electrification came quite late here too Lady A. I remember looking at a cottage in Suffolk in 1973 and the elderly lady was so proud that they'd "got the electric" a few years earlier so she no longer had to pump the water by hand! In 1961 the "Sale Particulars" for MIL's small farm stated "Mains electricity which is quite near , can be connected by arrangement with the Midlands Electricity Boar at very little cost."

It was connected in February 1961 at a cost of £120!
 
They say you don't miss what you've never had. Mrs Dinosaw's gran did have electric, but lived up to the 1980's in a terrace with no inside loo, no fridge, no hot water, no shower and no bath, she had a single tap in the kitchen and boiled a kettle for her hot water. She was set in her ways and didn't want her family to help her get the property upgraded. As long as she could make her daily visit to the club to play the bandits and have a few bottles of bass she was perfectly happy. We have never had a dishwasher and never will either, people think we're odd, which we probably are.
 
I've had a dishwasher almost since I got married - OH would only wash the dishes but only immediately before the next meal. :x
Don't have TV though and haven't had since I was 18.
 
No dishwasher here either. Both quite happy washing up chatting or listening to radio as we do. We do have TV but are very selective, this week it has mainly been off
 
Took some wether (castrated male) lambs to the Marts yesterday and got £53.50 each. The highest price was £63 for some Texel crosses from Fair Isle and the lowest was £30 a head. Couple that with a 200% lambing percentage and that gives me an income of £106 per ewe. Now I wouldn't normally boast about such things but I have had years of derision about my strange foreign sheep so a little bit a smugness is irresistible.
And by derision I don't mean a bit of bar room banter but a real slagging off behind my back. There is nothing more vicious than farmers.
 
Well done, that's pretty good going. I expect suspicion is always met by anybody who isn't actually born in the place, especially on small offshore islands. When we moved here, 46 years ago, to a small mediaeval Hampshire town of what was then 3,000 people, there was a lot of local feeling about the 'newcomers' on a new estate. We didn't live on the estate, but I got a lot of stick for going ahead and starting a new playgroup for our young children, as the one run by the locals wasn't up to scratch at all. (Mine is still going strong, and this year got an Ofsted rating of Excellent!) When I taught in the primary school, and later worked an allotment, I became more aware of the vivid network of local families, with the same names cropping up here over hundreds of years. Our local history society has plenty of material to work on.
Whitchurch, Hants, is now up to 4,500 and sometimes I walk the dog to view progress on the new building of another 180 homes, which is swallowing up a large field on the outskirts of the town.
 
Well done Hen-Gen thats a good price, comparable to what our neighbour got when she took some to market recently Romney/Texel.
Well done on the Ofsted rating.
 
bigyetiman said:
Well done on the Ofsted rating.
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Nothing to do with me now, they're into grandchildren of the ones who joined when I was helping there, but I was invited to the party celebrating the result. Unfortunately it was happening in the week when we were failing to see the ospreys at Glaslyn because of the flooding. Still, we did have an equally memorable sighting of three other rare birds of passage, i.e Margaid and you and O.H. - great to meet you all, at last!
 
Shame you missed the do, you started them off with great foundations and it must be very gratifying that the good work is still carrying on.
Definitely 3 rare birds at Glaslyn that week, that was a good day in spite of mother nature trying to thwart us. Hoping for a drier week in the Peak District from the 11th.
Say hello to Poppy from us
 
bigyetiman said:
No dishwasher here either. Both quite happy washing up chatting or listening to radio as we do. We do have TV but are very selective, this week it has mainly been off
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I've never had one either. pain in the bum, emptying them! Dau's has just broken down, and she's is devastated! It actually drives me batty, there's a constant pile of dishes "air drying" on her draining board. I like to have everything cleared away!
 
LadyA said:
I've never had one either. pain in the bum, emptying them! Dau's has just broken down, and she's is devastated! It actually drives me batty, there's a constant pile of dishes "air drying" on her draining board. I like to have everything cleared away!
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Emptying it is no worse than putting stuff away after you've washed it. Food Hygiene Regulations actually say you should not dry crockery that's been washed by hand but let it "air dry" as tea towels can be a major source of contamination.

But "air drying" from a dishwasher? No way! There was something wrong there Lady A. OK, it isn't a 90 second commercial dishwasher which gets stuff so hot it dries straight away (and is too hot to handle) but a domestic one should dry stuff properly. I only have trouble with saucepan lids (where water gets stuck in the rim) and some teacups hat I use occasionally which have a "foot" which creates a tiny bowl when they're upside down, so the water can't drain away.
 
But presumably you drink out of the inside of the cup rather than from the little dome at the base?
I was listening to a radio article recently which pointed out that most of the millions of bacteria which cover every surface we touch are actually either harmless or beneficial, and the main problem is our tendency to over-use chemicals in our homes to try to kill them all off. This not only lowers our resistance to those which may be harmful, but puts us at risk of poisoning from ingesting the chemical cleaners, or inhaling them from sprays. Comforting news, for someone with little time or energy for total housework!
 
Electricity came to houses around here quite late and has put us off many properties because it was a status symbol at the time. People had their concrete pylon deliberately put right in front of the house to show off and that doesn't create a very nice view at all. Costs quite a lot to move them afterwards. The last house we were in had electricity installed in 1997 and the English owners had the supply cables underground for 100 metres to protect their view.
 
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