The lambing has now finished and we have been very lucky with the weather, staying dry with lots of lambs growing fast.  We are still having to supplementary feed the ewes with concentrates as the late cold spring up here in Northumberland has prevented the grass from growing at the normal rate.  We have only cut the lawn twice and the May and Crab Apple blossom is just starting to appear in the hedgerows.

I am now catching up on all the maintenance jobs around the farm.  Double fencing old hedgerows which we will plant up in the autumn creating more wildlife corridors linking the ponds with the woods.  This is different work to the butchery and the farmers' markets but I enjoy the change and my customers understand that we only have lamb when it is in season. 

The butchery has been thoroughly spring cleaned and we are waiting for a wet day to freshen up the paint ready for our start at the end of August.

We have been included in the Local Produce Offer booklet run with the Daily Telegraph throughout the summer which enables you to collect one form and five tokens giving you a £10 discount off your online order.  The orders have to be placed and the form and tokens posted to us before the deadline, we will dispatch your order of this season's new lamb as soon as it is ready in September.

We hope you have a good summer and now the weather has finally warmed up, hope it continues and then just gets better!

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This weblog is sponsored by Firstline Interactive.

As another sucessful butchery season draws to a close with the launch of this new web site we have managed to sell the majority of our lamb through the Farmers' Markets and Morpeth's newly relocated and up graded traditional market which has proved to be a great success.

My attention is drawn to our other job, farming.  The lambing starts on the 10th April but before that there is a lot of preparation to be done (a stitch in time saves nine), it started in February getting the ewes ultra sound scanned into singles, twins and triplets.  The triplets were separtated and housed and given extra concentrates and TLC, the singles and twins were split into lots for easier management.

As we get closer to lambing the sheep are housed, wormed and inoculated with their tetanus and pneumonia booster, this allows the grass to grow in the fields giving the ewes a fresh bite after they have lambed to encourage good milk production after lambing.

The best thing we can hope for is a warm dry April as hypothermia is the biggest killer of lambs.  Depending on the weather we will update the blog during lambing.

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This weblog is sponsored by Firstline Interactive.

This is a new venture for me Jimmy Bell as the Lambman. Basically I produce traditional Northumberland Hill Lamb for sale online. I'm going to use this blog to track the year in this traditional and rare way of making a living. There will be regular posts on what we're up to and how things are progressing. Meanwhile if you want to see what we do why not visit our online shop?

Jimmy Bell
The LambMan

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This weblog is sponsored by Firstline Interactive.