The combine is now safely tucked away until next summer. Fortunately we finished harvesting the Lupins with an hour to spare on Friday evening before the rain started to fall! The yield was disappointing and I will have to consider carefully before growing them again in two years’ time.
They were doing well initially but somewhere along the line they stopped growing, and remained stunted and stopped flowering mid-season. Some were wiped out by the slugs which caught me napping, but that was only a small part of the problem.
They are a useful ‘break crop’, an alternative to winter field beans which should not be grown on the same land more frequently than every five years. Beans too are good nitrogen fixers, but Lupins are super nitrogen fixers in that they produce double the amount, and at over £350 per ton, well worth the effort - if you get a decent yield, which this year we definitely did not.
You would not believe that it was possible to lose a bullock in a small 9 acre wood! We herded the bullocks back to the farm in order to treat one which had developed New Forest Eye: a nasty eye infection which is painful and if not treated the beast can lose the sight in that eye.
All was going well as they followed me from the last field into the farm yard, but then a dog walker decided to wander through the milling herd. At which point half a dozen turned back into the field. Had we managed to bring in the one with the bad eye? No of course not, he was part of the small group which decided they were not coming in.
He then decided to leap over the water trough into the next field where some horses, and Millie the donkey, were grazing. As we tried to gently persuade our reluctant bullock to walk back through an open gateway, he had other ideas and decided to jump the barbed wire fence into the wood! That was at 11am, and other than a couple of brief sightings he has not been seen despite several of us spending hours tramping through waist high brambles and bracken.
If it were not for his bad eye, which I am desperate to treat before it deteriorates further and causes him added distress, I would leave him to find his own way back to the herd in due course. As it is we have spent the best part of Sunday looking for him to no avail.
The national newspapers are going to town on the story of Charlotte Proudman who until last week was an unknown 27 year old barrister. She is now at the centre of a global media storm for having publically rebuked solicitor Alexander Carter-Silk, whom she had approached on the networking site LinkedIn, for paying her a compliment.
She has also made a complete ass of herself. It will be interesting to see if this furthers her legal career as she obviously intended, or puts an end to it as it seems some are now hoping.
Women like Ms Proudman want equality, a level playing field, to be treated professionally and to be considered one of the boys. However it seems it must be entirely on their terms. One rule for them and another for the men. Well, they can’t have it both ways, and quite frankly she and her fellow ‘feminists’, who are supporting her actions, should grow up, get out in the real world, and get a life.
It appears that we now have a right not to be offended by anything or anyone. The PC brigade are out in force and it would seem increasingly amongst students. They have decided that they need protecting from disturbing bits in books and lectures. They are calling for ‘content warnings’, to be inserted into great books such as The Great Gatsby (because it is misogynist), Huckleberry Finn (racist) and The Merchant of Venice (anti-Semitic).
And Mary Wakefield recently reported in her Spectator column, that a professor of law wrote a piece in the New Yorker about a situation where her students had complained to the authorities that rape law was too ‘triggering’ of emotions and stressful to be taught at all. One girl thought the word ‘violate’ – as in ‘does this violate the law?’ – too traumatic to use in class.
She also recalled that her fellow columnist Brendan O’Neill arrived to speak in defence of abortion at Christchurch, Oxford, only to find his debate had been cancelled. Why? Because it was too offensive and might damage the “mental safety” of students to hear ‘a person without a uterus’ speak on abortion.
As the article stated, the PC way of thinking is unhinged. If someone feels slighted then no other arbitration is needed. Emotion is everything and if offence has been taken, an offence has been committed. But surely this is the thinking of paranoiacs and phobics. It is to confuse reality with perception.
What will this world turn into when students require Universities to provide ‘safe spaces’ in case a ‘triggered’ individual needs respite from a frightening lecture. The safe space at Brown’s University contains cookies, Play-Doh and videos of puppies! God help them when they enter the real world, they will really fall apart and turn into clones of Ms Proudman.
Carola Godman Irvine
They were doing well initially but somewhere along the line they stopped growing, and remained stunted and stopped flowering mid-season. Some were wiped out by the slugs which caught me napping, but that was only a small part of the problem.
They are a useful ‘break crop’, an alternative to winter field beans which should not be grown on the same land more frequently than every five years. Beans too are good nitrogen fixers, but Lupins are super nitrogen fixers in that they produce double the amount, and at over £350 per ton, well worth the effort - if you get a decent yield, which this year we definitely did not.
You would not believe that it was possible to lose a bullock in a small 9 acre wood! We herded the bullocks back to the farm in order to treat one which had developed New Forest Eye: a nasty eye infection which is painful and if not treated the beast can lose the sight in that eye.
All was going well as they followed me from the last field into the farm yard, but then a dog walker decided to wander through the milling herd. At which point half a dozen turned back into the field. Had we managed to bring in the one with the bad eye? No of course not, he was part of the small group which decided they were not coming in.
He then decided to leap over the water trough into the next field where some horses, and Millie the donkey, were grazing. As we tried to gently persuade our reluctant bullock to walk back through an open gateway, he had other ideas and decided to jump the barbed wire fence into the wood! That was at 11am, and other than a couple of brief sightings he has not been seen despite several of us spending hours tramping through waist high brambles and bracken.
If it were not for his bad eye, which I am desperate to treat before it deteriorates further and causes him added distress, I would leave him to find his own way back to the herd in due course. As it is we have spent the best part of Sunday looking for him to no avail.
The national newspapers are going to town on the story of Charlotte Proudman who until last week was an unknown 27 year old barrister. She is now at the centre of a global media storm for having publically rebuked solicitor Alexander Carter-Silk, whom she had approached on the networking site LinkedIn, for paying her a compliment.
She has also made a complete ass of herself. It will be interesting to see if this furthers her legal career as she obviously intended, or puts an end to it as it seems some are now hoping.
Women like Ms Proudman want equality, a level playing field, to be treated professionally and to be considered one of the boys. However it seems it must be entirely on their terms. One rule for them and another for the men. Well, they can’t have it both ways, and quite frankly she and her fellow ‘feminists’, who are supporting her actions, should grow up, get out in the real world, and get a life.
It appears that we now have a right not to be offended by anything or anyone. The PC brigade are out in force and it would seem increasingly amongst students. They have decided that they need protecting from disturbing bits in books and lectures. They are calling for ‘content warnings’, to be inserted into great books such as The Great Gatsby (because it is misogynist), Huckleberry Finn (racist) and The Merchant of Venice (anti-Semitic).
And Mary Wakefield recently reported in her Spectator column, that a professor of law wrote a piece in the New Yorker about a situation where her students had complained to the authorities that rape law was too ‘triggering’ of emotions and stressful to be taught at all. One girl thought the word ‘violate’ – as in ‘does this violate the law?’ – too traumatic to use in class.
She also recalled that her fellow columnist Brendan O’Neill arrived to speak in defence of abortion at Christchurch, Oxford, only to find his debate had been cancelled. Why? Because it was too offensive and might damage the “mental safety” of students to hear ‘a person without a uterus’ speak on abortion.
As the article stated, the PC way of thinking is unhinged. If someone feels slighted then no other arbitration is needed. Emotion is everything and if offence has been taken, an offence has been committed. But surely this is the thinking of paranoiacs and phobics. It is to confuse reality with perception.
What will this world turn into when students require Universities to provide ‘safe spaces’ in case a ‘triggered’ individual needs respite from a frightening lecture. The safe space at Brown’s University contains cookies, Play-Doh and videos of puppies! God help them when they enter the real world, they will really fall apart and turn into clones of Ms Proudman.
Carola Godman Irvine
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