Mrs Down's Diary November 5 2008

Not that we shall be drinking it all. It is for guests at the shoot, for after dinner when we have friends round for supper and as a winter warmer when it's very cold.

The brambles were a bit of a disappointment this year for bramble whisky.

We have the equivalent of about ten bottles going in demi-johns, but we usually do much more. The brambles were just not as good and a friend told me that if you pick them after the end of September, "the devil has spat on them." So I don't fancy that in my whisky.

What I might do is use up the rest of my frozen raspberries from last year and make raspberry vodka.

Lovely stuff and such a gorgeous colour when it is bottled.

You need a stiff drink this year when it comes to reviewing how the land work is going. Just as John thinks he has got on top of the job. More rain.

He has abandoned the idea of drilling one of our biggest fields for any more winter barley this year and instead is going to plough the field out and then let it lie fallow over winter for the frost to break the soil down. But before that it needs to be limed.

John suspected that the land was getting short of lime last year so this week a man with a set of tubes arrived at the farm to test the soil.

He took about nine different samples of soil from around the field and then added a chemical solution to them.

Green was a good result on his colour chart, brown bad. Our field came in dark brown and needs about two tonnes of lime an acre spreading all over.

As the weather has been a touch windy John has told him to hold off until a calm day.

"No point liming all the neighbouring fields" he said.

Tonight we moved the ewes to a fresh field of grass. John has not had any stock on the field for a few months, saving it for a good feed up for the ewes prior to tupping time.

The ewes must have known something good was around the corner. They could not wait to leave their old field, nibbled down to grass root level.

John feeds them every day with rolled barley so that they associate a paper sack with goodies. So all it needs is a shake of the sack at the field gate for ewes to appear from every hedgeback and far flung corner and race towards whoever is brave enough to be holding said sack.

We had roped in some neighbours to help us make sure that the ewes did not invade anybody's garden as they careered through the village.

Our village has become increasingly civilised, with barn conversions and cottage renovations, and the population has changed from predominantly farmers to predominantly barristers, solicitors, life coaches, property developers, accountants, psychologists, and IT and finance (before the recent turmoil) whiz kids.

Although we are tolerated '“ because we add that genuine rural touch and are seen as useful to pull the occasional car out of a hedge, trim a hedge or clear a dike '“ our stock, when out of their field setting, are viewed with suspicion.

Rightly so. The sheep might be hell-bent on getting to the next field of grass but that does not stop them stopping to swipe a mouthful of winter pansies or uproot a cyclamen as they trot past.