Explorer

It's great to be back at the farm. Seville was amazing, but there's nowhere lovelier than England in May :-)

I blipped our Simmental bull Victor in January. Explorer is one of our two Charolais bulls. He's four years old and was bred in the prize-winning Mortimers herd in Hampshire. He's out in the field in front of the farmhouse with about 30 cows and calves, but he's feeling rather sorry for himself. One of his front legs is obviously a bit sore, that's why he's sitting down. He should be racing round the field making a nuisance of himself with the cows. When our farm manager comes back on duty on Monday morning (we're the weekend cover), he'll get him in to see what the problem is. Hopefully he'll just have a stone in his hoof.

When we were last here 10 days ago, the oil seed rape was about 3 inches tall and we were considering ploughing it in. It's now about 15 inches tall and starting to flower (that's the yellow strip in the field behind the fence). So we'll leave it now and see if enough seed sets for it to be worth harvesting.