Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

One of our latest arrivals!! We now have ten ducklings in the latest brood hatched by Banana. Three of them are yellow as opposed to black and yellow. Ducklings or chicks born yellow are destined to become pale in colour once fully feathered and in this case probably white (although darker patches may develop later). It is likely that the three yellow ducklings are from eggs laid by Apple, our white Muscovy female.
It also looks as though the duck eggs have all got a little mixed up due to the fact we have had Apple and Banana sitting on eggs side by side. In theory Banana's set was due to hatch around the 8th-9th and Apple's set on 16th-17th BUT we still have eggs hatching from Banana's today and last night we found one pipping under Apple... We have tried to sort it so that any hatched/pipping were given to Banana and the rest left with Apple. This way we hope they each have broods of similar ages. The problem with the hatching being spread out is that the first ducklings to hatch will need leading to food and water after a couple of days and the risk then is that 'mum' won't come back to carry on sitting on the remaining eggs. Next year we will try to avoid this happening again by perhaps NOT allowing two ducks to sit side by side whilst incubating their eggs.
And so to our grass which is not actually growing that well: we have had a fair bit of rain and some quite warm days but what we are NOT getting are the warm nights and this is stopping the fast growth that we currently need. The lambs are now eating almost as much as their mums and yet, although we rotate them all round the mini paddocks, the first ones often have not grown back as much as we would like by the time we put the sheep back in.