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Private Notes
After 5 years following the Owen family we return to Ravenseat Farm for a special episode looking back at how their unique way of parenting has shaped their nine children.
Festive celebrations with Jane McDonald, and Amanda and Clive Owen and family from Our Yorkshire Farm. Plus, there are contributions from Julian Norton and Peter Wright from The Yorkshire Vet, and Friday on the Farm stars Rob and Dave Nicholson. As the people of Harrogate get their town ready for the Christmas festivities, cameras follow busy workers from the county doing their bit.
Enjoy the glorious Yorkshire landscape in all its wintry, carol-singing splendour.
As a blizzard blasts the farm, the Owen family must protect their 1,000-strong flock of sheep, and mend the farm machinery to keep the animals fed.
Spring brings some welcome new arrivals to the farm. 14-year-old Reuben leads his siblings on a rescue mission to find a missing lamb and when Clive skins a dead lamb 3-year-old Clemmy learns about an age-old adoption technique.
Clive and Amanda face the challenge of make the farm's hay crop in the searing heat of the Summer heatwave, while also entertaining their children during the summer school holidays.
The family prepare the sheep for the auction ring. The children are busy baking entries for the village farm show. Clive waits to see if his best sheep will be crowned champion.
It is the Easter holidays and while the children are out of school their lessons on the farm are just beginning. The family learn the highs and lows of lambing, build a dog kennel and save a lamb with a broken leg.
The Owens send their spring lambs up onto the moors. Reuben fixes up a dirt bike for little brother Sid. Amanda returns from Appleby Horse Fair with a surprise.
With Summer here, the family must gather all 1,000 sheep and shear them of their woolly winter coats. Disaster strikes when Amanda and Clive wake up to find their all-important quad-bikes have been stolen.
Late summer means it is haymaking time on the farm, but a storm halts the harvest and causes flooding. The family are left in doubt if they will manage to fill their barns with the feed they need for their livestock over winter.
This third visit begins as the Owen family bid farewell to eldest daughter Raven who's off to university. 4-year-old Clemmy is about to start school. The family have to pull together after hip surgery prevents Clive from working.
The Owens prepare for one of the most intense periods of the year, the breeding season. With Clive recovering from hip surgery and Raven away at university, Amanda and the children face a particularly demanding set of challenges.
It is Christmas time on Ravenseat Farm, and all nine children are home for the holidays. Four-year-old Clemmy has her hands full nursing a premature calf. Clive has rigged up an ancient contraption to cook the festive roast.
Inspired by the discovery that the farm is over 700 years old, Edith and Violet search an old barn for signs of life left behind by previous shepherding families. Clemmy helps Amanda treat an ewe with a nasty ailment.
This week the family battle through two brutal winter storms. While they fight the elements to feed the flock, mum Amanda is powerless to stop the only livestock trailer being washed away down the swollen river.
The family tackles life in lockdown, just as lambing season gets into full swing. The film crew aren't allowed on the farm so Amanda uses her phone to film a video diary - ably assisted by the children.
There are new beginnings on the horizon for the Owen family as the children take on more responsibilities, and later they decide to purchase neighbouring derelict farmhouse that they are hoping to bring back to life. Elsewhere, eight-year-old Sidney is given a sheepdog puppy to train, and 16-year-old Reuben leaves school behind to start his dream job as a mechanic.
Clive decides to introduce a sheepdog puppy to the flock for the first time, and Miles and Sidney take on more responsibilities on the farm while Reuben is busy working full time at his apprenticeship. Disappointed to miss the renowned annual Muker Fell race, Clive and Amanda decide to host their very own competition on home turf, across three miles of Ravenseat's toughest moorland.
After months of helping out and learning on the farm during lockdown, it's time for the Owen children to return to school. Clive and Amanda herd the sheep down to the farmyard, stock up on hay and everyone mucks out the derelict farm.
The Owens help Swaledale Mountain Rescue to stage a training exercise on their land. Clive and Amanda have volunteered their children to take part, by turning the drill into a gigantic game of hide and seek.
Autumn is a busy time for the Owens now they have bought an abandoned 30-acre farm with four barns and a derelict farmhouse, which requires renovation work by a specialist builder as it is a listed building set in a national park. Sidney continues training his sheepdog Nell, while Violet tends to nine-month-old calf Ciara, an animal she has hand-reared after its mother suffered an udder infection.
The Owen family members try their hand at self-sufficiency with their very first dairy cow, and Reuben accompanies his mum and younger sisters to pick up Buttercup from a neighbouring farm. Back at the farm, the family take on the toughest job ahead of the imminent breeding season, rounding up the free-roaming ewes who have spread themselves across hundreds of acres of wild moorland.
It is Christmas at Ravenseat Farm, and all nine children are home for the holidays, and this year, the family is busier than ever with a lot of calves to deliver. Fourteen-year-old Miles and his younger brother Sidney are asked to relocate their flock of hens, and work is piling up in the cowshed as Amanda's prize heifer Lily May is due to give birth to twin calves.
The family tackle their second lockdown during one of the worst winters they have ever faced, and have to juggle work on the farm with the childrens' homeschooling. Later, when an arctic blizzard batters the farm, Amanda and Clive face a desperate search to find their lost sheep, and Clemmie and the rest of the children have to give newborn Misty and the rest of their calves constant care in the freezing cold.
Amanda attempts to forge a new partnership with Clive's headstrong young sheepdog and tragedy befalls the farm when 40-year-old Shetland pony Little Joe passes away. When ash dieback strikes, the family is forced to call in local fellow farmer Morris to help fell a decades-old tree and stop it collapsing onto a traditional stone barn. Using wood from the ancient tree, the children craft a headstone for Little Joe and help dad Clive lay the last of the earth on the pony's grave.
The children are off school for the Easter holidays, and the family prepare for their busiest time of the year as lambing season begins. The lambing hospital shed has already began to fill up, so while nine-year-old Sid takes it upon himself to bed up a private room for a mother and her newborns, five-year-old Clemmie and seven-year-old Annas help Amanda deliver a pair of twins who are stuck.
Clive is concerned the freezing spring weather is set to worsen, with over 500 lambs still on the way, and the family must travel across hundreds of acres twice a day to top up the food of their free-roaming sheep. When a ewe struggles to feed both its lambs, Amanda teaches Nancy how to borrow milk from another mother and use the farmhouse's warming oven to resuscitate a weak newborn.
June arrives and Reuben has an entrepreneurial plan to start a digging business and shows Sidney how to flip a used trials bike, while Clive has a surprise for 12-year-old Edith - she's to become the proud new owner of a sheepdog puppy. While her siblings are at school, Amanda and Clive are encouraging Nancy's writing skills, tasking her to record the spring lambs that they are vaccinating and, to further Nancy's pre-school lessons, 20-year-old Raven encourages her to paint a name sign for Tony the pony's stable.
It's the summer holidays, and 17-year-old Reuben has taken some time off to help his parents with their biggest summer job - hay cutting. Meanwhile, Amanda and Clive enlist the help of Miles and Edith to shear their thousand-strong flock, and later Amanda takes the children for a well-earned swim in one of the family's favourite swimming holes, where she reflects on their successful summer.
