Month: December 2012

Christmas is fast approaching as  is the Winter equinox, life continues in full circle and moves towards Spring, personally it can’t come soon enough!

Those of you that know me personally will know we have a large family and Christmas time is a special time, not just because of presents and food but because it’s a time we all come together and just appreciate the strong bond we have with one another. We had our family meal last night and with extended members there were 40 of us all eating, drinking and making merry, we also had our secret Santa pressies. Instructions were, spend up to a fiver, what can you get for a fiver these days, some very good gifts it would seem judging by the smiles from everyone. I thought I would start the blog off this morning telling you about my gift which I feel is actually priceless, someone took the time to not only listen and remember a comment I had made but then personally scribe onto a piece of slate the most wonderful poem. I love Hares, for me they are highly symbolic and almost magical and one day I would love to own a large brass of a frolicking Hare, this what was heard and remembered, when I opened my present, inside was a pouch containing and tiny Hare and this poem scribed onto a piece of slate:

Magical Mystery

By day I am a shadow that hides in the light

By darkness a moonbeam that dances the night

I am the spirit that runs with the moon

From Springtime to Harvestime, in time with Earth’s tune

I am the spirit of fresh greening fields

I grow with the year till her harvest she yields

I am the last sheaf bound up with the corn

The spirit of Earth forever reborn

I am a shape changer, I change like the year

I fly as the Owl and run as a Deer

The eggs of the Lapwing are left in my care

For I am thy mystery and magic

I am the Hare

So if you should see me lying close in my form

I will run through your dreams

From darkness till Dawn

 

There are many things that money can’t buy and they are the most treasured gifts of all.

This will be my last post until after the festivities are over so I would like to take the time to thank you for reading my blog and sharing the week to week activities of the farm, thank you to those that support us by buying our eggs, our meat, and this year our Christmas trees, thank you to our liveries that share a large chunk of what happens on the farm, we appreciate it very much.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all wherever you are, from all of the inmates at the funny farm! x x x

 

The Christmas Tree venture is a little slow to say the least, at this rate we will probably only just get our money back, but that’s fine, nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say, so if you have not got your tree yet get down here and buy it 🙂

The weather has been eventful again this time the strong wind was causing the problems, I sometimes think it would be easier to strip the greenhouses of all the perspex and glass before Winter! We have now lost most of the roof panels in one of the greenhouses and the next one was stripped of three panels during one day. Hubby spent Sunday morning fixing them back into place, but for how long? The fact that we are very exposed and the wind whips up the small valley means that it is quite fierce when it gets going, something we should have thought about before siting them, but as they were erected in the Summer months we didn’t give it much thought and now have to mend them most Winters. The poly tunnel is standing up well to the wind though, probably because it is very taught, as it gets older and slackens a bit we may have problems with that too. We did put up a wind break around the whole garden but it is only waist height and was primarily to protect the growing vegetables, I think a six-foot high wall might do the trick but we would have no views across the fields!

The rabbit is still around and its delightful to watch her helping herself to the Kale in the veg garden, she almost has to stand right up to reach the best bits, each morning I go out and at first I don’t see her and think, that’s it she has gone, then she turns up somewhere unexpected or I see her scuttle out from a corner in the yard and I am amazed she is still around.

Mia has been a minx this weekend, while we were out feeding, Hubby came down the yard carrying her in his arms, she is limping badly and can’t walk he said, put her down and lets take a look, I reply, so he sets her down and she promptly runs off as right as rain, the livery and I burst out laughing and tell him he has been had by a five month old puppy! I think she just wanted a free lift from one end of the farm to the other.

We had an incident at 1.30 Saturday morning which I am convinced was human, the dog started barking as if to say get up there is someone out here. If you have dogs you will know that they have a different type of bark for different things, if it is an animal of some kind the bark is usually excitable the same as if they are playing, if it is someone they know it is a friendly bark, this was none of the above in fact it was quite fierce and so Hubby got out of bed and turned on the lights. This usually does the trick and by the time he got dressed and got the torch the barking had slowed indicating that the threat had moved on. I think they were probably after a tree, we had been warned that Christmas tree thefts were quite likely which is why they are in the front yard with the guard dog. It’s a sad state of affairs in this day and age when you are trying to make an honest living that some folks think its okay to take what belongs to someone else, it might only be  a tree but we have already paid for it so keep your mitts off or the dog wont be the only growling thing you come up against!! There was an incident earlier in the week along our lane, a stolen car lost it on a bend at 6am on an icy morning and went straight through our neighbours fence, one offender was arrested and one of them legged it, if anyone ever says they are moving to the country for a quiet life, put them straight will you 😉

Apart from that things have been pretty much normal around here, the colder weather means that watering is more of a problem as all the outside taps freeze and so carrying endless buckets of water around the farm become the norm. A hearty stew becomes the staple diet of Winter, nice for dinner to have been cooking all day and ready when you come in from the cold and a good apple pie always goes down well. I tested the cider the other day, it is still cloudy and its possible that it wont clear because of the pectin but it tastes good and it fizzes so I will count that as a success. 

The farm accounts have been taking up my time this week, I always think that I will keep up with them on a monthly basis but life gets in the way and now I have a ‘urgent response required’ letter from the accountant :s Sorting through receipts that have just been stuffed in a drawer all year long is not much fun and so my New Years Resolution is to be more organised and do it regularly, one a year is regular, right??

December has finally arrived and we can all get busy making preparations for the festive season. The Christmas trees were collected on Saturday and we have sold a few over the weekend so are hopeful they will all go by the 24th!! Hubby had to go and pick them up and decided he would be able to get all 80 in the van, he came back with sixteen! We hitched up the horse-box and off he went again to collect the rest, meanwhile I sold the first tree to a chap from the village so I was very chuffed. I have seen a couple of photos of them out in their new homes and they look very good, a nice shape, being the first time we have sold them we didn’t know how it was going to go and good trees are obviously what people want so we are glad that they appear to be that at least.

Thursday morning was an early start, we were up at 6 to load the geese, sounds like we have lots but there are only two, they were however still out in the paddock, so we had to cajole them towards the unfamiliar cage that they would be transported in, to be honest it was much easier than we had dared hope, and they went in easily. We are now waiting for the phone call to say that they have been processed and that’s Christmas dinner sorted 🙂

We have had a nice frozen couple of days, normally that would not be my chosen phrase but after all the rain it was a brief respite, however the rain is back today and we are almost back to square one, hopefully the forecast will be accurate and that is it for a while. The small paddock that the sheep came back to is saturated and so they were moved to the larger paddock once the geese had gone, I need to keep a close eye on their feet in this prolonged wet because they can end up with foot rot, not very nice, apparently you can smell it a fair distance away 😦 It was impossible for them to be in the paddock at the same time as the geese because the geese had decided that the very nice pig ark shelter would be their home, they are not very clean and tidy creatures and before long the ground was disgusting meaning that the sheep would have nowhere to sleep. I do miss their noisy morning acknowledgement though and they were no trouble apart from terrorising the chickens, chasing the dog, crapping absolutely everywhere and lunging at your bucket for food every time you went up there 😉

We have had the dreaded forms from ‘The Ministry’ arrive this week, they provoke terror in the hearts of smallholders everywhere, bit of an over reaction but you know what forms do to people. It’s a bit like an electoral roll for animals, we have one from the GB Poultry Register to record how many birds and what varieties we have  and one from DEFRA for the sheep, we also have to fill in a farm register to record any other livestock, the date for recording is Dec 1st and the form has to be in by Dec 31st, failure to do so will result in having headphones duct tapped your ears and being forced to listen to Jedward all year! Actually it increases the risk of inspection, the ministry arrive to check you have what you say you have and that all animals are tagged and legal. They will also check that feed is kept in separate feed bins for different types of animals, and you thought this lark was oh so simple didn’t you, some feed has fishmeal in such as Cat, Dog, and Chicken feed, this is not allowed to come into contact with Sheep, Pig and Cattle feed because of the food chain. It was all so much simpler before the War when people just got on with it, the Ministry took over to ensure the country didn’t starve which is fair enough but once they were in they didn’t want to go and now its form after form after form. This in itself would not be so bad if the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, but invariably it doesnt and you get a call to tell you they are inspecting 40 of your breeding ewes, you would like to tell them sharply that if they knew what they were doing they would know I only had four lambs at the time, the paperwork must have been there for them to consult. Being a polite type I informed the lady at the end of the phone nicely that I only had four lambs to which she replied, ‘well you have got off lightly then’  bloody jobsworth!

The chickens are still laying well, I am surprised at this as the egg numbers usually fall quite sharply during the colder months, feeding them extra and making sure they are in good condition before Winter obviously did the trick, coupled with the fact that we have had to let them fully free range because of the wet paddocks means that laying has hardly dropped off at all at the moment. It does mean that there is not a lot left of my brassica bed in the veg garden, they have been helping themselves on a daily basis but its a small price to pay and they love it.

I still find myself thinking about Milly on occasion, especially when I get the dogs in to feed them, although it is very much quieter as she was the yappy one that always wound the other dogs up. Kai, the guard dog, discovered he could open the side gate the other night, at first we thought it had just been left open but after shutting it, it was open again and he was round the side near the quail barking his head off. We tied up the gate and thought that would be the end of it, but he has now spent three nights in a row scrabbling at the gate trying to get back round there, I keep hoping he will give it up as it is right near our bedroom window but each night he tries his luck just in case we have forgotten to tie it up. One of the nights Hubby went out to try to get him to stop and he heard a din in next doors paddock, he took the torch and two foxes were fighting, they were so intent on killing each other that they didn’t even notice him watching them, they are definitely here again and we will need to be vigilant during the day and thorough with our shutting in round at night.

I made three dozen mince pies in the week, plus two dozen jam tarts after running out of mincemeat, most of these are in the freezer, if I left them out I would be making three dozen every week from now till Christmas Day, mince pies are that much loved in our house. I am really enjoying the run up to Christmas this year, for the past eighteen years or so I have been involved with a local charity pantomime which was always performed the weekend before Christmas and took up a great deal of time, all for a good cause, but this year I decided to take a year out and have enjoyed having the time to do things without time constraints or pressure to get things finished. Panto still goes ahead without me though and this year its Aladdin, its on the weekend of Dec 14th, 15th & 16th at the Community College in Carterton, if you want some pre-Christmas fun, get your tickets from Giles Sport in Carterton and go along and support them.

Tis the season to be jolly fa la la la la, la la la la 🙂