Harvest

It's started. That madness that eventually follows the scouring of seed catalogues and the planning of the hedging rotation. The fruits and veg, both wild and domestic are indefatigably, exhaustingly, here.
Today I have pulled and laid out to dry all the onions and shallots - enough for a great wodge of the year if drying advances more quickly than rotting. I have beheaded the globe artichokes and produced jars of artichoke bums in olive oil. I've picked cultivated raspberries and tripwire hazard blackberries and the first crumble of the season is in the oven right now. The runner bean chutney glints at me, the colour of tawny cat's eyes. Yellow courgette soup is in the fridge. Field mushrooms sit fatly in a pudding basin in the scullery for tomorrow's breakfast.
It's the start of the wild-eyed frenzy of grey rabbit activity. The hording and stockpiling, the harvesting and salting, the preserving and sweetening. Puddings are back on the menu. Vinegars are to be made. The orchard has to be checked regularly to make sure the damsons, gages and plums are caught before wasps, squirrels and birds ravage the lot. The apple crop is going to be huge, but the bottles and the crushing and pressing gear are all waiting.
We turn from bemoaning the empty shelves to wondering how we can find room for just one more jar. I don't wander anywhere without trug, colander or plastic bag. And the ducks I've been rearing for meat have started to reach the age of freezerhood.

Tumble weed, bindweed

I can't keep up with myself. My desk has 8 heaps all requiring attention, which they are getting, it's true, but other things are falling by the wayside.
I know this, but I'm not sure I like having it rubbed in my face. So when I went into the polytunnel this evening to pick shallots, courgettes, french beans and corn cobs to go with the supper of salmon fishcakes, I did a comedy doubletake when the rakes and hoes caught my eye.
Spiralling round them in a romp of green is a bindweed that should be nicknamed Prefect or Jobsworth, perhaps Tattletale or Longbacon. So I've been told, proper. Nature is turning against me; I've had a yellow card wagged under my nose.
I stuffed my colander with the vegetable goodies and ran into the house. If the triffids invade, I'll only have myself to blame.

A thing of beauty

Remember what we found in the derelict shed? Well, I hope Snakey Sid stays away and sticks to the compost heap from now on.
Here is the finished shedy article, with some of the widest oak boards imaginable - so I don't want any of you city types nipping down here to wrench them off for your luxury loft flooring. They are for my turkeys, and the rest of the time for me to contemplate and enjoy.
That just leaves one derelict cow shed to sort and some sad ruined piggeries. Cow shed thinking starts this winter, action next summer.

Quality Hotel?

Could one sue for misuse of the word "quality"? Having just spent a night in the Quality Hotel in Birmingham I'm beginning to wonder.
I'm often having to spend the odd night in a hotel. I don't do posh, but I do do clean, efficient, comfy bed. Holiday Inn Express is the benchmark; it'll do nicely, and is the least I expect when away. If I'm lucky it might be somewhere with room service - a steak and a salad munched in my nightie, surrounded by papers and prep for the next day. If I'm really lucky it'll be somewhere like this with free wifi, a snug bathrobe and sleek lines from the headboard to the iMac. And a double bed is a pre-requisite - otherwise all the paperwork falls to the floor, and anyway, why should I revert to ten years old just because I'm away from home?
So, when some bloomin' conference was on in Brum and there was practically no room to be had, I shrugged and went with what was left: Quality.
First up: entrance like building site...not a good feeling of what's to come
Second: great queue of blokes in grey suits all looking forward to a night away. Lots of male bonding, loudness and flash gold jewellery, bickering over the Executive Suite. Gawd.
Third: shouting out of my name and room number, not just once but thrice. Give over, guys - for years hotels have been quietly sliding a scrap of folded cardboard across the counter with your room number discreetly written inside and simply tell you which floor you need to go to and how. Haven't you heard about the need for looking after single women? OK, I'm hardly in the most vulnerable category, but really.
Fourth: when was this place last decorated? My room is gloomy, drab, not dirty exactly but not clean either. The doors are bashed and look like something retrieved from a school that's about to be demolished.
Five: stains on the "clean" towels.
Six: It does room service but there is bugger all information about anything in the room. I have to trog back to reception for them to tell me that they haven't had the menus printed yet. After telling them that no, I won't be heading for the bar to place my order as I have work to do, they get me a faded photocopy which I can take back to my room.
Seven: it's a twin room - urghh - and one of the beds is broken. I nick its duvet and pile two on the ok bed. It has VINYL HEADBOARDS. It's sticky. I'm about to be sick.
Eight: the TV is so low down I can't see it from the bed. I have to move the bed til it's at a diagonal so I can watch the box whilst I eat my prawn curry. 5/10 for supper.
Nine: in the morning I head for the shower to find it's a plastic shower from Boots kinda thing and held to the wall by a rubber band. Grohe's what you need boys.
Ten: I'm so relieved to be leaving that I hardly credit them for having organised a taxi for me that arrives on the dot of 9am.
Eleven: back home my own bed is paradisical.

I'm fine folks - just very, very busy!

I've had a few people ask if everything is OK, down here on the farm in Devon.
Yes, yes, thank you so much for checking (aren't you nice), but I'm just amazingly busy and have a lot of work to do at the moment, which is grand and most lovely but means blogging has had to take a bit of a back seat. But soon lambing will start and I'll be around for that and will certainly be posting on sheep type progress. A new boar arrives soon too, so no doubt there'll be fun and laughter about all that, and piglets are also growing inside Agatha and Dahlia.
And then there's the fab smallholding courses we've been running and there's lots to tell you about on that front. So please bear with me, I will be back, I haven't given up the blog, and now you can find me on twitter too.

The fear

Before I forget the nuances I'm forcing myself to share the fear. It's an old lady fear, a gut wrenching, bowel liquifying terror. It's new, this year, not felt before and I am hatefully feeble in its grasp.
This morning I was rigid with it, shoulders stiff and unlovely, neck hunched strangely, legs jellied and cowardly. I stood tentatively perched on the ground, not firmly rooted as I love to be, and felt the anger at my fear flooding through from head to heart and back.
It's the ice. The slick, polished, sheen of sheet ice that stretches from door to barn, to barn, to barn. Yesterday's thaw sent chill melt water running across all hard surfaces and overnight the slow streams have bonded into a continuous terror run; my very own glacier.
As I pulled on the layers, with two pairs of trousers to coddle grazed knees, I was brave and fearless. As I opened the door and took my first step, I was old and feeble, sad and scared, unable, thankfully, to curl into helplessness, as I set about feeding the livestock. But every step was tortuous, no following the crow's flight, rather plotting the least nerve-racking route, buckets in hand.
I felt like this at Christmas when the ice was almost as bad as today, and had a small fall on the road, grazing knees, but more importantly, grazing my confidence in my own infallibility to tend to the practical things around the farm, whatever the circumstances. I'm a handful of years off fifty but today I feel ancient and bruised and sad, and want, with all my heart, for the ice to melt and join the river waters and stay away.

Making a scene...a snow scene

Because I am in the middle of writing a report, I should NOT be blogging, but here are some photos of the farm this morning, snowed in and rather wonderful. Keep toasty.

Staying with the turkey theme...

...it being Christmas and all that, I've just had a laugh, a splutter and an irritated from Tunbridge Wells moment reading this.
In my professional life I deal with strategies - it's kind of important to know where you want to be in order to have some vague chance of possibly getting there. But the idea of store managers having conference calls to agree strategies for selling turkeys at Christmas seems to me as barking as outlining a strategy for taking a bath when you're grubby, having a snooze when you're tired, or making a sandwich when the old tum is rumbling.
It's like this, store managers, turkey buyers and the rest... It's Christmas. The majority of meat eaters eat turkey for Christmas. Make sure you stock up on them, so that there are enough fresh, freerange, organic and frozen to meet the demand. Stick 'em in your shops with a price label on them. Wait for customers to have that light bulb "ooh, it's Christmas, I must get some mince pies, a plum pudding, some chipolatas and a turkey" moment. Bob's your uncle.
Perhaps I should charge for this little bit of insight? Nope. The idea of becoming Head Turkey Consultant would just make me a laughing stock.

Disenfranchised turkeys

My turkeys have lost their way to the polling booth. They have been done to death, plucked, gutted, trussed, packed and frozen. Forty minutes or there abouts to pluck a turkey, compared to two hours for a goose. The four of them weigh a smidgen under 11lbs to nearly 12.5 lbs, fully dressed, or as seems to make more sense, without their clothes, feet, head and unwanted innards but with their giblets.
So what with my summer peas blanched and bagged and nestling in the deep freeze and the meat element sorted, I should be able to put my feet up until the 25th December...only there's no time left in the diary for buying presents, writing cards or restocking the meagre booze cupboard.

Preparation

As a third of the farm's hedges are being trimmed before winter sets in and heavy tractors won't be able to move across the farm, there is also lots of preparation going on in readiness for delivering smallholder training. I've delivered training of various sorts all over the place but only rarely on the farm. So it's time to install an outdoor bog, to make up a big table for ten of us to sit around, put together the flatpack stools, finesse the training content, plan the menus, tidy the farm and.... TIDY THE FARM?
Oh yes. Having done my risk assessment everything I see is either a hazard or a learning opportunity. I try to look at things through fresh eyes, both stuff of interest and stuff of risk. That hurdle, so usefully leant up against the barn wall as an impromptu gate for guiding Aunt Agatha into the stock box - a stumble and fall waiting to happen. The shearing equipment hanging from the ceiling of the barn? Ready to brain someone if they step back without looking. Beautiful mossy, licheny concrete? Treacherously slippery.
My list of to-dos is long and physical. Tonight I'll be painting some signs for the new bog.

I'm still here...

...just in case anyone was wondering. Along with many others at the moment, running to keep up with themselves, there is just too much stuff to be done and not enough time to do it in. Not sure what's happened at the close of summer, beginning of autumn, but bonkersly busy would just about cover it. I'm leaping up at 4am to deal with emails and other deskbound tasks that have emerged whilst I've had my head buried elsewhere. Next week looks more benign (famous last words), so perhaps I'll be able to walk the dogs, take a photo or two and post something farmish.

Suffolks in Devon

I'm having one of those infuriating days when the synapses in the brain are making far too many connections. First one idea, then another, pops into my head. I can't start to juggle half of them and my desk is strewn with stuff, stuff that needs attention, now interlayered with new things.
If there were a group of egomaniacs in the room, not one of them could get a word in edgeways, full of blabber, blather and babble as I am.
It's also slashing it down with rain, so I don't even feel able to go and stride out with the dogs until it calms down a bit.
So, when the dogs start to woof and I see a stream of chunky suffolks fill the yard, it's a welcome respite.

Making money

Unlike Barclays bankers, no-one is paying me any bonuses, so earning money is nearly always on my mind. Will enough consultancy opportunities come in now that the economy spurns those of us on the outer edges of employment? Am I selling the farm produce effectively? Am I minimising inessential costs? And so on. I'm not the only one to be preoccupied in this way (although I'm not about to lay my balance sheet out for you).
So when I read this story, the end of the farming game for Rosie Boycott, I had cause, yet again, to stop and think - is it possible to farm on a small scale and not subsidise it from other earnings?
Possibly, possibly, but only with some major caveats:

1. Small scale will never cover the mortgage payments, so live in a caravan, a hovel, a cave, under the stars, or buy outright with the moolah from some previous existence.
2. It will never pay you a wage, but you may be lucky enough to live in a way and in a place that minimises expenditure (just don't go wearing any holes in your jeans, and don't forget you can't pay your Council Tax in beans or the water bill with eggs).
3. It will certainly never allow you to pay someone else a wage (I think that's where Rosie went wrong), and because of this...
   
4. ...it's a full-time thing; even when you're doing something else to earn some cash, farm necessities must be dealt with - life and death and welfare issues can't wait until it's more convenient - the farm dictates, not the diary.
5. Some daft bugger desperate for short term cash will try to undercut you all the time - stick to your guns and prices or you really will be heading for doom and gloom, subsidising other people's lifestyles and choking on it.
   
6. It's a business, not a flaky hobby. That might mean registering for VAT, producing accounts, keeping records, analysing the finances, planning for the future, investing lots of time and appropriate amounts of money in the right places.
7. There is a lot of capital outlay, even if, like us, you make a huge amount of stuff yourself. You need equipment, tools (from a sledge hammer to a welder), almost certainly a tractor, animal handling facilities, animal shelter(s), the list goes on.
   
8. Work out how much stock you and your land can handle - all kinds of grief comes from overstocking (disease, exhausted fields, huge feed bills to make up for the lack of grass), and other grief comes from having more on your plate than you can cope with.
9. Don't fanny around being precious about farming subsidies - if you're eligible, get those papers in - you can't afford not to.
   
10. If you want a hobby rather than a business, smallholding is great, but if that's your limit, stick to producing enough for yourself and one or two friends...and leave it at that.
    

I am so far from getting this right; I'm learning all the time, and moving cautiously. But I do know, for example, after two years of keeping records, that selling fertile hatching eggs really does cover all the poultry feed bills, provides us with meat, eggs and entertainment, and produces the kind of surplus that matches the costs of their breeding, fencing and housing (just), but it's very time intensive. I know that it's not yet the moment to invest in a second breeding sow, and that the notion of cows has to be parked. Having increased the flock I don't know if I will be able to sell all my fabulous lamb boxes direct to discerning carnivores this autumn, but I do know how much the abattoir will pay for them as a second best resort. I know that I can't afford to pass my wool through the British Wool Marketing Board any longer and that I have to market my fleeces directly to spinners and weavers.
But the biggest caveat of all is that you have to see the point of it, because you will be spending 24 hours a day at it.

A day for shearing

214 sheep sheared in the barn today, 41 of them mine.
Now the mums are shorn their lambs look nearly as big, and at just 10 weeks old.
The two rams have been penned into a small corral in the barn to get reacquainted, an annual post-shearing ritual, smelling different as they do without their hot oily fleece. I've just had fun disentangling one from the other, horns wrapped up like an executive puzzle.
The dams and lambs are chewing on the fresh succulent grass and herbs in the orchard, giving the geese a run for their money.
In this warm, wet weather it's a huge relief that none had maggots or any sign of them, and without their fleece they should now be fine until the autumn.
Shearing done, it's time to start thinking about haymaking. Again.

Mending wall

There are patches of vertically stoned walls across the farm, no mortar, just laid dry, clamped together with earth and hope. Gradually they get repaired, even though they are just dots and dashes in the lines of the earth banks. Round the corner from the house is a flowerbed, lying up against an old boarded cowpen. Full of weeds and foxgloves it was also full of old ash tree stump. The digger put paid to that with chains and the flick of a finger, which sent yet more of the retaining stone wall tumbling down.
So in-house expertise set to work and produced a work of beauty. It's planted up now with herbs, surplus tomato, courgette and cucumber plants.
Walls seem to be on people's minds at the moment. Click on the pics for more detail.

What's next?

One ewe left to lamb, but it's a hurly burly of activity all the same. As I traipse from barn to field, to duck huts to pigs, round and round, back and forth, I stop mid tracks and look up. Where was it I was heading? What's the next job on the list? Have I forgotten to feed/check/water something?
I try to head for the top of the farm and work down so as not to miss anything, but some mini problem or distraction usually puts that idea out to grass. A sheep who's drunk her water bucket dry, a sleeping lamb that I need to check is just snoring and not ailing, a clot of blood on the grass from a ewe I know is healing from her birthing or is it something more sinister, a pig with the trots...on it goes.
Throughout the day I'm checking the egg filled incubators (last night the power in the barn where the incubators sit, tripped and I have to make sure that doesn't happen again) and that the heat lamp over the ducklings is working properly; casting an eye over newborn lambs and mums to be; peering at the back end of the sow to make sure she has taken from her serving by the boar and isn't coming back into heat; watering the seedlings in the polytunnel as there is a danger of frying in there; answering calls and queries about ducklings and posting off hatching eggs...and still on it goes.
And in between that I'm trying to sort out new work arrangements, transferring phones, broadband, banks, and talking to all those companies you really hate dealing with (if I get put on hold one more time, emailed stuff in non-English that's both unintelligible and irrelevant to my question, or told six different stories from six different reps from the same company I'm likely to decide on (very) early retirement instead (I wish!).
The dogs are looking particularly mournful as their walks have been curtailed and ad hoc but I have promised them and me a trip to the beach as soon as the last ewe has performed.
I'm not complaining, honest, just in a bit of a springtime whirlwind, and would relish a couple of days in complete slut mode with nothing to do but snore, breathe fresh air and read a new good book. Any reading suggestions for when I come out of the maelstrom?

Chance meetings

So much to do, so much to write, so much travel, so much thinking and planning and anticipating. It's spring, things are podding and everything is demanding, so I have been remiss and not posted for a week. A whole week! The financial year is drawing to a close and lambing hasn't even started yet.
I just wanted to share a thought on bumping into people you know when you are away from home. I was pootling about the Midlands this week and bumped into two people I had no reason to expect to see. One on a station platform, the other in an art gallery. OK, I lived in the region for twenty years but it's a HUGE region with MILLIONS of people, so why should I see anyone I know in a snappy 24 hour visit, apart from those I'd actually arranged to see?
And then on the train home I saw yet another friend and we chatted of this and that as the miles were chomped up and I felt as if the journey had been halved, having had company and conversation.

A weekend of animal husbandry

I hope some of you know how to have a relaxing weekend. Saturday and Sunday are when I forget what it's like to sit down for a minute.
After the general round of feeding and watering the first task was lifting two enormous second hand pig arks off a flatbed trailer, onto another one that could be pulled by a tractor, ferrying them to their various pig paddocks and gently, gently using lengths of scaffold pole as rollers to slide them to the ground. Much scratching of heads to perfect this process; number two ark came off in seconds.
Then it was time for inveigling the weaners into the tractor link box, carting them into said paddocks and watching them run with glee and abandon, round and round and round. They found the ark and its thick bed of straw, sorted the drinker and were off again to enjoy their freedom.
Into town to satisfy my Saturday Guardian fix, buy some R clips from the tractor shop and post some hatching eggs.
What next? Mucking out the four duck and goose huts and candling the eggs in the incubator. Then I walked to the far side of the farm to bring home the eight tegs being kept to add to next year's breeding stock. They are incredibly skippity and bounce rather than trot. I had to scamper in ungainly fashion, across mud and rush and sheep poo to keep up with them. They came to a particularly muddy, squishy gateway. They yearned to go through but didn't like to get their dainty toes wet. I clanged the two buckets I had in my hands and yelled and terrified them across the sludge. Then it was full pelt, them and me, towards the gate into the field they were headed for. They haven't done this journey for many months, and then only once and in the opposite direction, but they knew where they were going. They stood back for me to open the gate and then whizzed through, heads down to nibble whatever poor grass they could find.
By now it was time to feed all the neighbours' animals as they were having a short jaunt out. I can't believe the size of their boar - he is huuuggge! Then back to put all the animals here into their pens, night time feeds and last check at everything before collapsing onto a plate of mutton stew cooked overnight in the Aga.
Sunday was the diaried day for worming and vaccinating all the sheep. Now kept in three separate flocks, everything had to be brought one flock at a time into the barn, dealt with and returned before the next bunch could be jabbed and drenched. Taking advantage of the dry weather, I clipped off any dingleberries, and squawked when I handled a soft sample. Back to the house to nailbrush vigorously under my finger nails. Yeuch.
Off to one of the top fields to burn up the brush from the hedgelaying from last month. The dogs and I play about, having a love-in moment whilst the digger pushed the massive heap of twigs onto the flames; it's so hot I have to move back and take off my jacket. After making dinner and feeding and bedding once again, I trek up to the fire and fork in the bits around the tonsure.
I head for the shower and realise to my shame, that having done the usual early morning stint in nightie, tracksuit bottoms and wellies, that I still have my nightie on. It's dark, all I'm going to do now is hoover, have supper and fall into an armchair, so after the shower I just stick a clean nightie on and hope my lapse at failing to get dressed all day is a forgivable sin. It's not as if I lay in bed all day, is it?

The order of things

Each week the order of things change by a tweak; the routine is not as routine as one might think. Animal requirements alter with the season, livestock is moved from field to field, and post-abattoir some fields are left empty for a time.
On this first day of a sparkly new year I was more conscious than usual of the adaptations of my progress through the morning hour of feeding and watering the hordes.
First task is to tend to the indoor beasts. Cats and dogs sorted, I cover up with thick gloves, jacket, hat and neoprene lined wellies and cast myself into the frozen wastes of Devon. Animals closest to the house are next in line. I go through to Little Oaky where the last batch of 2008 lambs for meat are picking disconsolately at frozen grass. I cram a bale of hay into their hayrack, scatter a few nuts for their added inner warmth, and crash through the ice covering their water trough.
It was too cold last night to fill the rubber water buckets and skips; the hoses were frozen solid, so I have to go to the dog room and fill up buckets from there, carrying several loads for the Aylesbury and Black Indian Runner ducks. It's treacherous; the water the ducks spill in great abandon round the buckets has frozen into a slippy sheet and I try to take firm steps. I let the ducks out into their runs, give them their feed and admire the heap of ice bullets that emerged from the hosepipe yesterday.
I check on the cockerels being fattened; their run has been left open and a pair of them are pecking round on the barn floor, nibbling up strands of stray wheat heads. The surplus wheat straw from the roundhouse thatching is being steadily used up for poultry bedding and the cockerels spend hours denuding the wheat ears. I corner and pick up the birds, put them back in their run, add some more feed and refresh their water.
Up to the rams' paddock, I stuff fresh hay into the makeshift rack and whistle. They both come charging up to snatch at the hay, and I check them over for bumps and bruises. Catching up a length of scaffold pole I mash through the ice in their trough, which leaves my hands ringing.
I shovel out poultry corn and goat mix into a pair of scoops and go into the orchard. I trail an equitable line of corn on the ground for the geese and let them out of their hut, smashing the ice in their trough too. I stand and watch them for a while; Frankie the gander lords it about but is careful only to hiss at me once I've already moved off to check on the ewes in Long Lands. All ewes present and correct I put the goat mix in the llama's bucket out of sheep reach, crack the ice in their trough and check on the hay situation - they'll need more this morning. The old landrover is hooked up to the battery charger and is full of fencing tools so I stuff a couple of bales in the back of my car and take it up to the sheep by road, turfing the bales over the gate, ram the loosened bales in with foot and fist, so that I can make some attempt to close the lid of the hayrack.
I fill a barrow with logs and take it back to the house; time for my own breakfast and to salute the new year.

Straying from home

Taunton, Wadebridge, Exeter, Birmingham, Cardiff, Exeter again, London, Bournemouth... a ten day crazy merry-go-round of trains and cars, rails and roads, delays and traffic snarls, eating up the miles and the hours. Every time I close the farm gate behind me and set off in the car for the hour long drive to the station, I feel as if I'm straying from home, as if the travelling is against nature, both my own and of the way of things. It's as if I hold my breath the whole time I'm away and can only take a fresh, clean gasp once the gate shuts with me safely inside.
I've given up driving long distances unless it's entirely impractical to go by train, so I can read and write and think as I thunder cross country, but even so, it's such a waste of life and I resent every bit of it, which doesn't enhance my mood. Far from believing that travel broadens the mind, I now find it entirely inane, stuck in a canister with hundreds of others, also wishing they were elsewhere.
I wonder if the desire to be a homebody, a farmbody, is a danger; that I wouldn't see beyond the end of my nose, but I don't think that would happen. Lifes swirls round me quite energetically enough, my brain has to work harder than ever, the people I meet are as fascinating and rich in attitude and thought as I could wish, and there's a warmth that cannot exist in the commuter zone.
I will try and plan my diary more carefully and balance the away time less generously. Thank credit crunchie it's friday and I'm home.
And to celebrate, here's a photo taken today of the ewe lambs I'm keeping back for adding to the breeding flock next year.