Valley Farm

Gloucester Old Spots

2007-09-05T14:14:00.000+01:00

We now have seven Gloucester Old Spot Pigs (GOS). Three came from the breeder of the Alsa herd near Stansted Airport and four others came from a fellow who lives on a small holding in the middle of the Fens. These four weaners were also from a sow that came from the Alsa herd, so they are all cousins. They were all born within a week or so of each other.
They love their straw pig ark. It is holding up well, and although it was very wet during the middle of the summer, nothing more worrying than some strange foaming fungus grew on the straw.
Our next door neighbour has seven Tamworth pigs and we rely on their advice on Pig matters, as the have kept pigs for years. We feed them on a mixture of rolled wheat and barley. This has to be soaked in water for a few hours before the pigs are allowed to eat it. I allow about 1kg of hard feed per pig per day and this is split into a morning feed and an evening feed. The amount will increase as the pigs get larger, but it is important not to over feed the pigs as they are very efficient at turning any excess into fat. I have seen pictures of pork joints ready for the kitchen which have about a three inch layer of fat on the outside! Not very enticing...so they are on a carefully balanced diet. Through the summer we have added odd and ends to the feed. For example when the apples ripened we made gallons of apple juice and mixed up the squashed remains with the regular food. They love it! They also love the windfall plums which are really no good for anything else. They even split out the stones!
The pigs are very friendly and gallop across their paddock at feeding time, squealing and grunting with excitement. The children are quite relaxed with them. They love having their tummies rubbed and will roll over at a moments notice. The loudest squeals are heard when one of the pigs touches the electric fence. They all know exactly where it is and usually keep three or four inches away. However their droopy ears cover their field of view when they are foraging and mistakes sometimes happen.

Planning for Pigs

2007-05-17T08:49:00.000+01:00

We think we might get a few pigs or sheep.

A little bit of investigation has made the choice clear. The fencing costs for sheep will be substantially higher than for pigs. Our patch of land is long and thin, with hedges round all the sides. To keep the sheep in will require steel sheep netting and this is going to cost thousands of pound. The pig fencing will only be a couple of hundred pounds worth of electric fence.
Of course pigs need a shelter but sheep do not. New pig arks cost £300-£400 if you buy one, but we are going to make one out of large straw bales. I have decided to make one to my own design. We have fence posts and old bannister rails for struts and corrugated iron sheets for the roof. My neighbour has provided some large bales of straw which I collected o his trailer. It ought only to cost about £20 (plus some of our own labour) to build it. The photo is of the (not quite) finished pig house. It needs a bit of strengthening on the corners, although they are very unlikely to move the bales, as I could only slide them off the trailer with ropes and levers!
Then we need to get the pigs. The son of a local farmer breeds all sorts of rare breeds and is willing to sell us some: so we should be up and running soon.
I mentioned keeping pigs with a couple of friends who live close by and they are keen to join in. Our next door neighbour discussed it with their children, but, while the children were keen to have pigs they were not keen to eat them! We solved this problem by arranging that the local butcher will act as an intermediary.
Luckily, another son of the same local farmer also runs the butchers shop in the village! Their plan is to sell local produce when ever possible.

Spring Planting regime

2007-03-06T03:38:00.000Z

A few friends came round the other day. We decided to get together and try to organise the joint planting of the vegetable seeds in a slightly centralised fashion. We jointly bought the seeds from a variety of catalogues. I have ordered a load of seed trays. The poly tunnel has just been erected. The infrastructure for a watering system is being planned. We are nearly ready to go...

Having looked through the seed catalogues it seems clear that we should be able to harvest cabbages all year round. We should be able to get carrots ready to eat for 10 months of the year. We should be able to grow salad crops to keep us going from New year to Christmas.

Last year we did not do it quite right. I was campaigning for the local council elections during March, April and May. The old wooden framed greenhouse gave up the ghost at Easter. (I have chopped this up and made parts of it into an excellent coldframe.) Very little got planted last year, and what did all ripened in August when we were on holiday.

This year I am determined to do better.
I have a new vegetable patch, a new poly tunnel, a new watering system and a new attitude.

It should be a better year all round!!

Thumbs up for the heavy handed

2007-03-05T14:37:00.000Z

I do not sit in an office all day; sometimes I have to do some manual labour in order to stop my brain from being compressed by electronic gadgetry. Living on a farm, I find that much of the manual work involves lift heavy old bits of machinery, fence posts and the like.
After a relatively short period I noticed the callouses on my hands getting worse and the skin hardening up on my hands. My wife noticed it too and I was instructed to use lashings of hand cream several times a day. I tried this from time to time but to no avail. A local friend supplies special aloe vera products that everyone swears by, so a couple of tubes were bought and given a thorough testing. Even the local vet buys the aloe vera products to keep sutures supple on animals that have recently had minor surgery. It feels great on your hand but just does not last very long; it becomes a very expensive business.
After a couple of months my hands were getting worse rather than better. Doing the washing up and bathing children made it worse still. I started using latex and PVC gloves to stop the dirt getting ingrained into the cracks in the skin.
These small cracks appear in the skin when it is really dry and as the skin dries further the skin shrinks and the cracks enlarge. They tend to get longer and more painful as the day goes on. Occasionally they bleed too.
I spent a few minutes on the web searching for a cure.... There appear to be none that are practical and actually work. There are endless ointments and potions (all of which cost a fortune). Shearing sheep is considered good as fleeces contain a substance called lanolin and shearers always have soft hands, but I can't give up the day job to shear sheep.
None of the ointments seem to last for any length of time. Twenty minutes to half an hours seems to about standard until they have evaporated or been absorped completly. Some ointents really make the cracks sting and none of them stop the dry skin from becoming dry again...short of putting on more cream every half an hour.

By accident I made a great discovery. By putting a tiny amount of Superglue in the cracked skin and bonding it together, the pain immediately stops. It prevents the cracks snagging, pulling or getting bigger when they get caught on a rough surface. And it provides instant protection in the form of an acrylic scab over the wound.
A tiny bottle of super glue would cure hundreds of cracked hands for a few quid, while those precious ointments do not work (in my view), last no time at all and cost a fortune.
However they do usually smell a good deal more pleasant than superglue!

Get your Canoe!...The River is Up!

2007-03-03T19:15:00.000Z

Sam told me first thing this morning that the river was up and we would be able to go in a canoe. I was a little bit suspicious. I know about half and inch of rain had fallen over night but canoing seemed wildly unlikely. Once the sun was up (Sam is an early riser) I glanced up the field to the Water Meadows and, sure enough, the river was up. This needs to be put in perspective...
For 36 of the past 38 months the water meadows have been lush green pasture. In summer the grass went a shade of hay and in the winter the wild birds have found it to be a haven; out of the wind and with hedges stuffed with berries. It is only in the past two months that we have had sufficient rain to turn it back to water meadow. The stream flows off the top of the hills between two villages. The high ground is clay covered, but as it runs off the hills it comes over the chalk, where is starts to soak in. It will soak in until the chalk becomes saturated.
The picture shows the river as it starts its journey down the hill. It has come from about one mile away, and about 70m vertically up a very gentle slope. Watching the slow but inexorable progress of the stream making its way down the valley keeps the children entranced for ages. Then they have the opportunity of building dams and bridge for a couple of days if it does not dry up again and disappear until the next downpour.
So much for my canoe trip!

Painting Pylons

2007-03-01T15:59:00.000Z

The National Grid own all the pylons that you see striding across the countryside. The pylon structures were designed to withstand ferocious weather conditions and to last for 100 years. But the cables will not last for quite so long.
We have a line of pylons that go past, us a few hundred yards away. They start near The Wash and go to Brent Pelham, on the way to powering eastern London and the surrounding area. This part of the grid carries 400,000 volts.
The pylons have now been up for 50 years and they are having their first major overhaul. This involves inspections and repairs, paining every bit of exposed metal with two coats of paint and then replacing the cables. It is a massive engineering excercise and has taken over year to date. Last summer they painted some pylons and changed the cables on the eastern side of the line. This spring and summer they will replace the cables on the other side.
Every road, farm track and footpath gets a scaffolding safety cage built over it. Many of the farm tracks (which are mainly mud) have been rebuilt with hardcore, so that the contractors vehicles can reach the pylons easily. Hundreds of sign posts have been erected directing the National Grid contrator to the correct pylons. And steepljacks can be seen climbing to the very top of the pylons like monkeys, with paint pots strapped to their belts.
Last summer there was a spate of thefts of equipment from beneath the pylons at night, so we had endless visits by security guards in red vans, many of whom stayed out in their vehicles, in the middle of nowhere, for days at a time. I can't think which would be worse: the soul destroying boredom of the security guard or the endless vertigo of the steeple jack.

Well! Well! Well.

2007-02-27T14:38:00.000Z

When we moved here, we had to replant the garden from scratch. We put in many new trees, a new vegetable patch, a green house and several flower beds. All the work would have come to nothing, had we not been able to water the vegatables, the saplings and tender plants sufficiently over the summer and until they became established. Our outside tap is a bit of a joke. It takes nearly 4 hours to fill the water butt, so you can imagine it is of no use for watering the garden.
Luckily we have an old brick lined well, with an old hand pump (which looks nice but does not work). Heaven only knows when it was dug, but it is 75 feet deep. When we arrived it had 12 feet of water standing in the bottom.
I purchased a borehole pump and plumbed it and wired it in and "Hey Presto" there was a veritable fountain spraying forth, and at some pressure too. The water butt is now filled in ten minutes (it is an IBC container and holds 1000 litres).
The water level in the well hardly dropped at all the first summer. Nor did it during the winter or spring or the following summer of 2003. But come September 2003, the well was dry. It was not a serious problem for the winter months, other than we could not easily wash the cars. However watering the next summer was murderous. No rain (to speak of) fell that summer or autumn and in fact the well has been dry until about January 2007.
This winter has been wetter than the last few. We live in a chalk valley, but the hills behind us are covered with clay. When there are more than a few millimeters of rain, puddles form and then run off down the valley. When the stream meets the chalk it starts to sink in to it. (It is a nationally important aquifer). When the chalk begins to get saturated, it flows down the valley and eventually it comes down what we have always called "The Gallops" (but what previous inhabitants have called "The Water Meadows").
The water table in the chalk has been rising all winter and in December it reached the base of the well. In the last 2 months has come 10 feet up it. Enough free water for the whole of next summer I hope!

Death swoops down from the air

2006-10-18T18:11:00.000+01:00

I was mowing the lawn when out of the corner of my eye I saw a figure approaching the house. We live in a very private place, down a long track, and anyone wandering about is either a burglar, someone coming to see us, or hopelessly lost.

He was stoopong and carrying a cross bow. His right hand held the pistol grip, the black arms stretched out to each side. I jumped off the mower and ran across the newly mown lawn towards him without thinking. He looked up and pointed the crossbow at me which made me stop... and then look closer. It was not the normal cross bow, had no string and had a number of arms on either side.

Unthinking, I accosted him (a little aggressively I fear) and asked what he thought he was doing.
His story was a relief to hear. He was not planning to take me and my family hostage or anything sinister. He was searching for his pet. It had a radio bleeper on it, and the "crossbow" was the radio direction finder.
"What sort of pet?" I asked him, thinking it might be a ferret (Ferretmen use radio locators.)

"It's a large Goshawk!" he said "and I think it might have killed something here."

We looked around in the direction of the bleeps and sure enough under the short beech hedge there was the dark shape of the Goshawk with its prey.
I was quite excited. I have never seen one close up before.
However when I saw the prey I was less excited and a little more irritated.

The Goshawk had swooped down and murdered one of my fine new Frech Bluebell chickens. Talk about an easy target. It should have been after the low flying partridges which populate the countryside round here. One could tell immediately that the long fang like claws would have pierced almost every vital organ in the first crunch. Bluebell did not stand a chance.
So, beware if you are thinking about walking round our place unannounced.
You will definitely need to wear a camoflage hat so the Goshawk does not pounch on you.

The other chickens, kittens and free range pet rabbit have been warned, and unless they take heed, they do not stand a chance on the next encounter...if he dares to come by again.

He did give us £10 to get a new chicken.

The Autumn Air Show

2006-10-16T14:54:00.000+01:00

Living in a remote house with nothing but fields on all side sounds like the perfect idill. It certainly has its up sides but there are one or two downsides as well. Not all remote places have the same problems or the same benefits.
Every autumn, just as the temperature begins to drop and the chestnut trees start to turn from their dark summer green to the beautiful ocres and russet colours, we have the local air show. This is not the Duxford extravaganza. This is the Insect Airshow. Our bees seem to have been well looked after but the strays and wild bees have smelt the honey that we extracted and are out looking for it, so they can rob it for their own winter stores. This in its self is not too much of a problem. One can dodge the odd bee in the house (I hesitate to swat or spray them now I am in the apiarist fraternity). I can also tell that they are not my bees from my hive... you do get to know them.

No. The real Insect Airshow appears on warm sunny days in autumn. One side of our house faces in each direction. The south side on a warm sunny afternoon changes colour.
It grows darker as the number of small files bask in the hot sun. These are the dreaded cluster flies. They are looking for a place to hibernate and in rural areas they tend to creep into crevices in houses.
The roof space is full of them.
The windows facing south have 100s of dead flies on the window cills. They can squeeze through the tiniest gaps between the window and the frame. They creep into the folds of the curtains. They die in their 1000's all over the house.
But the worst place is in the bathrooms. The lights are a recessed type, and which puncture the ceiling into the roof space. Most of the light is aimed down wards, but there is enough light in the roof space to attract the squadrons of cluster flies. They try to creep through the gap into the bathroom but nearly all get frazzeled by the bulb.
The numbers are so large that the bathroom eventually becomes dark. (The picture shows just a few hours collection when the light was only on for about half and hour.) So I have to pull out the bulbs and scrape out thousands of flies into the bin. Then clean the glass on the light which has been coated with brown cooked fly ointment.

Cluster flies are strange:
They do not eat.
They are not attracted to theose sticky fly papers.
They are not attracted to ultra violet fly zappers.
If you leave them for a day or two they leave an unpleasant oily smell and stain.

Last year I purchased a couple of gallons of persistent insecticide called Protctor "C". This is excellent stuff. You spray it onto a surface and it will kill any bug that walks over it for about 2 months. The only trouble is that I have to spray the inside and outside of all south and west facing windows and much of the roof space.

I also spray it onto the bricks of the south facing outside walls. It can be used in kitchens and is harmless to mammals. (It does kill fish, however).

The other thing you need is a batch of new bags for the vacuum cleaner. It is a once a day job, every evening after the sun has gone down. I must have collected several gallons of fly carcasses by now!
At least they will be gone when the first frost arrives! I can't wait for it!

2006-10-04T08:53:00.000+01:00

The honey harvest is in!

The advance careful planning went out of the window, as usual. I spoke with the local GP beekeeper and booked a time to use his centrifuge. During our conversation he said that I should definitely take out any filled frames in the more recent 2nd super. I had only added this (brand new and self assembled, with sparkly new frames and wax foundation) at the very beginning of August, just before we went on holiday. On subsequent hive inspections in Mid August and early September the bees had hardly touched it, so I was not expecting to extract anything from it .
Any way, on the advice of the good doctor I opened the hive and to my great surprise found the 2nd super about 60% full. The bees were seriously unimpressed at being robbed again (I had not had the time or chance to put the Porter excluders in) and they put up a fearful din. My smoker ran out of smoke, 2 bees got into my trouser pocket and another inside the veil where they did their duty. Ooowwww! Next time I will remember that time spent planning is time well spent!

I took all the frames over to his extraction room (this makes him sound more like a dentist than a doctor) and started decapping the frames using an old bread knife. This is a messy job and surprisingly hard work. In no time I had cramp in my hands. When I spoke to some apiarists at the Quy Country Fair they said they had used a hair drier to melt of the caps and it works very well, once you have realised that you do not want to melt holes through the frame; a light touch is clearly required but it sounds much quicker.

The second lot of frames were thinner and strangely had significant proportion of the honey in a crystalised form, which therefore did not extract. The honey smelled and tasted different too. Doc says it is probably from Ivy and not so sweet or flavoursome. The bees will reprocess the crystalised comb when I put the frames back in the super.

The centrifuge is simple and effective but you have to hold it down with all your weight when it gets up to speed, or it can shake itself to bits. A slight difference in weight of honey in the frames gets magnified enormously when the centrifuge gets up to speed. Its elementary physics really.
The honey splats out onto the walls of the centrifuge walls and drips down to the bottom, with all sorts of bits of wax, dead earwigs, bees and propylis etc. We then lifted the whole thing onto a table and drained the honey through a double sieve (coarse and then fine) into a bucket.

The great part of it all is that you do not need to clean anything. Just leave it out in the garden and in no time at all the bees have found it and over the next day or two they will clean it up completely. If there is a lot of runny honey in a bucket, put in some hay or straw so the bees do not drown.

So now the honey is in the kitchen keeping warm and settling. Any impurities float to the top.
I am ordering my honey jars and about to design the labels. I think that we will get about 25-30 lbs.

The children all asked for home made bread and honey for breakfast. This is a first. Great excitement!
And they have taken a sticky frame of honey to school for "Show and Tell". The teacher has been learning what she can from the internet.
I just hope they do not leave it lying about or the school will be filled with 100s of bees, and I will be in the Dog House!

2006-09-28T12:01:00.000+01:00

Several new arrivals this month. The menagerie is getting larger each month:

One Polo Pony has arrived for the winter. She belongs to a local polo professional who is not back until next summer. Hopefully she is a well behaved pony and is willing to have novices ride her!

Two kittens arrived last week from Judith, the sister in law of an old friend. We have no idea what to call them. I suggested Whack and Blight, as one is white with a little black and the other is black with a little white. Our two year old picks them up like a terrier with a rat and I fear for their safety. We are slowly teaching him to be a bit more gentle: I am amazed that he has not been scratched and bitten more. The kittens are very tolerant for the moment but I expect them to retaliate any day now.

Three French hens arrived from the local Country Fair. They are French Bluebells, a breed I have never heard of before. They are a pretty grey colour with a hint of blue/mauve.
They were very suspicious of our other two hens for at least 3 or 4 days and would not go inside the hen house. I found them roosting on a low branch of a tree overhanging the chicken run one morning, completely drenched. Anyway they are now the best of friends and laying an egg each every day. Very satisfactory!

Our neighbour has suggested that we get some sheep and share the meat. The only problem is the shape of the grazing. Our paddock is very long and thin, which means that it is disproportionately expensive to fence with electric sheep netting. I have just worked out that our plot of land (about 15 acres) has a circumference of 1 mile! That makes it about £2500 just to keep the sheep in, and certainly makes £15 for a leg of lamb sound really inexpensive.

2006-09-01T15:52:00.000+01:00

I need to mow the grass again.
After a really hot July, when I did no mowing for 4 weeks in a row (due to the drought conditions and hot sunshine), August has been very wet.
It is like spring again! The grass is growing in that bright epidote green again. It looks great...but I have had to mow it 4 times in 8 days to get it back under control. We heard from the next door neighbour, on our return from holiday, that it rained every day while we were away!
Now it is September. Spring and Autumn seem to have joined together. Whatever next?

2006-08-30T16:26:00.001+01:00

The dry old vegetable patch

I have got to move the vegetable patch shortly.
After three years of watering the growing vegetables every other day, I have eventually worked out that the large tree nearby is using all the water. It is a Lepidodendron Gigantium or Giant Redwood.
When digging up some potatos I saw a cluser of new tree roots that have appeared and now they are everywhere. A couple of days ago, an inch and a half of rain fell and it soaked well into the ground. I dug some potatos a day or two later and found the top 3 inches damp and then it was dry as a bone lower down. These little roots cleaarly suck the water straight out of the ground.
Mind you, the tree is a Wellingtonia and is about 80' high. Someone told me they use about 2500 gallons of water a day in summer. No wonder the vegetable patch is dry, and the pootatos are never larger than a tangerine.

The new vegetable patch is going to be about 25 yards away, but it is in a direct line away from that huge tree. I have killed the grass . I did not do this the last time, and spent the next 3 years pulling tufts of grass out from between the vegetables.
The new patch is also close to an old cow shed, so I can use the rainwater off the roof to do much of the watering.
I have put a 1000 litre IBC container under one end of the gutter and it fills with a very rustic tea coloured liquid after every rain storm. I think the colour leaches out of the moss that is growing on the corrugated roof. Either that, or there are some bugs doing something unspeakable in the water!
The next job is to scape the old grass off and level the site. I will ask John, the JCB driver , to do this when he comes over to dig some other holes that we need.

Then I need to get the edges in. I am going to use old railway sleepers. I have some round the old veg patch and will shift them when I feel I need some excercise. Actually it is not too difficult with a large wheel barrow. I bought these some time ago. Now you can not buy sleepers that have been treated with creosote (i.e. nearly all sleepers). You have to buy fresh ones which are twice the price.