A success - and a failure (I can live with it)

   After many tribulations with the pigs (left, if you peer closely, you can see the current wwoofer Mat walking two of them home from my neighbour's hillside, which they had escaped to - they were very happy to come back with him as long as he kept chatting) the two boars finally made it to the butcher's, and then back home to my big freezer.  (Need a truly big freezer on this kind of farming enterprise.)  We tried some chops earlier this week.  Fabulous!!  Really, not like pork at all  . . . .   like some previously unknown super-meat.  As a first-time pig-keeper, I felt particularly pleased and proud.  And the other members of the Transition Monmouth Pig Group are equally pleased.  Rearing pigs on planet-friendly locally-grown organic feed really works.  Being ignorant, I fed them at the rate set out in the text books; next year I will go more backyardy, and feed them less carbs, only once a day, and get them to eat at least their five-a-day from the veg waste.  Cheaper, healthier for planet/pigs/humans, far more sustainable.  It's win-win.  And someday (soon?) there will be skimmed milk for them.
   I invited a local dowser to the farm, trying to locate an earlier water-well, in case I ever cannot pump the spring water up from the bottom of the valley to the main tank; but he says there never was a well here, and past-time farmers used to carry water up from the brook.  That seems ridiculously hard work, but back then people just did do the things that were needed to stay alive.  I do hope, though, that I am never reduced to fetching water from there!  It's filthy, apart from the labour!  Our luxury oil-fuelled lifestyle gives us so much more than fast transport and computers.  I am hoping to spend the winter working out what to replace, with what (the Little Mill Farm Energy Descent Action Plan).  I can replace coal and oil with farm-grown wood; but what do I replace chainsaws with?  It will have to be saws and axes.  Must acquire some really top-quality ones.  That means importing from Sweden, because British-made tools are all disposable rubbish.  And so the thinking goes on.  I don't have much time for farming these days  . . . . .

    By the way, the dowser, embarrassed at failing to find a new water supply for me, then dated the farm and watermill. The oldest part of the farmhouse is 1560.  The mill dam, and an earlier mill, are 1570.  The leat and later mill building are 1630.  There is documentary evidence placing those at 1628 - so dowsing does work.

Summer's over then!

Well, the last post was the highlight of the haymaking season  . . . .  nothing more happened.  Either the weather was forecast to be terrible - or not forecast, but was anyway; or the machinery was stuck (it's so old, it took a week to source a new baler tyre); or, worst of all, my back gave out, probably in protest at all the other uncertainty.  I have two wwoofers due next week and if the weather's warm, may have a last go at cutting the second field.  Heigho! - no-one ever promised life would be easy, did they? 
The two new rams arrived (see post of 14th June); in a state of shock at finding the world was bigger than they thought, but they are getting less wild, letting me get a little closer (I hope they don't need vet attention in the next 3 months).  The pigs had to put up with commercial pellets for a while, because of my bad back, but really hated them - bullied me by biting my boots when I put the pellets in the trough, insisting on real food (peas and barley) which I couldn't carry to them.  So my locally-sustainable-feed theory is good for the pigs as well as the planet, that's good to know.
The veg garden is producing more than we can eat at present and looking good for the winter (thanks to weeding and digging wwoofers; thank you Anna, Sam, Chris, Gill and Lydia!), and the autumn foraging season is underway - here's the first giant puff ball in the stockyard behind the barn; a small one, maybe because of the dry summer, but delicious, and shared with friends.

After a dazzlingly bright spring, with hardly any rain, the grass in the hayfields barely grew at all. I waited through July to give it a chance to make good with a bit of real rain, but it still didn't grow and the rain meant I couldn't cut the hay either! And then there were the seemingly interminable problems with machinery that has been standing in a corner of a field for 11 months with no-one paying it any attention ....
Yesterday however it looked like being dry for around 36 hours, so I finally set off to cut what grass I could find in the first meadow - the one known as the Home Meadow; it's nearest the barn and house, and is particularly attractive. The sheep like it and are always put there in spring to lamb down.  Some parts of the field had no grass at all, just flowers (mostly ribwort, which is highly medicinal for sheep). The leaves of flowering plants are less tough than grass blades, and the vigour of the tractor-driven machinery can shatter them before the baler can pick them up; I do really need horse-power and the gentle pace of its machinery, but of course it's slower, especially as I'm single-handed.  Speed is needed to make good hay (rain is always threatening), but perhaps there would be fewer machinery delays. Last night the tractor broke down in the middle of the field  - a blocked fuel filter that I didn't even know existed . . . . horses don't have those.
So the hay harvest has started! Such a long way to go till it's all in the barn - such a lot of hard work. But the old mixed grasses smell so good as they dry, and the flowers and butterflies and grasshoppers glow in the sun, and the owls and buzzards patrol the field hunting the suddenly exposed voles and mice. It's real farming.

Bram and Celine came over from Holland and tackled all sorts of hard work with humour and surprising enthusiasm.  Enough wood stored now for half the winter - a cleared patch for the hens to forage in, with a fire-break the fox has to cross before reaching his dinner - all very good.  Bram and Celine also started clearing a massive bramble from the "fruit cage" - plenty more to be done there but the reward is lots of bright fat sweet fruit for the jam pan and freezer.
We also took a breather to check the hay meadows - the recent rain has given a bit of growth but not enough.  If I cut it this short, most of the leaf will fall to the ground and not be picked up by the machinery (that I still have to use).  So we have to wait again - need some warm sun again, like we had in April - hope it grows enough before it goes stalky and poor!  No such thing as a happy farmer, of course.  Except when wwoofers do as well as this.
(The blog lists jobs and problems - but we forget those in the evening - we have a good laugh over dinner, sit round and swap stories and ideas.  Best part of having wwoofers - nearly.)

The piglings arrived four days ago.  They are 8-week weaners, organic and pedigree Oxford Sandy and Black, two gilts and two boars; when the boars reach lager-lout age, they will be converted to pork, while the gilts will be grown on to bacon weight, near enough.  They are the "Transition Monmouth Pig Group" and two or three other Transitioners are sharing the input cost and output success - we'd like to see backyard pigs come into their own again.  Their function here on the farm is to clear the orchard of weeds - you can see the scale of the problem in the photo - so that in maybe two years' time, I shall be able to use up all my rubbish old hay as a mulch, and plant the new forest garden through it.  Well, that's the plan.
     But there's sad news; the young geese that you can see relating so charmingly to the camera in the May post vanished one evening between 6pm and 9pm, with not even a white feather to show where the fox found them.  I got the fox-man in, he says no sign of cubs around, so maybe it's a lone dog fox and the other geese and the hens will be let alone?  There are still deer in the plantation.  The local poachers invade my neighbours' farms at night, leaving all the gates open, presumably for a quick getaway in a pickup with venison on board, so round any bend in the lanes next morning you might run into a bunch of escaped ewes and lambs.  Dangerous to drivers and sheep, and criminally unfair to the farmers (and the sheep).  Chain and padlock seem to be the answer.

The late-May hot weather was ideal for shearing.  John has shorn my sheep for 19 springs now.  The sheep know what to expect, poor things.  Their fleeces are not particularly fine; they're mostly used for carpets (so please buy wool ones!).  These are Ryelands, fat lowland sheep; they give quick-growing, hungry lambs.  So I intend slowly changing to a primitive breed (Hebridean) which will eat rougher hay and much less grains, and give a thick fleece, and lambs which finish on grass and come good at 18 months, not 4.

The latest wwoofer was Despina from Greece.  She didn't have long here, but she learned how to grow cauliflowers, from digging and mucking the ground to watering in; and she taught me how to make stuffed vine leaves, using my fresh leaves (I never have time to prune the vine, so the leaves are a better crop than the grapes, alas).  They're a good peasant dish, you can stuff them with anything you have, as long as you use lots of herbs.

                                                                                                             

Well, not much happened in April then!  It was a hard month in the veg garden - watering can always in hand - no time for much else.

Present inhabitants of the farm: 37 sheep, 4 geese, 4 goslings, 4 cats, 3 hens (fox had 3 by day last week), 2 humans.  A couple of fallow deer suspected in the plantation.  Pigs due in June: 4.  Horse due sometime: 1.

The sheep had their toenails cut last week, and their muck cut away at the back to make life easier for the shearer, who is due next month.  The cost of shearing is about 3x the value of the wool.  I hope to keep back the half-dozen best fleeces this year, and recommission my elderly spinning wheel.  I shan't have time to use it! - but it will look good, standing round.

I'm hoping to find some new hens; would like Rhode Island Reds, excellent layers and excellent table birds.  If I had a cock, pure-breed birds would produce their own replacements - but the crowing of the cock will attract the fox, I've found that out the hard way.

This time of year is the Hungry Gap in the veg garden.  It would be tough, if we couldn't buy.  Need to plan for that for next year; asparagus, globe artichokes, all the luxury stuff!  Good idea!

Nearly the driest month since records began  . . . .  in 1995.  Only August 1995 has been drier.