Hibernation over  .  . . ?

It's been a tough year.  No sun, too much rain.  Some really good wwoofers though!  Where would places like mine be without you?  So thanks to (in order of appearance) Agric, Karen, Jan, Neil, Sue, Bastian, Kelly, Lucy, Nick, Julien, Paul, Chris  . . . . .  and not forgetting Christine, with whom I wwoofed myself - for one night - to learn about her house-cow.  That was great.

 So - remind me about the year again - January was fitting the photovoltaic cells on the barn roof.  They look stunning, and give me double the sunset show.  I slipped in inside the government's extended top-rate FITs period, so there's a bit of an income to go towards the cost of everything else.

 

This year's pigs arrived looking more like KuneKunes than the GOS X Tamworth I thought I was getting - turns out it's the piglets' parents that were the GOS X T, so these are (in veg-seed terms) F2s, not vigorous F1s.  No end to the things you have to think about.  But two of them (girls fortunately) have lovely long Tamworth backs and have been kept on for baconers.  But I still haven't learnt to love pigs.

Sheep on the other hand I know well.  Left, two ewes have just given birth in the wood-store - sheltered, quiet, near the barn in case of problems.  The lambs were sired by the new primitive Hebridean rams - they are small but perfectly formed.  Eating quality to be ascertained next summer.

 The baconers got out regularly, over the fence, with the help of an ant heap built against it.  I didn't know pigs could travel vertically.  They didn't take long to find the bins of feed outside the back door.  

Then other members of the Transition Monmouth Pig Group turned up with shiny new barbed wire and put a stop to all that.

So the pigs tried eating the gate instead.  I have to be careful when feeding them; a finger in the wrong place would get bitten and, no doubt, thoroughly enjoyed.  They are going to be slaughtered on-farm this year.  I'm rather nervous about it, and don't propose, this first time, to go through the whole thing of stirring the bucket of blood, washing out the intestines, etc.  The Pig Group will cure hams for Christmas, salt bacon for the winter and spring, and make all the rest into sausages, which will taste sensational and probably be eaten three times a week.

 Thank goodness (or whoever) for those 9 days of drier weather at the beginning of September.  I cut and dried the hay myself but was in such a state of anxiety by then that I had to import paid help (who also really enjoyed themselves!) to do the baling as well as the carting.  I cut on the 2nd and we finished carting on the 10th - in the dark, in the drizzle, but it was done.  I have never before got the hay in when the leaves were beginning to turn.  

There wasn't enough hay in the barn from earlier years for all my sheep for the winter; hardly anyone else round here has enough either; so even if I could find some to buy, it would cost outrageously.  That September crop was essential.

The veg garden is seriously short of produce.  None of the carrots I sowed came to anything, except the ones sown in February in the polytunnel.  I'm up to speed so far with next year's crops - onion sets and garlic planted, and new strawberries; broad beans to come in the tunnel; and the early beds for next February are cleared, composted, and covered.  And I learned a new trick - my Sarpo Mira potatoes, allegedly slug-proof as well as blight-proof, were nothing of the kind and had rotted and been eaten before I got them dug up.  And how the worms loved that sub-surface composting!  I have never seen so many in one of my beds.  But it's a bit over-the-top to grow potatoes just to get them to rot to increase fertility - isn't it?