Sunshine at last!

Pictures from the top! Two of the orchard - one of a brilliant flush of bloom after last year's disaster (one apple from 13 half-standard trees) and one of the two rams and 8 ram lambs from 2012 eating down the dock leaves, and doing pretty well.  Next shot down - plantlets hardening off on the sheltered table outside the back door before being planted out in open ground - celeriac, sweet corn, tomatoes, brassicas.  Next - my lovely front lawn, now a speedwell lawn, looking wonderful after years of hard work doing nothing.  And then the veg garden, also after hard work doing nothing, but at least a few veg are now growing there in the Anglo-Saxon primitive patches of clearing amongst the weeds.  So much better than last year.  There will be home-grown food next winter.  Finally, Jack-2013 - he fell down to the hearth from the chimney nest on Monday night / Tuesday morning, quite a well-grown bird, still with me (Friday evening) and in-waiting for when he will be ready to be taken back by his parents to spend the rest of whatever life he has left as a proper wild family jackdaw.  He is sitting on my shoulder as I type this.  This happens regularly; I know the routine now; when he can fly he will be put in the front yard in a cage, for his parents to find, and when I think they are on the ball I will let him go, to be taken up and taken care of by the family unit.  "He" is purely courtesy, I have no idea of its sex!

The quantity of green spring growth has taken me utterly by surprise, as always.  I have started to get local workers to strim and mow the excess greenery.  The best Genetic Modification, I often think, would be to give humans two stomachs, so they could digest grass, of which the world has so much  . . . . .  I would be sitting pretty, with my multi-species, ancient grasslands, so much more interesting to eat than monoculture rye grass.  But it won't happen, and perhaps shouldn't.

The springboard hasn't sprung - yet

 This is a horribly grim grey scene for late April.  The natural world is still in hibernation - no leaves on any tree on the first of May (tomorrow)!  Doesn't excuse the farmer/smallholder/gardener from carrying on as though everything is bright and vigorous.  Here are a bunch of fencing volunteers (not wwoofers) deep in consultation about a straining post for the new pig paddocks.  Along with the hay meadows, the pigs will be a cornerstone of the locally-sustainable farm.  They will plough, fertilize, eat, feed other stock, and be eaten.  Or that's the plan  . . . . .

 Meanwhile work begins on replenishing the wood store.  Simon is sawing up big hazel branches cut from the lane hedges by last winter's hedge-layers; they're going to the back of the store, on the side that's to be started first of the new wood.  Hopefully, in late October rather than early September.  The stack on the left is what's left of last winter's wood; it will be in fine nick ready for cooler late-summer evenings.
The Esse wood-burning cooker I had delivered last July still isn't working properly.  A bit of hair-tearing going on.

Work finally starts on resuscitating the veg garden after summer of 2012's growing disaster - good work, Agric, thank you.  I sowed carrots three times and harvested a handful.  Even the weeds sulked and wouldn't come up to be composted.  I blame lack of light as much as surplus soil-water; it's a lovely day here so let's hope there's lots more to come!  (Could do with rain in between - just a little - to keep the soil crumbly and delicious.)  You can see the pig paddock fencing in the middle.  Handy for throwing veg over to piggies; not so good if they learn to climb it, or dig under the (double strand of) barbed wire.

 But at least the greenhouse is coming on this year.  This is (top to bottom, left to right) chillis: cardoons: tomatoes: celery: celeriac: tomatoes.  There are another 34 toms in pots, as well as the 3 dozen in the tray.  At the moment the forecast suggests a drought coming.  Well, as long as we have sunshine with it, I'm happy!

March 2013

 This month is all about sheep - and the weather.  Bitterly cold, some snow (not like January though), no grass, horrible (evidently) hay - but the lambs don't know any better, and anyway have Mum's milk to cheer them up.

I let each newest ewe-and-twins group free-range over the gardens to find something to nibble at.  The hens joined in - as hens will.

But towards the end of the month the sun began to appear, things warmed up, we all began to think maybe spring would start one day.

The sheep have eaten hardly any of that September hay this winter.  It's obviously tasteless and lacking real nourishment.  They have grazed and grazed the grass till it's barely more than roots and stubble, and apparently have done well on it!  I had no idea that sheep could get by on so little.  There's always something new to learn.  But now I don't know what to do with all that hay  . . . . .

In years gone by, February used to be the gloomiest month, hard to work through.  Last year, and the year before, the spring drought gave us bright and dry beginnings to the cycle of the year  . . . . .  Not this year.  It's all grey and dreary.  The brightest spot is the arrival of all those lovely new lambs!



 This is the first one.  And even with the lambs, there is a
major problem. They were supposed to be born from mid-
April (according to the date I put the ewes with the rams) - and their mid-February arrival tells me that the ewes have been impregnated by one of their 2012 sons, whose rubber band evidently didn't do the work I expected of it. So my beautiful and friendly (except when I have a feed bucket in my hand) Hebridean rams have had a dull and pointless winter. And instead of more 1/2-primitive sheep for next year, I have sheep that are still 3/4 Ryeland.

Well  . . . . .  next year I will do better; like check the ram lambs for untoward lumps at the end of July  . . . . .

The pig saga ended well though.  The picture here shows the sides of bacon and one of the hams salting on the draining boards in the pantry.  (I thought I wouldn't harrow you with pictures of the in-between stages). The blue bag in the sink is the bulk organic sea salt.  All the rest of the pigmeat is in the freezer. It seems a lot; but more than average is fat (good for cooking with, but it doesn't make a meal), and it is so delicious that it's hard to save enough of a joint for more than one day's cold dinner.

Little Mill Farm could support a large family, or even two or three smaller ones. (By support, I mean feed well year-round, and give most of the inhabitants a healthy productive open-air life.)  I'd like to think that's how it will end up, after my time here.  Meanwhile, I try to keep the options open for that next stage; and it's hard work for one person on her own. If you have ambitions to live like that, you could do worse than learn how, here!

January 2013

This month's post was going to be about my first experience of having a pig killed on-farm, and having it cut up, and salting the bacon and ham, and making all the sausages.  Okay, one pig got done, for my co-Pig-Groupies, but THE SNOW came before the second (for me) could face her demise.  It has been one delay after another since November; much more work and expense than I anticipated, and moreover I'm not set up yet for full-time pig residence.


Piggy enjoyed rooting in the deep snow for snails.  She spent most of the time asleep in a deep-strawed loose-box; I did envy her.




I had some good snow-savvy wwoofers to help.  They found Piggy charming.  They didn't have to get her moved from straw to orchard and back twice a day!  -  though they did help a lot with the difficult first time into the dark, fusty, but well-provisioned loose box.  Her diet has been nearly all locally-grown barley and peas.  The local expert says that peas make for hard bacon.  We'll see.

The sheep are well-covered, don't mind weather, but were fed up at having to eat that dull late hay instead of being able to find small nibbles of grass.  The half-bred lambs, the start of my "primitive" flock to take me into a low-input, low-output future, are doing really well on rather meagre rations.  Now the snow has gone I have begun feeding them a little rolled oats, partly to make it clear that I am one of the good guys.

More snow pictures  . . . . .  it really did look gorgeous, until the animals and I began treading it down and churning it up with the underlying mud.  Getting around the fields got harder and harder.
The wwoofers and I were snowed in for several days; eventually they walked the 7 miles to Monmouth to get a lift to their next stay, while I finally got out five days later.
It's quite an art not to run out of anything, and there's always something that gets overlooked.  This time it was the biomass pellets, so the wwoofers had to use electric heaters in their bedroom.  It doesn't often happen, I promise!

Next month:  it really will be the saga of the pigmeat.

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?

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.