events

In celebration of the Berkshire pig we recently hosted a tour of the farm followed by a long lunch created by chef Vince Velletri, featuring our special free range rare breed pork.  Eightly people filled our shearing shed to feast on porcetta, special Italian tarts filled with pork offal, pig's trotters in a soup, our own SBF bangers (sausages for those not raised in the UK), glazed whole ham, chorizo and not forgetting the beautiful home made cakes.  A spendid day was had by all, see photos!

On Sunday 22 November we hosted a fun day of recycling and art - saving the environment artfully was the theme for the day held in conjunction with Earth Solutions, a subgroup of the Avon Valley Environmental Society. Instead off sending our pile of the usual farm junk (old fencing material, sheet metal, amongst other stuff) to land fill we commissioned a professional sculpter to create a piece of art for the farm.  Kerrie Argent from Lake Grace, specialises in recycled materials in her art and she created a flower garden from sheets of old tin.

There was a demonstration workshop on making a solar oven out of scrap materials and another on making a worm farm from old polystyrene boxes.  Adrian Price, a renowned recycling guru, gave a talk and demonstrated how many useful items can be made from 'junk'.

The smaller guests were invited to construct and paint a Bunyip put together by an artist, Yvonne, from York and tasting of farm produce were available before three short films were shown including one from our daughter which recently won a Media Review Award-we will put a link to it for those who are interested-which was mainly shot on location on the farm.

Photographs from the day are posted below.

The Accidental Farmer Blog

Neil famously once said "I don't get horses" I think we will be addiing "and cows".  Last weekend two lovely wwoofers, Kathrin and Lukas arrived on the farm from Germany.  We were showing them around the farm doing our very best to prove how professional we were when we spotted a cow who had calved three days ealrier.

For some reason half her udder was engorged and whilst the calf appeared to be feeding ok I decided we should take a better look at her and get her into the yards.  Earlier in the year we had the same problem with another cow and her calf was not feeding well and getting weaker by the hour.  On that occasion we intervened and milked the cow, fed the milk to the calf and all was well.  So off we went, persuaded the cow to get into the farmyard where she backed herself into a corner and was having none of it.

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