We had a busy time building things in March during some unseasonably warm weather. The main job was to sort out the ‘hub’ area in the centre of our five crop rotation in the raised beds. The first part of the plan was to build a treebog (a simple kind of composting toilet) along side a pair of donated greenhouses. We got a basic rectangular frame erected quite quickly in one afternoon. We were then very lucky to receive a load of old shiplap timber that was perfect for cladding the walls. A couple of salvaged windows provide some light in the west wall and the roof cleverly re-uses an old garage door that was rusting away in a corner of the farm.



We then fenced off the remaining area with a low picket fence to provide a safe area for the toddlers and laid some turf for them to run about on. The unseasonal spell of warm weather meant we had to water the lawn in well but it has taken root quickly and put on some lush new growth.

The warm weather has caused us some other problems – the rhubarb is ready to bolt already!
We were also lucky enough to have the bottom few acres of our field ploughed and rotavated by a very helpful neighbour. However after a couple of dry, warm weeks the field had dried out to leave the topsoil feeling like a bed of gravel. We’ve now planted all the early potatoes and most of the onions but need a good few days of rain to get them growing!

With the hard work of digging trenches for potatoes behind us, we can sit down in the new kids area and enjoy a well earned cup of tea.

In preparation for our spring planting this year, we made a number of cloches from various bits of junk that we had accumulated. The first design was an old favourite, using water pipes to form arches over a rectangular wooden base and then covering the lot with offcuts from the polytunnel covering. With a little bit of bracing, these frames can be made relatively robust but they do end up being quite heavy. The next lot of cloches were made to a much simpler design, simply hinging together two sheets of polycarbonate with loops of fencing wire.
Both designs have stood up well to the end of the winter weather, protecting our early peas until they can be uncovered.
We have also been digging over the ploughed areas and building new raised beds. We’ve made up a dozen beds for the roots rotation which have had beetroot and parsnip seeds sown in to them. The legume rotation was the first to be fully completed with 18 beds, half containing a succession of pea varieties and half containing broad beans.
We also extended our perennial fruit area to include nine beds of raspberry canes. They will take a while to get established but hopefully the wait will be worth it!

We finally have some piglets! We were quite disappointed that the AI seemed not to have worked with Priscilla, but her sister Tallulah was due at the start of February so we had that to look forward to. The cold snap arrived at just the wrong moment for her though. On the Friday her milk first came in, just a few drops, but enough for me to start getting excited and to begin checking on her every hour or so overnight. Saturday came and went with still no change and Sunday was much the same. Matt was a great help, coming out to share the night shifts with me despite the road out to the farm being covered in snow. On Monday afternoon I was up in bed having a nap to help me get through another night of watching and waiting when Em came running in to say that Tallulah had passed a bit of bloody mucus and it was all starting! I quickly phoned Matt who called in a half-day holiday and rushed up to join us. By the time he arrived I already had five little piglets dried off and curled up in the creep area.
Em and Matt took a turn sitting in with Tallulah and we ended up with ten lovely little piglets and one stillborn.
Matt stayed with the piglets (and had some dinner!) whilst we took a little break as we were worried about mum accidentally crushing the piglets as it was so cold and they would need time to learn to hide safe in the creep area whilst she was moving about. Unfortunately during the evening this did happen and we lost one. The following evening, I was too nervous to leave the piglets alone for a moment, so Karen, Georgie and Neil all came out to run shifts with Em and Matt so I could get some rest.

The others were soon settling in to a routine of feeding and then retreating to the creep area under a heat lamp. However on day three, we noticed that one of the smaller runts wasn’t looking as active as the others. We gave him plenty of chances to feed on mum alone whilst the others were kept in the creep, but he just kept failing to latch on properly. After an afternoon of this, we decided to bring him in to the kitchen and try to feed him with a syringe. We got a couple of ‘meals’ in to him and he seemed to perk up a bit and so I continued with syringe feeding every few hours overnight. Unfortunately, by the four o’clock feed he had started to look weaker again and he died shortly after that.
This left us with eight healthy piglets who continued to grow at an almost unbelievable rate. It felt like you could lean on the gate for half an hour and just watch them getting bigger before your eyes. When first born, the piglets have a soft hair and almost velvet ears, but it doesn’t take long before they are all wiry and far too big to cuddle, so we had to take our chances whilst it lasted!

Finally, in early February, winter hit us at last. As might be expected, it was the weekend that Tallulah was due to farrow that the snow really started to fall in earnest. Here’s a little gallery of pictures of the farm in the snow and frost.

With our sows due to farrow at the end of January or the beginning of February, we separated them out into two neighbouring runs. Here’s the line up of intrepid pig herders preparing to gently persuade a 350kg sow to squeeze through our little pallet gate into her new home. Fortunately, Priscilla’s stomach leads her and she happily followed Trevor and a bucket of pig nuts with minimal effort from the team!

In January we finally began to see our first proper winter weather. This is just one of many spectacular frosty dawns I was treated to in January – well you do need some motivation to get out there bright and early to defrost all those troughs every morning!

We had a really busy last workday in January as we had a lot of prospective new members coming out to find out what exactly we get up to on a Saturday morning. Here you can see Jenny and Tom getting stuck in to the job of building some cloches from left over timber, water pipe and polytunnel coverings. The design for these is pretty simple, the so called ‘Geoff Hamilton cloche’. The main problem with this design can be it’s weight, which we kept manageable by creating two half-bed length cloches that can be easily carried out to the field by two people.
On The following Wednesday, we also built a couple of cloches out of polcarbonate sheeting we had been donated. These are very lightweight – essentially just two sheets joined by wire loops that you can foldout to form a ‘tent’ shape over the bed. These need staking down to keep them put in the strong winter winds but are easy to move and store as they fold flat.

The other big winter job we had to do was to finish planting out our perennial fruit beds.

We had a lot of raspberry canes to be spilt out and planted into freshly prepared beds. We also had some more current and gooseberry bushes to complement those we got planted towards the end of last year. These beds are the last that were laid out before we had the plough running and so they still needed a good bit of digging and hoeing to provide a suitable soil for planting.

It’s not all work though, whilst all this is going on, Ruth and the girls were playing ‘What’s the time Mr Wolf?’ in the garden. Over the winter we have also been having a bring and share lunch on the last Saturday of the month. We end up squeezing everybody into our sitting room, with the kids forced to picnic on the floor.
Its been a great chance to chat together and sample some of the dishes people are making with the farm produce. In fact, the lunches have been such a success I’m sure we’ll find a way to make them continue through the year.

I’ve managed to run up a massive backlog of posts, so some of the workdays in December and January will have to get only brief summaries and a few photos until I get back up to date – so here goes!
Just before Christmas we started work on the new tool shed. We had been donated an old 8′x8′ shed that needed a few new boards and new roof felt but that was otherwise sound. The first picture shows Karen clearing back the area we’d chosen for the shed between the caravan and the old willow tree.

With the soil roughly levelled out, we put down a layer of sand and cement in a dry 5:1 mix. The kids really enjoyed helping with this bit, happily pushing their little wheel barrow back and forth and pointing out to each other where the sand needed to go.


Then we started laying some large square slabs starting from the ‘highest’ corner of the levelled out sand!








Under expert supervision, we managed to get the slabs down and at least roughly level!








The final job then was to brush some sand/cement mix down in to all the cracks – another job the kids loved helping with








The team surverying their finished handiwork!

We’ve spent a month or two getting ready for ploughing our fields to prepare our fields for growing vegetables next year. We bought a Kubota compact tractor, its an imported Japanese model dating from the early ’70s that we picked up cheap at auction. Under Kriss’s expert guidance, we changed all the filters, oil and glow plugs. We had a bit of trouble getting the old girl running again after this service, but after sucking the diesel through and putting in a brand new battery she was off and running. In the meantime, we’d bought an old Ferguson single furrow plough on ebay. It wasn’t in too bad nick, but needed a small plate welding on to the mouldboard to patch an old piece of damage. Kriss did most of the work, assisted by his new apprentice, Matt.

With all the tinkering finished, we were ready to head out to the fields and get started. I spent a couple of happy mornings getting to grips with the controls of the tractor and learning the basics of ploughing with a single furrow plough. This weekend, I was feeling confident enough to pass on my hard won knowledge to the rest of the team and lots of people had a go at ploughing up the area we’ve set aside for greenhouses and kids play area. Trevor, Dan, William and Karen all had a go today and there’s plenty more field left for everyone else to have a go!

After our AGM we set up a number of ‘teams’ amongst the members to take on the organisation and running of some of the activities on the farm. The first team to get under way was our brewing team lead by our ‘master brewer’, Tom. We’d already harvested some barley from our first small crop and, using traditional methods we threshed the grain and winnowed it on tarps in the field. After leaving the barley to dry for a week, we were ready to start the brewing process proper. The first job is to soak the barley several times in water, allowing it to dry in between. We had been given some large blue tubs that helpfully fitted inside each other so Tom drilled a series of holes in the bottom of one tub and set it inside the second one. We then repeatedly soaked and dryed the barley over the course of a few days.

Next, we had to germinate the grains. For this, we used an old kids sandpit that was big enough to spread the grains out fairly thinly. We left it for a week in the polytunnel, with just occassional stirrings until the grains had grown little shoots.

Then the barley must be dried thoroughly at around 45 degrees. We were a bit stuck at this stage, but fortunately Dan offered us his home-made honey separator which could take most of the barley and keep it at the desired temperature. The rest of the grain was put in the farm’s egg incubator which could nearly get up to the right temperature. After a week of this treatment the grain had dried out until it was back to its original weight, 8kgs.

The last step before the brewing can really start was to grind the malt. We weren’t fortunate enough to have a proper grinder, but Simon managed to knock together a couple of rollers during the week that we could mount and use to grind the barley. We swiftly mounted these lovely rollers on the back of our cider press. The original plan was to power one of the rollers with a cordless drill but we soon realised that it had too much speed and not enough torque.

During the following week, Kriss constructed a handle and on the Saturday he welded it onto one roller and with a hand-cranking action we were able to grind the grain twice in fairly short order. Our barley was now ready to be brewed! Unfortunately at this stage, when we added hot water to start turning the malt into wort, our malt failed. We never got enough maltose out to make a decent brew and so the remains of the experiment have been fed to the pigs – nothing wasted!
The story doesn’t end here though, we’re going to try with professionally malted but not yet ground grain next week and see if we can workout if the grinding or the malting stage let us down. Once that’s been worked out, we’ll be ready to try again with another batch of our barley.

We spent the first part of October putting in a lot of work for running a stall at the local village ‘Feast’ events. First up was Willingham Feast, where we had a great morning, chatting with fellow stall holders and doing a brisk trade in lemon curd and beautiful piggy cupcakes baked by Andrea, one of our members. We then took the stall on to Cottenham Feast where the duck eggs and artichokes were bestsellers. We also ran a competition to name our fabulous Khaki Campbell drake who now bears the equally fabulous name of ‘Archduke’.

We’ve been doing a lot on our workdays in October in preparation for the coming winter. We wanted to separate out our ducks into two flocks, the Khaki Campbells and the Aylesburys. Having eaten all the cockerels from the corner pen, we moved two Aylesbury drakes and five ducks over there. The ducks needed a new pond and we had been donated a large fibreglass lining so all that remained was to dig a hole for it and as you can see they’re very happy with their new pond.
Having harvested in our small barley crop which was heavily hit by the drought in the spring, we’ve been threshing in the traditional way by ‘dancing’ on the ears and then using the fantastic fen winds to winnow the grain from the chaff. Tom has taken on the role of chief brewer, seen here creating our mashing tun from a couple of old plastic barrels. We’re now looking forward to sampling our first brew in a couple of months.

As winter approaches, we also have to reduce the livestock on the farm, choosing those chickens to keep on for laying or breeding next year and those who will end up in the pot. This is the cycle of life on the farm, just as we have been artificially inseminating our sows we are also sending off the last of this years weaners to the butchers. Emma bravely volunteered to try to transfer her medical skills to the very veterinary task of AI’ing our saddlebacks and we’re very optimistic that Priscilla is now ‘in pig’ if so, we’ll be expecting piglets at the end of January. Lets hope we were as successful with her sister, Tallulah, and can look forward to a whole lot of new piggies next year.

Today we sent off our last saddleback boars to the butchers. Last time we had to load some boars into the trailer, they had provided a certain challenge – in no small part due to the wet and muddy conditions which resulted in Alan finding himself in a wallow with 100kgs of pork sat on top of him. This time the ground was dry underfoot and we got the three boys loaded with relative ease. Six more families are now looking forward to collecting their boxes of pork on Thursday so it only remains to order the curing salt and dig out the sausage stuffers!

To celebrate the first anniversary since we bought Hempsals Farm at auction, we held our first AGM and Hog Roast following a bigger than usual workday. We had two main jobs to do out in the field. The first was to get in our meagre barley harvest, which was planted only a little bit late but got hit badly by the drought early in the spring and only really got under way very late. We stacked the barley as it came off the field into ricks built on the ubiquitous pallets. It will be left there for a week or so to dry out fully before we attempt to thresh and winnow it (by hand or possibly by foot). There’s not going to be enough barley to make a dent in our pig feed bills over the winter although our fodder beet is looking very good as the moment. Hence, we’ll probably try to brew some beer out of the small harvest we have mananged.

The second job this week was to plant out the first beds of soft fruit bushes, with blackcurrants, redcurrants, blueberries and gooseberries all going in to the newly prepared beds. We also had been donated some fruit trees by one of our member families and had (rather ambitiously I think) added an apricot and a nectarine tree to these. The six trees were planted along the wire fence dividing our two areas of completed beds, the intention being to train them along the wires to form a beautiful and fruitful hedge. Whilst all this was going on, the children were being kept busy cutting out and colouring in their own pieces of fruit – a job which seemed to require all the toddlers to get completely covered in glitter! (The bouncy castle we had hired to entertain them had broken down on the A14 and never made it!).
At the end of the workday, we all made our way out to the field where the children brought up their colourful fruit offerings and hung them on a ‘tree’ next to those the adults had planted. Having us all gathered together was an opportunity too good to miss and so we grabbed a quick group photo before heading back to the garden for the (thankfully brief) AGM.

The AGM covered a few main points, first up was a big thank you to all the members of the ‘steering committee’ who had helped us to get the farm up and running. We also introduced the new board (Myself, Emma, Ruth, Karen, Trevor and Hanna) who will be taking over the running of the farm for the coming year. The first proper piece of business was to vote on the timings of winter workdays after the clocks have gone back and we decided to hold them on Saturday mornings with the last Saturday of the month being a slightly later start and finishing with a bring and share lunch. We also kicked off the new ‘teams’ which will enable all the members to get more involved with planning and directing our activities here. The ‘goat’ team was particularly well subscribed and there will be much more about the six new teams on the blog in the coming weeks. Finally, I talked briefly about the upcoming Feast weeks in Willingham and Cottenham where Emma will be running a fundraising stall and trying to sign people up to our new Friends and Sponsorship schemes.

With all the business concluded, we all sat back, relaxed and tucked in to a fantastic hog roast (not our pig this time – maybe next year)! Our families all brought along something to share and we had plenty of salad and a most wonderful selection of puddings.