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!

A brave bunch of volunteers showed up on Sunday to help me load the three little pigs into the trailer for their final trip. In hindsight, allowing them to dig a deep, muddy wallow right in front of the gate out of their field was a bad idea. We backed the trailer up to the gate, climbed in and started pig wrestling. As is often the case, the first went in relative easily but by then the others had got wind of our plans and were refusing to come anywhere near the gate. Neil lost a shoe in the wallow, Alan ended up on his back in the mud with a pig on top of him and I sprained a wrist – but we won!

We picked up our half-a-pig from the butchers on Thursday afternoon and spent a happy evening curing, chopping and freezing. We’ve now had a breakfast of home cured bacon with maple syrup and pancakes and started in to what truly seems to be an endless bag of sausages.

As harvest is in full swing on the farm, we’ve spent a couple of workdays building the necessary facilities for processing some of our harvest. Trevor, Jago and I spent a happy Wednesday afternoon building a cold smoker down in the woodland

We tried it out the following week on some shop-bought cheese and bacon and it seemed to work pretty well – considering it was built from a tea chest, the chimney from our old aga, an old grate and a pile of rubble. Jago and I particularly enjoyed mixing up some of our good fenland clay with water and straw to smoke-proof the firebox.

We also built an apple press of somewhat eccentric design.
We made a square ‘barrel’ to hold the apples which balances on an old kitchen door screwed to an upturned pallet. The piston is provided by the square face of a plasterer’s hawk powered by an old car jack. The supporting frame is a trimmed down window frame. Like most of our creations on the farm, it has a certain rustic beauty – mainly in the eyes in the constructors! However, it works – squishing a gallon and a half out of our first load of apples.




Finally, we found a few of these huge caterpillars during the week:

They appear to be goat moth caterpillars which have spent five years living inside one of the trees in our woodland. They have just burst out of the tree to find a quiet place in the soil to pupate and we will be on the look out for them hatching into huge moths in June/July next year.

Lots of fun and a few sad moments last weekend as we prepared to send off our first three pigs. Before they could leave the farm, the two Old Spot boars and the largest of our Saddleback boars needed to be tagged with our herd number so that they can be identified throughout the slaughter and butchery process. The process to pierce the ears is relatively straightforward assuming that the pig stays still! The first one went easy enough, a pile of apples worked as a distraction pretty effectively. From then on, it got a little trickier as the pigs were now wise to our game although we were supported by the massed ranks of spectators shouting encouragement!

After the ear tags were put in the next job was to finish off the bridge over the drainage ditch so that we could get the truck and trailer over to the pigs and back out again. The teenagers had been digging out soil from behind the beehives and moving it over for the last couple of weeks, but this time the adults got involved as well. First, we cleared the huge ash piles from this year’s bonfires and then topped it off with a couple of tons of sub-base to provide a nice level surface. Dan and I enjoyed standing and watching Alan provide the finishing touches, thinking back to the first ‘work day’ on the farm back in February when the two of us had started covering the drainage pipe with soil. A lot has happened around the farm between then and now but we’ve finally finished the first job we started!

We had a much better week the following week, the sows finally made it down to us on the Tuesday after being tempted into the trailer with a big bucket of pig nuts and we had a relatively straightforward job getting them in to their new home.

The sows are two eighteen month old saddleback sisters, who had their first litters last year. Georgie is unregistered, but Peppa is a fine registered example of the breed. We are planning to artificially inseminate them soon, to produce our next lot of piglets for the farm which will no doubt prove to be an interesting new experience for all of us!We ‘weighed’ them by measuring them and doing some calculations and they both came in at around 350kg! Initially I was a little bit daunted by their shear size, but now they’ve been with us for a couple of weeks and they’re getting used to me and all the children who visit, they seem to be shrinking down to a more manageable size – at least in my head!

Finally, there has been a lot of activity out in the field and around the polytunnel. We’ve planted out all of our globe artichokes and some of the rhubarb seedlings aswell as potting on lots of herbs and building a lovely new coldframe out of an old shower door.

As usual, we also spend a fair bit of time sitting down with a nice cup of tea and some home-baked cakes!

We had an exceptionally busy week last week, with emergency evening sessions on Tuesday and Thursday to fence off another corner of the pig field and build a new ark in it. This was in addition to the regular Wednesday and Saturday workdays. Our most dedicated member, Trevor deserves some kind of prize for having come up to the farm four times this week to help us in our time of need!

On Tuesday evening, Alan, Trevor and myself spent a happy couple of hours bashing in fence posts and tensioning up a run of stock wire. Em provided some inspiration by designing a sliding gate made from an old pallet and a few fence posts which we also made. The Thursday evening session started off badly when I soon realised that I had ordered half as much board for the ark walls as would be required. Fortunately, whilst we were standing around hunting for some more boards, Karen arrived with a crate in the boot of her car that could be broken down quickly to fill the gaps in the walls left by my error, phew! Following the plan used in our last home-made ark, we managed to get this one bashed together in the few hours we had left before sunset. Along the way, Trevor managed to bash in some more fence posts and we discovered Matt’s talent with a chisel.

On Saturday, we managed to finish clearing the old orchard area, including taking out some of the worst of the dead wood in the fruit trees. We now just need a wind-free day to be able to have a bonfire. We also had another delivery of crates – this time from Dan who had spotted a couple of large crates sitting outside the Cavendish Lab which he wasted no time in hauling back to the farm. They were massive – and so just the job for building a goose house with. Matt and Dan pulled together the basic structure just leaving me the small the matter of attaching a door and running a cable out for the heat lamp. So I finally managed to get the goslings into their new run, complete with big shed, on Sunday.

After a week off from the workdays over Easter, we got back to work last week with a big attack on the old orchard area. We spent Wednesday and Saturday clearing out the undergrowth around the old fruit trees to make room for some new duck runs. The brambles were quite incredible in size – as was the number and size of hawthorn and elder trees that had grown up since the orchard was last properly cared for.

The other job on Saturday was to build a stock fence in the pig field to separate the boys from the girls as the Old Spots are over three months old now and we don’t want any unplanned piglets! William did some great work bashing in the fence posts, whilst Matt had better timing, showing up just in time to knock a couple in and then break for tea. After tea and cake we strained and pegged in the stock netting – an operation that was complicated by the need to keep shoving the pigs back to the correct side of the fence.

Everyone also had a chance to inspect our new colony of bees which seem to have settled in very nicely and are building new honeycomb at quite a rate. We also handed out more of the ‘Russian Giant’ sunflowers for the children’s growing competition – I’m hoping for a winning height of over 10ft.

Today (Tuesday), I’ve just been out to visit the very helpful people at Gulliver’s Geese who have provided 30 day old goslings for us. These should grow up in to Christmas dinner – hard to picture at the moment as they are so cute and fluffy but I know it won’t last…

We had a trip out to Potton on Sunday to pick up some more weaners for the farm. It was mine and Matt’s third time to get pigs and we have begun to get a bit complacent about how straight forward it would all be – to the extent that I forgot to take and pictures of the pigs at all! We picked up four saddleback boars.

The little fellows are still a little bit skittish but slowly getting used to all the visitors. The old spots by contrast are very tame now and come running up to see you and rub against your legs or chew your shoes.

The Wednesday workday was spent planting up some seeds: rhubarb, artichoke and more sunflowers. The sunflowers are a giant variety which we’re hoping to use in a sunflower growing competition over the summer.

It was another glorious day down on the farm today. The first job of the afternoon was to apply some sun block to the pigs’ ears. Our old spots have fair skin and do burn easily on glorious days like these. They do their best to keep cool and covered by wallowing in mud but however hard they try, the tops of their ears are always clear so out comes the factor 50!

We had two big jobs to do today, building another pig ark and clearing a mass of oil seed rape. We started off by clearing the line of the electric fence and some space in the pig field for the ark. The plan for the structure was simple enough, fence posts driven in to the corners, clad with board walls and a corrugated iron roof. So, we went back to the farmyard to cut the OSB walls to shape and roughly cut the roof purlins. Back out in the field, we spent most time getting the fence posts in vertically enough so that the boards fit neatly. We needed a bit of adjustment to the morticed joints for the roof but eventually it was all bodged together in time to screw down the roof and call it a day, ready for some saddleback weaners to move in tomorrow!

The other half of our team today spent the afternoon down the farm clearing a huge area of oil seed rape from one of the fields that we want to seed with fodder beet and spring barley. It was hard work in the warm sunshine, although a light breeze provided some relief. I have to say I spent very little time down there today after having spent the afternoon scything on Friday and knowing I’ll be back there on Monday it was lovely to have a break. It can’t have been that bad though as we found Trevor still scything away long after we’d retired home for dinner! Hopefully all this work will mean that we can get the field rotavated this coming week and perhaps next weekend we can do the far more pleasant job of sowing some seeds.

Today Matt and I made the long trip down to Oak House Farm near Ipswich to collect our first pigs for the farm. We’d reserved five Gloucester Old Spot weaners a month ago and were really looking forward to meeting them at last. The piglets are now eight weeks old and have only just been weaned from their mother so we’ll have to keep a close eye on their feeding this week to make sure everyone’s getting a fair share!

The trip was surprisingly uneventful, we got them home nice and easily without any of the usual hiccups. The pigs were fast asleep in the trailer when we got to the farm and so we recruited some help to make their new bed!












It just remained to put out some food and water and give the electric fence a quick test before we fetched the pigs over and showed them their new home.

















They settled in very quickly, enjoying a forage and root around amongst the young rape plants that are growing in their little enclosure. They then had a fairly relaxing afternoon, mostly resting in their new ark whilst several of our families came out to the farm to meet the new arrivals. The children all enjoyed stroking the piglets, whilst the grownups were happy to just watch them. As evening fell and the last visitors left, the piglets came back out and spent a pleasant couple of hours rooting around in the twilight. I’ve just been out to check one more time and they’ve finally taken themselves off to bed in the ark – enough excitement for one day!