Last autumn we extracted our first honey from one of our beehives. Here is a photo collection showing the process.

The first job is to remove the waxy caps over the cells of honey. This requires a sharp knife and a steady hand!













The next job is to the spin the frames of honey in a centrifuge. This separates the honey from the wax comb – it’s so easy even a child can do it!







Kriss then inspected the frames to check all the honey has spun out. If not we had plenty of little hands eager to have another go at cranking the handle.







Finally, the moment of truth as I opened the tap at the bottom of the barrel and waited for the honey to flow….






While we were waiting for the honey to flow out, there was plenty of time to sneak a taste from the tray of waxy capping removed earlier.






Once the honey had been collected, we filtered it through on of the filters normally used for goats milk and collected the clear honey in jugs and jars.




And here is some of the final product, we ended up with just over ten pounds of clear brown honey – delicious!

We’ve got a massive surplus of slightly rotten willow branches and trunks after felling a couple of large trees near the farm house. Willow isn’t much good as a fuel – too wet and light, so we decided to use up some of the wood by creating a Hugelkultur bed. The basic construction plan was to strip the top soil off, pile on lots of the rotting wood and add layers of straw and the removed top soil. The end result should be a raised bed that has loads of nutrients available from the decomposing wood and yet, due to the wood, retains moisture better than a standard raised bed.

The kids got really into the construction of this, enjoying building up the layers of wood and shovelling soil about. We built our hugelkultur bed in the play area as it will end up a perfect height for the kids to plant and weed. For the layers above the wood we used a mixture of feathers (high nitrogen content to offset the effects of nitrogen depletion caused by decaying wood) and rape straw that we cut last autumn.

We finished off by shovelling the top soil we’d removed at the beginningback over the top of the whole structure. Jenny then had a great idea – to transplant the excess runners from our main strawberry beds that were escaping all over the paths into the sides of the hugelkultur bed. Over the following few weeks we planted a quick crop of lettuce seedlings around the top edge and have now just planted in a few pumpkin plants that should benefit from the rich and water retentive conditions.

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!

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.

We were generously given seven new chickens this week, a mix of commercial hybrids who are laying well. Unfortunately, they came without a coop (which will follow on later) so we needed to knock something together quickly. At first glance round the pile of scrap wood we didn’t have anything too promising ‘in stock’ but on a second look, we found enough to make a start.

The base was provided by an old crate scavenged from a building site. We added a simple pitched roof and clad the whole thing with board from the packaging of a spectroscope (obtained from outside the Cavendish physics lab). The interior was furnished with a pair of perches running the width of the coop and a low board dividing off a nest box along the back wall.


It was around this point, with the main structure complete, that we started to add the finishing touches of craftsmanship. Matt got to work fashioning the sliding doors for front (entrance) and back (nest box access) along with some smart handles. We struggled a bit to find the last pieces of cladding needed, in the end we had to demolish an old door to provide the final panel. As time ran out we carried the coop over to the corner of Dipper’s run and took a last chance to admire our work before letting the girls into their new home.

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 typical day on the farm today: lots of faces, old and new; some hard work; some cake; and a truly stupid idea that somehow worked.

The main mission for the day was to get the geese moved out from the small run in the orchard and into a much bigger field. Trevor and I had finished the post thumping for the fence on Wednesday but we still needed to get the netting up. We started with some chicken netting that we had been given by a friendly local thatcher who strips it off old roofs and has no further use for it. As more folk arrived, we also ran a length of stock net down the final side of the field – thankfully for once we got that tensioned up nicely with no mishaps. Whilst all this was going on the teenagers started work on digging a shallow pond for geese to wash and paddle in.

The fence took a good while to get up so we all stopped for tea and cake a little later than usual and I unveiled my next plan. We had to get the geese from their existing pen, across the garden, through the vegetable plot, over the bridge, down past the pigs and into their new field and my plan was to herd them there. There was a pretty sceptical reception to this idea but at least everyone wanted to watch even if they didn’t think it would work. So, we formed a human barrier around the geese and slowly everyone started shuffling off towards their new home. Amazingly, the geese followed along fairly meekly and it was no time before they were tucking in to their new field full of oilseed rape.

Once we’d moved the geese it became essential that we shift their house too – a heavy and smelly job that the boys got stuck in to. Whilst we were doing this, the girls finished off digging the pond, which we just managed to line but will have to fill up another day…