Hempsals Community Farm

Honey extraction

benkt — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:14:12 +0000

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!

Getting Goats

benkt — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:53:05 +0000

Last winter, we decided to start keeping goats on the farm. Our main motivation was to get a regular supply of milk and, hopefully later, cheese. We spent the winter visiting local keepers and doing our research so that we were ready to go when the better weather arrived. The first job was to build a new stable and ‘milking parlour’. Our construction can be seen here – it comprises two stalls for goats (with a removable central divider) with a small milking room at one end (with the full length window made from an old shower door). Since this picture was taken, we’ve added a low fence about a meter away from the front of the stable and added an overhang onto the roof. This means that we have a sheltered corridor to move the goats to and from their stables and the milking parlour during the worst of the winter weather.
Initially, we got a trio of British Toggenberg goats, Cyndi with her little kid Clementine and a goatling named Cora. Tragically, we lost Cora during the wet summer to a bout of entorotoxemia, it was a sharp lesson in to how quickly a goat can go downhill and was the lowest point in our farming year.

Having Clementine, who was still feeding from Cyndi, meant that we had less milk to deal with initially, which gave us more time to get up to speed with the daily demands of milking. The technique is very simple, indeed about a dozen of the farm members now milk at least occasionally. It does, however require some practise to master – and to build up the strength of your fingers! For the first week, it took me over half an hour to milk out a pint or so from Cyndi – six months later I’m down to maybe twenty to thirty minutes to milk eight to ten pints from our three girls.

It was in rather sad circumstances that we gained our other two milkers. Ellie, a local goat keeper, who had been very kind to us in helping us to get started and teaching me to milk initially, died suddenly and left her husband to cope with a large herd of British Saanens. We were asked to take on two of her milkers to help reduce the workload and so we ended up with Data and Diva. They’ve taken a bit more settling in here and are only just getting used to being milked by many different hands. Data is a bit trickier than our others, having very small teats but both are producing plenty of milk. Our daily yield is around twelve pints from the three goats and so from necessity our cheese making skills have been improving! We’ve more or less got the hang of producing a delicious soft cheese and we’ve a ‘cheese making evening’ planned for members in October when we should be trying out our home-made cheese press for the first time!

Hugelkultur bed

benkt — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:39:12 +0000

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.

Treebog and Kids’ Area

benkt — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:05:57 +0000

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.

Starting the spring planting

benkt — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 20:23:56 +0000

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!

Piglets at last!

benkt — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 19:59:16 +0000

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!

Snow gallery

benkt — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 22:44:56 +0000

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.

January Activity

benkt — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 21:24:53 +0000

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.

A(nother) Shed

benkt — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 21:47:58 +0000

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!

Ploughing

benkt — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:54:51 +0000

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!