Having reached the 5th anniversary of our move from suburbia to a North Pennines smallholding, it’s clearly a good time to review the current situation and take stock of our progress so far. Not least of which is where did all those years go! The first task for me was to look back at my …
Continue reading ‘Looking back over our first 5 years as smallholders’ »
Surprisingly, today marks the 4th anniversary of the move to our smallholding in the North Pennines. This is hard to believe partly because it’s just 4 years since we left the suburban semi-detached house but also because it feels longer than 4 years given that so much has happened in that time. From having 3 chickens in our …
Even now I occasionally find myself thinking of our smallholding as the “new” place but it’s been 3 years since we moved here so it’s time for the third anniversary blog update. The various blog updates certainly make for some interesting reading and it’s at times like this when this blog really proves its worth. …
Now that the weather seems to have settled down a little I can safely think about doing a “Spring” update here. We’ve had a bit of everything from the weather over the last week or so – snow, hail, rain, sun, cloud – but the forecast for the week ahead seems to show a more …
Okay, so it may not be a major new bestselling novel but it’s always nice to see the results of my efforts in print again. In this months Home Farmer there is a smallholder directory feature based on the smallholder group listings that I maintain on this website. Any non-subscribers to Home Farmer can read …
After a busy weekend which culminated in the delivery of the 2 pigs to the abattoir on Sunday morning, it was a pleasant distraction to see that the promised article about our set-up actually made it into the paper. There was a nice article in the Sunday Sun – a sister paper to the Newcastle Chronicle and …
It’s that time of year again when the friendly neighbouring farmer comes along to cut the hay meadows. Unlike last year when everything happened while I was out for the day, this year he arrived while I was pottering around the place so I was able to take some pictures. In our area it seems …
The blog posts here may have been much less frequent in recent weeks due to work commitments but they can’t compete with my “regularly” published articles in Home Farmer magazine. The first article was in the May 2013 issue and the latest has just been published in the August 2014 issue. Obviously an article every …
Around the middle of July, just 7 weeks after moving to our new house, we started our first attempt at rearing pigs. The two Tamworth weaners were collected by car using a borrowed dog cage with surprisingly little difficulty and only a slightly unsavoury smell. On arriving home they were installed in their woodland home …
Continue reading ‘Our first weaners – from start to finish’ »
Slowly I find that we are settling into something resembling a routine and each day that passes sees us getting more used to the realities of our new life. Even the few animals that we already have here are adjusting well to the new regime although we’re still not too sure where some of the …