memories to treasure -july 2022
I have to admit, my horses are my great loves. I have owned Ernie for sixteen years and he turned 27 this year. I realised I haven't any good photos of him. With Pash joining us this year it seemed like a timely moment to get some taken- and what could be more striking than two white horses cantering around a field in the summer sunshine?
The boys didn't let me down and put on quite the show. I am quite sure Ernie has a picture in the attic, as he can go from hollow-backed ancient nag to strutting, powerful racehorse in mere moments. He is truly living up to his full name- Eternal Light!
Handsome Pash was happily strutting around as well, pausing for the odd mouthful of grass. He is such a character and is a great credit to his breeders, Halsdon Arabians.
pork aplenty - march 2022
When JoJo's litter were born last August, there were eight boars left over that hadn't been sold. I was totally stumped- this had never happened before- normally we were having to turn people away! I could only put it down to world events. The price of pig feed was set to skyrocket, and a shortage of CO2 and labour (post-Brexit) was affecting abattoirs. This tragically meant that tens of thousand of pigs were ending up being destroyed on farms around the U.K. Despite these being issues that were affecting larger commercial producers rather than smallholders/small abbatoirs, I think the headlines and news articles about this were making people wary of buying in youngstock. So, we decided to 'run them on' ourselves. I was a bit sceptical about this; you get an awful lot of pork back from a pig (let alone eight!), and we have limited storage facilities (two chest freezers) and only sell small amounts of meat. Plus. all eight boys would have to come inside during the winter to save the ground in their outdoor pens from being ruined, with all the added straw consumption that would entail.
It has cost a lot to feed them and if I never 'straw up' pigs pens again it will be too soon!. Atchoo! We have only just now- two weeks ago- sent the first two off. They are butchered for us by multi award winning butchers, Veyseys in Cullompton and when they were delivered I was holding my breath to see if we would fit all the meat in the freezers- just about! We have sampled the sausages and they are absolutely delicious- salty, sweet and moreish. I'm always so proud when good butchery does our meat justice!
The boars we sent off were a touch small, so we will probably run the other six on for a few more months. It's much easier now the weather is better and they can be outside again- I'm sure they're an awful lot happier too. It's a pleasure to see them rooting around in the soil.
There will be a lot of produce to sell, but if we have a good BBQ summer that should be fine. Our friend Steve cooked this entire leg of pork on the BBQ, with roasties underneath basted by the juices from the pork. Doesn't it look fab?!
everyone in? - january 2022
We are now in the depths of January, which means that all the pigs and cattle are indoors. We don't like keeping animals inside if we can help it, but the grass isn't growing at this time of year so left out, the cows do get rather hungry and for a Devon, hungry means LOUD!.Added to that, the ground is soft as we are in a low lying area, so unless we want the fields poached up beyond recognition we have to bring the cows in. They have a huge area inside one of our massive top sheds. They eat only haylage made on the farm in the previous summer- no 'hard feed' or imported soy. Devon Rubies are such 'goos do-ers' they get fat just on grass and hay! They seem to enjoy being indoors for a bit, with endless supplies of food and plenty of space to move around and interact. I enjoy going up to the barn and breathing in their smell (which I find rather lovely!) and soaking in the deeply peaceful atmosphere that surrounds them. Watching Petal, one of our matrons, groom Nearly (the orphan calf from 2020) was particularly moving last week.
The pigs also come in in the Winter, into spacious pens custom designed by Jon for stress free moving. They love snuffling about in their straw beds. We made the tough decision to downscale our British Lop breeding herd before Christmas. Jon is working away on a build in South Molton, so the running of the farm falls to me now. We were finding that we were spending all of our weekends when he did have some free time doing 'farm jobs.' Most of these revolved around people collecting piglets, keeping an eye on litters just born, moving pigs around....add this to running the holiday cottage, the long lets, the other animals, the farmhouse- we were getting no time to do anything for ourselves! So we decided to scale down the pigs. We found a lovely home on another smallholding for Dukey the boar and Vicky, our older sow. We decided to keep JoJo and have a litter a year from her, which means we will still have enough piglets to run on for ourselves and a few to sell to our regular buyer. Dukey's new owners have agreed we can pop JoJo up to them for a 'conjugal visit' every Autumn, so we should be able to keep ticking over.
We always say that the farm has to work for us and that means sometimes changing the shape of things a little, so that we can stay happy and fulfilled ourselves.