Review Of Year 2 On Our Smallholding

As we are coming up to the anniversary of the move to our smallholding, it seems a good time to stand back a little and have a good look at what has been achieved in the last 12 months, the lessons learnt and to celebrate the passing of another four seasons.

During our first year here, I laid out the basic areas of the smallholding, a duck enclosure, annual vegetable garden, food forest, chicken fields and the wilderness area beside the piggeries.

Top, view as at November 2015. Below, view as at November 2016

Thus it went from fairly open and empty paddock to a working food production area. Our second year here has seen some drastic changes, most for the good, some just necessary. 

In early December DEFRA announced that all poultry were required to be kept under cover with immediate effect, so I spent a couple of days completing the conversion of the stables into the chicken condo and converting the open fronted outbuilding that I had planned to be my garden room, into the chicken palace. We bought and erected a large walk-in chicken run that we sited in the duck enclosure for their use while they had to be under cover and subsequently have used it for ducklings. We built covered walkways outside the two chicken buildings and over the year have made those walkways more permanent (in light of the likelihood of a repeat of the 'lockdown' during this winter's migratory movements of wild birds.

After the lockdown had ended, we built a pond in the duck enclosure and also acquired an old trampoline which is used to cover an area (in readiness for the predicted lockdown this year). The number of ducks has fluctuated throughout the year as ducklings have been raised and we also bought eight mature ducks, one drake and seven females which have proved successful breeders. As I type we have 9 adult ducks (7 of the eight, Mrs Warne and one young adult from our first hatch of ducklings from the eight) and there are also eleven ducklings that are a couple of months old which will provide us with food throughout the next few months.

The food forest has been expanded, I've planted 14 fruit trees, moved an apple tree from behind the greenhouse and planted several medium large fruit bushes that were given to us by new friends, just prior to their move from Newport in South Wales to Eday in the Orkney islands.

The Annual Vegetable Garden

The biggest change visually has been the creation of fencing around the annual vegetable garden. The few pallets that were around the front of it at the end of year one have been extended and this productive area is now fully enclosed except for two access points at the front and on the side next to the food forest. Compost bays and storage areas have been created along left hand side of the vegetable garden fence and at the front (the side nearest to the house) I have built a raised perennial border having failed miserably at keeping on top of the pernicious weeds in the bed that was created in the first year. I have resigned myself to accepting that this old perennial border needs a total overhaul, which I plan to do during the winter months. 

After I had created the fence around the vegetable garden, we were offered some longer pallets, these are eight feet long by three feet high and look more like fencing than the shorter pallets, so, bit by bit, I have started to replace the shorter pallets, as and when I have the energy to haul the long pallets into place. The older pallets will not go to waste, I am using them to create free standing compost bins and what are too old or damaged to use are being cut down and used as kindling for the wood burners.

This year I've grown several crops that I hadn't tried before, potatoes under a cover, sweetcorn, Greek gigantes beans - all of which have been a success to a greater or lesser degree. I plan to grow potatoes under cover again in 2018, but to make a cover from wood chippings and straw rather than a plastic sheet. I will grow sweetcorn again, but instead of growing it for its colourful appearance (as I did this year) I have selected seed of varieties that are reputed to have excellent flavour. The gigantes beans taste superb and next year I plan to grow a full bed of them rather than half a bed.

Our runner beans grew very well this year and I harvest well over 100lbs of beans, many of them were frozen for eating throughout the winter and spring and others were swapped with local residents for crops that I was unsuccessful with (courgettes) or just don't have enough in the garden yet (apples).

During the summer and early autumn I selected a seven week period and undertook to record everything that I had harvested and in just 50 days, harvested and stored over 800lbs of food. Next year I will continue to record the harvest, but perhaps won't put the pressure of having to harvest and process X amount of food each day.

We raised some meat birds this year, it was an experiment to see whether we preferred the fast grown meat of Ross or Cobb birds to the slower maturing more traditional meat birds. I think the jury is still out over the result of that experiment. Certainly we both prefer the taste of Welsummer, Silver Laced Wyandotte, Australorp and Jersey Giant birds, but there is an appeal to '8 weeks until table ready' birds. There is little difference in terms of cost as the Ross/Cobb birds eat such vast quantities of food in their short lives, but which route we go down next year is still undecided.

During spring we had four very successful hatches of chicks and in the space of four months had raised almost 80 chicks, partly to increase our flock size and partly to provide us with plenty of meat birds. I figured that we would need at least one bird per week throughout the year (whether chicken or duck), that we'd want a few extras and some to give to friends or exchange for different food.

We have ended the year with eleven Jersey Giants, five Brahmas and four miscellaneous birds in Big White's field and around forty-three birds in the chicken condo area (Elvis' flock). I intend to reduce numbers still further over the coming months until we have around thirty birds in total to provide us with eggs for eating, selling and for hatching chicks next year.

One of the lessons learnt this year is that the birds that hatched in January came into lay, but then went into moult in autumn and have stopped laying, whereas the birds that hatched in February haven't moulted but did come into lay and have continued to lay as the daylight hours have reduced. Perhaps that is just coincidence, but it's certainly something to be aware of for next year.

View of the field November 2017

You can see (almost) daily updates of life on our smallholding on my YouTube channel here.

Ready, steady, harvest! Abundance in our garden.

It seems that this has been a very good year for growing food in our garden. Hopefully this is a result of us improving the soil in the raised beds and an indication of things to come, that year by year the yield will increase as we enrich and enhance the soil.

 I've been picking blackberries, not only from the hedgerows of the fields surrounding us, but from the brambles that are quietly but steadily invading our garden.The area immediately outside our boundary is not being cut back by the farmer using the fields, this is a nuisance on one level because the weeds are growing very well and are now about four feet high and their seeds are blowing and dropping into our garden and chicken field, on the otherhand, it is supplying us with an amazing crop of blackberries. Now if I could just find a way to eat thistles, we'd be completely sorted!

 The elderberry tree is now starting to look purple, the birds are gorging themselves on ripening berries and I have started to pick as many berries as I can reach. I'm putting them straight into the freezer and, when I have enough, I will make some more elderberry wine. I'm also going to make elderberry syrup as I hear it is soothing for sore throats and the other symptoms of winter colds.

 The mirabelle plums are almost ready, one or two show the deep rich yellow of ripeness and I'm watching daily as the others turn from green to pale yellow to a darker, softer, buttery yellow.These too will be going into the freezer until I am ready to use them. Last year's crop were used to make some mirabelle plum and red grape wine which turned out to be a great success (unlike the elderflower wine that I made last year which is disgusting!).

Today's vlog continues the harvesting theme, if you can't view it on your device from this blog, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Our 10 Reasons for Homesteading

There's a really lovely, thriving and supportive network of folks who are smallholders and homesteaders (the American name for smallholding) that I've bumped into via social media. While I've known this about Twitter and Facebook for a while, I didn't know until recently that a similar network existed via YouTube.

Anyway, one of this network had a fabulous idea for a collaborative challenge whereby vloggers are invited to make a video about a particular subject. This one is about our reasons for choosing to be smallholders.

As usual, if you can't play the video on screen, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Chicks away! We're off to a flying start.

Last month I advertised our surplus eggs for sale locally. These aren't the hatching eggs that folks can buy to put in an incubator, but eggs for eating. The response was amazing (read about it here).

Since then we have found a gentle rhythm of folks who are now coming regularly to collect eggs from us. Today I have spoken with a lady who'd like the rest of our surplus eggs, so it seems that we are now going to just about break even in terms of feed costs and the chickens will be paying for themselves. At least until autumn arrives and they reduce or stop laying.

I have registered as self-employed so that our egg sales are all above board and as they should be and I've also asked about what I need to do if I want to sell any of our surplus fruit and vegetables. The member of staff at the local council was incredibly helpful and has sent me all the information that I need to decide whether that is a route I want to go down and in the next few days I will make that decision. So now I am officially a smallholder and trying to eek out a living. Thank goodness for Mr J working outside the smallholding as I can't see the smallholding making a profit for a goodly while, if ever!

But making a profit is not why we live here or why we chose to raise and grow our own food and as long as we keep our reasons for our lifestyle in mind, I don't suppose we can go too far wrong.

Back to the chickens; the older girls in the flock (those that we rescued last year together with Jack and Diesel) are definitely slowing down their egg laying activities. So that we can ensure a good number of eggs in the future we need to have young birds maturing throughout the summer and hopefully some of them will lay during the colder months.

The seven oldest chicks are now almost ten weeks old and have grown rapidly in both size and confidence since they moved into the mixed flock field. It's lovely to watch them scampering up and down the length of the field looking like they are without a care in the world. Taking a photo of them is now very difficult as they rarely stay still for long!

The chicks from the next hatch are now almost six weeks old and are going through that scruffy stage where they have most of their feathers but still have chick fluff on their necks and rumps. They are also growing well. I divided the hatch of eighteen surviving chicks into two houses, one contains solely white Jersey Giants (JG) and the other has some JG crossed with Australorps, Silver Laced Wyandotte and a couple of JG that are destined not to be breeding stock.

I advertised some of the JG chicks for sale and within a couple of hours agreed the sale of three of them. Inevitably purchasers only want the girls so that they don't have to deal with noisy cockerels, but that suits us very well. The boys are broader in the chest and longer in the leg than the girls and as table birds, they are ideal.

I'm relieved that these chicks are leaving us while still fairly young. Once they have moved from the nursery houses into the chicken field with the adult birds, I start to get to know their personalities and parting with them is a little harder.

The most recent hatch of chicks are still in the nursery pen in the stable and still need heat to keep them warm while they grow enough feathers to survive outside. We lost one of them, the weakest chick, after a couple of days, so that leaves us with twenty chicks racing around the nursery pen. There are Cream Legbars, a couple of hybrids (Big Red and Diesel's babies), some Australorps and more white Jersey Giants. All of these chicks are from eggs laid on the smallholding and I'm delighted to have such a healthy looking group of chicks from our own birds.

On Sunday I was contacted by a woman who helps to organise a 'hatching chicks in school' programme to see whether I'd be interested in giving a home to some chicks. Of course I jumped at the chance to have some other layers in the flock, even if they won't be laying for several months! She also organises duckling hatches, so I've expressed an interest in having some ducklings too and I'll wait to hear whether we can have any ducklings in the coming weeks and months.

So tomorrow we will welcome sixteen chicks that are almost four weeks old and give them a home in one of the nursery houses. While there are some Cream Legbars in the group, the rest are breeds that we don't have yet, so I'm excited to see the little bundles of potential brown, blue and cream egg layers. Of course, if there are males as well we will make a decision about whether to breed from them, find them new homes or pop them into the freezer at a later date. 

Our next hatch of chicks is due in a couple of weeks, this may, might, perhaps (probably not!) be our last hatching of chicks for this year. We also have the first of our ducklings due to hatch around the same time. I'm very excited about the duck eggs in the incubator, there are a couple of eggs that I bought in and eleven fertile eggs from our own ducks. I;m keeping my fingers crossed that this will be a successful hatch of ducklings.

In other news, all though still chicken related, I was delighted to see that Country Smallholding magazine have printed an extended version of an online article that included some of my input. This month's edition of the magazine has photos of the covered walkway that Mr J and I built, the metal pen that we use for the ducks and of the medium and low tunnels I built that safely keeps the birds' drinking water out of the reach of all but the most determined (and low flying) wild birds. It's nice to know that I've got our biosecurity right!

I am still vlogging daily and now that I am used to walking around with my phone (for the camera) and a small microphone clipped onto my top, it has become less time consuming and invasive of my daily routine. I record and edit one day and upload it the next, so if you'd like to see the new arrivals shortly after they've arrived, you will need to visit my YouTube channel on Friday 7th April.

I need to go and prepare the nursery house for our new arrivals, but first, as always, I think it's time for a cuppa!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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How many baby chickens?

It was Mr J's birthday this weekend and I had set some eggs in the incubator with the hope that they would hatch on his birthday. Well, nature has a mind of its own and from late in the afternoon of day 19 in the incubator, we could clearly hear cheeping and peeping of little chicks.

On day 20 I got up to be greeted by two little chicks and throughout the day they seemed to arrive in a gentle but steady stream. As we went to bed there were eleven little fluffy chicks stumbling their way around the incubator.

As so often happens during hatching, I was unable to sleep very much as I get so excited about the new little lives that are presenting themselves in the incubator and so, at 3am or thereabouts, I was sitting in the kitchen blearily staring into the incubator and fifteen little pairs of eyes looked back at me!

On the day of Mr J's birthday, we moved eight of the chicks to the nursery run to snuggle under the brooder (the electric mummy) so that there was more space in the incubator for the more recently hatched birds. By the end of his birthday, there were twenty baby chickens. I had put twenty-seven eggs into the incubator, three were not fertile so were removed at day five, which left us with twenty-four fertile eggs. Twenty hatched chicks from twenty-four eggs is a very good hatch rate and I was delighted.

The day after Mr J's birthday yet another little chick hatched, giving us a total of twenty-one!
I think that we have two hybrids that are Big Red crossed with Diesel, they are very black with a smidgen of brown on their necks, seven Australorp, four Cream Legbars and eight Jersey Giants.

All these eggs were laid here on the smallholding, they are all the off-spring of birds we have here (or have had here as Squeaky and Big Red are no longer with us).

To make space for these little newly hatched chickens, the four week olds (all eighteen of them) have been moved into nursery houses in the chicken field, actually they are just outside the chicken field where I have easy access to them and can attend to them regularly throughout the day without disturbing the other chickens.

Split between two nursery houses, the eighteen chicks are now in groups of nine Jersey Giants and a mixed group of Australorps, Silver Laced Wyandottes and a couple of Jersery Giants (that we know we won't be breeding from as they have the wrong colour legs to be true to the breed standard). They are all doing well, they are feathered and off heat and seem very pleased to have grass to run around on and eat. 

The seven chicks that were in one of the nursery houses have also moved. They have graduated to the shed with the mixed flock and after just two nights in with the older girls, they seem settled and are running around the field very happily. They have learnt that their food and water is inside under cover and also seem to have grown tremendously in confidence and agility,

There have been some other new additions to our flocks. We have a lovely White Sussex girl who has spent most of her time with the young seven, Mr J and I have decided to call her Auntie Mabel. She's a very friendly although somewhat timid, chicken who no doubt will find her feet and settle into the mixed flock very well.

Two new thirteen week old pullets (young female chickens who haven't started to lay), these are a cross between a deep brown egg layer and a very dark brown egg layer and they should (fingers crossed) give us deep to dark brown eggs when they start laying. There are also two more of this cross-breed chicken that are now six weeks old and they will remain in a nursery house for a couple more weeks.

Yesterday four laying girls arrived, three that will also lay dark-ish brown eggs and one that is a Leghorn cross and she lays white eggs. 

Between the new arrivals and our existing flock, we should be able to offer a nice selection of colour of eggs in our egg boxes.

All the newly hatched chicks, the four week olds, the six week olds, the eight week olds and the thirteen week olds cost a pretty penny to feed, so thankfully we are now selling the eggs of the layers to help pay for the feed costs.

I've also sold some of the Jersey Giant eggs for hatching and as long as we continue to see hatching eggs and eating eggs, the girls will pay for their own food. At least during the summer. When autumn returns and throughout the winter, feed costs go up as there is less grass to eat and fewer bugs in the garden and of course, if there is a lockdown again this year, the feed costs will soar as the birds are restricted to being inside.

Not all of the chicks will be laying birds, obviously some will be males and they will either be kept as breeding stock or will feed us throughout the latter part of the year. So today we have fifty chicks that over the next few months will start laying or be moved to a separate area. And that should keep us in eggs for a while!

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I also post vlogs daily (almost). You can find my YouTube channel here.

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If you'd like to receive my blog posts direct to your inbox just enter your email address in the box below and follow the instructions. You'll probably need to confirm by clicking a link in your email inbox and then you will receive my blog each time a new entry is published. You can, of course, cancel your subscription at any time.

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Hatchwatch 2017, first chicks of the season

As the temperature is dropping outside I am less keen to spend a lot of time in the garden and I now have the perfect reason to stay inside and keep warm. The chicks are about to hatch!

At the tail end of last year I chose which breeds I would hatch for the first batch to add to our ever-changing flock (read about my choices here) and the next forty-eight hours should see the arrival of our first chicks for 2017.

I will update my blog as the hatch progresses, but I'll post more regular updates on Twitter, so if you want to see the news as it happens, please follow me on Twitter @Liz_Zorab or search for my hashtag #hatchwatch2017. The link on the right hand column of this blog should work (but with all things technical, I can't guarantee that I've set it up correctly!).

I wasn't expecting to see any progress today, they aren't due to begin hatching until tomorrow, but as so often happens one little chick seems extra-keen to enter the world and has already pipped. As I understand it, chicks need to break a hole in the membrane that is inside the egg, they then have a little air to breathe while they break a small hole in the shell. Often this appears as just a crack, but it seems to be enough to allow air into the egg for it to breathe (this is what is called pipping). Then over the next day or so it makes more and more holes in the shell in a line that eventually splits the eggshell into two and with some shoving and heaving it manages to push the two sections of shell apart and ta-da, it has hatched.

Sitting in the kitchen over a cuppa and slice of cake with Alison (from Alison's Animals) I could hear faint cheeping noises, so I knew that at least one chick was making a bid for freedom. If I'd thought more carefully about it, I could have invited Alison to come for a cuppa tomorrow so that she could watch them hatching too. For anyone who isn't familiar with the name, Alison is a well-known animal cartoon artist, you will probably have seen her work on placemats, calendars, cards and mugs. I am very impressed by folks who can draw as my hand/eye coordination is dreadful and so I appreciate what a great talent it is to have (and Alison is certainly very talented).

I'm sure that the temperature has dropped again this afternoon. As I was giving the birds some corn (I was wrapped up like a Michelin Man yet again) and the tree surgeon arrived with another trailer load of well composted wood chippings. Hopefully the weather will be warmer in after the weekend and I will be able to move some of the compost to the raised beds. In the meantime, I plan to spend as little time as possible outside and as much as possible sitting in the kitchen watching new life emerge from little eggshells. And to that end, I think it's time to put the kettle on and make a cuppa!

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Homestead Vlog Tour January 2017

Hooray, I've finally done it, I have made a vlog tour of the smallholding! 

Well, actually it's not a complete tour of all of the smallholding, but a brief stroll around the annual vegetable garden and an introduction to the chickens and ducks.

If clicking on the image above doesn't work, you can also find my vlog on YouTube here.

I think it's going to take me a little while to get the hang of editing a vlog and to come out from behind the camera more often. I've always been a production team type of person rather than an on-stage person, so seeing myself on a screen is a little unnerving.

Anyway, if you like the vlog, please hit the like button on YouTube and subscribe to my channel, that way you'll receive a notification each time I upload a new vlog.

If you like the music that I've used, it's by Kafkadiva, it is taken from their album Big Toes & Fingers (Explicit) and is a track called Breathe. 

You can find it on Amazon (via my affliates link) below.

For more information about my affliates links, please see the Small Print and Disclosure section.

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Watching and learning

I really enjoy watching a range of vlogs made by other folks who are living a similar lifestyle to us. I take inspiration from their ideas, learn how to do things and get hint and tips about what not to do. I'm sure everyone knows what a vlog is, but just in case, it's a video log, just like a blog (bio-log) but a filmed one, usually but not always, put onto YouTube for others to watch.

I will be starting to vlog on a regular basis very soon. I made a couple of short vlogs last year so that I could start to learn how to edit videos. You can see them at my YouTube channel here. I'd be delighted if you would subscribe to my channel and then you will know each time I upload a new vlog.

I've been inspired to vlog by a few people who I see so regularly on the telly screen in my living room, that they are starting to feel like old friends! 

These are some of my favourite vlogs (in no particular order), I subscribe to all these YouTube channels and watch each new vlog as it appears.

Sean James Cameron

Sean (with the help of Rusty the cat) has been making videos and vlogs for around four years from his allotment in London. Together with other allotment holders, he makes interesting and instructional vlogs. As with all the vloggers that I like to watch, Sean tells it like it is and doesn't gloss over the problems that arise when gardening. He is also rather partial to the occasional cuppa (which makes him a kindred spirit).
Find Sean's channel here 

Art and Bri

This couple, who have four young children, inspire me by being so positive and yet almost humble in their approach to life. Art and Bri's love for each other and their children is touching to see. They've been in their homestead for a year or so and are now enjoying having their first farm animals, chickens and goats.
Art and Bri's volgs can be found here

The Grass-Fed Homestead

Dan and Ashley (and Little Buddy) have recently started out on their homesteading adventure. I like their humility (a wonderful trait in my eyes) and their gentle approach to life, the way they care for their animals (sheep, chickens and rabbits) and the obvious joy that they get from learning new information and skills. They've spent ages studying permaculture and are now putting that knowledge into practice.
Watch The Grass-Fed Homestead here

Pure Living for Life
Jesse and Alyssa live off-grid and debt free and are recording their progress as they develop their 5 acre plot of land from scratch into their homestead. I find them highly entertaining and like their practical yet joyful approach to life. They made the best video I've ever seen about the trials and tribulations of trying to dispatch their first chicken!
Pure Living For Life can be found here

David The Good
I find these vlogs great fun, sometimes a little off the wall which is just up my street, but always filled with interesting and inspiring ideas for gardening in a food forest. David The Good and his family live in a rented property that is currently on the market for sale, but that doesn't stop them from putting down roots and making long term plans. 
David The Good's channel is here

Happy Homestead

James and Dee have just moved to Eday, a small island in the Orkneys to start a new life on a croft. It's great to follow the progress of lovely pair who have become firm friends, they came to visit us several times before they moved (read about it here) and I'm delighted to see how they are settling in.
Watch Happy Homestead's channel here

Justin Rhodes

I expect that many of you have already seen Justin Rhodes' vlogs. They are inspiring, uplifting and entertaining. Justin currently lives on a homestead with his family, although they are about to embark on a tour of homesteads and farms right across America and Canada.
Justin Rhodes' vlogs can be found here  

Off-Grid with Doug and Stacey
I admire this couple, they are practical, informative and entertaining. They've learnt so many skills since moving to their homestead in 2011. And, you don't need to be living off-grid to glean loads of useful information from their vlogs.
The Off-Grid with Doug and Stacey channel is here

This is not an exhaustive list (there are many others that I watch occasionally), but I hope you enjoy exploring these YouTube channels as much as I have.

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Mighty meaty

It's been a highly sociable week. On Saturday, my daughter and two grandsons came for an overnight visit. It's the first time the boys have stayed with us and grandson number 1 was very excited about staying on 'Grandma's farm'. They arrived mid afternoon on Saturday and played a bit, ate supper and got settled in for the evening. On Sunday morning it was still damp outside, but dressed in our not-so-glamorous waterproofs, we still managed to get outside and do a few chores. My older grandson helped us to move flexible fencing, feed the chickens and ducks and move wood chippings onto a particularly soggy and slippery area in the duck enclosure. 

 My daughter took this photo of us on our way to get yet another barrow load of wood chips, it made me realise that I really need to invest in some waterproofs that don't give me a Michelin Man look. I loved spending this precious time with him and hearing his squeals of delight as we raced around the yard. It seems riding in a wheelbarrow is the mode of transport for a five year old, although I'm not sure which of us enjoyed this more!

 Yesterday morning Mr J and I cleaned out the chicken shed. The eight inch deep bed of sawdust certainly made interesting scratching material for the chickens and it also helped to soak up some of the rainwater that was sitting on the surface of the ground unable to drain away fast enough.

 The chickens will scratch through this and turn it over and over during the winter months and then, in the spring, I will fence some of the area off and plant kale, spinach and other vegetables that the chickens like to eat. It will be quick and easy to feed the chickens some of their favourite leafy greens when they are growing in the chicken's field.

We then refreshed the deep bedding sawdust in the chicken shed and I treated the perches and fixings with diatomaceous earth as a preventative measure against red mite and then we headed indoors for a quick wash so that we didn't smell of chicken poop for the rest of the day.

Martha of @MarthaRoberts arrived early afternoon to deliver a couple of boxes of pork. I met Martha via Twitter, which has proved a great place to get to know some like-minded smallholders. She has a smallholding near Abergavenny on which she raises rare breed pigs that happily spend their days foraging on her hillside amongst woodland and grass. 

Photo courtesy of  Martha Roberts

A few weeks ago I asked Martha for a half a pig when the next batch of free range animals were despatched. She gave me plenty of notice so I was able to make sure that we had lots of space in the freezer.

I asked for some of the parts of a pig that aren't as popular now as they were in the past. So yesterday I took delivery of my half a pig together with some liver, hearts, kidneys, hock and leaf fat (the fat from around the kidneys).

I'm going to make liver pate, a coarse pate for Mr J and a smooth one for me. I'm going to render the leaf fat to make lard, which is high in omega 3 and I understand that if it's rendered very slowly and makes a very white lard, it is perfect for pastry as well as for using as a cooking fat. I'd like to try a rich slow casserole with the kidneys and slow roast stuffed hearts.

I'm really keen to experiment with old recipes and find ways to use as much of the carcass as I can because I feel that so much of the animal must go to waste. While we love a pork joint for a roast dinner, there are an awful lot of other dishes that can be made using other cuts.

Photo courtesy of  Martha Roberts

This experimentation has a reason. Mr J and I have been discussing our mid term plans for the smallholding and have decided that we may have a couple of pigs in the future. This certainly won't happen in 2017 and depending on how far we get with upgrading the dilapidated piggieries, it may happen in 2018 or later. In the meantime, we can learn how to make the very best use of as much of a pig as possible. There are some parts of the animal that I can't face trying, it makes no logical sense at all, but still, I don't fancy the lungs or spleen despite finding several recipes of how to cook them.

I've been searching through my mother's cookery books (like this 1961 edition of Mrs Beeton's) and looking online for recipes, hints and tips of how to prepare our new food. My plan for the next couple of months is to try out new recipes and decide which appeal to us the most and to share the successes on my blog. 

This morning Helen and Jane came to visit. Actually, Helen came to collect the flexible fencing that she kindly lent to us earlier in the year. We spent a lovely couple of hours drinking tea, eating cake and talking all things smallholding. Helen keeps pigs and Jane has sheep, so we swapped stories of muddy incidents, rainy days chasing our animals and shared lots of laughter.

This afternoon I started turned my attention to the pork. I started with the easiest joints to cook, the roast shoulder joints with crispy crackling.

I unwrapped the joints and left them to get to room temperature. I put them into a roasting tin. I scored the skin and rubbed some sea salt over the skin and into the scoring and put them into the oven on 220 degrees C. After about 25 minutes I turned the temperature down to 170 degrees C and cooked the joints until they were ready (I like meat well cooked). I poured off some of the fat and juices into a bowl after the first hour and again once they were cooked. Once they are cold, the fat and juices can be separated and I will freeze the juices in small portions until I want to use it as a base for gravy.

This evening's supper was a celebration of smallholders' food. We had roast pork, crackling, apple sauce that I made in September using our neighbours' windfall apples, gravy and purple sprouting broccoli which I picked from the garden just before dusk. We took a few moments to appreciate how lucky we are.

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A sociable weekend

On Friday morning my daughter came to visit. It's been several weeks since we had a chance to just hang out together, doing nothing in particular, but sharing our time and chatting all things family related.

She was enchanted by the five littlest ducklings, although not as much as I am besotted with my grandson number two, who at ten months old has developed a lovely personality and is now getting speedily mobile.

She went home with a food box filled with vegetables from the garden, chutney and sauces that I've been making and an organic butternut squash that came from a local shop. She hadn't cooked a whole butternut squash before so I gave her a recipe suggestion and a few hours later she sent me photo of the roasted squash filled with goat's cheese and pumpkins seeds, which she said was delicious.

In the afternoon I continued to plant out the perennials and shrubs given to us by Jane and to transplant young plants that I have raised from seed. I started to think about which plants to take cuttings from so that they have time to form root systems before winter stops their growth. It's such an easy way to propagate plants and every year I forget to spend the short amount of time it takes to take the cuttings. This year I will get around to doing it before it's too late.

Saturday morning was spent in the kitchen, my neighbours have kindly invited me to collect as many windfall apples as I'd like and I've taken them up on the offer and have been collecting a bucketful a day. So, I made apple sauce (to accompany pork) and froze apples to make crumbles from in the depths of winter. The kitchen smelled delicious.

I have had some poor nights of sleep this week and have become very tired, so Saturday evening by the time we had got the birds safely tucked away in their houses, I was ready to sit quietly for an hour before I went to bed.

On Sunday we were up and about bright and early and after doing the morning chores, I baked a lemon and poppy seed cake. We were going out for the day and I was very excited to be heading off to Carmarthenshire. Ten minutes before we were due to leave the Dirty Dozen made a bid for freedom and more than half of them escaped from their run. Mr J phoned me from the chicken field to request my help in rounding them up. Over excited chicks who are hell-bent on being outside their run are not the easiest to herd back into their confines, but with a bit of extra coaxing and a lot of bribery with armfuls of green leaves from the vegetable garden, we got them safely back into their run.

We hadn't got very far in the car before I fell asleep (which is why I am not driving at the moment - falling asleep at the wheel really wouldn't be too clever) and I woke up just as got the to sign that read 'Welcome to Carmarthenshire'.

We were headed to the smallholding of Annette and her partner. I 'met' Annette via Twitter and a few weeks ago she invited us (and several other smallholders who tweet) to visit their home for a barbecue. And what a lovely smallholding they have! 32 acres of Welsh hillside and a pretty house nestled into it with beautiful views across the valley.

The barbecues were lit and heated up while we all took a tour of the smallholding. Their flock of sheep in one field were lovely as was the dog Edwin who was very well behaved. They have eight chickens and a number of ducks free-ranging around the back garden. 

 We ate a feast of food (everyone brought something to share) including burgers, lamb chops, roast pork, rabbit, vegetable kebabs, salads followed by cake, brownies, Eton mess and New York cheesecake. It occurred to me that any gathering of smallholders was bound to have fabulous food and Mr J ate so well at lunchtime that he only had a few biscuits with cheese for supper.

Mid-afternoon we said goodbye to the new friends we'd made with promises of having another get together before too long. I was more than happy to offer to host the next one here on our small patch.

After a much wanted cup of tea, I headed out into the garden and pottered for a while, planting some herbs and moving some more of the huge pile of wood chippings from the front garden into the area that will be the food forest.

Once the birds were all in bed, we curled up on the sofa and switched off our brains for a while by watching television.

It has been a lovely weekend and I'm looking forward to getting to know the other smallholders better as time goes on. Today we are starting to make an improved run arrangement for the Dirty Dozen, but before we begin it must be time for a cuppa.


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