Some nice pictures of Ouessants and Kune Kunes in the sunshine!

I have had a really interesting and busy weekend! We have a new wwoofer/helpexer! Ross has departed to France to help a friend of mine and another person has arrived! L is a local who is radically changing her lifestyle and striving to learn sustainability and how to tread lightly on this planet!........she is revamping the caravan and giving it a makeover and also helping with the growing veg garden.
So Saturday began with L arriving and settling in and then the village fete in the afternoon with my middle son aged 15 working hard on the bbq of locally produced burgers and sausages. Youngest son was 2nd in the boys aged 5-7 running race and Pete got a long handled stapler on the bric a brac stall. I chatted with lots of people and secured an order for some good hay over a Pimms!.....back to reality at 5pm with the organisation of the shearing of all the big sheep, plus the Ouessant rams and my neighbours sheep! Several trailer loads and we were ready for Jock the mega fantastic shearer who does all my big sheep! I had already vaccinated the Ouessant ewes and lambs earlier that afternoon and so did all the others as they were shorn.........once cleared up and sorted out all the wool bags were taken home and I sped off down the road to vaccinate several pet sheep belonging to a friend.........we ate dinner as the sun was sinking....about 10pm!
Today Lesley and I made lots of Lemon Curd before heading off to the Green fair and Scything festival where I was supposed to be selling woolly stuff, but had decided against going early in the morning due to a poor weather forcast..........sensible decision as they had a monsoon for about 10 minutes! Pete was there selling bags of home produced charcoal.........he had sold out by the time we arrived and the weather had improved. I had a good time browsing the stalls and came away with a knitting pattern for a baggy jumper and 2 CDs of my band of the moment 'Damh The Bard' I chatted to many friends and contacts and thouroughly enjoyed myself!

Permaculture is one of those mysterious words that many have heard of but not many are sure exactly what it means! It is a word made up from a combination of 2 others PERMAnent agriCULTURE or just CULTURE! It is a system of sustainable production that takes its cues from what is happening naturally and relies on a period of observation before rushing in and changing things irreversibly! For example there are reasons why bog plants grow in boggy areas........so rather than draining the boggy area and putting in great effort to grow something that needs dry ground it would be easier and better environmentally to grow what likes damp ground! And whats more rather than use gallons of water to irrigate bone dry ground it would be better to grow drought resistant plants!
This may seem simplistic but basically its true! Problem is everyone wants to grow the catch crop of the moment.........sustainable agriculture based on permaculture principles of which i have only just touched upon is probably the most environmentally and climate friendly option.
Industrial agriculture is not the fault of the farmer........although he or she often takes the blame in the eyes of the public..........it is the fault of the consumer demanding cheaper and cheaper food....we now pay about 10% of our income or less for our food and we expect better quality and rather than eat what is in season we demand strawberries in January. Therefore farmers have to produce more for less........a very unsustainable position!
I read the other day that in Britain we throw away four and a half million apples per day.......this is waste on a staggering scale! We also throw away 5,000 unopened whole chickens every day......that is approx 5 broiler houses full per day..........and the farmer gets paid 10p per chicken produced for Tesco and the other supermarkets to sell at £2.50/$5......makes you want to weep! I want to give you an idea of what industrial farming is like and how soul destroying it can be. Paul, a friend of Stuart who writes the Permaculture in Brittany blog keeps pigs.......indoors. Pig prices across Europe are at an all time low at the moment with many people going bust . Take a look at the short videos of Stuart driving Pauls tractor to get an idea of what it can be like! If you want cheap food the environment will pay.....and people like Paul will work for decreasing returns.
The chicken situation is an interesting one...........it costs me around £7 - 8 per bird, not including my labour, to raise the 33 meat birds I have here who are now 4 weeks old and about to go outside onto the grass.
to cheer you up after such a heavy post here is a picture of one of my wensleydale cross rasta sheep with her lamb by a suffolk ram

Pics of my veg garden showing how its growing on....and showing the brassicas....cabbages, kale and white sprouting broccoli mulched with waste hay which they really like! I have mulched the potatoes with it too and they seem better than ever....remains to be seen if there is a good crop! I have problems with creeping mint and horsetail in one raised bed so its war! I have a watering system set up with a hose coming off this huge tank, which due to the amount of rain last week easily reached its 1000litre capacity from Petes shed roof!
Also here is a nice picture of my garden before the rain of last week finished off the clematis blossom which smelled wonderful......now the jasmine and honeysuckle have taken over. The willow fedge is looking amazing and much leafier than in the picture!
Ross our current wwoofer from Australia is a gem and has done just about everything in his life (he is 68!) It turns out not only did he belong to a sheep shearing gang in his youth, but taught sheep shearing! So....I have sheared 3 Ouessants and half another and Ross sheared the rest....a master at work too!
He has also dug out every dock plant on the place.....wow!

We went to the Sunrise festival.....pictured above in someone elses slide show! It was to us a well orgainised little break, we got in Pippa a smallholding sitter to keep an eye on everything, Ross our Aussie wwoofer was keeping a gentle eye on Pippa, and the packing to get away took ages. This was to be a treat for Petes 50th birthday which was celebrated on Wednesday........however we should have known what would happen........after all it had been pouring with rain all week....!

We left in beautiful sunshine........but as we parked our car and tried to put up our tent the heavens opened and it came down in stair rods! The fields flooded, the river burst its banks, the festival was abandoned as the camping fields became waist deep in water!The flash floods caused made the national news!
We got out, aided by a fery nice tractor driver, but as the clip shows some had to wait 24 hours for rescue and partied the night away....

Butter......it is so easy to make your own I cannot believe it!........well I can as the pictures prove I have made some!
I have always wanted to have a go at making butter.....at one time long ago when I had at least 3 dairy goats producing 5-7 litres of milk per day each I was literally awash with milk and made tons of soft and hard cheese as well as feeding calves, kids, pigs and the family on it....but I never made butter! Partly the reason was that goats milk fat globules are smaller than those found in cows milk so wholst it separates it is not very easy to skim by hand and a cream separator was always out of my price league.
Well I got to thinking I would like a go, spurred on by seeing cartons of double cream marked down in the supermarket due to reaching their sell by date.
I knew Blow a company that has long gone out of business used to produce hand churns in the past and decided to look on ebay......where I discovered a whole new world of butter pats, moulds and....yes churns! So I bought a small one called a 'dazy mazy' from a seller in the USA for a very reasonable price! Now it must be remembered that most people collecting butter making paraphernalia want to display it....I wanted to use it and this has fascinated everyone!
I then purchased 2 very large pots of organic double cream from a supermarket for under £2 for the two and set to work turning the handle.....
First it went thick like whipped cream followed by thin like single cream......and just when I thought it had gone wrong chunks of golden yellow butter magically appeared and very quickly the butter was a big blob completelt separated from the buttermilk!

The buttermilk was poured off and the butter scooped out and salted, shaped and refrigerated....the buttermilk was used for scones........yummy!...........AND there was still a pot and a half of cream left for the next attempt!

Rain.....at last! I know its unpopular but after 10 days of continuous wonderful weather all the butts were running dry and I was getting a bit fed up with continually watering my seeds! I have a weed problem in one of the raised beds with creeping mint! Worse than bindweed it is and I have resorted to painting each bit that pops up with a paintbrush dipped in glyphosphate as pulling it disturbs my tiny carrot and parsnip plants and beheading it with the hoe makes it pop up 5 new ones for everyone I chop off!! I have horse tail(equisetum) in that bed too......now that is a different fight completely as it is a plant descended from the time of the dinosaurs and as you can imagine is nigh on impossible to get rid of! Both these 'weeds' have their place.....but not in my heavily mulched no dig raised bed, and certainly not in the middle of my seedlings thank you!
I have started to shear the Ouessants last evening while waiting for my regular shearer Jock to phone to tell me when he will come and see to the large sheep. Last year when presented with the Ouessants he laughed and commented on needing a magnifying glass but did a reasonable job considering they wriggle like eels! Well I have a nice set of shears I use for the odd dagging job(tidying up bottoms that are grubby) or sorting out and flystrike that occurs when it is vital that the area is sheared clean of maggots very quickly....uggh!
But I have never in all this time sheared a whole sheep......I have clipped plenty of horses in the past and just regard sheep as a rather larger woolly version when it comes to clippers.
Well I did a reasonable job on the chosen 2 that were first in the queue as they were starting to lose their wool......primitive sheep such as Ouessants 'rue' their wool which means that when it starts to get a bit warm the oils and lanolin in the wool 'rise' and the sheep gets a bit itchy and rubs and the wool breaks and falls out!..........not ideal if you want to use the wool!
The Ouessant has more wool on it per pound/kilo of sheep than any other in the world and so from under a large fleece a very small sheep emerged! The first who is a bit of a tearaway got a couple of small 'nicks' from the shears which were sprayed with some purple antiseptic and the second one got away with no nicks at all to her.....but nicked my finger top with the shears and she had blood everywhere on her.....MINE!

I am doing some work for Dorset Community Actions 'Three Rivers Partnership' at the moment called Friends and Neighbours and at the moment am meeting all the agencies involved (known as the stakeholders) before surveying the general public in the chosen case study areas. Whilst on my travels I went to Shaftesbury for a meeting and after getting a sandwhich ate it at the top of Gold Hill in the picture. I am very familiar with this area having spent most of my adult life in North Dorset and it was interesting and sad to discover how things change......you only notice when you go back to an area and I had not really been back very often for about 10 years except to visit friends....so I went to see what had happened to my good friends old farm........

They had a County Council farm on the Dorset County Council farms estate near Shaftesbury where they worked harder and harder over 25 years for an ever diminishing return! My friend (I will call her S) and her husband (R) had a dairy herd of 60, raised rare breed pigs, rented a little attached cottage as a holiday cottage, did B&B, AND S worked nights in an old folks home and R did fencing contracting. Yet everyone who met them but did not know how hard they worked commented on how lovely and relaxed it must be to live in such a beautiful place! When 3 years ago they could no longer make ends meet they were forced to give up the tenancy of the farm........the County Council decided that the farm was too small (60 acres) to be a viable unit for anyone else (?) so decided to sell the house with 12 acres as one lot, the lovely old barns as another with a few acres and give the rest to an adjoining Council farm (the only one left in that area now) Well S & R were given first refusal to buy........but having few assets except that from the sale of their cows could not dream of buying the home that they had lived in for 25 years......!! They received notice to quit with the offer of a council house on a local estate.....well they had been good council tenants for the past 25 years hadn't they? Their lovely house was sold........to the only ones who could afford it....downsizers from London. So S & R left the farm.....they have never been back although they rent a small cottage 5 miles away........its too raw for them to return even to see their old friends and neighbours.....they meet them elsewhere!
I drove slowly past remembering all the good times we had had there and drove on seeing that some of the other council farms had changed into art galleries, alpaca filled smallholdings etc, the farming community long gone. The fields I noticed were rather unkempt along with the general feel of the area and hardly a cow in sight.....sad as this is the Blackmore Vale described by Thomas Hardy as 'The vale of little dairies'........subtle changes are going on and this description will soon no longer apply as we import our milk from elsewhere whilst those who can afford to buy up the little family farms who had the little dairies.....I will say no more as it causes lumps in my throat and tears in my eyes.

I have added to my solar powered world with a solar powered oscillating fan in my polytunnel! I got all the bits from.....ebay for a good price..... and connected them all up to one of my electric fence batteries. To my amazement it works and keeps the hot air circulating rather than becoming humid and its very good! I have also connected one to the ducks fencing along with a little gate made from a pallet to get in rather than climb over the electrified netting. Itworks so well and keeps the battery topped up so well the ducks, who are prone to diving through the netting and raiding the hens food have not been near it!
I also planted my tomatoes in the polytunnel a few weeks ago and mulched them with good old waste wool and installed a 'leaky pipe' a recycked rubber hose pipe with deliberate leaks that trickle feeds the bed with water. Its great and the aubergines are now planted too. peppers and chillies will follow when big enough as will the cucumbers any day. Pete obtained a tomato planter in a job lot of bits and bobs at an auction, it is now lined with wool, filled with compost and home to 2 totem variety basket cherry tomato plants

Just before I found out I had got the funding for the felting project I went to Wonderwool in Builth Wells. I had my knee surgery 2 days before and was told not to drive for 2 weeks.....in fact the pale and pasty indoor type surgeon (who is very nice really!!) had said I wouldn't be doing much farming for a few months........what planet does he inhabit.....us self employed folks don't get sick pay and the sheep won't feed themselves!.........Anyway off I went with the most splendid person as my co conspirator....Lucie Wilby sheep artist extrodinaire!

I must explain..........when I booked my stand at Wonderwool I had a double stand including a pen for some sheep booked. I was due to exhibit the Ouessants but due to the Blue tongue movement regs could not. I had a brainwave (it occaisionally happens) that if not real sheep some pictures would be good....and the artist responsible sitting painting them too!
So Lucie and I set up our wares and retreated to an amazing b&b with the best hosts ever thouroughly shattered!
On the following morning we were back at the showground bright and early and sampled some of the foodie delights as the show was sharing with the Mid Wales Mouthful starring Anthony Worral Thompson........and yes he is very short and very plump!!!
After a very hectic busy day selling a lot more than we could have hoped for we had some dinner and followed a fellow sheep breeder (coloured sheep and Ouessants) back to her remote Welsh farm to look at some rams with a thought to buy.
Now I live in Wellies and am even seen in the supermarket in them.......but of course both Lucie and I had our glad rags and shoes.....we had not even contemplated buying sheep. So whilst Lesley sent her sheep dog over a distant mountain to find the rams we found ourselves in a boggy field being approached bu a herd of Dexter cattle intent on loving us and rubbing their heads all over us. Well I was still not to steady on my feet so rather than be knocked over by the amiable cattle we climbed a gate into the next field where we had 2 stark choices 1. go back through the cows who were convinced we were bearing gifts of food and were all looking longinly over the gate and were too tame and friendly to be shooed away or 2. ford a small stream that in our normal wellied state would be easy but was like crossing the Nile in new shoes!!
Lucie decided to do the stepping stone hop.....and promptlu slipped and got her feet soaked. I decided that as I could neither jump nor hop due to my knee a cold paddle was in order and removed socks and shoes and waded across much to the horror of the flock of sheep who were making up the spectators!
Eventually we both got to solid ground, the sheepdog found the rams and I agreed to purchase Josh a Wensleydale x Charolais x Icelandic coloured ram and I also put my name on a nice little Ouessant ram to be collected at weaning.
Sunday passed with hectic sales and Lucie and I returned home tired but happy with several purchases too! I bought some icelandic wool tops to knit and felt into bags, some dye stuffs and a skein of Colinette yarn that I took a fancy to trying out as I am having some of my wool made into slub yarn later this year. I made a cosy for my coffee pot and am making a tea cosy with the rest........as you can see I am a wool producer not a knitter!!
Thanks all for the very positive response to the felting project.........its going to be amazing and will hopefull raise the profile of wool!

STOP PRESS NEWS!!!!

The funding for the felting plant has been successful so we will be up and running by the autumn!!
The eco business unit that the project will occupy is a recycled ww2 building on an old ww2 airfield at Dunkeswell in the Devon bit of the Blackdowns! It now has a new roof, good insulation to the roof and walls, a latest technology compost toilet and a wood pellet stove that will use local wood chips!...........it is fab and I saw it today!! This felting plant will hopefully be up and running by the autumn..........more news to follow soon!

Have been working hard in the veg garden and here are some pics to show you what I have been up to! I manured several beds with very well rotted sheep and cow manure (rotted for 2-3 years until crumbly) I am now putting a weed cover over through which I will plant beans, courgettes etc!
The cabbages, kale and white sprouting broccoli are in a bed topped with home made compost and to keep the pigeons away......and the rabbits of which we have lots, I put several large flower pots over the bed and stretched netting over the top. A few old give away CDs on strings to sparkle and flap completed that bed....and they are growing nicely. Some blue water pipe I found has been used along with some netting to keep birds, cats, errant hens, and other marauders off my onions and seeds....parsnips, persil (a german parsnip type root) and carrots......very good results so far and a good use for the pipe! Plastic sheeting could be used instead to make a temporary tunnel.
I have also bought a huge trailerful of wood chips for £5 to cover the paths and areas around the beds. This has a triple function.....1 it stops slipping and sliding, as the veg plot is not flat. 2 It acts as a mulch/weed suppressant on the pathways, and 3 the slugs and snails hate it as it is sharp!! With that around the beds, the hens ranging around 2 sides and ducks on the other 2 sides hopefully I will have good slug control......we will see!
The Ouessants are grazing the new orchard where temporary tree guards have been built with free recycled wire and non treated posts that were 5p each. There are a lot of nettles in this area which are going to be strimmed regularly for the sheep to eat as they like cut nettles, and also to encourage grass growth. Have also planted potatoes and they are through. Now installing leaky pipe system in the polytunnel to combat water running downhill too quickly.....more to follow soon.
On Wednesday last week I went to the hospital for my knee surgery and was in and out in 5 hours! Well they found not a torn cartiledge but a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament so now I have no ACL in either knee! I will now be put on the list for the ACL physio clinic and knee ligament reconstruction at a later date......oh joy!

Beautiful knitted christening shawl..........a real work of art was knitted in my Dorset Down 4 ply type knitting wool by Sarah D an amazing knitter and owner of the blog linked on this blog....the 21st Centuary housewifes unbought blog!

This is a commission knit..........so if anyone else wants an heirloom, get in touch!
This wool is being used by a lot of people now and I have it on cones for weaving and knitting machines too!

We had snow last week......lots of it, enough to throw snowballs! It was all gone by lunchtime but I went out and took some photos to prove it. The recycled fencing is now all finished and had a couple of second hand gates added to it and very smart it all looks.....ok so the stock wire is not quite as tight as if it were from a new roll since it was pulled from its previous home with a tractor but with Petes skill as a fencing contractor among other skills its not bad!

Some friends came over to move some manure for me on Saturday and we now have 3 raised beds topped up with very well rotted(3 years) crumbly black gold! I will now put on some more mulch and the beans are going to love it! Got some tomato plants in the country market in Taunton 2 yellow, 2 plum and 4 cherry toms. Peppers and chillies are in pots and its all looking good.
Sunday I went to a meeting of some of the creative living forum to catch up with one or two and have a natter....I really don't get out enough! Knee being repaired next week......counting the days!......will have to take it easy as I don't want to spoil the repair, but am off to Wonderwool a few days later........I am going to sit down and rest (?) whilst I'm there!
I have just tendered for and got a big bit of community development work in Dorset so will be working hard over the next few months. I have a lovely student from Bournmouth Uni as my assistant!

Red tape.............!
This morning I should have been talking on the Radio this morning, on the Beeb, about all sorts of stuff including the embryonic wool felting business I'm setting up called Woolly Waste......but I wasn't there at the studo due to a variety of factors, mostly my knee that decided to hurt like crazy whilst getting out of bed!.........dangerous activity getting out of bed with a torn cartiledge!
So having been promised an appointment 'within 2-3 weeks' I have waited 3 weeks and .......nothing! So at 8.30am right on the start of their opening time I phone hospital.....and the conversation went something along the lines of.....you are booked you say.....yes, please can you tell me a date yet......mmmmnnn ummmm well we have no record of you are you sure you saw the consultant and went to the pre op assessment?.....YES (through gritted teeth).....have you a reference number from your letter?.... No, because you havent sent me one yet!.....Oh! Ok I will see what we can do the earliest appointment seems to be August as I know we are chokablock until the end of May.........but I cannot wait until August I have a life to get on with and cannot even take the dogs for a walk or safely handle my sheep, infact I cannot even cross the road without risking my knee giving way (at this point I burst into tears) ........oh sorry, we have found you on the system and you are under non urgent surgery.................BUT IT IS URGENT I sob, feeling rising hysteria.........Right we will see what can be done and phone you back.

I was so devastated.....if I was rich or a footballer or the queen I would have had it repaired by now but not being able to do my job properly, having to have someone help me with my sheep, someone exercise my dogs, someone carry the washing downstairs, and friends and family helping with ordinary tasks such as heavy shopping bags is classed as non urgent! What is this country coming too!!

Phone went at 11am......hospital.....they could fit me in on the 23rd April.....2 weeks time!
Well why had it taken me getting hysterical on the phone for that to happen? Probably the same reason that by my persistant phonecalls had got me an appointment with the surgeon originally, out of hours at the private hospital and cost me £120. I have had to buy a very uncomfortable metal hinged knee brace too at £75 to be able to walk outside the house and do tasks.....if it were not for that brace I could not even walk down the field or feed the pigs let alone lay a hedge. If I try to do anything quickly or suddenly or carry anything I am in trouble.

So I will get knee repaired on 23rd 7 weeks after the initial accident. BUT the important issue here is if I had not the capacity and confidence to make a song and a dance, and not the money to pay.....I would still be waiting for the initial consultation let alone be on a list even for August....best health service in the world the NHS......thats what my father thought.....I don't agree!

Add to this a phone call I received last week at 7am............from Animal Health the dept that sends us ALL those forms and regulations. They wanted to know if my animal records were accurate! They had some queries......firstly why had I only recorded 2 sheep deaths. I answered because I only had 2 sheep die ......well what about lambs.......well yes we lost a few one to a fox (no body to be found), didn't mention the 2 to the dog as they were very tiny and we incinerated them. Well she was very 'official' and said we must report ALL lamb deaths even aborted ones.
Well.....I obviously have been at this too long....we can bury a dog but not a tiny aborted lamb foetus.....we must take it to the appropriate disposal facilities....brings to mind a story I was told this week by a dartmoor farmer who put 150 sheep out onto the moor but when he got them in for lambing only found 141. Animal health of course asked him to account for the missing sheep! Hid reply was 'well they is probably dead' the animal health officer wanted to know how he had disposed of the bodies to which he looked blankly at them and said you'd be best asking the crows and foxes that my dear........which right flummoxed them as there were now at least 9 once eartagged skeletons on the moor.....along with all the other hundreds of bodies of deer, ponies, sheep, cattle etc that have dies over the years and not been found!!! Scandalous!!! ;o)

Lambs! We have 2 ouessant lambs a ewe lamb born last week and a nice ram lamb born yesterday. We also have some Dorset Down cross lambs and the new owners of my pedigree Dorsets that I sold last year sent me a lovely pic of 101s lambs....ewe on the left ram on the right!
I have also been busy.....making lemon curd....jars full of it to keep the egg mountain at bay! and I took a pic, along with bread and apple buns. We make all our own bread, shop bought is not the same and everyone loves home baked bread here. Also am posting a picture of the veg plot....so that I can hopefully see something growing when I take a snap later on!!!
Its been beautiful here the last few days, warm and sunny with little fluffy clouds. As a result I have mowed the grass, strimmed under the electric fence, painted the fences and me with one of those sprayer things that is supposed to be quicker than a brush....mmmm! Unpainted me and my jumper!! planted my onions and spuds and generally tidied up.....!
Wrenched my knee despite strapping and knee brace..........(wish they would hurry up with my appointment!).......climbing over the chickens electric fencing. Oh the joys!!

Pete won a class at the Blackdown Hills Hedge Event.........and a large shield is now on the shelf for the year!! Here are the before and after pics.
I have finished the hedge shown in a previous post and it is shown here along with a picture of Pete making pea sticks and hedging stakes.
The material taken out of a hedge when it is laid is a lot, probably half of the stems in a thick hedge are coppiced out and as this hedge is hazel we made a lot of useful items such as bean poles for this years beans, pea sticks for both growing the peas on and protecting seedlings from the pigeons, a lot of stakes for temporary fencing and for staking a north somerset style hedge at the national championships which Pete will be entering in the autumn and lastly stems to put by for making walking sticks. A little of the waste was tidied up and burnt but in true permaculture style the harvest from this hedge was huge.....coppicing is an example in true low input high output!!

I have recently explored my family tree via some interesting websites and got right back into the 17somethings with some of the names which are unusual! Most of my family come from Devon, Dorset and the Somerset/Gloucester border where they were variously agricultural labourers, sailors and horse dealers!. However my paternal grandfather was from Freston in Suffolk, just down the road from 'Constable country' and came to Devon when sent as a policeman to Devonport dockyard near Plymouth, why I don't know, but he met my grandmother whilst there! He was a great grower of veg and though blind in his later years would grow veg along lines of wires so he knew where the parsnips etc were located by touch....fascinated me as a child!My father was also a hobbyist woodworker who actually built 2 houses in his spare time and who grew veg!

His father, my greatgrandfather was the local postmaster and a smallholder who grew industrial quantities of veg.........he, my gt grandmother and their garden, including conservatory that apparently contained vines, are pictured above, he died at the age of 45 in 1908 of scepticaemia (probably from his farming activities!) leaving behind a large family. His father and fathers father were all woodsmen.........so what I get up to is probably in the genes!! My son George works for the National Trust at the moment and lays hedges and works in the countryside, so allowing for my father who was not that serious about 'growing your own' I reckon thats a line ofat least 7 generations of smalllholders, veg growers, woodcutters etc!!

Well it was not the cruciate ligament but the cartiledge! Apparently after manipulating my leg and looking quizical, then asking me when I last injured my leg.....which to be honest I couldn't remember as being recent, the consultant informed me I have already ruptured the anterior cruciate in that leg and it was my cartiledge I had damaged this time! It would account for a lot, having ruptured the ACL in my right knee stupidly jumping some electric fencing 5 years ago I had completed the set not done the first one. Thinking about it I have had so many little accidents over the years such as falling off horses, whacking my knee on gate posts whilst riding horses, being kicked across the parlour by fractious cows etc that its not surprising to find out why my knees are so wobbly! The latest injury just added to the list! Am now on the fast track for key hole surgery to repair it, they say about 3 weeks wait! In the meantime I have become the proud posessor of a knee brace.......a damned uncomfortable device that has metal plates on eitherside of the knee with a hinge in the middle.....means I can hobble!
I have been getting cabin fever stuck indoors so today I made lemon curd and a large loaf of bread, and plotted my escape to the top of the field! Pete had taken all my hedgelaying gear to the hazel hedge that needed urgent attention as it was beginning to tangle in nextdoor smallholdings telephone lines and with the aid of 2 electric fence posts as walking sticks I made it down there. Spent an enjoyable afternoon laying the hedge, completing two thirds of the length, will finish the rest tomorrow if the weather permits. I was getting desperate to do this as the end of the hedgelaying season is nigh!
Took a photo with my phone to illustrate what I was doing....not good quality but I didn't have the energy to get up to the house to get the camera. Still got to tidy it up and put in a few pegs made of hazel to neaten it up and hold it in place.
Talking of hedges I posted several pics last year of the Blackdown Hills Hedgelaying competition which Pete competed in. Well this year he took part again....and won!! He now has a nice shield to polish for a year!........and I was not there to take a picture of the moment of triumph!

Pigs.....who would have em!!.......well we now have 3 and I am confined to the house on crutches.....connection? You bet!
I have had many pigs over the years starting with a Tamworth piglet called Mabel who was given to me by a farmer for whom I used to milk record his lovely Guernsey cows. She was a pedigree pig from the Roseleaf line and grew to be huge..........but very gentle and never tried to escape AND being 21 years ago we didn't have a battery electric fencer unit as they were only just becoming affordable (and reliable!) She could have destroyed the fencing but never bothered! She was mated to a local tamworth boar and had 10 piglets and was a realy good mum bless her. After being a pet for a while as she wouldn't breed again, she went to join a farm producing iron age pigs as we felt she was a bit lonely.

After that I had various pigs including lops, large white cross, large blacks, berkshires and many heinz 57s!! all for pork or bacon........none were a lot of trouble except a pot bellied pig I was given who was quickly passed on!

So when last year I was persuaded that on our wet ground KuneKunes would be ideal I bought 2.........who are very good on the whole although the gilt can jump and both are very noisy!
So I decided that I would get another and on Tuesday Treacle a 2 year old in pig sow arrived with a reputation for good behaviour.
It had beed terrible weather on Monday so I had been unable to get to sort the electric fencing so I riged up a suitable pen in the shed next to the sheeps current overnight quarters. This pen had contained 2 Berkshire gilts 2 winters ago with no trouble.
So when I found her walking around the sheep field the following morning I was astounded....she had jumped over a breeze block wall 5 blocks high topped with corrugated !! (the corrugated was a bit worse for wear!!)
Contained once more, this time in the sheep shed I set about the electric fencing job, moving Kermit and Miss Piggy, our current Kunes into the far pig paddock. Treacle was wailing her annoyance so to relieve my ears I let her out while I was completing the fence.....I thought she would go and talk to the other pigs through the fence or just snuffle around bearing in mind each pig paddock is quarter of an acre..........not a bit of it she put her snout under the stock wire and heaved it up as if it were made of string!!..........and shot off towards the woods. I grabbed a bucket of nuts and persuaded her back to the sheep shed where she was locked in again whilst I went back into the ankle deep mud, repaired the damage and finished the electrics! Pig was then let back out and immediatly knew the fence was 'on' but had to test it a few times!!
Well I then made the daft decision to stand on the low wall at the end of the yard to observe said pig....as I hauled myself up I felt a twang...in fact it was almost audible and I knew I had done some serious damage. I had left my mobile phone in the kitchen and at that moment the kitchen seemed a long way away. Somehow I managed to hobble, hop and crawl back to the house and after a visit to casualty am the proud posessor of a pair of crutches and an appointment in the post for the knee clinic!
This morning Pete had to feed and check the stock and the little darling had removed the metal field gate! This is currently being repaired as I type!
The pics are of a typical Tamworth sow and a Kune Kune sow which will show that contrary to popular belief that Kunes are large not small.........a Tamworth is about 25 inches high!

My willow 'fedge' (cross between a fence and a hedge) is finished!! With advice from Stuart Anderson willow guru extrodinaire who has more varieties of willow in his garden than you can shake a stick at, I set to and did it!! I used a green willow 'viminalis' and a red willow called just 'hybrid red' all from the Somerset levels local to us. The spare rods have been planted in the willow bed at the soakaway end of our septic tank sewage system where they will help with purifying the water, and drinking lots of it as willow is very thirsty!
Now I just have to hope all the rods 'take' and survive!! The pics are of my fedge in the garden and of the path looking down the garden past the fedge and my newly laid bit of ash hedge towards the ducks with fields and woods beyond.

Sheep.........bad week this week, but thats what keeping sheep can be like. Last Monday one of our French Ouessants lambed in the field a full term dead ram lamb.........at least it was dead when I eventually found it and I suspect it had been born dead. Mum had wandered off and was not at all bothered........mental note to watch her like a hawk next time as has not got a lot of mothering instinct about her. Then on Thursday the nicest of the French Ouessants lambed....a nice live ewe lamb. The next day all was apparently ok but not the next..........lamb was balling its head off and was very hungry, mum had mastitis which is hopeless in sheep....no milk, hard udder teats not working......So lamb was bundled off to the house to be bottle fed and ewe started on 5 day course of antibiotics.........lamb took to the bottle quite well but I felt there was something not quite right.
Gradually as time went on the lamb suffered a creeping paralysis and died. On investigation its mouth which I thought was noisy when feeding proved to have no soft palate and the roof of the mouth was all wrong, hence not being able to suckle the ewe properly......a congenital abnormality which I suspect also affected the central nervous system. Heho.........we lambed 50 ewes last year.......nearly 100 lambs! and lost one stillborn lamb that was one of triplets. Otherwise apart from those we lost to sheep worrying all survived........everyone said we were lucky and I knew we were .........seemingly not so lucky this year but thats farming!