Well, we have a new project. we are renovating a Victorian Miners Cottage in MId Wales, and working on it to help provide food for the family.

We intend to do this by creating a small but productive garden to the rear of the property, on a very steep slope so it will probably need terracing, and then we are hopefully starting a Community Farm Project a few hundred metres down the road from the cottage. The idea being that the garden will rpovide a few vegetables, and the community farm will provide allotments and the chance to raise some livestock too.

Watch this space for updates!

Well, what a turbulent few months we have had. Shirley had her piglets and with the exception of Hamish, she managed to eat all of them within the first two days of their lives. I have finally resolved this in my mind and come to the conclusion that due to her rushed move to us because of her impending doom, the poor weather , less than the best accommodation for her (just a stable) then perhaps all the conditions weren’t right for her to have them.

Anyway, we managed to save Hamish and we grew him on to be such a big lad. Up until recently he was a cracking 45kilos of pure porky happiness. As he was now a single pig, we took a trip to The Lilac House Pigs near Bishops Castle, as they had a hand reared castrated boar saddle back piglet that would be ideal to go with Hamish. We bought “Napoleon” – spot the George Orwell reference – and brought him home. Hamish immediately thought it was great to have a friend and Poly loved it too.

Which is why with great upset i have to report that a week ago, poor Hamish was killed by a piece of falling masonry off on of the barns we rent on the farm. In the morning he was there and at afternoon feed, he was laid out in the yard, dead. Poor Hamish. Napoleon is now understandably a bit miffed that his best mate has gone, and unfortunately he is too small to go with the others, so we are now on the look out for a semi grown pig to go with Poly as a companion. RIP Hamish – you were a fantastic little pig.

In other news, we now have goats – or to be more precise – little sh&t bags. They are possibly the most troublesome, mischievous, capricious little sods you could ever want to meet, but by god they are good fun to have around. we bought them as orphan goats. well, they weren’t really orphan, just surplus to a commercial dairy goat farm’s needs. See it from his point – he has a 1000 goats, and they must have a kid once every two years to come into milk. so that means (assuming each goat only has one kid, sometimes two) he has approx 1200 goat kids on his hands every spring. So he needs to get them moved on or all his profit from the milk disappears into rearing goats he doesn’t want or need. To be fair, some of the goats (if they are female) will be kept back as replacement stock, some of the male dairy kids may be kept on as replacement breeding stock. But apart from those, he has a lot to move on!

So we come in at this point. we want goats, he has a few female goats to spare – so we buy them at a price we believe and he agrees is fair. We end up bottle feeding them for another 4-5 weeks until they are onto creep feed and then they are weaned fully and by the time they have beem with us 3 months they are feeding for themselves on hay and anything else they can get their lips around. It then dawned upon us, some three weeks later that we would also need to get a male goat to get ours in kid otherwise we will have no milk. Not wanting to be left with a male goat kid of no use to anyone, we decided that the male goat we would have would also have to be a meat goat. that way, any female kids would still give a fair amount of milk and any male goats would have enough bulk on them to become of interest as a meat animal for our table or an ethnic market. Hence we brought home Bertie the Boer Goat – also from the same farm as he also produces goat meat – perhaps this is where some of his unwanted dairy kids end up?

So we are storming ahead with goats and pigs, it seems that every day another hen that we though had been taken by foxes or cats turns up again with chicks behind her – the last one was a Black Araucana hen trailing 3 little jet black chicks behind her, all with five toes. Now the Araucana has five toes, but so does the Dorking. So we will see what they grow into as the dorking cross will hopefully add a bit of meat to the birds so if they end up as a male chick, they will be fattened for the table.

The geese are settling in, but no signs of laying yet, the ducks are doing what ducks do best – making a bloody mess and quacking about it. Turkey numbers are down now to just breeding groups until the end of the month when they new poults arrive for the Christmas market.

We may well have a new project on the go which will see all this go through an upheaval – but more on that later.

Well this is a task for the stupid! If you look at he commercial value of such an idea it soons becomes impossible to balance to books and tehrefore abandoned or orphaned piglets should be disposed of…….. yeah like that will ever happen here!

So, Shirley gave birth to a load of piglets and one didnt look too good. we scooped him up and placed him into a dog crate with an infrared heat lamp over the top to keep him wamr. You must ensure in the first few days that the heat on the floor of the crate is around 30 degrees celcius. Make sure there is enough room so that if he gets too warm he can move away from it.

Important thing to remember when you have a handreared piglet is that it must have colustrum, or the first milk, from the mother as this is where it gets its immunity from. If you cant get the first  milk, or you arent sure that the piglet got enough, then either try and express some off the sow or use a colustrum replacer. Here in Wales, we arent known for our huge demand for pig colustrum so the only colustrum we can get around here is sheep or cow colustrum. A qucik check with the vet told me that cow colustrum is closer to pig than sheep.

£17 for a sachet of colustrum and off we go. They can have this for the first 12 hours then they must go onto the sow milk replacer. If you cant get sow milk then you can use goat milk as a stop gap, but it isnt as good as the proper thing. so, £30 later for a sack of sow replacement milk and already (including the vet consultation) we have spent nearly £70 on this pig so the financial side has already gone as his value as a weaner is only around £10 at 8 weeks of age.

We feed the piglet every 2 hours, and in his first few feeds he takes around 50ml at a time, these last two days he has taken 75ml. make up the milk fresh everyday, and dispose of any left over the next morning. It must be kept cool in a fridge inbetween uses, and never keep a half used bottle of milk for next time, use a fresh fill each time. We make up a jug of milk each day and replace it in the morning, filling his bottle from it each time.

Warm the milk up to body temperature and allow him to suckle it at his own pace. do not squeeze the bottle as this will force the milk into his mouth with the possibility of him getting some in his lungs and then he may die from pneumonia.

Once he has fed, return him to his crate straight away as he will be wanting to pee. He shoudl pee in the same place each time so it soon becomes easy to clean as its all in one place.

Try not to keep holding him when you feed as otherwise he will still want to do this when he is older, and its no fun having a 30kg pig on your lap!

Having said that, you cant always resist a quick cuddle and the picture below proves that! At the age of three days, he may go off colour for a while, this is because he is low on iron. get the vet to give him a jab or some oral paste to sort this out. at the age of around 2 weeks, he may start to encounter bacteria and virus’ due to him being allowed out. this is where the use of real coloustrum over manufactured wins. his immune system will be challenged at this point so do keep an eye on him and make sure that you dont lose him through something stupid like a cold…

This is a picture of our little boar that we are raising. as time goes on, yo ucan follow his progress and see how he grows!

Well, that’s old news really. as soon as we moved to wales, one of the first things we bought in were some saddleback pig weaners, at 10weeks old. these have now grown on well and in fact we may be sending some off to slaughter soon. As we can’t leave a pig on its own without company, and one gilt (female) pig is being retained for breeding as she has such a lovely temperament, we decided to be on the lookout for a companion for her. Just as we came to that conclusion we helped re home a black sow that was destined for the sausage pile.

Anyways, after a few weeks we noticed that her belly was moving all on its own. OK, so we now have a pregnant pig. No idea how pregnant or to what, so a voyage of discovery. Today she chose to have the piglets. the coldest windiest day, with severe weather warnings all around!

She had 8 in the end, one was still born, one she crushed by accident and two she rejected. The rejected ones are now in a dog crate in the dining room under a heat lamp and being bottle fed every couple of hours! They were very reluctant at first to take to the bottle but now they have both had a good drink so hopefully they will make it through the night.

If not, we will have 4 piglets left on mum. Luckily they are all girls, and it looks like she was put to a saddleback boar as she had equal amounts of pure black (like her) and saddleback coloured piglets. I am hoping that one of these boars we are hand rearing makes it, as having a boar around the place can be dangerous, but hopefully if he has been hand reared he may be better tempered enough to retain??

Anyways, i suppose you are wanting pictures!!

Saddleback coloured female piglet

piglets feeding from mum

Shirley the mother pig

a pregnant shirley

well, today is the fifth day of our “incarceration” at this snow infested Bastille, more snow last night but at least the temperature dropped to mere tropical -3.

both kids are off school now as the buses are cancelled, yesterday they sent a 4×4 taxi out for my lad, but even that struggles today. The water problem has been sorted as it was a burst pipe at the lodge next door. Our water supply used to come direct to us, but when they built the lodge, rather than “T” into the supply, they broke into it and therefore our water has to flow through there before it gets to us. If the water is off at the lodge, we don’t have any either!

So, how do you manage without water? well, if you know the water is going to go off, fill a bath full of cold water. you can then use this to flush the toilet with a bucket full at a time. Mind you, remember the poem – if its yellow, let it mellow, if its brown, flush it down. This will save you lots of water as you only really need to flush the brown stuff away, and the yellow gets a flushing at the end of the day.

It has highlighted to us just how much water goes down the toilet. It takes me two buckets to fill the cistern, yet only one bucket sloshed directly into the bowl to flush it. Therefore, doing it this way saves 50% of the water.

as for drinking, well for us we have bottled water in store we also took precautions and stored some from the tap when we saw the pressure drop. We always have a few empty 2 litre coke bottles or similar knocking about as they are handy to bottle beer and cider in, make cloches for seedlings etc, so we washed a few out and they are good enough for boiling.

As for the animals, we melt buckets of snow by the fire so they can have a drink too.

It looks like in these parts, unless your house is covered on three sides with logs, you have at least three bottles of gas for the super ser, two electric heaters and a pantry full of tinned stuff you aren’t ready for winter! We always have a sack of spuds and a large net of carrots in as we find we can graze through a half sack in a couple of weeks before they start to go a bit soft. at this point they then get cut up and fed to the pigs and other animals. everyone is a winner

To keep warm, i always wear a pair of long johns and thermal vest in this weather, i have on a further two t-shirts and a pair of Cotton cords. Do not wear jeans in this weather as once they get wet, jeans take ages to dry and the wet jeans will conduct heat from your body faster than i care to mention. Over the T-shirts i usually have a woolly jumper or hoodie. In fact, my HomeFarmer Hoodie is great as its well sized and has handy pocket on the front. The hood comes up over the woolly hat and all is warm! I need to get another one as these clothes need changing regularly as the pigs have a “unique” odour which gets onto everything and after a long day outside, no-one wants to come near me!

As for foot wear, i wear a pair of standard short sock, over which i have a pair of knitted boot socks, and then over that i have a pair of fleece welly boot liners, look like santas stockings for the fire place! these make for a tight fit into the wellingtons, but my feet are loveley and warm. I also have a thermal liner in the sole of the wellies too so it does get too cold.

Gloves are a necessity, i wear nylon thinsulate ones. Woolen ones are great for walking around in, but get damp so are no good for working in unless you put a pair of rubber gloves underneath. Hats – well, if you are anything like me (i have a solar panel on my head the hair it that thin) a good woolly hat is hard to beat as a lot of heat is lost through the head. I have again a thinsulate hat.

This way i keep warm and can be out there all day and not really suffer. As for travelling about, if i am brave enough to go out in the car, i always pack a thermos of tea or coffee, a sleeping bag, multipack of crisps, multipack of chocolates such as twix, torch, walking boots, wellies and a towel. I also make sure i have a fully charged mobile phone and coupled with that i also carry a small bag of salt and grit, and a snow shovel. that way i can sort myself out if i get stuck in the car

Well, i havent posted for a while as things have been very hectic. We are growing on some 150 turkeys for the christmas market, mainly heritage breeds such as Norfolk Black, Bronze and Buffs, and they are certainly slower growing than the commercial type. A commercial bird would be ready in about 14 weeks, these traditionals take anything up to 26 weeks! but what you lose in time, you gain in flavour. Plus remember that these birds will be nearing adulthood by the time they are slaughtered, and they will be laying down fat stores, and as we all know, its fat that gives the meat flavour

It is snowing at the moment, we have about a foot of snow currently and its still coming down. On saturday, the village 10 miles from here was recorded as the UK’s coldest at -17 degrees celcius, and we are higher in altitude than that! Keeping on top of the frozen water drinkers is a real issue at the moment.

Rabbots are getting plenty of food to keep them warm, but with a current local shortage of hay, i have resorted to feeding teh rabbits pony pellets on top of their normal feed as pony pellets are practically compressed grass. Make sure you ask for the non-heating type when you get it otherwsie its too rich for the rabbits.

In the next couple of weeks, i need to put the female rabbits to the bucks to ensure a ready supply of baby rabbits for Easter. If you are looking for 6 week old rabbits for Easter Day, then you need to work back 6 weeks for the birth date, and add one month for gestation. Easter is a late one this next year, 22nd April is Good Friday, so you would be wanting to put the doe to the buck around mid february. I would also like to get some older rabbits in for just after christmas, for the end of January, therefore i will be putting the girls in next week.

Feeding is very important at this time of year, very important, and we have some feral llams on our farm that come and go. we know when the weather is going to be bad as they come up to the house to shelter. We have taken to feeding them some “Sure Stock” pencils which are a multipurpose feed stock that can be fed to cows, sheep, pigs etc.

More important than feeding is water. Make sure that you check the drinkers each day and defrost them. In these really cold times, i have a drinker in the barn, set up under a heat lamp. This keeps it frost free for the free ranging birds, the others i take the drinkers out each night, empty them and store empty. That way they will be ready to use first thing in the morning without having to break ice!

More snow coming in tonight, we have now lost the water so i managed to walk down into town and get the last few bottles of water until th ewater is back on. as for flushing the toilet, we are defrosting buckets of snow for that duty!

Well its been a while since i last posted here. Things are hectic on the smallholding at the moment. The turkey chicks are getting bigger day by day and the chickens are getting back into condition after their moult.

I had great pleasure in writing an article for homefarmer magazine on the 52 Meals to Save the Planet concept, where a local mental health hospital actively encourage the patients to grow their own food and they now have a large polytunnel and an alotment and are almost self sufficient in vegetables.

On our Welsh smallholding we have taken delivery of 4 saddleback weaners, so they are looking good come Christmas! Three have the traditional lop ears but one has prick ears and beady eyes, so we have nicknamed it “devil pig”. its a boar and will definately be going off to slaughter, as we certainly couldnt breed from a saddleback with pricked up ears as its not true to type.

The two sows we are watching carefully as if they become friendly and nice to be around, they may be kept back for breeding, with just the two boars going off to slaughter.

Christmas will soon be upon us, and Jennie has already bought some christmas presents, however, we are starting to go all out for the christmas turkey market. we have around 140 turkeys left now from our initial intake of day old chicks, so are looking to sell on some fine looking turkeys as christmas dinner! We are also able to sell young poults if you want to rear your own.

We currently have bronze, norfolk black and buff turkey poults, born 12th july 2010. now off heat so ready to go outdoors if you want to rear your own for christmas.

just contact us at contact@bramble-poultry.co.uk and make arrangements. alternativly if you want an oven ready, email us as above and w can get one couriered to you for the 22nd december.

We have been down to the new farm today and finally got our hands on the keys. We have been down today and cleaned through top to bottom and we are ready to start moving the animals across.

The local DEFRA office are comedians however, as they have posted us the CPH application form in WELSH! so a quick bit of translation is in order!!!

So hopefully, by this time next week, we will be fully installed with all the animals ready to start the next chapter! Up until now, we havent been able to move the animals as we didnt have a holding number to move them to.

Tomorrow, is an exciting day, tomorrow sees the start of the Clay Oven course. 10 lucky people have paid for the priviledge of getting covered in wet sticky clay, and building an oven together – probably in the rain looking at the forecast!

Ho hum – let the fun begin! I am setting off at 6am saturday to be up there in time to set the oven buring and get it up to temperature. I do hope that it burns well for the course as on the test fire it didnt get up to a hot enough temp – due to it dryig out and only burning for 2 hours. i reckon if we can get it burning for at least 4 hours we should get enough heat into the clay! if not, i will have to take the attendees down to McDonalds for lunch instead!

The one thing smallholding has taught me is that you must learn to deal with a roller coaster of emotions on a daily basis. One day you could be over joyed to see lots of little chicks hatch, only to be disappointed when you see them killed by rats a few weeks later. Yesterday was one of those days.

We went to the new farm yesterday to sign the contracts and get the paperwork sorted for the holding numbers etc. Two days before we had taken in a poorly kitten from another farm where someone wouldn’t look after it, and would be pleased if it had died as it would save them the effort of feeding it. When we had it, it was full of fleas, ear mites, worms and was streaming with cat-flu. The poor little chap was only 4 weeks old and the vet gave it a 40% chance of making it through the next 24hours.

We took him in and starting working on him, cleaning his ears and dosing him for fleas etc. The vet had given him a 48hr jab of antibiotics to relieve some of the pressure on his system, and we kept our fingers crossed. He made it through the first night and seemed to be a bit brighter and so yesterday, we tucked him up with a bowl of food and a hot water bottle and nipped down to the farm. When we got back in the evening, he was there to greet us, meowing away happily, his eyes still streaming and his ears still bunged up. we cleaned him up again, looking for signs of trouble as we were conscious that the antibiotics were wearing off.

We went to go to bed last night and he was in his box, dead. How can such a little life, encounter that much experience, grasp your heart so tightly in such a short time? The kids are understandably distraught, my wife who nursed him the most is very upset and even me, the big softee that i am shed a few tears.

Rest in Peace littel man. You may not have had a life full of kindness and love, but at least the last few days of your life showed you what life was really all about.

"Scrat the Cat" in the sun

Well, i have to move the bees. they are in a secluded part of the garden that is getting a bit over grown at the front, but i can easily access it from the back to carry out maintenance – however – in a few weeks time i will need to move it to Wales, so i will need to access the front to block up the entrance. I cant do that from where they are at the moment as i would have to lean on the hive and reach over. Something tells me that a full hive wouldn’t be too chuffed with some pillock leaning on it and stuff foam into the hive entrance!

So i decided to move the hive backwards a bit so i could reach the front. when moving a hive, you must move it either less than 3′ or over three miles. The first is so that they can find the hive again, the second distance of three miles is so that when you move the hive they aren’t likely to see a local landmark the recognise and go back to the hive they used to be at!

So i laid a paving slab down and placed some wooden rails on it to lift the hive base clear of the ground. I then took the roof off and put to one side. Then the top supers onto the roof, the queen excluder and the brood and a half i could just lift as one item so i lifted it up and onto the new slab. I then reversed the supers etc and put them all back into place.

I stood back and realised that the returning flying bees couldn’t find the hive easily as it was 2′ away. You must remember to make sure that the hive faces exactly the same orientation or they wont recognise it. I stood there and watched as about 50 bees circled the spot where the hive used to be, looking confused. Then i noticed that the hive workers had gathered at the entrance of the hive and were flapping their wings hard. The flyer’s soon moved in towards the hive.

A quick read up on thi sbehavious tells me that the bees wafted the scent of the old hive into the air so that the flyers could pick it up. Aint bees clever????