Gloucester Old Spots

We now have seven Gloucester Old Spot Pigs (GOS). Three came from the breeder of the Alsa herd near Stansted Airport and four others came from a fellow who lives on a small holding in the middle of the Fens. These four weaners were also from a sow that came from the Alsa herd, so they are all cousins. They were all born within a week or so of each other.
They love their straw pig ark. It is holding up well, and although it was very wet during the middle of the summer, nothing more worrying than some strange foaming fungus grew on the straw.
Our next door neighbour has seven Tamworth pigs and we rely on their advice on Pig matters, as the have kept pigs for years. We feed them on a mixture of rolled wheat and barley. This has to be soaked in water for a few hours before the pigs are allowed to eat it. I allow about 1kg of hard feed per pig per day and this is split into a morning feed and an evening feed. The amount will increase as the pigs get larger, but it is important not to over feed the pigs as they are very efficient at turning any excess into fat. I have seen pictures of pork joints ready for the kitchen which have about a three inch layer of fat on the outside! Not very enticing...so they are on a carefully balanced diet. Through the summer we have added odd and ends to the feed. For example when the apples ripened we made gallons of apple juice and mixed up the squashed remains with the regular food. They love it! They also love the windfall plums which are really no good for anything else. They even split out the stones!
The pigs are very friendly and gallop across their paddock at feeding time, squealing and grunting with excitement. The children are quite relaxed with them. They love having their tummies rubbed and will roll over at a moments notice. The loudest squeals are heard when one of the pigs touches the electric fence. They all know exactly where it is and usually keep three or four inches away. However their droopy ears cover their field of view when they are foraging and mistakes sometimes happen.

Planning for Pigs

We think we might get a few pigs or sheep.

A little bit of investigation has made the choice clear. The fencing costs for sheep will be substantially higher than for pigs. Our patch of land is long and thin, with hedges round all the sides. To keep the sheep in will require steel sheep netting and this is going to cost thousands of pound. The pig fencing will only be a couple of hundred pounds worth of electric fence.
Of course pigs need a shelter but sheep do not. New pig arks cost £300-£400 if you buy one, but we are going to make one out of large straw bales. I have decided to make one to my own design. We have fence posts and old bannister rails for struts and corrugated iron sheets for the roof. My neighbour has provided some large bales of straw which I collected o his trailer. It ought only to cost about £20 (plus some of our own labour) to build it. The photo is of the (not quite) finished pig house. It needs a bit of strengthening on the corners, although they are very unlikely to move the bales, as I could only slide them off the trailer with ropes and levers!
Then we need to get the pigs. The son of a local farmer breeds all sorts of rare breeds and is willing to sell us some: so we should be up and running soon.
I mentioned keeping pigs with a couple of friends who live close by and they are keen to join in. Our next door neighbour discussed it with their children, but, while the children were keen to have pigs they were not keen to eat them! We solved this problem by arranging that the local butcher will act as an intermediary.
Luckily, another son of the same local farmer also runs the butchers shop in the village! Their plan is to sell local produce when ever possible.

Spring Planting regime

A few friends came round the other day. We decided to get together and try to organise the joint planting of the vegetable seeds in a slightly centralised fashion. We jointly bought the seeds from a variety of catalogues. I have ordered a load of seed trays. The poly tunnel has just been erected. The infrastructure for a watering system is being planned. We are nearly ready to go...

Having looked through the seed catalogues it seems clear that we should be able to harvest cabbages all year round. We should be able to get carrots ready to eat for 10 months of the year. We should be able to grow salad crops to keep us going from New year to Christmas.

Last year we did not do it quite right. I was campaigning for the local council elections during March, April and May. The old wooden framed greenhouse gave up the ghost at Easter. (I have chopped this up and made parts of it into an excellent coldframe.) Very little got planted last year, and what did all ripened in August when we were on holiday.

This year I am determined to do better.
I have a new vegetable patch, a new poly tunnel, a new watering system and a new attitude.

It should be a better year all round!!

Thumbs up for the heavy handed

I do not sit in an office all day; sometimes I have to do some manual labour in order to stop my brain from being compressed by electronic gadgetry. Living on a farm, I find that much of the manual work involves lift heavy old bits of machinery, fence posts and the like.
After a relatively short period I noticed the callouses on my hands getting worse and the skin hardening up on my hands. My wife noticed it too and I was instructed to use lashings of hand cream several times a day. I tried this from time to time but to no avail. A local friend supplies special aloe vera products that everyone swears by, so a couple of tubes were bought and given a thorough testing. Even the local vet buys the aloe vera products to keep sutures supple on animals that have recently had minor surgery. It feels great on your hand but just does not last very long; it becomes a very expensive business.
After a couple of months my hands were getting worse rather than better. Doing the washing up and bathing children made it worse still. I started using latex and PVC gloves to stop the dirt getting ingrained into the cracks in the skin.
These small cracks appear in the skin when it is really dry and as the skin dries further the skin shrinks and the cracks enlarge. They tend to get longer and more painful as the day goes on. Occasionally they bleed too.
I spent a few minutes on the web searching for a cure.... There appear to be none that are practical and actually work. There are endless ointments and potions (all of which cost a fortune). Shearing sheep is considered good as fleeces contain a substance called lanolin and shearers always have soft hands, but I can't give up the day job to shear sheep.
None of the ointments seem to last for any length of time. Twenty minutes to half an hours seems to about standard until they have evaporated or been absorped completly. Some ointents really make the cracks sting and none of them stop the dry skin from becoming dry again...short of putting on more cream every half an hour.

By accident I made a great discovery. By putting a tiny amount of Superglue in the cracked skin and bonding it together, the pain immediately stops. It prevents the cracks snagging, pulling or getting bigger when they get caught on a rough surface. And it provides instant protection in the form of an acrylic scab over the wound.
A tiny bottle of super glue would cure hundreds of cracked hands for a few quid, while those precious ointments do not work (in my view), last no time at all and cost a fortune.
However they do usually smell a good deal more pleasant than superglue!

Get your Canoe!...The River is Up!

Sam told me first thing this morning that the river was up and we would be able to go in a canoe. I was a little bit suspicious. I know about half and inch of rain had fallen over night but canoing seemed wildly unlikely. Once the sun was up (Sam is an early riser) I glanced up the field to the Water Meadows and, sure enough, the river was up. This needs to be put in perspective...
For 36 of the past 38 months the water meadows have been lush green pasture. In summer the grass went a shade of hay and in the winter the wild birds have found it to be a haven; out of the wind and with hedges stuffed with berries. It is only in the past two months that we have had sufficient rain to turn it back to water meadow. The stream flows off the top of the hills between two villages. The high ground is clay covered, but as it runs off the hills it comes over the chalk, where is starts to soak in. It will soak in until the chalk becomes saturated.
The picture shows the river as it starts its journey down the hill. It has come from about one mile away, and about 70m vertically up a very gentle slope. Watching the slow but inexorable progress of the stream making its way down the valley keeps the children entranced for ages. Then they have the opportunity of building dams and bridge for a couple of days if it does not dry up again and disappear until the next downpour.
So much for my canoe trip!

Painting Pylons

The National Grid own all the pylons that you see striding across the countryside. The pylon structures were designed to withstand ferocious weather conditions and to last for 100 years. But the cables will not last for quite so long.
We have a line of pylons that go past, us a few hundred yards away. They start near The Wash and go to Brent Pelham, on the way to powering eastern London and the surrounding area. This part of the grid carries 400,000 volts.
The pylons have now been up for 50 years and they are having their first major overhaul. This involves inspections and repairs, paining every bit of exposed metal with two coats of paint and then replacing the cables. It is a massive engineering excercise and has taken over year to date. Last summer they painted some pylons and changed the cables on the eastern side of the line. This spring and summer they will replace the cables on the other side.
Every road, farm track and footpath gets a scaffolding safety cage built over it. Many of the farm tracks (which are mainly mud) have been rebuilt with hardcore, so that the contractors vehicles can reach the pylons easily. Hundreds of sign posts have been erected directing the National Grid contrator to the correct pylons. And steepljacks can be seen climbing to the very top of the pylons like monkeys, with paint pots strapped to their belts.
Last summer there was a spate of thefts of equipment from beneath the pylons at night, so we had endless visits by security guards in red vans, many of whom stayed out in their vehicles, in the middle of nowhere, for days at a time. I can't think which would be worse: the soul destroying boredom of the security guard or the endless vertigo of the steeple jack.

Well! Well! Well.

When we moved here, we had to replant the garden from scratch. We put in many new trees, a new vegetable patch, a green house and several flower beds. All the work would have come to nothing, had we not been able to water the vegatables, the saplings and tender plants sufficiently over the summer and until they became established. Our outside tap is a bit of a joke. It takes nearly 4 hours to fill the water butt, so you can imagine it is of no use for watering the garden.
Luckily we have an old brick lined well, with an old hand pump (which looks nice but does not work). Heaven only knows when it was dug, but it is 75 feet deep. When we arrived it had 12 feet of water standing in the bottom.
I purchased a borehole pump and plumbed it and wired it in and "Hey Presto" there was a veritable fountain spraying forth, and at some pressure too. The water butt is now filled in ten minutes (it is an IBC container and holds 1000 litres).
The water level in the well hardly dropped at all the first summer. Nor did it during the winter or spring or the following summer of 2003. But come September 2003, the well was dry. It was not a serious problem for the winter months, other than we could not easily wash the cars. However watering the next summer was murderous. No rain (to speak of) fell that summer or autumn and in fact the well has been dry until about January 2007.
This winter has been wetter than the last few. We live in a chalk valley, but the hills behind us are covered with clay. When there are more than a few millimeters of rain, puddles form and then run off down the valley. When the stream meets the chalk it starts to sink in to it. (It is a nationally important aquifer). When the chalk begins to get saturated, it flows down the valley and eventually it comes down what we have always called "The Gallops" (but what previous inhabitants have called "The Water Meadows").
The water table in the chalk has been rising all winter and in December it reached the base of the well. In the last 2 months has come 10 feet up it. Enough free water for the whole of next summer I hope!