Tuesday 27 March 2012

What do we do? down on the farm


What do we do?!

Yesterday a guest asked what do you do here?  Although a simple enough question in itself. I found it tricky to answer.  

We are a Farmhouse B&B with a couple of self catering lets, Farthingwood Barn  & Eden Lodge, we also do alot of dinners for guests as well as being open to non residents & locals.  We also do a fair amount of farming and try to produce as much of our own food as possible.
Although we started off very much novices (which is another story) we now have sheep, chickens, ducks, geese  & goats , with a herb garden and veg plot well and truly in the pipeline. Our food is very much River cottage style if you know what I mean.  Check out this weeks menu on our website
We also smoke our own foods, make salami, bacon and air dry our hams. There always new stuff in development, this week were trying to cure & air dry our mutton  with an old recipe that we uncovered .
After this long winded reply the guest look puzzled and said "when do you sleep?"
 I replied "January"!

Sunday 25 March 2012

Never work with Children & animals !

Crazy morning the pigs got out, two sheep went and joined them on an early morning ramble.  They went into next door field to explore (grass is always greener thing I suppose) Took a few hours to round them up and get everyone back into their correct quarters.
Then time for bottle feeding the lambs with guests which is always a calming event, the kids really do like this , a real pleasure this one .  

Then time for some proactive fencing ! in the sun

Thursday 22 March 2012

Lambing day

Today was lambing day, started off with a couple of twins just before dawn, both perfect deliveries which is as best a way to start  any day as I can think of   – then the sun came up  happy days.

This  experience although a simple pleasure has been the culmination of 7 years of learning with many ups and downs   We  now  have a small flock of 50 ewes, we started with only  5 & no experience, both numbers and   knowledge have increased during our time down on our small farm on Exmoor .   
Many thanks to everyone who helped , guided and offered advice