It has been almost a year since I last made a diary entry, just soo.. busy and I must re-design this page before it gets too big.

At long last we are harvesting a wide range of vegetables. Currently we have new potatoes (Orla and Colleen), broad beans, french beans, beetroot, spring onions, spinach, courgettes (green and yellow) and carrots. It has been a strange year again, a warm start with everyones hopes up of an early summer and then it turned cold for long periods.

The potatoes have taken around two weeks longer this year to bulk up and with a very early full Smith period this year I thought we were in for another bad blight year. Luckily the weather of late has been kind so that we have a very decent crop of potatoes this year. The broad beans were full of Black Bean aphids and typically I had loads of ladybirds and their larvea in our next field but not in my beans! My son, James and I collected as many as we could in a big bucket and tipped them in the centre of my bean crop and boy they had a feast :-). Finally we have a high population of ladybirds everywhere and aphid numbers are much reduced.

The egg enterprise keeps growing and Heather is currently rationing some of our farm shop and pub customers. We have another batch of hens in the system that have just started laying and we are trying to persuade (in a nice way of course) those that haven't started to please begin ASAP.

The bad news:
Those of you who frequently visit this web site will notice that there are no references to our pigs. Unfortunately, with the ever increasing costs of organic feed, transport and butchery and the recent financial strains on household income has made some customers switch to cheaper less welfare friendly pork has forced us to sell the whole herd earlier this year. This has caused us a significant amount of anxiety and stress. With a significant effort from Heather we were able to find good homes for all the pigs and all the breeding stock went to various organic farms. Many others are leaving the organic pig sector and I don't think (like us) they will return in a hurry.

The weather has continued to be unkind with no real summer and September has been exceptionally dry. I was hoping to make my first million :-) on sales from the various winter squash we are growing this year but the weather has put stop to that! The winners from the vegetable area so far have been the early and second early potatoes, carrots (finally) and runner beans, the losers include broad beans, french beans, sweetcorn, main crop potatoes, winter squash and onions. I think this year has to be one of the most challenging years for organic growers ever and I suspect some businesses will be forced to quit and others may reconsider their futures.

Rosie (who has had the highest number of piglets in a litter) has done it again. On 21st September she gave birth to 15 live pigs. She really is a "super" mum especially considering she was a bit poorly early on in her pregnancy but a bit of tender loving care saw her through and she repaid us with a very good litter. We intend to breed from her for our replacement stock in a year or two as her progeny are good quality too.

Worryingly the cost of organic feed for the chickens and pigs continues to rise. Although we have been experiencing this for many months now, the conventional producers are now experiencing significant increases in their prices too. Those farmers producing pork and eggs at the cheaper end of the market or in fixed contracts will really be suffering and go out of business unless supermarkets/customers pay more for these products. We have recently had to increase the price of our eggs to our farm-shop/pub/restaurant customers and most have accepted the extra cost. One pub/restaurant customer, unfortunately decided to stop buying our eggs and explained that "short-cuts" will have to be made because of the increases in food costs. This brings me to my other concern- is food described as "organic" or "local" by pubs/restaurants really so? We know of butchers who have sold meat as "free-range" and "local" and it's been conventional Danish pork. Also some people claim something as "organic" because they get it from someone who says "he doesn't use chemicals", this is just open to misuse and fraudulent claims. What is local? Some may say, "Yes my potatoes are local because I buy them from my local wholesaler". If you go and have a meal and you have taken the trouble to pay extra to have something organic or free-range, do ask where it has come from. If the response you get is vague, chances are they have no real idea what it is and I suggest you find a different place to eat in the future, rant over....

We have been trying to find a suitable butcher to cure our pork so we can start selling bacon, gammon steaks and gammon joints again. We are excited to announce that we have found a really enthusiastic and conscientious (in our experience a rare thing in the butchery trade!) butcher in Horncastle who is prepared to help us. We will have some bacon by mid-October and also hope to be able to offer things like pork pies in the near future.

We hope to be able to sell some of our products through our new online shop , this will accept secure payments via credit and debit cards. This will go live sometime early October.

I must try harder to keep you all updated more regularly (although we do have the monthly newsletters), it has been a long time since I updated the diary. We have been so busy, every enterprise has been expanded. We have more than doubled the area devoted to vegetables, we have increased the number of egg layers to 330 hens, with more than 200 Maran Noire and Cuckoo Maran to add to the flock shortly. The sows still keep producing good size litters. Since we last posted numbers in March, Rosie had 13, Emma had a disapointing 6 (having a rest from the 11 she had last time) and Ivy, Miss Piggy and Ruby have all had 12. We are now averaging 10.31 pigs weaned per litter, which is excellent and indicative of the general well being of the animals due to the high welfare standards we employ. Out of a total to-date of 157 births, only 3 piglets have died and again shows how good a mother a Saddleback pig is.

The weather (as you all will know) over this period has been really unkind, April was very dry with June and July (so far) being ridiculously wet. As so far as the vegetables, I want the year to start over again. There is so much disease about, blight in the potatoes and chocolate spot in my broad beans being the worst. Thankfully, the potatoes have bulked up earlier this year but I hope that the blight does not affect too many tubers. I think organic main crop potatoes may be in short supply later on in the season, we will have to see.

Some of you may have noticed that we have not been selling early bunched carrots as we did last year (which proved very popular). Unfortunately the early carrots have been a disaster, a combination of poor seed, an unproven antique drill/planter and rabbits caused me all sorts of problems. Be assured we hope to have a continuous supply from the end of July.

The two second-hand polytunnels we bought in March are still to be erected, simply no time available, I will now wait until the autumn when things on the vegetable area will calm down a bit. This is a big shame as I was hoping to start growing tomatoes, cucumbers etc this year but never mind there is always next year.

We bought some commercial butchery equipment late July, including a 20lb capacity sausage maker, a Hobart mincer/mixer and Berkel bacon slicer. We have started making some wonderful bacon and pork burgers for ourselves and family but unfortunately we cannot sell these to the general public yet until we get our butchery premises up to the relevant food hygiene standards. We are currently working on the butchery premises and hope to have this up and running in the not too distant future.

I apologise for not updating the diary for a while but we have been so busy with the farm that we have not had the time to update the web site. Most of the work has been related to problems we have had with our last butcher. We now use some butchers at Ancaster, who are now making our best sausages yet, so if you have tried our sausages in the past and for what-ever reason they were not to your taste, then why not try them again! Our intention longer term is to do our own on-farm butchery but we feel we need to concentrate on the enterprises we currently have.

This month has been particularly busy. We have had our annual Soil Association inspection, which went very well, I sometimes wish our customers could be present at the inspection so they would see how much we have to do to comply with the rules.

We have managed to buy two large second-hand polytunnels, which I hope to erect in the near future (all help gladly received :-) ). These will enable us to grow a much greater range of fruit, vegetables and herbs.

I have spent some time (not as much as I would like) looking through and ordering seeds from the various seed catelogues and web sites. In March I have managed to sow my Red Baron onion seed and planted my early Colleen potatoes.

Both sows Dot and Sweety gave birth to 12 piglets each, we are now averaging over 10 pigs born per litter. So far, we have not lost any piglets at all, these Saddlebacks are truly wonderful mothers! The main downside with the pigs at the moment is due to a lack of organic cereals grown in the UK we constantly have to pay more each month for organic pig food.

AT LAST, our Black Rock chickens have started laying eggs. The eggs are very small at the moment but we hope that in a short space of time these will be big enough to help satisfy the ever increasing demand for our eggs. On the down-side, the Marans are only producing about two-thirds of their normal number of eggs, although we hope this reduced productivity will be short lived and numbers will increase as day length increases.

The pigs have been very busy over the Christmas period with Ivy, Miss Piggy and Ruby giving birth to 6, 9 and 12 piglets respectively. All piglets are doing well and for those that are interested we are currently achieving 9.8 live pigs born per litter with 0% pre and post weaning mortality. We believe our pig herd performance at the moment is excellent and far exceeds all expectations and so far we have not had to use any antibiotics on any animal destined for meat production.

As you can guess by the absence of August and September entries we have been very busy. The pigs have been very productive, the last 4 litters (all gilts) we have had 42 piglets, no deaths (who needs farrowing crates!!). Our special award goes to "Dot" who gave birth to 13 live piglets (for a first litter is excellent) about 6 weeks ago and they are all doing extremely well.

"We need more eggs!!" - As those who have been reading our newsletter and who keep looking in vain in our honesty egg/vegetable box will know, we cannot meet demand for our delicious eggs. THE GOOD NEWS is that we should be having another batch of organic point of lay hens on site TODAY (01/11/2006) , these will only produce small eggs to start with but in a relatively short while we hope that egg production will increase significantly. We are also having another batch of Maran day old chicks shortly to further increase the number of laying hens by April 2007.

The vegetable area has been keeping us very busy with weeding, weeding and more weeding! On the 9th June we harvested our first of our early potatoes and they are a real hit with customers as they taste delicious.

Ruby, our saddleback gilt had her first litter of 10 piglets born this month, these will be our first fully certified organic pigs and will be ready for slaughter in time for Christmas. Boris, our rare-breed Welsh boar has been busy with "his girls" this month so we will be able to supply more pork to satisfy the increasing demand for our tasty pork.

10/05/2006: The ewes have started lambing, see the sheep summary page for pictures.

We are very busy on the vegetable area, planting, weeding, weeding and more weeding. We value the rain particularly on our light land but so do the weeds. It's typical, we have just invested in a drip irrigation system and since it arrived we have had a regular rainfall!

20/02/2006: Took delivery of organic seed potatoes, onion sets and shallots. Now hoping that weather warms up soon so we can get these planted in March. We have chosen specific varieties for their eating qualities and disease resistance.
17/02/2006: We collected our first batch of pork from our butcher today. Our own pork to sell and eat at last!!!
13/02/2006: We sent our first pigs to be slaughtered this morning. We were very impressed by the local abattoir and the treatment of livestock being slaughtered.