Emma Warren – A Portfolio Life – Work, Country & Family. - a portfolio life: entrepreneur – businesswoman – mum

Well, I can hardly believe that we’ve been at Beetham Farm for over a year now! I think I might have to do a 2011 picture blog at some point to catch you all up on what’s been going on.  There’s lots of changes afoot and at the moment I am busy planning all the various threads of our lives for 2012 – but more of that later

For now, I’m pleased to report that 2012 has started in the way we mean to go on – immersing ourselves more in country life.  Hubby has had a week off and has been revelling in the fact that he’s had lots of time out and about on the farm – and I’m loving the fact that my list of jobs for him is finally going down.

Yesterday was fabulous weather in Somerset, which was a stroke of luck for hubby as he was off on a hedge laying course in a nearby village.  We’re based on the Blackdown Hills, which is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty http://www.blackdownhillsaonb.org.uk/ and  there are a number of organisations who dedicate their time to improving the area and maintaining traditional skills.  One such organisation is the Blackdown Hills Hedging Association and he had booked to go on their introductory course (for more details click here http://bhha.info/pg/hlc/main.aspx).  He had a great day out on the hills and came back full of enthusiasm for hedge laying.

It’s important to have a range of habitats across the holding to encourage all the different species, and as Beetham has not been touched for about 15 years, we have got a lot of wildlife which we want to help conserve.  We will be keeping some hedges wild and woolly but others will be laid.  We’re learning as we go and we’ve got some great people working with us, so it’s all a great big adventure!

Here’s some hedge pictures for you:

The hedge at the end of the course Ancient boundary

The Wild and Woolly hedge

Ancient boundary

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It seems that so much has happened this past year, that it’s hard to know where to start!  So I’ve decided that rather than worrying about what I haven’t written, it’s better to actually start writing something!  I will post a montage of photos which sum up the year, but for now I’ll concentrate on the here and now…

We’ve had a long held family wish to try and live a bit more sustainably - mainly inspired by Brigit Strawbridge and her family in a BBC2 programme called “It’s not Easy Being Green” which aired in 2007.  Until that point I had considered green as a go/no go colour. By that I mean that I thought you either had to be fully committed to living completely sustainably or not do it at all.  Brigit and her family showed that it is a journey, along which you can tread at a pace you are comfortable with, you don’t have to be perfect overnight! So we started out cooking more of our own meals, shopping less, growing more and even keeping our own pigs and sheep.  Roll forward a few years and here we are with a few acres of land and embarking on the adventure of becoming a real smallholding as a family.

With each new thing we attempt, we usually get more wrong than right but we earn important lessons and get it right the next time.  The fun bit is learning together and knowing that we are equipping our two boys with some important life skills.

This summer we’ve had our first litter of piglets – see if you can see the odd one out.  She’s been named Spotty Botty and the boys are on a campaign For her to become the farm mascot.

We share a small herd of Dexters with friends from another farm – they arrived to eat some of our grass – Mack the bull arrived soon after and has been busy paying attention to his ladies ever since!

We’ve had a good crop of pears, apples and blackberries – which have been keeping us busy and we’re really looking forward to the sloe crop.

We’ve also been spending time considering what we want to do going forward, weighing up various options, but not really making any
decisions just yet.

I hope to keep you up to speed with what’s going on via this blog – and I’d be interested in your tips and help as we learn more about ourselves and our smallholding.

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I love this time of year, the lovely surprise of still-hot summer days and the depth of the days starting to suggest Autumn – I find myself longing to light the log-burner and to sit beside it with my boys – snuggle-cosy warm.

But before we get to that stage, we have been gathering the fruits of the hedgerow – our hedges are wild and woolly and hold all sorts of hidden gems; cobnuts, beechnuts, rosehips, blackberries and elderberries are hanging waiting to be picked.  We love to go out as a family, dogs included, round the fields – shouts of delight from the boys when treasures are found, blackberry-stained mouth signalling that the berries are sweet and delicious.  We follow the country code and pick randomly, gathering fruits for us but remembering that there are animals who rely on these wild crops to get them through the winter.  I smile to myself as I realise that nobody has told the squirrel about sharing – trees which were nut-laden a few days ago have been stripped bare by very efficient squirrel pickers.  However, I did manage to find a few and will use them to make “Honeyed cobnuts”, a favourite of ours from the River Cottage Preserves book (***insert link).

The blackberries will be transformed into jellies to sweeten yogurt, with some more frozen to combine with our apples in the depths of winter to make a warming crumble.  When I’m cooking crumble, I always cook a batch of crumble on its own in a layer on an oven tin – the crispy, crunchy mixture can be frozen to make a crumble topping later – it avoids the sogginess you sometime get on the underneath of the crumble layer of a fruit crumble.

When we moved here we were delighted to see lots of blackthorn, heralding the promise of a good sloe crop – not ready for picking yet…but being inspected daily – we’ve already made raspberry and blackcurrant vodka – but our favourite is sloe vodka – a lovely winter warmer.

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We keep chickens and as a result, we eat a lot of eggs – my boys love them – boiled, baked, poached, scrambled or fried! I used to put the shells in the compost, but now I collect them in a bowl and let them dry out. Then I get a wooden spoon and bash them (good for those frustrating moments in life!) – the resulting mosaic of shells is perfect for sprinkling around plants that the slugs love in your vegetable garden. Evidently the slugs don’t like the scratchy texture – any more good slug repelling tips out there?

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Well, we first viewed our new place last June and really didn’t think that we would ever be able to manage to pull off getting it – but we did . I have to confess to the fact that I still walk around with an inane grin on my face – which our new neighbours probably find a bit strange, but it’s just because I’m so happy to be here. I’m loving the silence at night, broken only by the soothing sounds of the owls hooting to each other from their trees. The early morning is a different matter though, as the crowing cockerel cacophony starts early doors – might be time to have a bit of a cockerel sort out!

The animal numbers are starting to mount; we’ve managed to get the pigs out into their new home, so they’re enjoying rooting up bramble roots and the field in general; we’ve got a lot of chickens now and it will soon be time for the Goose Fair in Buckland Newton and we’re going, but don’t tell my hubby!  You can read more about this here on my blog.

It’s been a bit stressy-busy at work for the last few weeks, even more so than normal, so I’ve also discovered that coming home in daylight and taking five minutes to explore the happenings of the day in the garden has a wonderfully restorative effect. We moved in last November, so the garden has just been “there” during our first few months – but now the hidden treasure bulbs are springing through from their winter slumber and I discover a new plant or bud every day! I’ll take some pictures and start tracking what’s going on as I’m sure the changing garden vistas are going to be beautiful.

The veggie garden we’ve inherited needs some sorting out as well, but there’s all sorts of plants springing through – I really do think I need to find someone to give us some advice before we start ripping up things we shouldn’t.

It feels like it’s been a bit of a dark winter this year, the stirrings of Spring promise haven’t come a moment too soon, and I’m looking forward to discovering more about our new home as it all unfolds.

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Well, I like to think that I can come up with plausible reasons for my actions – but I have to confess that even I pushed the boundaries recently.  I’ve written previously about our smallholding and our various animals and go green initiatives, and we’ve been pressing on with growing our own veg.  My hubby has a bit of a weakness for old tractors and farm tools, and I love my chickens – and I’ve got quite a few!!  We keep extending our chicken run and I saved up and treated them to a chicken palace from a great place near us called Flytes of Fancy so in my mind that meant that I had room for more chickens.  I had seen an article about a Charity Goose Auction held twice yearly at the Gaggle of Geese pub in Buckland Newton and so with a determined air, I set off with all the family in tow.

Well, I was expecting a few pens of chickens for sale, but it’s a massive affair with over 400 lots of chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys and even peacocks.  My hubby was happy as they also had a cider tent and a hog roast on the go, with lots of things for the kids to get interested in as well – so a bit of a day out for the whole family.  I set about the serious stuff of watching the poultry auction and unfortunately for hubby, the bidding bug bit and I was off!  By the end of the auction, we were proud (me), and bemused (him), owners of the following:

5 Aracuna blue-egg laying chickens

A bantam and three tiny chicks

4 point of lay bantams

2 frizzies – they look like exploding chickens!

3 Marsh Daisy chickens

2 Lemon Fantail ornamental chickens

3 runner ducks (OK so I promised I wouldn’t get ducks but they were only £8 and I couldn’t leave them there…)

As I was bidding, hubby was getting ever more anxious and I, desperate to justify getting more chickens, heard myself saying “but they’ll make great material for my blog” – the best excuse I’ve ever come up with for unrestrained purchasing!!

Hughie, Dewie and Louie

My boys were really excited by all this activity, so once we had packed them into crates and set off for the car, my hubby took the opportunity to point out that we’d got too many chickens and what on earth was I doing buying “bloody ducks”.  I ignored him and later that night, as I introduced the ducks to our geese, I was a bit concerned that he might start a campaign to get rid of the ducks. However, I needn’t have worried as the ducks launched a charm offensive of their own, and the very next evening I found him laughing his head off as the ducks all stood neatly in line for him to spray them with the hose – one converted husband!

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With two children, two businesses and an embryonic smallholding, I always think that it’s important to try and get some time together as a family, so as promised in my New Year’s resolution – I did book some time away at the start of the year. We’re half-way through the year now, so I thought I’d report back and let you know how it’s going!

First off – the one that our two boys aged 8 and 6 had been begging to do for years – Legoland in Windsor.  It was only a day out and we kept the costs down by taking our using Tesco Clubcard vouchers to buy the tickets and taking our own sandwiches.  The boys were beside themselves with excitement – and our youngest gravely pronounced in the back of the car that he’s been waiting to do this “all his life!!”  We went on a Saturday, lots of people about, but not too packed although we were told it was a “quiet” day!  The boys managed to get us on the wettest ride first, but luckily it was a sunny day.  We went on a lot of rides that day, and on the way home I asked what their favourite was – only to be astounded when the answer was “panning for gold” which was a completely non-techno attraction which involved water baths, sand and finding nuggets of gold!  Just goes to show that sometimes simple is best!

Panning for Gold

The next pre-booked time-out was a trip to Wales for my husband’s birthday – we wanted a weekend away, somewhere different, but definitely based outdoors.  We normally go camping, but we decided to have a treat and go to the Yurt Farm, near Lampeter in Wales – and what a great choice that proved to be!!

We followed the directions and arrived at an idyllic spot in the countryside.  We parked our car, transported our belongings across to our Yurt by wheelbarrow and settled into our home for the weekend.  The Yurts provide simple luxury based on sound eco-principles with candles and paraffin lamps for lighting and a log burner for heating.  If you’ve always wanted to camp, but can’t do the whole sleeping on the ground thing then this will be ideal for you.  There are only five yurts on the whole site and you literally have acres of field surrounding you – kick back, relax and enjoy!

Laurie and Thea, who run the Yurt Farm, are absolutely lovely and couldn’t do enough for us – printing out maps of places to go and just generally making sure that we had a great time.  They offered to take us on a tour of their organic farm, which is next-door, and on the way back we purchased fresh vegetables and meat from their farm stall.  Each yurt has it’s own private campfire area – so lamb burgers cooked over the embers were much enjoyed by everyone that night.

The facilities on site consist of solar showers (so much better than I expected), compost toilets (ditto) and a lovely area for communal cooking and eating if required – with another log burner for my pyromaniac husband to play with!  The kids were straight in from the word go, disappearing off to make friends with the other children on-site and generally having a fab, outdoor time.  Our youngest had pestered Daddy to bring pocket knives, so we went walking to find hazel sticks that could be whittled and transformed into thumb sticks for walking – cue hours of whittling outside the yurt and lots of wood shavings.

The inside of one of the Yurts

Come Monday, we were extremely chillaxed and very reluctant to leave – but it was time to go and so we set off back to Somerset – stopping off for a detour at a local pottery – Daniel Boyle Ceramics - on the way, as recommended by Laurie & Thea. We rounded off the treats with Fish & Chips in Lampeter and arrived back in Somerset in time for tea!

So, booking at the beginning of the year is really working for us, as it doesn’t offer the opportunity to duck out pleading that we’re too busy.  We haven’t spent a lot of money, but we have gained so much in terms of family-time and reaping the benefits of down-time to return to work with a renewed vigour!

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