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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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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This morning, I took the dogs out into a field I have walked them in many times before – it was a beautiful sunny morning and the grass was dew moist. This particular field has patches of grass and reeds and the dogs love to play hide and seek in it.  As I walked down and idly gazed across the field, I noticed web after web waving in the slight breeze – it reminded me of a busy bazaar with each of the stall holders proudly displaying their wares.  Intricately placed between anchor points and each one a mini-masterpiece of individual toil, they were a real sight to behold, a veritable field of dreams!  As I turned and looked behind me, I realised that they had become invisible – the sun and where I stood made the difference between seeing them and missing them entirely.  I must have walked past hundreds of webs previously and not noticed them, a particular set of circumstances had highlighted their beauty and the work they entailed.

As I walked back to the house, I was musing on how many times we as leaders must miss the efforts of the individual, only noticing the times when the hard work comes into stark focus – yet at other times toil and trouble go unnoticed.  How powerful it would be to notice this effort at times when it is not waved in our faces – to recognise that each and every day, many people weave an intricate part of our organisation into being.

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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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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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I have to confess to being a serial house market watcher – we moved down to Somerset 14 years ago now and as I have a would-be landsman for a husband, we started small-holding in a small way a few years ago – inspired by the BBC2 series “It’s not Easy Being Green” .  The yearning has long been there for somewhere with a bit more land – hence the house market watching.  We had been pipped at the post on a few properties and early last year made the decision to sit tight and stay where we are for a few years.  Then serendipity intervened and as usually happens when you stop looking, we came across the place of our dreams!  We viewed it in late June, it went to sealed bids in July and much to my (screaming!!) amazement, we got it.  I then spent the whole of the Summer working on finance and property related things – I’m sure many of you have been through the “heart in mouth” house-buying process.  We finally completed in late October, and then the work really started – lots of cleaning and re-decorating ensued…

So, all that activity consumed an inordinate amount of time, I am so in awe of the people who manage to blog through everything – I think my head would have gone bang!!  But now, the mists are starting to clear a bit, and as a family we sat down and agreed the things we were going to try and do better this year – our list of “Betters”, some of which are based around health and eating, and some around functioning better as a family.  For me, I wanted to try and capture things as they change and develop – and to share our experiences with others and learn from them as well, so time to get back to my (much enjoyed) blog writing.

I’m going to try and improve my blog writing at the same time – so bear with me while I work out the improvements and please feel free to offer advice and tips, I’d love to hear them.  I’ve been reading around various resources and have really enjoyed the advice from http://michaelhyatt.com/category/social-media and http://www.copyblogger.com – both are great resources.

I look forward to sharing more with you over the next few months

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So, the summer then! What have we been doing. Well, firstly we’ve made time to go for walks with friends, which the dogs are really pleased about. In addition to this, I seem to have turned into a fishing widow as at the princely ages of 8 and 6, my two boys have discovered fishing and it’s all they want to do – much to their father’s delight!  It evidently involves procuring lots of kit (and here was me thinking that only girls had to accessorise to the hilt!) and then going and standing on the beach for hours at a time.  Our eldest son can stay there for hours, but unfortunately for him the younger one soon gets bored.  The thing I really don’t understand is that they haven’t actually caught anything yet, but it only seems to make them go and do it more??

In August, we set off in our car and then picked up an old VW Type 2 camper van in Keswick for a week long camping holiday.  We didn’t go too far, only over to Ravenglass on the coast.  We had fabulous weather all week – just one afternoon of rain, so we definitely picked the right week to go.  The camper van (aka Billy Bling!) was brilliant, it was so good to just kick back and amble around (amble seemed to be the fastest we could go) – and amazingly other road users just waved and smiled as they passed us – no road rage!!  The boys made new friends within 10 minutes of arriving at the campsite, and so we fell into a routine of hanging around the site in the morning and going off fishing or sightseeing in the afternoon.  We went up the coast to Whitehaven, which was lovely and then across to Ulverston and the Laurel & Hardy museum.  Our slapstick loving boys were absolutely transfixed by the godfathers of comedy and we ending up buying a DVD which they now adore, provoking real belly laughs from them both!!

We also walked from the campsite to Muncaster Castle, which was well worth the visit – they had entertainment, owl displays and a great playground.  I managed to slip away and do a tour of the castle rooms, for once I picked up one of their audio tour guides and it was narrated by the family who live in the castle – which made it very engaging.  We had lunch there and the food was lovely and great value for money – so the boys final requirement for a great day out (food!) was well and truly ticked…

Finally, we had to reluctantly pack Billy up and take him back to his owners, the boys didn’t want to give him back and wanted us to book next year’s trip there and then!!  We headed off to Ulswater after we dropped Billy off – more fishing, that was a surprise   While I was sitting and watching them, I started chatting to a lady who was also there with her lake-splashing children, nothing unusual in that – but within a very short time, we had meandered through the conversation and realised that we had some places in common, as well as both being Mums.  Now I’m not going to break any confidences, but we ended up having a long conversation about a particular thing that was obviously a key concern for her on that day – and I’d like to think that I was there to listen at just the right time for her.  Now I’m not claiming to have special conversation powers in me or anything – but it did stick in my mind for two reasons.  Firstly, that my complete detachment from the situation obviously helped her to be very open about it – which in a funny kind of way underlined to me how important it is to be detached when I’m doing pure business coaching for individuals.  The second reason was that I felt a curious regret when she drove away – it was a bit like I’d met someone that I instinctively knew might have had the potential to become a great friend, but we didn’t swap contact details or anything, so I’ll probably never know…

Anyway, back to the holiday…we moved across to Guisborough, to see my hubby’s brother and his family – and on with them to Castle Howard the next day – what a fab place to visit!  Late that Friday afternoon, we headed back down to Somerset – a straight run home, the traffic gods were kind to us that day

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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!

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!