Even before the first goats arrived two years ago, we had got a couple of pigs for our personal freezer. We were so delighted by the taste of the pork, bacon and sausages from these that this year we have grown extra pigs, and will soon be offering the produce for sale alongside the goat meat. We hope that if you fancy trying goat, but are a bit put off by the additional delivery expense, that you could make a box up of both products and spread the cost in that way. Keep an

As a wrap up to this batch of updates, I would just like to share the following. On a Saturday evening our lovely vet called in to look at Penguin our poorly kid. She was as gutted as we were that she had gone down-hill, but we all agreed it was time. The vet had her young son with her and so I invited him to help me feed the bottle babies whilst mum was ‘busy’. Whilst preparing the bottles I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up (yeah I know - gosh how original) and

If you haven’t heard of the Darwin Awards, do Google it (other search engines available) – the stupidity of humans never fails to amaze, and we have certainly made our own contributions since moving here. Here is our top ten (in reverse order) awarded for general ignorance, sheer stupidity or just damn bad luck. Perhaps some of these resonate with you? #10 Wonky Fencing We decided that a lovely place to set up our first chicken pen was within our little orchard. We duly purch

So we knew ‘we’ were expecting 23 kids sometime between the end of January and March, but aside from Tiggy and Gloria who were attended to by our own boy Emperor, we had no dates – excellent 🙄 Many hours were spent staring at what we call ‘foofs’ (the lady parts) for signs of gloop, tails were wagged to gauge floppiness, udders were inspected to see if they had ‘bagged up’, and any slight groan had us on tenterhooks. It was our own phoney war. Luckily tech boy Dave had set u

What were we thinking? We didn’t have a scooby do about goats. The nearest I’d ever got to a goat was mucking out a pen for pocket money at the age of 11… and I don’t think I even saw the goat that caused my resulting back ache. OK, Keep Calm and Stumble On Regardless. We bought some books, we looked on the internet – wow – goats come in three flavours – Dairy, Fibre and Meat. The most common meat goat, certainly in the UK, is a Boer. Boer goats are predominantly white with b

I’d liken this time to the ‘honeymoon period’ – endless possibilities, we had some money in the bank and, until we purchased our first livestock, no real responsibilities – it was a gentle wind down time that I think we both needed. Like many new smallholders, we scratched our heads over what we should tackle first. We decided to create two lists (I like lists) – one which required experts and one which didn’t (that would be us). When I started to document what was completed

Disclaimer – we don’t really advocate our somewhat cavalier approach, but given our particular situation it was right for us! The smallholding we bought was not in accordance with 'The Plan'. 'The Plan' was to buy somewhere with a barn ripe for a holiday let conversion (source of income) with a house for us and a bit of land. We found one property which was summarily condemned by the surveyor, viewed some holdings which required rose tinted binoculars more than just vision t

The following 6 blog posts have been taken from my contribution to a Facebook group 'Celebrating Smallholding UK'. For the benefit of those who do not follow Facebook, I hope you enjoy these short updates. Post 1: Introduction Greetings fellow Smallholders - we are Dave and Debbi Church - a quite ordinary risk averse couple, quietly working hard in the world of IT for a large corporate and paying the mortgage on an average 3 bed semi in Hertfordshire. A near tragic event occ