I have just spent two weeks in Cwmbran doing an 'unofficial WWOOF' for my sort-of-aunty. She is hoping to sell her house and the garden had got a bit out of hand so, despite the torrential rain that we have all 'enjoyed' in the last few weeks, I found enough dry patches to sort the garden, culminating on Saturday evening with my favourite event - a bonfire! Previous to that I had spent two weeks doing another paid farm sit, and it has been my biggest one to date. In retrospect I should probably have charged more, but we live and learn!
I WWOOFed here more than two years ago, in fact it was only my third one (I've done more than 40 now, including re-visits!) and I loved the area. It is situated in the South Shropshire hills not far from Ludlow and Craven Arms and only a few miles from the Welsh border. The farm itself is up a long, rough farm track on the side of an Iron Age hill fort and has lovely views across the valley. When Christine emailed and asked if I would be interested, I jumped at the opportunity to go back.
There are two cows, one in milk and one that is just a big baby at 18 months (but hopefully in calf), three pigs (two sows and a boar) and two groups of Shetland sheep with their attendant rams – it being that time of the year. There are also upwards of 30 chickens who don't only free-range during the day but also roost in the trees or in some fascinating houses on poles about six foot in the air at night. This system seems to work well as only a couple get taken by the fox each year, because they're not all shut in one place together.
My morning started with feeding the chickens their grain and then preparing the fodder for the other animals. Both the milk cow and the pigs are fed on sprouted seeds which are grown in a special room with lights and heaters and, like the seeds you sprout yourself for salads, Chinese stir fry, etc. the seeds have to be rinsed and watered. I didn't know this, but sprouted seeds have much more nutrients available for absorption than unsprouted ones, because the enzymes in the dry seed 'lock up' the nutrition and Christine reckons that doing it this way, even taking into account the cost of the electricity required, saves many hundreds of pounds on her feed bill annually!
So, back to the seeds (an equal mix of peas and barley) these have to be soaked overnight, rinsed in the morning and allowed to sprout for two days (being rinsed once a day and then watered twice more); on the third day the seeds are tipped into large seed trays and allowed to grow in the dark for another two days before they are placed on shelves under lights where again they are watered three times a day; these seeds are then grown on for three more days under lights before they are tipped out of the trays, cut into blocks and fed to the animals. This is, therefore, a seven day cycle of soaking rinsing and watering in a warm environment (about 20C) with high humidity (about 65%). I had to strip down to a sleeveless T-shirt to be able to cope with this environment, even when it was frosty outside!
Once I'd cut up the fodder for the day I had to make up the rest of the milk cow's feed – some feed pellets, minerals and a glug of cider vinegar (good for the gut, in humans, too!) and then get her into the little milking parlour and milk her, luckily with an electric portable machine and not by hand! Like the cows at Old Chapel Farm, Lolli is not tethered during milking so my biggest fear was that she would finish her feed before I'd finished the milking and wander off still attached to the machine! I got quite paranoid about this, even putting some extra feed from the pig buckets within easy reach so that I could lob it in her direction, should the need arise. However, we managed to negotiate the whole two weeks without this happening, but it was still quite stressful!
Once Lolli was milked I had to turn her and her mate, Turnip, out into the field. I was assured that Turnip would be so keen to get out into the field that it was best to put her halter on before I milked Lolli to avoid problems afterwards. However, Turnip had decided to 'try it on'. If you've ever been in a situation where you are in authority over some unknown child – teaching, baby-sitting, etc. you will know how they love to try and get one over on you 'Mummy always lets me stay up to 9.00pm, even on a school night' – you know the sort of thing. Well, I think that Turnip was doing the same thing: the first morning she refused point blank to come out of her stall, so we stood there admiring the view until she (and I) got bored; the second morning she came out of the stall.......but only half way so, again, we stood and looked at the view; the third morning I thought I'd cracked it – she came willingly out of the stall and then stopped halfway along the driveway to the field where we stood for rather too long. In the end I found the best way to deal with her behaviour was to totally ignore her – I would have sent her to the 'naughty step' but I don't think she'd have gone! It seemed to me that every day she'd thought up a slightly different ruse. In the evenings we had a different sort of behaviour – she would come out of the field quite docilely and then she'd pick up speed as we went down the concrete slope so that she was in the lead, then she'd cut in close to the metal stanchion of the barn so that I was almost squashed against it, and if that didn't work she'd do the same thing on the doorway into her stall. After a couple of days of this nonsense I'd let go of the halter once I was sure she was heading for her stall and not Lolli's (she did that one day and ate some of Lolli's tea before I could get there!) I swear that cow had a sense of humour!
Once I'd safely got the cows into the field, it was time to feed the pigs with one bucket of sprouted seeds and the bucket of milk (less what I needed in the house). There was a Tamworth sow (the red-haired ones) and a Berkshire sow and boar (these are black with little white socks and a white blaze) and, of course, they could see and hear me coming so were quite noisy by the time I'd walked the length of the field to their pen. The seeds were scattered about their little concrete yard, but the milk had to be poured into a trough and it began to remind me strongly of the first place I'd WWOOFed where the pigs were fed on cider sludge and barley meal and got it all over themselves and me in their desperation to get in the trough. It wasn't too bad if the trough was lined up parallel with the fence (it was tethered by a piece of rope to stop it being moved completely), but one day I went out and it was at right angles to the fence. There was no way that I was going to get the milk in there so I threw in the other food and then went off to get the dung fork from the manure heap to try and hook the trough round. While I was gone (all of one minute) there was obviously a scuffle and when I returned the Tamworth had sustained a nasty head injury at the hands (or should I say 'tusks') of the boar and there was blood everywhere. Working on the theory that head injuries always bleed lots and that pigs are generally quite resilient I tried not to panic and left them to it. However, I did go back to check about an hour later armed with the ubiquitous 'purple spray'. Purple spray is the medical standby of all farmers – a bit like TCP or Dettol – and is used for all sorts of minor injuries. These days 'purple spray' has a blue colourant rather than the purple of days gone by and contains Terramycin, but is still called purple spray by every farmer I know. Christine's 'purple spray' actually is purple (it contains gentian violet) because it is organically approved and does not contain antibiotic, so poor old Toot ended up with a purple head. After a couple of days the wound scabbed over and she seemed none the worse.
The chickens were relatively low maintenance in comparison – the main thing to watch for with them at feeding time was the ones that roosted up high in the beams of the Dutch barn would suddenly hurtle at you from a great height and they aren't terribly good at flying and certainly not very good at steering whilst airborne, so I was in severe danger of being brained. I should have asked for a hard hat! One day I found a chicken out in the field who did not look at all well – she was sitting very upright, for all the world looking like a penguin, with her rear end tucked between her legs. I popped her into the aerial hen house expecting to find her dead in the morning, but she wasn't. After a couple of days I moved her to the safety of the greenhouse where she continued to eat and drink and be quite perky but still only able to waddle like a penguin. Christine examined her on her return and said that her back was dislocated, so despatched her forthwith!
The sheep were really low maintenance – I just had to fill up their hay rack every day and check that they were all present and still alive!
I always feel very hesitant to go off the property when I am farm sitting, even though I had a few hours during the day when I was at leisure, so I read a lot and made some bread and did word puzzles. However, I did visit Stokesay Castle on a beautiful autumn day. It is really a fortified manor house located about one mile south of Craven Arms, and is relatively unspoiled. It has a large medieval hall with attached 'solar', a fortified three storey South tower and a three storey North tower, plus a rather attractive Jacobean gatehouse. It is run by English Heritage and they provide you with an audio tour and a small laminated map, which is very useful. However, the female voice guiding you around was obviously Zoe Wanamaker and I kept having visions of a slightly mad-looking woman with crazy hair, as she appears in My Family on TV! Still, it was well worth the £6 entry fee and was quite compact so didn't take more than an hour or so to look around. There was also a very pretty church next door which had the original box pews and a gallery containing the organ.
I also ventured down into the village one Saturday evening to go to 'Flicks in the Sticks' at the village hall. They were showing War Horse, which I'd missed when it was doing the rounds before, so I went armed with a large hankie and had a very enjoyable time. It cost me the grand total of £5.50 and that included two soft drinks and a packet of crisps! When I came out at 10.00pm I had to scrape the ice off my car for the first time this year, before I could drive back to the farm. As I got out of the car I looked up and saw millions of stars shining so brightly that you almost felt you could reach out and touch them! Because there was absolutely no light pollution, they really came into their own. Amazing!
No comments:
Post a Comment