Big Apple - Cider too

The second local cider that will be made into sausages for the Big Apple can now be revealed as...
...Browns apple, Kingston Black & Sweet Coppin pressed by Gregg's Pit on the 13th of October 2010.

Kew Village Market - October Sausages of the Month are...

• Pork, Black pepper & Tomato
• Pork, Apple, Sage & Onion

We will also have our usual range of three flavours: plain; Pork & leek; and Pork & local cider.

See our Kew Village Market page for more information.

Please look visit us at the market to take part in the vote for next months flavours!

The Battle of the Plum Pudding

When we first started the farm we had to decide on which route to go down in terms of fencing - either electric fencing or full scale wire netting fencing. The former won out as it is much more manoeuvrable and adaptable (as well as cheaper!). However, this does sometimes mean that there a few excursions from the pens - mostly this is when I forget to turn the fencer on or because the pigs have burrowed underneath it! Ironically most of the pigs can jump a good 50cm high and so if they choose could leap over the fencing with ease (it is only 30cm high) - fortunately I don't think that they often realise the fact - many of them return to their pens this way having got out.

Speckle before her great escape

However, when they do escape, they have a knack of doing it at just the wrong time. And this morning/yesterday evening is a case in point. One of the four Oxfords, Speckle (you can read more about Speckle here) decided that the tractors collecting the hay were a little more interesting than rootling around with her sisters. She snuck past the tractors and into the Rushall turn field. From here her wanderings (and squeezings under fencing) took her to a section of no-mans land between our perimeter fencing and the fencing of the Dingle field. Normal procedure for taking the pig home is to get a bucket of feed and the pig will merrily follow you to the end of the earth - however, Speckle had clearly found a rich seem of pickings and turned her nose up at dinner. Hence, I began to put my sheepdog techniques into practice. And herd her back out of no-mans land and into our field from wence she had come. It became apparent as Speckle ran her way into and around the top end of the Dingle that to be a sheepdog you need to be slightly faster than the sheep - unfortunately we were both very much on a par...
...two hours later (and much panting and exhaustion on both sides) she was safely hurdled into the corner with only a stile blocking the route to home (and bed!). However, as all Ladybird readers know (see below), pigs don't like using stiles and without having a cat, rat, rope, butcher, cow, water, fire, sitck or dog the only option was tro pick her up and heave her, a 50+kg pig, over the stile.

Obviously, all picture rights are owned by Ladybird!

For those of you who learnt to read without Ladybird books, the story goes something like this:
An old woman finds a crooked sixpence and buys a pig at the market. On her way home she comes to a stile and tells the pig to jump over but it refuses to do so. The old woman asks a dog to bite the pig to make it jump over the stile but the dog refuses. She then ask a stick to beat the dog but the stick will not hit the dog. And so it goes on for a while until a cat agrees to do as she says in exchange for a bowl of milk. So the cat began to kill the rat, the rat began to gnaw the rope, the rope in turn hit the butcher, the butcher started to kill the cow, the cow began to drink the water, and the water started to quench the fire, the fire began to burn the stick, the stick then began to beat the dog, the dog then began to bite the pig, so the pig jump over the stile . . . and eventually the old woman managed to get home.

(synopsis text from: www.theweeweb.co.uk/ladybird)

Some Pigs

This morning the spiders of Much Marcle showed that they could tell that the British Lops are "some pigs" - unfortunately their spelling isn't quite upto Charlotte's yet!

Pig in the field

A momentous day arrived as we finally reached full capacity on the paddock and so the first hut in the field had to be built and populated! Last week Clive the diggerman came and dug hundreds of metres of trenching for the water piping for the new pens and Dan, a workawayer, helped to cut and construct some of the huts - the next job is to knock in the eighty or so wooden posts - possibly a job for a man with a machine!

Cecilia is the first to move into the Boar waiting pen before revisiting Henry in the next few weeks. Within a few hours she had already cleared the majority of the grass from the floor of her hut and began rootling the soil to make it more palatable to her lying position - the grass in the rest of the pen looked on with trepidation!

You might be wondering why the picture is taken late at night, I had taken the camera to picture our new inhabitant of the feed shed (who turned out to be camera shy). Hamlyn and Sootica - the cats - have managed to keep the rats and mice away, but they don't seem keen on the new nightly visitor a Ms Tiggywinkle. Everyday the two cats come for the evening feed only to find the prickly customer is already there! Cat bowls may have to be taken to new heights!

The Big Apple

At the beginning of October each year the communities of the Marcle ridge join together to celebrate the cider prowess of the ridge with the Big Apple festival. And this year we will be taking part with a stall at Hellen's, in Much Marcle, selling sausages, bacon & pork and also deciding on the ultimate cider question... which cider makes the best Pork & Cider sausage? We'll be using a number of different local ciders to make our sausages and then asking the public to choose the best. We can confirm that one of the ciders will be from Dragon Orchard - come back soon to see who else will be involved!

This isn't the Big Apple, it is just a normal apple taken close up!

Pomace time

It's reached the time of year again when we get the left over apple pulp from nearby Once upon a tree (Dragon Orchard) in nearby Putley. When the apples are pressed to release the juice for their cider, it generates pulp as a waste product - not that the pigs seem to mind!

Kew Village Market

Good News!

We have just found out that we will be at the inaugural Kew Village Market on Sunday the 2nd of October outside the Tube Station!

Be there or be sausageless!

100th Pedigree Lop birth!

Mother and 10 piglets doing well after another successful birth - thankfully a morning farrowing, no pesky staying up late!