Samhain, All Soul's Day Biscuits

The morning after Samhain the valley is swathed in a heavy mist and the ghostly hedges interspersed with spectral trees loomed out of the mist as I trudged across the fields with the dogs who dashed in and out of sight throught the mistiness. Visibility was only a few yards and the fields seemed very empty and isolated.
The autumn colours are superb and now they are just emerging from their thick blanket of mist with a pale sun lighting up the golden leaves.
This is one of the most beautiful times of the year on the farm as we are surrounded by trees and have views across a heavily wooded valley and so we have a gilded landscape as a background to the daily chores.

The pagan festival of Samhain took place last night but today and tomorrow, the 1st & 2nd of November are All Saint's Day & All Soul's Day, two Christian festivals that tried to blot out the ancient pagan beliefs. The yew tree as symbol of everlasting life grows in many churchyards and through recent research it has been found that some of them may be anything up to four thousand years old, pre-dating Christianity and so strengthening the belief that many churches were built on ancient pagan sacred sites. There is a marvellous old yew tree at the ruined Strata Florida abbey near Tregaron in mid-Wales and also at Nevern church in Pembrokeshire.

There was tradition in Wales & elsewhere of making Soul Cakes on 2nd November, All Soul's Day and I found this recipe in a fascinating book 'Kindling the Celtic Spirit' by Mara Freeman;

1/2 tspn mace
1/2 tspn cloves
1 tspn baking powder
1 tspn baking soda
1/2 cup milk
1 ounce brandy
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 cup molasses
21/2 cups flour
11/2 tspn ginger
1 tspn nutmeg

Cream together the butter and sugar, add the eaggs, beat well. Add sifted dry ingredients. Blend in the brandy. Pour the thick batter into 2 greased 13"x9" baking tins and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.
Cool for about 15 minutes, then turn out onto a foil-lined falt surface and using gingerbread man cutters cut out biscuits.

Autumn winds, Welsh Dairy Event

Autumn has settled in with sudden change in the weather overnight. Winds have littered the ground with a rich carpet of golden beech leaves and the the garden has a thick scatter of ash twigs & leaves over the lawns and caught in the branches and brackets of shrubs. After the balmy weather of recent days it is a reminder that we are heading towards winter.
The season's rounds are marked as always not just by the weather but by the work on the farm. Hedge-trimming , slurry-spreading are both being done while the weather is good. The ram has just been put in with his harem of ewes and lambing will start in 5 months time. The milking cows are already being housed at night. Our herd is autumn-calving and so there is a shed full of calves to be fed twice a day and the chorus of their demands for milk start and end the working day for us all.

Yesterday the Farmer & I attended the Welsh Dairy Event held near Carmarthen. It is a hightlight of the year for many dairy farmers who come long distances to attend. As a show case for the industry it covers everything the modern dairy farmer needs to know as well as being an opportunity for herds to exhibit their best milking cows. We watched the judging ot the Holsteins which was very interesting. Holsteins are huge cows standing over 5ft at the shoulder and were certainly impressive. Our little British Friesians look positively Lilliputian in comparison.
Interestingly the general mood amongst the traders and farmers was very upbeat considering how dairying has been in the doldrums recently. Things seem to be improving and this was reflected in the conversations we had. Of course the one bad thing that continues is the bovine TB problem. Everyone has tales of losing cows and hating sending them off to slaughter.

Autumn, Holiday Cottages

Autumn has set in with misty mornings and a chill in the air. Mist in the valley is usually a promise of a sunny day and with the fine weather the Farmer and Sons have been very busy out hedge-trimming, slurry spreading and logging. The land is still dry and firm so as much work with tractors needs to be done while they can get onto the fields without making a mess.

Th poly-tunnel is still very productive and we are getting a good crop of tomatoes & sweet-peas. The potatoes are doing well and the cabbages seem to have avoided the predations of the cabbage-white caterpillars and the occassional rabbit that has ventured in.

The bookings for the holiday cottage have eased off somewhat but that is to be expected at this time of year, though half-term is booked out and the week after which is good. It has been a difficult year for many holiday accommodation providers in the area...there are more properties available as more people move to the area and decide to convert outbuildings without researching just how much accommodation already exists here. This is not a 'honeypot' area and so we have to really plug away at promoting the Teifi Valley www.visitteifivalley.co.uk The numbers of visitors are not increasing so there are the same number of people to fill a greater number of cottages. A quick count comes up with well over a dozen different holiday accommmodations just within a couple of miles of us and there are several more in the pipeline that I have heard of. For many of us the bookings are down this year which is just something we will have to weather. Travel abroad is so cheap and sunshine guaranteed so west Wales has to really work hard to compete. That said the visitors who do come to the area love it and many return.
www.visitteifivalley.co.uk

Hedgerow Berry Preserves

Yesterday evening and early this morning I was out picking brambles, hawrthorn berries, rose-hips and sloes. All of these except the sloes, are now simmering away to make juice for hedgerow jelly. The sloes of course are destined for immersion in gin!
We seem to be having something of an Indian summer which is glorious and it means that the brambles are now ripening. Up till now they have been slow in ripening and not very sweet, but now with a few days of warm sunshine they are making up for it.
My larder shelves are well-stocked with preserves and it is very satisfying seeing the rows of jars of jams, jellies, marmalade,chutneys and bottled fruits to say nothing of the good quantities of honey we have had this year. It is astonishing how much jam etc. we get through in a year...in cakes, puddings and on toast.

The Farmer & I have spent a couple of days doing some much needed renovation work in the garden around the farmhouse.We have removed a border that had been completely swamped by that demon of the garden, ground elder, and the area will be lawned and I will plant bulbs to naturalise in the grass. We also took out a thick section of hedge that was making the garden dark and damp and have replaced it with a stone wall that will soon settle in and draw a cloak of ivy and small wall plants over itself.

Cider season,

The Farmer has been busy over the past couple of weeks making cider. We have a lot of apple tress here on the farm and we are given apples by people who have no need of them from their gardens so there is a goodly quantity to process. So far the Farmer reckons he has made abour 25 gallons of cider which is sitting in fermenting barrels in the kitchen bubbling away nicely. We also freeze the apple juice as juice which is delicious throughout the winter.
(Since writing this I have been taken to task over 'being unencumbered by research' therefore I apologise and must say that the Farmer has in fact made 35 gallons of cider!)

The farming industry has been full of comment lately regarding the appointment by Jeremy Corbyn, the new Labour leader, of a vegan Shadow Minister for the Environment, Kerry McCarthy. Her remark that meat eaters should be regarded in the same light as smokers is possibly a step too far and will certainly alienate the Labour party from many voters, rural or urban, and risks the Labour being seen as the party of cranks.
This appointment has caused a lot of discussion and but it should be remembered that it just the Shadow Cabinet and quite possibly Ms McCarthy (and Mr Corbyn) may never be in a position to implement these ideas.
That said it is a useful excercise to think seriously about what the implications of banning meat-eating could be.
Veganism & vegetarianism are personal lifestyle choices available to affluent Westerners. Meat & dairy-free diets are highly dependent on imported foodstuffs such as pulses, nuts etc. cannot be grown in this country thereby incresulting in many food-miles.(e.g. most soya (which cannot be guaranteed to be GM free!) comes from Brazil, US, Canada or China). How can this be sensible & ethical when we are all being encouraged to reduce food miles and 'eat local'? On the premise of eating local for 90% of our diet and at this latitude meat is an essential component of a healthy balanced diet. The joke would be if a population of 63 million people were to be dictated to by the 2% who are vegetarian or vegan? I am not anti-vegetarian/vegan, in fact I do a lot of meat-free cooking, and I do think we should eat less meat, but do not believe it should be removed from the diet by legislation...a scenario that is, of course, highly unlikely.
As food producers we are in the very fortunate and rare situation of being able to keep much of our diet very local and with very few food-miles...we use our own milk, meat, eggs and fruit & veg., though not exclusively.
Another question is how do we want our countryside to look? Here in west Wales the patchwork of fields and hedges is the result of livestock keeping because the crop that grows best here is grass and the only way for us to utilise grass is to turn it into meat. Take cattle & sheep away and a much-loved & productive landscape would have to be preserved by legislation or be lost.
(For more information on imported soya go to www.newenvironmentalist.co.uk)

Autumn Harvest, Bovine TB,

We are in the season of fruitfulness, the polytunnel is providing us with a steady supply of tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, carrots, beetroot and courgettes (which sometimes have become marrows). I have been busy making chutneys and freezing brambles as the hedgerows fruits are now beginning to ripen, albeit slowly compared to last year's bumper harvest. There is nowhere near as much available as last year probably due to the lack of sunshine and they are lacking sweetness but mixed with apple they will make good winter puddings. Oddly enough last year was not good for sloes but this year they seem to be much more in evidence so I shall be making sloe gin before too long.

After something over a month without a telephone and really bad broadband connection we are now back online. Am engineer arrived at 8 o'clock yesterday morning and spent the whole day until 5.30pm working on the problem and we now have an internet speed way beyond anything we have ever been led to believe was possible here. After almost two years of persistent difficulties with phones and internet it is amazing to have both working so efficiently and it is all down to the terrier-like determination of the engineer to get the whole thing fixed once and for all, thank you Saul!

We have had two more cattle identified as reactors to the TB test and they went off to slaughter last week. We will have another test in two months time and so the saga goes on. We will continue to be under restrictions until we get two clear tests, so this situation will run well into the new year. The restrictions mean we cannot sell any cattle meaning we will have to keep all our bull calves which normally were sold to be reared elswhere. Hopefully by the time we have reared them to a saleable size as beef animals we will be free of the restrictions.

The swallows are still with us though I guess they wil be heading south before too long. There is a definite chill in the air now and the the leaves are beginning to show signs of golden hues. I saw two herons at one of the ponds this morning who were interupted in their frog fishing by the dogs and took off up into the air with their strange long-legged slow flight and drifted off towards the river where they would be undisturbed by lolloping labradors.

Rabbits, Bovine TB, BT phoneline

My delightful terrier Dottie, has a lovely time snuffling around in hedgerows and under fallen trees on our daily walks around the farm. She has proved herself a very adept rabbit-catcher lately. Rabbits are everywhere at the moment and though they are pretty they are also real pests particularly as they have discovered the poly-tunnel and so have midnight feasts on the lettuces, carrots and anything else they fancy. The Farmer takes on the role of Mr McGregor as often as he can but the bunnies always seem to be one step ahead. Sadly, we have now found that there is myxymytosis in the rabbit population which is awful for the rabbits but it means they are very slow in their reactions and so easy prey for the dog who dispatches them very quickly which is surely better than the the slow lingering death they would otherwise have to endure. This is one of the grim realities of country life and everyone who has their vegetable plots decimated by rabbits will understand the need to control them.

Today the Farmer & the Sons have all the cattle in for TB testing. Having had one reactor to the last routine TB test and have therefore been under restrictions as to selling cattle, we hope that this test will prove clear. We have always maintained a TB-free status until this summer when we had one in-calf heifer show a positive reaction to the test. It was real blow but we have been very lucky in being TB free for so long when it is rife. The reactor heifer was taken away for slaughter and we will be compensated for her but it is not a good situation. The irony of it all that we do not have badgers on the farm, but as we all know rabbits, bats, rats, otter, cats etc. can all be carriers of the TB virus and so control is almost impossible and we have no way of finding out where the disease came from in our one heifer. Sadly even organic farms can succumb.

We have been without a phone for almost a week, again. BT have promised it will be restored to us when they have managed to hire a set of traffic lights!!!
We do have a mobile but signal is not great here and because we rarely use it no-one has the number and so we really do rely on our landline. Oddly, despite having no phone the internet still works... I don't understand how it all works much to the exasperation of the Sons who just raise their eyes to heaven and mutter 'Oh mother, you're hopeless!'

Holiday Cottage Guests, Organic Farming

I've just waved off another pair of happy holiday-makers who have been here in the cottage for a week. It is always lovely when people leave saying how relaxed and peaceful their stay has been and knowing that they have enjoyed what we have to offer. That sounds awfully smug...it is not meant to, but we do appreciate our guests appreciating us!
One of the selling points of the cottage is that it is on an organic farm. We think that is very important and it seems to matter to a number of our holiday-makers. Many book to stay here because it is an organic farm, and also because it is something of a picture-book farm...very traditional. They like the idea that our milk goes into Yeo Valley yoghourt (through OMSCo the organic milk co-operative) and that we produce milk and meat without the use of chemicals and anti-biotics. These basic tenets of organic farming seem to be what the public latches onto and the fact that our animals are out in fields eating grass as they should be. Visitors enjoy seeing the cows come in for milking and ask a lot of questions about dairy farming and organic farming. There is still a lot ignorance about what organic really means and we do our best to explain how and why we farm as we do. Awareness of organic food seems to have waned in the last couple of years and the organic movement has struggled with the perception of it being a niche market for the well-off middle classes. We, as milk producers, cannot market our product as individuals (though there are some very successful entrepreneurial dairy farmers out there e.g Daioni) so are reliant on organisations such as the Soil Association, Organic Farmers & Growers and OMSCo to promote the organic dairy industry on our behalf. Giving people access to organic farms is very important which is why we encourage our guests to see what we do here and host school visits and have open days. It is only when the public see for themselves how organic farming works and why it is beneficial to the land, the livestock and people that sales of organic food will increase.

Despite the weather being somewhat changeable this August there are still plenty of lovely days with dramatic cloud-strewn skies and light breezes waving through the trees. We have had large gatherings of seagulls in our newly mown silage fields. The glimmering of the sun glints on the silver wings of the adult birds as they wheel around the sky and the flecked tawny colouring of the the young birds contrasts with purity of the white and grey plumage of the adults. The young birds are very raucous though not as noisy as the young buzzards we have resident on the farm. They have been particularly vocal recently as they soar above the yard circling on the thermals. Their voices mingle with the persistent cheerful chatter of the swallows as they perform their amazing acrobatics.