What can I say? December was a filthy month with gale-force winds and lashing rain and deep, deep wellie-pulling mud. I’m sure that most mornings it didn’t get light until well-gone 10, and by 3 o’clock it was definitely getting dark again. And it rained a lot … did I mention the rain? There was some quite serious flooding in the area, mostly to the south of us, towards Gloucester and the Forest of Dean, but thankfully, having cleared a lot of our drainage ditches during last summer (which turned out to be a very prescient move!), all the rainfall was carried away from Green Farm to swell the rivers elsewhere.
For
some reason, we had a huge amount of mistletoe growing this winter – we
always have plenty growing in the old perry pear orchard, but I came
across lots more growing in trees I’d never seen it in before – field
maples and blackthorn. Something in the air? Who knows, but I think the
animals had an inkling of something, and for a while seemed to forget
their differences and learned to share!
Friends,
the ones that don’t spend their lives looking after livestock, often
ask me how I feel about taking our lambs to slaughter and then eating
them? I remember my very first trip to the abattoir … loading the lambs
(and nice fat lambs they were too!), and feeling a bit of a twinge
knowing that this would be their first and last trip away from the farm.
But when I collected them, fully butchered, a couple of weeks later and
the butcher told me what super lambs they were – great conformation and
we’d got the condition just right, I couldn’t conceal my pride that
we’d firstly picked a good ‘eating’ breed of sheep, and secondly that –
even as beginners, we’d managed to rear them properly.We’ve now got a thriving small business (our private lamb sales actually make a profit!), and many of our friends and a growing list of customers enjoy tasty lamb and hogget knowing its provenance, high-welfare and minimal food miles from field to fork. So obviously, our Christmas dinner had to have similar credentials … and we chose Goose … in fact, we chose one of the geese that we’d spent several days filming during 2013! So my motto is, get to know your meat, learn about how it’s reared – any you’ll enjoy every forkful that little bit more!
