Our journey over the last couple of years has been a real adventure, from keeping chickens and turkeys, to catching fish and game, making sausages and cheese, learning to pickle and preserve a variety of foods. Our neighbours have acted as quality control kindly sampling produce. We hatched 15 Cornish Giant chickens back in Feb 09 finished weights range between 6-8.5 lbs.

The bees are still alive after the snow and we are looking forward to establishing two more hives this year. cheese making has not happened due to the long cold period it needs to be over freezing and below 8 degrees C to mature the cheese in the workshop.

We made 20lbs of low fat turkey sausages again this Christmans from one of our 4 turkeys, with port and cranberry and chestnut and turkey with wild mushroom ( fantastic) . We picked 25lbs of mussels again in Jan. We invested in a vack pack machine last year this increases the storage time for frozen and fresh foods by around 3 times.

Elderflower champagne is really worth making but very difficult to keep in the bottle, lively on opening too if not chilled properly! We have developed the front garden further increasing the area we can grown veg. In May we will go mackerel fishing again which we will hot smoke turn into roll mops and freeze the rest which later we will turn into fish cakes, pasties and curry, which if somewhat unusual, is great. I intend to go fishing from the boat again this year hopefully with better results..

If you would like to support the campagin to stop intensive rearing of chickens then click here