We had a brilliant weekend – not sure why, I’ve never worked so hard or been so sore, but we gots loads done, and had really good fun doing it!

The weather was surprisingly mild and dry, and in Wales, that means outdoor work. You can never count on the weather being dry on the weekends, so when it happens, all indoor tasks get abandoned and we put on wellies to head out. 

The downside, of course, is that the house ends up a tip, filled with mud and muddy trousers (Benjamin went through three pairs in one day.) But I’ll just have to cope with that later…

We started out Saturday morning going up to the top field to do some hedging. I wanted some willow to build a willow tunnel in the new garden, and Rich wanted to finish off trimming the hedge.  So we packed everyone on to the quad bike and headed up.  I cut willow twigs for the tunnel, Joli and Benjamin collected them for me and put them on the quad, and Rich trimmed the hedge with his machete.

Rich with his machete

Hedges are a big part of rural Wales. They’re long stretches of thick growth of a particular type – willow, alder, beech, blackthorn – anything that’s thick and prickly and grows quickly. The hedge gets chopped half-way through and laid on its side every year, and shoots spring straight up from the fallen stem. Over time, this grows into a thick barrier that prevents animals from wandering from one field to another. Hedging is a particular skill, and one that is in high demand. Luckily for us, Rich is at good at that as he is at everything else.

The dresser Rich made from a tree he cut down

Handy man to have around, that Rich…he can make a harp, cut down a tree and turn it into a beautiful traditional Welsh dresser, midwife a lamb, weld a trailer out of metal, cherish a child, fix an engine, butcher a pig, cook a roast dinner, run a farm, dance like a madman, make a brilliant cup of tea, shoot the eye out of fox all the way across a field and howl at the moon. The kids that he used to teach in school call him “Lege,” short for Legend, and you can certainly see why…

Anyway, once we had enough willow poles for the tunnel, we went down to clean out the pig pen, armed with shovels, wheelbarrow and brush. Rich shut the pigs into their little house with an iron gate, and Taid leaned against the gate and kept them inside while Rich and I brushed and shoveled.  

The pigs are quite big now – and they can bite, apparently, although ours never have. Benjamin has been quite frightened by their grunting and oinking, and it’s taken him weeks to be able to walk by the pen without running away. Pigs eat meat and their teeth are sharp and pointed – and even Rich is a little wary of them!

One of the pigs - this one is named Porkchops

I feel really ambivalent about the pigs – I worry that they’re too smart to keep and slaughter. Truth be told, I think I read Charlotte’s Web a few too many times when I was a kid. But then again, I do eat pork – and it just seems terribly intellectually dishonest to be willing to eat pork if someone else does the dirty work, but unwilling to deal with the live animals.

So I try not to get too attached to them, or feel too guilty as I walk by the pen. We’ve named them Porkchops and Applesauce, just to remind us…

It’s funny, growing up on the farm, Benjamin doesn’t seem to have any of these conflicts. I was telling him about the chicks we’re going to hatch, and how cute they’re going to be, and he said, “And then we’re going to eat the chickens, right mummy?”

And I sighed, and said that yes, we would be eating some of the boy chickens that we couldn’t keep.

Now that is going to be a challenge to my city girl squeamishness –  eating chickens culled from the chicks that I hatched and raised. Don’t know if I’ll manage it or not…

Once we had the pig pen clean and the pigs comfy on a freshened bed of dry straw, we went down the hill to clean out the old goose pen. 

Taid has just bought a group of twenty rescued battery hens, and they settled right in and kept laying without a hitch! He’s getting around ten eggs a day, and we suddenly have more eggs than we know what to do with. 

He wanted to put them in the old chicken house at the bottom of the orchard, so that they could range over the hill along with the geese during the day. But first it needed cleaning.

So we scraped and shoveled and dumped out loads of old shavings until all was presentable, and then put bags of fresh new shavings that Rich brought home with him from work. Benji even had a look inside the chicken house:

So it was a lot of digging, shoveling and goose poo on Valentines, but fantastic to get a chance to be outside!

A new feeling for me, to have the comfortable feeling that the animals were clean and settled and happy in their new homes, partly due to my efforts…one of the satisfactions of being on the farm…