December 2005

There's a down side to working all the hours God sends... you get exhausted and drained and then some hard truths need to be faced.

Mark and I are fed up to the back teeth of working as hard as we do whilst living without "two halfpennies to rub together" (that shows my age!). So this was a month of action. We had some coaching sessions with a friend, Derek to shift some limiting beliefs and move things along a bit... watch this space!

December held wet markets (that didn't bode well for the money turnaround plans), and hot on the back of celebrating no cow escapes this year, the horses decided that the electric fence was a challenge to be overcome and that the neighbours garden was the goal. We have one horse, Bruce, who should surely be a Badminton contender! Anyway, our neighbours are understandably, completely unimpressed by his athleticism and they are now barracaded in with trailers on all sides, and the holes in the lawn have been filled with compost which in due course we will topsoil and seed. Some relationships seem destined to be continually tested.

Last year we struggled to cope with some rather rickety pig pens that I had made "Heath Robinson" style. They served the purpose, but were difficult to clean and the continual battering they got from the pigs meant they were a rather different shape at the end of the season to what they had been at the beginning! Well, a rather nice man called Daryl visited one weekend and offered to build us some nice new pens. It all happened this month. He and Geoff (now returned to the USA to swear his citizen's oath), cut out bits of pipe, bolted things to the floor and ceiling and each other and in two days had created a framework of 5 pens with gates and space for the tractor to scrape out. The big pigs moved into the front pen and now enjoy rampaging around the yard with the cows, and we had a delivery of little pigs from Prudence who have taken up residence in the back pen. It's all very civilised and they have shelter, can be cleaned every day and now even have running water to each pen... bliss. This is another example of how greatly we are supported by our friends and visitors. It seems so strange that we hang by a thread financially, and yet there is all this magic around us. Well, Daryl caught the "barter" part of our lives and we are seeking some breeding Ixworth chickens for his smallholding in Cheshire as a starter.

Turkeys were duly dispatched and plucked without too much ado. As always, I was grateful for the help of Sandie, my cutting room chum, who came to help make shed loads of sausages and sausagemeat for the Christmas orders.

As Mark ran around like a headless chicken on a couple of days before Christmas as people arrived to collect their orders and Lorraine was either at Markets or in various parts of the country delivering, Matthieu (our French WWOOFer) took charge of the animals and Saffron (who lost her first calf last year) decided to produce Eve, a beautiful heifer, born in the yard as the last person took their parcel away, on Christmas Eve!

We enjoyed a relatively quiet Christmas, Mark, me, the animals, Matthieu, Emily... and a variety of friends passing through.

As the year draws to a close we give thanks for the infinite blessings we have received this year and the continued opportunity to live the life we are living. We also make a commitment to turn things around in 2006. It is clear to us that it is not financially sustainable for us to continue in the direction we are going. We do not know how to do it, but by this time next year, we want the farm to be financially viable and for the abundance we experience in "things" and people, support and friendship to be visible in our bank account too.