It's been a long time but we're nearly there! The roof is finally going on and we have the Dolton Ladies Phoenix group to thank for the money to put the lid on this project. We have managed really well with a tarpaulin and some roofing felt very kindly donated by Mark Hedges and have been able to shelter from the wet weather during our Forest School sessions.  Soon it will be totally weathertight and will look very authentic....and hopefully Stuart can sort out the smokey fire!
This autumn has been a disappointment for us, although a lot of the rain has fallen in the night and we have enjoyed all or our schools' visits.  The ground is sodden, providing a lot of mud to suck our boots in and slip us up!

Winter is coming!

The arrival of Spring!

Here at Nethercott we have just waved goodbye to our final school of this term (St. Swithuns R.C. Primary in Southsea) after a wonderful week of sunshine, hard work and laughter. At the same time our goslings have started to hatch out...just in time for the children to see it happening before they went home.
The rhubarb is bursting forth and is already being brought into the kitchen to make delicious puddings. Stuart is getting ready to plant our potatoes on Davids' field and it will be a busy Easter holiday in the garden as well as at The South West Food Fair in Exeter where we have a stand. Come and visit if you're in the area on Friday 13th, Saturday 14th and Sunday 15th April in Northernhay Gardens. There will be opportunities to work with our cooks making flavoured breads, oaty flapjacks, butter and apple juice.
During our Forest School sessions on Tuesdays there have been several willow hurdles made and taken back to school to beautify outdoor spaces. Our willowbed has been harvested to provide us with more materials for making all sorts of wonderful woven things, such as plates, headdresses and dreamcatchers.
We wish all our friends and 'Old Farmers' a very happy Easter and look forward to seeing you all again soon.

After a pretty cold May and a cloudy and chilly half-term, the weather has now come good for our first school of the summer proper! There are loads of chicks hatching out and a couple of young goslings in the cob shed with their parents. The vegetable garden is visibly changing every day and things are growing so fast. In the house we are eating new potatoes, rhubarb, salad leaves, parsley, strawberries and radishes. Our last 4 pigs are providing us with delicious sausages and pork and we have loads of eggs every day. Things will only get more abundant as the growing season progresses and we are planning to get more weaners in September to supplement our pork stocks.
On Saturday 23rd July we will be at The Mid-Devon Show in Tiverton as the charity of the show, so come and see us there if you can. We are also running a Grand Draw to coincide with the show and tickets are available from Nethercott from this week.
Our family of Bluetits fledged last week and now the nestbox is very empty. We had a lot of pleasure out of watching the laying and hatching of eggs and seeing the parents coming again and again with food for their chicks. Sadly, one of them died before it was fully-grown but hopefully the rest of them are living independently and successfully around Nethercott.
Joseph, Chriss and Bluebell are in the yard waiting for the farrier to come and trim their feet today. They don't enjoy that much but it needs doing!
Roll on another enjoyable half term and long may this weather last.

Spring turns cool and cloudy.

April has been so warm, dry and sunny and we have all enjoyed it very much, but......the farmers need rain to make the grass grow so that they can make a lot of sileage. We need it to help our potato crop as well and the River Okement is low enough for us to walk through it from one side to the other (stopping to skim stones on the way!)
Our pigs went to the slaughterhouse during the Easter holidays and we are now eating delicious sausages and roast pork. The pig shed seems very empty and won't be welcoming more weaners until September. We have more eggs than we can eat as the hens are laying so well. There are turkeys and geese sitting on eggs as well as loads in the incubators.
Death Hill is covered in buttercups and thistles, which makes rolling down it quite painful on the stock check....but we still do it! Now the smell of cooking pizza is wafting up the stairs to my office as I write after the children from Curledge Street Primary in Paington have spent today cooking their tea.

Spring is definitely on its' way in!

We've been enjoying a wonderfully mild and sunny period which has pleased our two most recent schools. It was coats off and draped over the cob oven during our Forest School session on Tuesday and we were all sorry to have to go indoors....even for lunch! Our pigs are fattening up fast and are due to go to the abbattoir on April 12th which means that we need another chest freezer to store them in. Graham and Jonathon have finished lambing and David has started his so there are plenty of lambs in the fields enjoying the sunshine, some needing bottle-feeding. The dairy herd at Parsonage Farm are going out into the fields during the day which means that the electric fence is back....a favourite job for most children! Two goslings hatched out on Thursday and there are plenty more eggs in the incubators so everything is moving forward in a very seasonal way. We welcome the light mornings particularly and the evenings are drawing out too.

Winter at Nethercott

It's been a long time since my last post and winter is well and truly under way...so much so, in fact, that it is the middle of January and Christmas is well and truly in the oast! We were very snowed out over the holidays so it was difficult to get in and care for the poultry and donkeys. Barry took the tractor home so that at least he could come and go every day while those of us with only cars couldn't get very far at all.
Now we are in 2011 and are 2 schools into the term. We are pleased to be welcoming 3 new schools to start the year with Lark Hall Primary from Stockwell, London here at the moment. The weather has been damp and mild and is now cold and clear and sunny. Lots of cold fingers and toes first thing in the morning! We have established cooking as a regular activity on Tuesdays, when the children make their own tea (pizza, salads and puddings). Next week we will start to operate a three-way division so that we can run Forest School, Toms Talk and cooking every week.
I am posting a selection of pictures taken over the winter and depicting the wonderful bonfire Sunnyhill Primary from Streatham, London enjoyed, as well as some of our pigs which went to the slaughterhouse last week and Lark Hall children cooking.
A Happy New Year to all our friends and farmers!

John Perryn Primary School are here!

After an enormous amount of rain we are now experiencing blue skies and sunshine, although it is very cold first thing. Luckily for us, the rain has left puddles and mud to get stuck in, but none of it matters because we are well dressed up against the elements! Today the children made their tea with our cooks, Leanne and Angela. They made delicious fruit tarts and salads as well as cheese and tomato pizzas and biscuits. There are some real budding cooks among them so maybe they will prepare a meal for you when they get home!
The sky is darkening and it's time to light the log fire and get ready for tea. Tomorrow it's back to farm work for everyone but today was fun and the cooks really enjoyed working with the children.

It's half-term already!

We're coming to the end of our last school week before half term and wonder where the time has gone! The weather has been very kind to us for ages with lots of mellow autumn sunshine and temperatures way above what we could hope for....will it continue for my walk along Hadrians Wall on 30th October? I doubt it!
Kings Hedges have enjoyed a full week watching the pigs grow, their arrows fly and the fires crackle. We will be sorry to see them go and I suspect they may feel the same. I hope every old farmer has a good break and we will be back in the swing in a few weeks.

Autumn is here!

So here we are in the new term and the new year and it's been a restful and enjoyable summer for me...I hope it has for all of you reading this, too! We have been enjoying some of the best of seasonal autumn weather and the fruits of the season are in abundance. On our Sunday walks we have been picking blackberries and eating them in our fruit salads and as blackberry mousse. The elderberries are hanging off the trees and the plan is for Widey Court Primary school to gather them in on the Sunday walk this week. It is a bumper apple harvest this year and Hilary and I have started to pick eating apples for the fruit bowls at Nethercott Barton with the kind permission of Bob and Wendy Barrett. Next week we will be picking for making apple juice and I expect we will make gallons! The potato harvest is safely in thanks to both Prior Weston and Whetstone Field Primary Schools and there has been a real opportunity for everyone to clearly see the route of some of our food from the fields/trees/garden to the plate. The squashes are ready for roasting and form a part of Sunday lunch alongside our own roast pork and all the runner beans are picked and frozen. Three types of chutney have been made, rhubarb, marrow and apple, and will be for sale in the shop.
Four new pigs arrived a few weeks ago and they are already settling in and beginning to nibble at childrens' feet through the bottom of the fence. This time they are very gingery and spotty, two boars and two sows.
The turkeys are sitting on eggs but yesterday and today we picked one out that was definitely full of liquid and not chick, and broke them on a stone to see just what is the worst smell in the world!!!!!!!! Ask the children of Whetstone Field Primary School and they'll have the answer.
On Tuesday we had a great time in the spinney making things out of natural materials; willow snails, wooden medallions with rush rope, charcoal out of burnt willow and bows and arrows which have been played with constantly since then.
So...a lot of fun and a lot of hard work and a lot of food production and collecting...I love the autumn!!!!!!!!

I've been having a bit of difficulty uploading the photos I took of the rapidly-cobbed roundhouse so I'm here to have another try! On Tuesday St. George's Primary from Wrotham in Kent left only one small panel to cob and we had a lot of fun covering the roundhouse (and ourselves) with mud! The weather has continued to surpass expectations and the children have worked hard covering the silage and cleaning out the rest of Colly's Barn as well as the rest of the routine farm jobs. Partly because of the heat, I think they're all quite tired and will be ready for a lie-in at home on Saturday.

Still trying to upload the pictures.

As promised, here are photos of the work we all did yesterday putting cob onto the woven hazel walls of the roundhouse. The weather was perfect and everyone was really enthusiastic, with the result that several more panels were completed and we are confident that it will all be finished within this term. If so, our cooks Leanne and Angela, are planning to run cooking sessions with the children so that they can all have a part in cooking their own tea. These will happen on Tuesdays during the winter months,especially when the weather is too poor to want to be outside for the whole day. But the first one will happen in July because they can't wait to try it out! Any ideas for dishes children can prepare?

A huge 'thank you!' to all those who came to our Open Day on Sunday 30th May. The weather was really great and, apart from the fact that the bouncy castle wasn't delivered, the It's a Knockout competition more than made up for it! Graham's commentary was witty and pithy and it was lovely to see everyone eating, drinking and soaking up the sunshine on the lawn as they watched. We raised just over £1000 and couldn't have done any of it without the loyal support of our staff and friends. Titchfield Primary School from Hampshire were represented by their steel band during the afternoon and many people commented on the quality of their playing. They were really good!
For the last 5 weeks of the academic year we are concentrating on finishing the cob walls of the roundhouse so that it can be thatched during the summer holidays. Let's hope that the schools which are due to visit us in the near future are ready for a challenge. Tomorrow I will be taking photos of cob-making and they will be posted asap.

Now that the swallows are here it is time to start adding the cob to the walls of our roundhouse so Stuart is today working with groups of children from Goodrich Primary School in East Dulwich to do just that. There's nothing to beat getting stuck in to clay and mud and daubing it onto the woven hazel walls....plenty of pairs of sticky hands to wash! At the present rate we should see at least one wall panel a week being completed on the outside and maybe we'll get faster as we get better at it? The weather is lovely today...warm and still and the rooks are cawing like mad high in their nests in the pine tree. A perfect Nethercott day.
On 30th May at 2pm we are holding another of our Open Days with a Fun Team Triathlon event (teams of 6 competing in a succession of challenging rounds involving a greasy pole amongst other things!) so if you can make it here get your family along and show them the place where you spent a week on a farm. Perhaps your school staff will make up a triathlon team for a bit of fun? The more the merrier! There will be good food, drink, stalls and games in the idyllic setting that is Nethercott House and we hope to see you there!

Easter at Nethercott House

Here we are in the middle of the Easter holidays and the weather has finally come up with the goods! The sun is shining and it is almost warm (though it wasn't at all when I let out the poultry this morning). The incubators are all full and due to hatch out from any time soon. There are several chicks already under lights and we're all eagerly awaiting the hatching of the turkeys eggs. I've never seen turkey chicks here in my 5 years so I can't wait.
We've decided to hold a free Teachers Weekend on 20th/21st November this year for staff from schools who would like to have a taste of what we offer children. When all the places are taken that will be it so if you know anyone who may be interested they need to contact us soon!
I hope all our 'old farmers' are enjoying the Easter break as we are and that those who are due to come and visit us between April and July are looking forward to it, as are we. Our next event will be our Open Day on Sunday 30th May so watch this space and we hope to see you there.

At last, clear blue skies and sunshine, although a sneaky N.E. wind is making it pretty chilly here. Never mind, in sheltered spots it's glorious. Our plan tomorrow is to light the fire in the roundhouse and make charcoal drawing sticks which we can use to draw on pieces of bark. Barry is going to make a wooden pig so watch this space...! Today there was ice on puddles and baby lambs to bottle-feed as well as shetland ponies on Death Hill.
Hyde Park Junior School are having a great time and a group have just set off across the lawn field to collect the donkeys. Time to light the Quiet Room fire I think...

I'm trying to get my head round this blogging thing and want to let you view photos of the progress of the roundhouse from the beginning to now. Let's see how I get on!

Our roundhouse, half-finished though it is, has come into its' own already as a perfectly serviceable shelter from the elements when we do our Forest School sessions on Tuesdays. The weather turned against us this week and there was drizzle and a little blustery wind, although it was much milder than of late! Titchfiels Primary School entered into the spirit of things with a log fire on which to cook scones using our new tripod and making charcoal drawing sticks and rush rope. Outside under a thick holly tree Barry helped to saw discs of hazel with which to make medallions and several groups had a go at creating a spark with the magnesium sticks. We all enjoyed eating our scones as soon as they were cooked and everyone ended up smelling strongly of smoke and understanding a little of the trials of our ancestors in living in a roundhouse!

What a relief to be rid of the snow and back to normality. It looked very beautiful but prevented us from travelling freely and caused our first school of the year a few worries when they feared they might not be able to get to us. As it turned out, everything melted away in time and we are half-way through a lovely week. Milder temperatures and some sunny skies have made it a pleasure to be out and about although there was a sneaky cold wind in the spinney today during our Forest School session. The campfire struggled to heat us up but the children were incredibly resilient and made charcoal, sawed wood for pendants and wove things from willow without complaining! Thanks for that.
Three new piglets will be arriving next week as well as a new stag turkey with some females. We'd love to be able to hatch out some of their eggs so fingers crossed that they will be good and fertile. The bulbs are just poking up above ground so spring is definitely coming.
Quote of the week so far;
Q."What does a heifer become when it has had its' second calf?" A. "A sheep".
(Thank you, Eleanor!)