Happy New Year

Happy New Year, lots of news and happpenings on the Farm.

We have planted approx 150 native trees this year hoping they will all catch.

This is Farmhouse breakfast week and we are involved in breakfast with a local school on Wednesday preparing home made granola bars with British rolled oats and Glamorganshire Honey a great recipe for those pumpkin seeds you kept from your Halloween pumpkins. Recipe and pictures to follow :-)

We also are having a free breakfast community event with workshops on homemade bread,poached egg prepared in the microwave and armchair exercises to keep you moving the "keep it shaking" butter making experiment will be at both events if you want more details visit here

National Farmhouse Breakfast detail at Shake up your Wake up

Sheep are now all in the shed and scanned we changed our scanning system this year and the sheep are scanned upright and is finished in a few hours.

Will be updating the website with the new video shortly

Results 33 sets of triplets, 323 sets of twins , 179 singles expected seems we will have a busy time!

Also another visit from our friends the students from Maison Familiale Rurale in March.

Sausage and Mash Club on tour

It is British sausage week and we are celebrating  with our bangers before bonfire night.

Check out the recipes on the Love Pork Website

Last years activities led to an extra 572 ton of sausage eaten during sausage week!

Let us know what your favourite recipe is or where your favourite Sausage & Mash is served in Bridgend we would like to know what is happening.

Leave comments at The Real Food Box or Feastival

The Bridgend  Sausage and Mash club are on tour this week to sample some local sausage by Maddocks Kembrey Butchers in Maesteg being served with mustard mash and red onion gravy at Creation Cafe Blaengarw.

Creation Cafe is a great place to source local and delicious food at reasonable prices, but booking needed for Thursday's sausage & mash extravaganza. Please ring Ruth or Nicola to book your place 01656 353919. the Cafe is situated in Katie Street Blaengarw.

Happy British Sausage Week make sure they are British!

SMILE 2011 & Open Farm Sunday

SMILE (Students Motivate Innovative Learning through Enterprise.) 2011

2011 celebration day was upon us .Clare George  is an IT Lecturer at Bridgend College and has received the ‘Most Enterprising Teacher Award 2009' approached me to help with a planting workshop for the day.

The theme this year was "the plight of the Bumble Bee" and details of the winning song by Dolau Primary will be published shortly it will be available to download from i tunes and we are hoping for a no 1 it is brilliant :-)

We watched the Video Logs and songs which were produced with the students of Bridgend college a great time was had by all by the looks of things.

There were 7 workshops and we were all kept busy in the sunshine at Kenfig Nature reserve. We made recycled newspaper pots in which we put some salad leaf seeds to grow, the pupils were very knowledgable about bees and their importance in life.This was a great opportunity to tell the pupils and teachers about Open Farm Sunday and I gave them the details of the farms in their areas this weekend.

For more details of Farms in your area contact Open Farm Sunday

 Congratulations to Litchard Primary who made the winning Bumble Bee design that was built by the apprentices in the engineering Department of Bridgend college.

This now has a permanent place at Kenfig Nature Reserve and we hope it attracts more bees to the reserve ;-)

Also congratulations to Llanilltyd Fawr Primary that won the video log it was buzzing with entertainment

The Planting workshop was well attended and the schools recieved goodie bags to return to school with seeds for their gardens and learned how to make bee habitats from the other workshops.

 

Also the day would not have been complete without Clare on the Hooter

Don't forget the big day with LEAF on Sunday

 Open Farm Sunday

Discover Life on a British Farm June 12th 2011

Bridgend ESDGC Conference Tondu Primary

Our Welsh Farm had a brilliant day at the ESDGC conference we were one of many stalls promoting this subject at Tondu Primary School.

The Opening speech was made by James Fletcher, a climate change champion in 2008 from Pengam , Caerphilly . He is currently studying a BA in Politics and International Relations at Reading University. An inspirational speaker and we will watch this space for more news..............

a clip below from 2008

This was followed by Steve Lambert who shared some of his experiences of best practice as part of the Sustainable Development Team in BCBC. All this and more was shared with teachers at the end of the conference as a resource DVD.

Thanks to all the teachers who visited "Our Welsh Farm" in the IT suite and if anyone missed us and would like to get in touch please do.

Don't forget to visit Open Farm Sunday to find a farm near you.  Grab your wellies and visit a Farm on June 12th 2011!

Our Welsh Farm is back!!

Huge apologies to those that have missed us over the holidays but website is now back on line unfortunately no webcams at the moment as the electrics controlling the streaming have not dried out and been tested yet. we are working on it but please enjoy the rest of the site.

 Happy New Year

Very Busy Summer, awards and Harvest!

Sorry for no posts but we have been updating the website and now have 3 cameras live!!

We all took our family holiday to the Royal Welsh (that's us and the children we didn't take the sheep!). Lots to see including the world Golden Shears competition and new Food Hall.

I was lucky to be runner up in the NFU/Natwest Welsh Rural Champion Awards.

We managed to get our Harvest in though the rain in August did mean it was a little here and a little there so silage and wrapped bale silage this year no Hay :-(
We also managed to get some barley straw from a neighbouring farm in the Vale of Glamorgan.

We were also nominated for the Bayer/FACE innovative learning awards story to follow shortly.......

The Red deer have increased we bought in 5 young hinds so hopefully lots of deer calves next year.

some of our Deer's friends at Blaenhow

10 Green Bottle recycled Greenhouse and Bridgend SMILE project

I was fortunate to be invited to the award ceromony of SMILE in Bridgend recreation centre last month and met Claire George.

Claire is an IT Lecturer at Bridgend College and has received the ‘Most Enterprising Teacher Award 2009' from the education team at Enterprise UK, the campaign to increase entrepreneurial behavior in the UK.
Claire has worked with 5 primary schools which entered into the SMILE (Students Motivate Innovative Learning via Enterprise’) project and has plenty of more ideas for further projects.Claire with her fellow colleagues in the construction academy from Bridgend college are going to build a 10 green bottle recycled greenhouse in a local primary school annually.

Claire approached me "Our Welsh Farm" to come along and help the pupils plant some seeds ready for the greenhouse. I attended the school and with the pupils made some recycled plant pots from newspaper and the children planted salad leaf seeds these they were going to take home.

We then used the bottoms of the 2litre bottles that had been discarded from the build and planted these up we had a talk about the properties of wool and put some raw fleece in the bottom of the seed planters as an experiment we are hoping that by watering daily the moisture will last in the pot by absorption in the fleece to save the caretaker watering over the weekends we will let you know the outcomes......

Below are the photos we took and along with the seeds and weeds club hoping to have a project with pumpkins in the autumn.

We are very grateful to FACE http://www.face.org.uk/ and the NFU for the seeds