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.

Are you ready for Farmhouse Breakfast?

Farmhouse Breakfast Week is on it's way.......... January 23rd - 29th

Shake up to Wake up

lots of recipes, information and ways to get involved on the website.

facts taken from website:

Send your children to school on a full tummy and get a glistening school report!

Research done by the Cardiff University School of Psychology, led by Professor Andrew Smith has shown that eating breakfast helps children function better in school than those who skip the first meal of the day. The results revealed children who start the day with cereal are:



•9 percent more alert

•11 percent less emotionally distressed

•13 percent less tired

•17 percent less anxious

•10 percent less likely to suffer memory and attention span difficulties, than those that have no breakfast

•33 percent less likely to suffer from stomach complaints.

So what are you doing for Farmhouse Breakfast? Get involved !

Farmhouse Breakfast Week

Pictures from a previous event school children with fruit kebabs and cheese and bacon toasties and a local Rugby player Dale McIntosh (former international player)

The bacon was -British ,the cheese- Welsh and the Milk from the local dairy Ty Tanglwyst (silver award winner in the "True Taste 2010")

"What do you know about great British Bangers?"

British Sausage Week November 1st - 7th
great website for all info: British Sausage Week



For those strictly dancing fans Craig Revel Horwood will be dancing around the country as celebrity British sausage judge.

We have had some venison sausages made and they tasted delicious with hardly any food miles attached.

We won Innovative learning with Bayer / FACE awards 2010

"Farmers on tour" we were invited to the Tower of London for lunch in the New Armouries Banqueting suite it is called "new" as it originated in the 17th and 18th centuries please see The Tower of London for more details

We won the BAYER/FACE Innovative learning award and were presented by Jim Paice Minister for Agriculture and Gary Richardson from the Countryside Foundation for Education

For more resources for Farm education please visit the FACE website

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