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.

FACE annual meeting 2010 Leckford Estate

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Had an interesting day at the Leckford Estate, (after finding the Village Hall as my sat nav doesn't quite pin point the whole postcode! )
John Lee (Chairman of FACE) set the scene for the day and we had a welcome and introduction by Malcolm Crabtree (Managing Director of Leckford) who gave us an insight into the afternoon's trip.
The estate is a worker's democracy it was purchased my John Spedan Lewis of Oxford Street London in 1928 and formed into a Ltd company in 1929 and now forms an important part of Waitrose.
The Leckford Farm:

• produces 30 ton of mushrooms per week
• 230 acres of fruit but the harvest this year is less than last year being approx 800 ton not 1200 ton
• Organic processing dairy unit
• Winter Wheat milled into Leckford Flour
• Oats
• Spring Barley
• Free range Egg Flocks
• Free range Chicken flock

We were then given a talk by Amanda Dance Event and Education Manger followed by Mary Noyce Consultant to the Rural dimension.
Meg Hart FACE regional co ordinator gave us highlights of the work in her area in the last 12 months and this was followed by Bill Graham on FACE's acheivements this year.
John Lee summed up the presentations and asked Sir Don Curry to give the closing remarks which gave us a positive outlook for the future of farm education and working with partners to acheive this.
After a superb lunch from the farm produce we climbed aboard the tractor and trailers for a very informative tour of the Farm and Longstock Park Water Gardens

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

Our Welsh Farm visit to Llangewydd Primary

Thanks to Llangewydd Primary for letting me visit with Freddie and Pillow, we all had a great time although Freddie was a little restless. Both lambs love their new names and certificates have been sent to school.

There was a vote in each class and the most popular won.

The school had the theme "keen to be green" so we discussed the properties of wool and it's uses.
They were given seeds to grow and we discussed food miles on a lamb dinner and the benefits of local and fair trade food.