Phew, welcome to 2019. Let’s hope that you all had a lovely Xmas and New Year and that all is back to normal in your households. We had a lovely rest, enjoyed spending time with friends and family, walked the dogs and generally recharged our batteries ready for the challenges of 2019. Our shop has reopened today and is fully stocked up, we are back in full production making our hen corns, pigeon foods and wild bird foods, ready for you to give your birds the best possible nutrition at prices that make you happy too. We have been interviewed for a farming magazine with Robyn, our youngest daughter. The magazine was initially interested in her story about how she coped with her epilepsy while living on a farm with the related challenges of not being able to drive etc, but they also interviewed Chris and me about our Bird food...

And so it begins, Harvest 2018 in the most unusual year of our farming lives. After the Beast from the East in March 2018 we are now experiencing the hottest summer since records began if this hot season keeps up throughout August. We have begun by cutting the Winter barley, then Winter oats which were a very dry and crisp crop which is mostly droughted off but we will get what crop there is and it most certainly will not need to be dried as I’m sure there is so little moisture in the grain that it will be fried to a crisp. We use the same farming contractor every year and his new combine is fitted with tracks as you can possibly see by the photos, although I don’t think that they will be needed this year like in other years when we have been almost flooded out! The cutting...

We all remember the Beast from the East, the snow that visited us early in March and then repeated its visit a couple of weeks later.  Now we seem to be plagued by torrential rain and cold weather so that Spring feels far away still, but hopefully this weekend will see an upturn in temperatures for the whole of the UK. The RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch seems such a long time ago after all of our extreme weather since then, but, trumpet fanfare, the results are in......pause for effect,  More than 420,000 people completed the count and 6.7 million birds were recorded.  Its good news for the blue tit (pictured) as their numbers are up by 5% but the winner seems to be the goldfinch with recorded numbers up by 11%. The long tailed tit and coal tit are also up in numbers, perhaps helped by the milder temperatures before...