Adopting ex-battery chickens (or re-homing hens!)

Today we made a start on re-stocking our little smallholding with that most versatile of creatures, the chicken. Or rather, four chickens (despite the ardent lobbying of the toddler son who for some reason had the figure of twenty stuck firmly in his head). We had decided to offer a genteel home county retirement to some […]

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Week two: Hello dog, goodbye alpacas

This week marked what I think is our first big lesson about smallholding, to whit, that we had some very strong preconceived notions of what this would be like. I wanted to like the alpacas, I really did. They were so dainty, with their pretty eyelashes and their long graceful necks. I had visions of […]

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Week one: Settling on our smallholding

What a week. And what a shame that so much of it has been spent inside but with a little boy and two cats (my life really is filled with marvellous small noisy beings), getting the house unpacked so that they could feel like they were home seemed to be a priority. We’ve had a […]

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