Hi and Good morning to you all.
Been lurking in the background on here for a while and thought I say "Hi"
My names Mark and I'm just starting a smallholding with a friend of mine, we're renting 1.75 acres from the local parish council.
Our plan is to keep pigs, chickens, veg and bees.
We aim to grow lots and lots of veg, some to sell to friends and family, we also have 2 farm shops in the village that want as much as we can produce and a local butcher that will have pork from us. We're not doing as a money making scheme but trying to cover ours costs and get our food for little or no money, well thats the plan!!
I love the River Cottage way of life and think one day hopefully to pull it off, I enjoy growing veg at home and have more or less turned the whole garden over to veg and chickens. I have learn't how to butcher pigs with my local butcher and enjoy making sausages, choritzo and samarmi's, this year I'm hoping that my first air dried ham will come good, but will have to wait till about august to try it!! lol
We have got pigs lined up and my CPH and Herd numbers came through at the weekend, we have got 4 pens for the pigs that we set up at the weekend they are 17x10.5 meters, so we can rotate the pigs, we've got 2 Ped saddleback guilts to breed from and 2 Saddlebacks and 2 GOS to fatten up for meat.
The chicken pen is 17x18 meters 6 foot high and will have an electric fence round it, we plan to divide this up even more and raise some ross cobb meat birds, I did some of these at home for xmas and they were good to eat but eat like pigs!! I have Indian Game and Dorkings that I'm planning to cross breed to see what they're like as table birds, as per RC. But also we're going to raise some turkeys for xmas this year.
On the bee front I'm doing a beginners course at the mo and have some bees on order so they should be here in a few weeks.
We have hit one snag and that is we've been let down on the pig ark front, we were looking for second hand ones as we've had so much to lay out and the ones we've have lined up have fell through, now I'm looking everywhere for some second hand ones and even trying to plan how to build our own.
Anyway hope my first post hasn't bored you toooo much!!
Cheers
Mark.
Topic: Newbie From Leicester (Read 4972 times)
