Quid pro quo

We are rapidly learning that bartering is the way the real rural economy works. Over the past few weeks we have managed to get our hands on all kinds of stuff as well as crack on with the big jobs around the place without having to spend a single penny. Check out these recent coups…

1.5 pigs = 2 haunches of venison + 1 hare

Some fellow smallholder friends had been helping a mate ‘sort’ his pigs out and they had one and a half pig carcasses left over. Having just butchered their own pigs they were already drowning in their own pork products so they gave the lot to us in exchange for some game from the freezer. We are now 100 sausages richer and have a bit more real estate in our freezers. Cher-ching.

Free pork - don't mind if I do...

1 discounted piece of farm machinery = 3 geese

Preparations for our new glamping site continue apace with the next step being to install running water in our top field. Apparently to lay the pipes you need a ‘mole plough’ (nothing to do with the little furry beasts apparently – just something that goes underground).  The hard-nosed farmer flogging this particular piece of equipment refused to budge on the price, but instead offered to throw three geese into the bargain, after our kids had spent an hour chasing them around the field while said deal was being negotiated. Enter stage left our new guard dogs (although so far they have done less guarding and more lounging about by the pond – starting to see why he might have wanted rid of them…)

Boo!

3 days hedge clearing = 5 Easter eggs + 20 bottles of beer

Nothing like inviting the family up for a ‘relaxing break’ over Easter and then, as soon as they walk in the door, handing them a pair of heavy duty gardening gloves, a pitchfork and a pair of firelighters and asking them to clear and burn great swathes of overgrown hedges and trees. All in exchange for copious amounts of chocolate and beer. Labour doesn’t come cheaper than that.

Nothing like a relaxing Easter break...

½ tonne rhubarb = 8 broad bean plants + 2 days free child care

The one and only thing growing in the veg patch at the moment is the rhubarb which is trifid-like in its prolificness this year. Unlike everything else which, after a late, sharp frost, has given up the ghost meaning we have to start sowing all over again. So I’ve been offloading great armfuls of it to my folks in exchange for bean seedlings (which they cleverly protected from the sub-zero temperatures) plus a hand with the kids so I can crack on and attempt to play catch up after Jack Frost has wreaked his trail of destruction.

Just add custard

1 foot across the threshold + a pulse = 3+ dozen eggs

We have finally reached 100% production with all 8 hens now laying religiously each morning, some even producing double yolkers (so by rights you could argue for a 120% return at the moment). Alas poor Boom Boom (our aged matriarch of the coop and the last hen we inherited when we bought the place) turned up her toes up this week, but then she hadn’t laid an egg for months and had been looking ‘peaky’ (hen speak for death’s door) for some time. The upshot is that we are now drowning in eggs and anyone who shows the faintest gesture of goodwill has multiple egg boxes thrust upon them before being allowed to leave the place.

364 days of hard labour = 1 day at a health spa

Not so much a barter so much as a negotiation to escape for 24 hours with my girlfriends for a day off the chores and the shit shovelling. After a wonderful day of pampering and relaxation, I did however try to offset the guilt of abandoning my dependents (not to mention the eye-wateringly expensive bill) by half-inching a few of the free apples from the health spa to bring back for the pigs. Given their enthusiastic oinking and chomping on the super posh fruit I think I may have been forgiven for my short absence…

So you see, regardless of what happens in the General Election and Brexit and our (apparently) shrinking economy, all you need is to master the art  of bartering and striking up a good deal and you will always come up smelling of roses. Or perhaps just a little bit of sausages. 

Spring/summer collection 2017

With the arrival of spring and the mercury heading back into double figures for the first time in months, my husband decided it was time to embark on the smallholders' equivalent of a new wardrobe or in our case, a new set of farm animals to furnish our freezer with in the coming months.. The first Friday of the month is pig market day around these parts. The monthly gathering of seasoned pig farmers and those gullible suckers who haven’t a clue but fancy themselves as the archetypal smallholder. You can almost see the former rubbing their hands in anticipation as they see the newbies rolling up in their unblemished stock trailers, freshly printed (and totally incomprehensible – to them) livestock papers in their hands. My husband had pretty much been counting down the days on his calendar to this momentous day and on the long-awaited morning assembled my father, somewhat seasoned auction-goer, and a good friend from the Bar (the law type, rather than the other, although fair to say they have spent a fair amount of time propping up the other type too) with, quite understandably, zero experience of pig shopping. So off they all went, only to come back a few hours later with three lovely looking pink piglets and much laughter and guffawing. Turns out in the heat of the moment, my husband had misunderstood the pricing system and ended up paying for each pig what he had intended to pay for all three. Doh. Rookie mistake. There is some farmer from down the road now sporting a rather expensive new pair of wellies and the very latest in farmer chic overalls this season thanks to us. We’ve named our new collection Prada, Chanel and Gucci, the most expensive piglets in Christendom. And as if that weren’t bad enough, in our recent mini heatwave my husband thought that his new pride and joys were getting a little sunburned so asked me to get out there with my ultra-expensive Vichy Factor 50, to stop their little pink ears from getting any pinker. Seriously?

Meet Prada, Chanel and Gucci...

Having settled our new gold-plated pigs into their new sty and checked them approximately every 20 minutes, the following morning brought yet more new additions to the family. After 21 days of massively irritating clicking every 9 seconds, our incubator appears to have done its job. We came downstairs on Saturday morning to find a small beak protruding from a shell and pecking its way out. It is little short of miraculous watching this tiny, bedraggled form wrestle its way out of its shell and into the world. The kids were captivated, (CBeebies did not get a look in all weekend, their noses pressed up tight against the incubator instead), but not quite as enraptured as the grown-ups who couldn’t quite believe this had actually worked (previous attempts having all ended as duds). And it turns out watching chicks hatch is a little bit like making popcorn. After the first kernel pops nothing seems to happen for ages and then all of a sudden it all kicks off and it’s like Armageddon in there. Same for our chicks. You turn your back for a few hours and come back and there’s loads more hatched, all clambering over each other like drunks at the finishing line of the Grand National. What has had us baffled though is the colour of the chicks in relation to the shell they emerged from. Where we had been expecting a nice little yellow ball of fluff from one of our Light Sussex hens, they were coming out black or stripy. Awkward! Something you’re not telling us you naughty hens?!

Hot chicks..... a grand total of 14 hatched into the world

As if all these new arrivals to the place weren’t enough, our daughters have taken to adopting the many tadpoles swimming in the ponds around the place to be their ‘pets’, catching as many as they can in jam jars and making ‘aquariums’ for them with an assortment of stones and leaves. The whole kitchen looks and sounds like a sodding menagerie. You can’t move for something hatching, tweeting or wiggling around. 

Does my tail look  big in this?

And finally my husband decided to treat himself to an egg this Easter, a Big Green Egg. For those of you less familiar with this season's fashions in big brand American barbecues, this thing looks like something from outer space, an alien pod or cocoon perhaps (why is it that that particular film seems to become all the more appealing to me the closer I get to forty!). And it is bloody huge. You could fit all of our aforementioned pets and ourselves in there and close the lid and live out the next nuclear winter no probs. And not content with just one supersize barbecue, he came home with TWO! After the whole pig debacle it was a bloody good job he got a significant discount on these – when I casually perused the prices on the internet I nearly fell off my chair. But despite my concerns that in buying this we may have jinxed summer 2017 forever, for once the weather gods have been smiling upon us and we have actually managed to use the thing for three consecutive nights – we’ve cooked (venison) burgers, steaks (of course, venison), even pizza (yup, you guessed it, venison pastrami) on it, although admittedly last night it was my husband out there on his tod, shivering into his tongs as the rain hissed off the grill. Turns out that just because you have the mother of all barbecues it doesn’t mean you live in the South of France. Enjoy the sun while it lasts folks - and Happy Easter!

This year's Easter egg