We have made it through the Christmas madness! Pre Christmas saw our busiest ever two weeks with the team putting in a lot of hours to pack and deliver our biggest ever orders, close to 30,000 lovely organic eggs going out the door on the week before Christmas. The difficulty is that the weeks after Christmas see orders virtually dry up (about the only thing that has dried up!) and our hens are creatures of habit and happily laying away despite the winter weather. So we planned the peaks and troughs to conicide with moulting (resting) one flock of hens and changing over another flock. We also organised ourselves to have minimum work to do over Christmas, however like many other farmers, animals dont do bank holidays, so Christmas has been a delicate juggle of work, family, three excited children and 13 people for Christmas dinner, school holidays and miserable weather! But on balance has been really lovely.

New Year and it stopped raining! which is a great start to 2013. Does however mean that we have got to get on with a long list of urgent ‘dry weather’ jobs
– move and clean out and move back the house with the moulting hens in occupancy
– dig out new gateway and pad to relocate hen houses in the new years field (we rotate the hen houses around the farm as ‘proper’ organic practise) plus lots of other jobs for the digger whilst on the farm
– move, clean, move to new site change over hen house
– clean out cattle shed
– hedging
– pruning 1000 apple trees
– tree planting
– and so on
Long may the better weather last!