I know I’m expected to write something about the rollover from one year to the next, but there’s a problem.
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions, so I can’t write about mine and I certainly don’t want to write about other people’s.
I don’t do a year in review. I spent too many years churning out year-in-review columns and specials for newspapers, magazines, radio and the web to do my own.
Much has been made in the past few months about rises in the prices of hops, barley, metals and fuel feeding through to the price of beers and ales. Some brewing companies and industry experts even predict prices will hit £4 a pint in 2008. Well, I have a solution – that’s them in the photo. Mangels. You doubt me? I’ve turned up an ancient recipe for mangel ale, which I’ve redacted into a modern homebrew recipe and then spent all day concocting a batch as a way of averting beer price rises for the Other Half. What a thoughtful, bearded, homebrewing bloke I am…
When the Other Half and I went out to feed and water the livestock this morning, we quickly found that Doris’s litter of Berkshire piglets had settled into their new home.
But their house move still left one major chore to do and with the Other Half off into the village after breakfast, I’d be doing it on my own for quite a while. Read the rest of this entry »
The task for Friday and today was to move two pig huts (from the yellow-circled areas to the red), move Doris—one of our Berkshire sows—away from her piglets, move two older growers in with Doris, move Doris’s piglets in where the weaners were, and move Delilah and Graham to make way for Doris and the growers.
Easy peasy in summer on hard, dry ground with a tractor and front loader with forks, with the Land Rover, or even with four strong people.
It’s another matter in winter, when a succession of frost, thaw, rain and another frost have left the ground part-mud, part-ice. Read the rest of this entry »
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