This weekend it’s our two day intensive Sheep for Beginners course.

What makes you cringe?

Just not quite as planned

Mild rants and doing what’s best for our livestock

Harvest continues

Apple & Cider one day course covering the whole life-cycle of an orchard as well as harvesting your produce, cider making, apple juice. Based in Devon.

Yes, I know this gets published on a Friday, but as I write it is Thursday and the end of a very farming oriented day. For a start it was my turn to do all the livestock chores: feed the pigs, feed an...

Okehampton Show 2026

There are countless writers who squeeze, splurt, ooze and spray out their work under the influence. For drugs think Kerouac, William S Burroughs, Ayn Rand, Coleridge, Hunter S Thompson, Aldous Huxley,...

All you need is love... cock-a-doodle-doo!

Flipping the definition of farm diversification on its head

The aftermath of Storm Goretti

Unidentified Farm Objects

Oh the relief. We still haven’t started on the haymaking, what with the weather weeping onto the fields, but there were two dry days, enough for the sheep to shed the water from their fleeces and for ...

Turning the hay with our ancient little Massey Ferguson ten years ago

Now don’t get all over-excited or exasperated.

It's all happening somewhere else

Following the phenomenal success of those omnipresent property programmes where people do up everything from an olde sweety shoppe to a turreted chateau and everything in between, there’s been a mad s...

I’ve been thinking about bright spots; you know, the high points of the day, the week, the month.

Online life is as full of spring as our fields.

This one day course covers choosing and bringing your first pigs home, the daily routine and less regular tasks, essential equipment, fencing and housing, the implications and realities of breeding. H...

I've seen the sun and it is warm

There are those who love to admit mistakes, others who will resist blame (self or otherwise) at all costs, but in farming as in other pursuits, it doesn’t pay to ignore the evidence of getting it wron...

Things new and things old

Dates for smallholder training courses at South Yeo Farm West, Devon. A wide range of 1 & 2 day courses available for beginner smallholders & livestock keepers.

and an homage to spring

and shrieking at rats

Torwen Badger Face lamb

Its lambing time

and a trip down memory lane

Spring has come a-knocking

It’s ironic, being so lazy in the housework department, that I have so many beds to make.

Because I'm all about London Fashion Week...

Alcohol, food, GLP-1s, and knitting.

Detail from A Map of Days - Grayson Perry

Years ago, twenty I think, I was tootling along the hedgeline of one of our fields, peering over the fence and getting acquainted with the various scrubby bushes, saplings, tuffets of grasses and twin...

and other bollocks

And What Not To Eat

And What Not To Eat

This morning I was walking across the farm with the dogs, checking the pregnant ewes and the group of tegs who will go to the ram this autumn, and it was drizzling, removing the last traces of the sno...

At any time of year

It’s not that you don’t notice rubbish in an urban environment – of course you do – but there’s so much of it that it blurs into a grey acceptance.

I love a good smeuse.

Thinking about Christmas fare