Open Farm Sunday

Sunshine, bunting, tea, tractors, cows and piglets.

We had a fantastic time on Sunday.  Thank you to everyone who visited, it was great to see so many people exploring life on the farm!

A few photos follow - you may notice they revolve around tea and cake, so you can tell where I spent most of the day!  If you have any photos, we'd love to see them.  Post them to our Facebook page or e-mail us: farm@lowerdairyfarm.co.uk  You can also enter LEAF's OFS photography competition for the chance to win £100 of grocery vouchers.

The calm before the storm...

Tea time in the lean-to...

Lizzy and Ben - emergency bakers extraordinaire

Thank you to everyone who helped out.  Judith and Leo, OFS veterans, for amazing work on refreshments, baking, artistic direction, mouse-taming, bunting-hanging and everything else.  Tom Gardiner for cleaning, clearing and keeping Dad on the straight and narrow (almost).  The BEMs for clearing, washing-up and persuading Mum to sit down and have a well-earned cup of tea.  Dougie Fryer for sheer strength and turning up to do the farm walk only to be handed a tray of mugs by Mum "because I thought he'd know what to do with them".  And to Lizzie and Ben who simultaneously served in the shop whilst baking emergency fairy cakes, washing-up, egg-collecting, running messages up and down to the farm AND hanging out our washing - above and beyond the call of duty!  We could not have asked for a better team of helpers and we are hugely grateful to you all.

(Oh, and Dougie, erm..remember those heavy iron gates you helped lift off?  Well, they've got to go back on...did I mention we owe you big time?)

When tedding goes wrong...

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

Meet Mrs Rogers.

  Mrs Rogers is a Centaur (part-woman, part-Humbug).  One sunny day, Mrs Rogers was tedding the fields at Lower Dairy Farm.  "What fun this is!" she said to Humbug.

Suddenly, the tedder stopped fluffing the grass and started making a funny noise.  Mrs Rogers jumped out of her tractor cab and headed out to investigate.

"Oh no!" said Mrs Rogers, "I seem to have wrapped a large quantity of fencing wire around the tedder!".  [Not her actual words.]  And just at that moment, Happy Farmer Humphrey appeared.

   And so they unwound, and unwound and extracted the wire and pretty soon, the tedder was free.  "Phew!" said Mrs Rogers. 

But Mrs Rogers had to say goodbye to the tedder and will never be trusted again.

"Bye-bye tedder!" said Arnie, sorry, Mrs Rogers.

"I'll take this out of your pay!" said Farmer Humph as he jumped into the tractor cab.  "What pay?!?" said indentured Mrs Rogers nee Taylor.

"Time for lunch." said Humbug.

Lime Plaster Course 12th - 13th July 2012

Essex County Council are delivering a series of free Traditional Building Skills courses for the Managing a Masterpiece Stour Valley Landscape Partnership aimed at people based or working within the Stour Valley.

Hosted at Lower Dairy Farm, this practical course will cover:

-  Introductory talk -  Correct methods of repair -  Laths (riven or sawn) & fixings -  Sands & aggregates including hair -  Preparation of lime plaster, including mixing & gauging -  Ways of giving a set -  Methods of aftercare -  Patching existing plaster

The focus will be on increasing awareness of the need to continue working with traditional materials and in traditional styles to ensure the survival and continuation of built heritage.  This course is aimed at craftspeople and plasterers working in the Stour Valley.

Course tutor - Roy Cafferty - Traditional plasterer

Roy Cafferty runs his own plastering business and has been in the trade for forty years.  He works in all aspects of lime plaster but specialises in fine plaster finishes.  He is one of the few lime plasterers who still run mouldings in situ.

For further information and bookings contact Katie Seabright on 01245 437672 or e-mail traditional.buildingskills@essex.gov.uk

From scaffolding to walls!

From scaffolding...

 

to walls!

 Excellent progress in only three days!  Thanks to everyone who took part in the course.  A collection of very skilled carpenters allowed the barn restoration to leap forward, and the soleplate is now complete.  Hurrah!

We'd particularly like to thank Katie Seabright and Richard Green for once again running and leading a fantastic course.  Special mention to Richard for going above and beyond the call of the course and unblocking the gutter that had not recently been cleared...maybe not for over a decade? Lovely.

Below, you will find a gallery of the course in action, to give you a little insight on the process from a pile of timber to a new wall.  It really is remarkable!

Bank Holiday madness

I spent the weekend working so can take no credit for any of this.  But look!

1) The clearing is complete - there's even electricity!

2) The floor has been excavated back to the original plinth ready for the new soleplate. Plus, a huge bonus is the uncovering of the original floor  - an excellent incentive to keep breaking!).

3) The rubble has been smashed, shovelled, smashed again and redistributed for that rustic farm track look.

(Picture by special request of Mrs H "Arnie" Rogers to demonstrate her hard work*)

And, 4) The happy carpenters have replaced the top beam...

..and are still speaking.  All this means...we were ready for the course on time.

Incredible work!  If you'd like to see what we're doing, come along on 17th June when we'll be opening the doors for our third Open Farm Sunday!

[ * Apologies to the farmers of Dorset for returning a tired (but not broken) vet.  Our Arnie, she's made of tough stuff. ]

Bye bye bulk tanks...

One patient man, one man with a JCB, one hole in a wall and bye bye bulk tanks!

 

Soon to be recycled as boats for our own Jubilee River Pageant...

A prize for the first person to spot the water tank.

Temporary accommodation

6am wade into the "stream" to rescue a non-floating duck house plus paddling inhabitants.  One homeless Humbug because emergency accommodation = kennel. He assures me he's charging exorbitant rent and doesn't just want to sit in front of the fire all day.  Remind me to order that second pair of wellies...

The case of the hanging window

  No skeletons, no sideburns, only one rat's nest, and a lot of spiders!

   Despite the expectation of several feet of debris, the “smooth, impervious, easy-to-clean” surface backed by a range of weather boarding, panelling (we're very posh) and the Devil's own concrete shuttering, revealed quite a clean wall.  Plus, the metal sheeting did it's job well and the frame has only sustained minimal damage.  Thank goodness they used all those nails.

One insistent rodent gnawed through this joint, but nothing was found in need of urgent repair and not an Acro in sight!  Excellent news.

For the next timber frame repair course, we hope to work on two sections which will complete the majority of the repairs to the Mill House (see pictures of previous work here) - so named because it housed the feed mill.

The first area is an internal support where the Mill House joins the extended nave of the barn.  Timber supports were removed to open up this stretch as a long cowshed.  Whilst this worked at the time, this very important beam is now a hanging feature beginning to bow under the load from the barn.

We could, of course, prop it up with the help of the bulk tanks found beneath it...

But monumental news!   Over thirty years since they were last used, the bulk tanks are leaving the building.  Or we hope they are.  The only way out is the way they were carried (?!??) in...

Which brings us to the second section we have to navigate round to do this.

. 

 

We're in the destruction phase and experiencing a sense of deja vu/Olympic weight training as we remove more concrete shuttering.  It's heavy, unbreakable and will always land on your foot.  But it is essential to be gentle so we preserve the hanging window above.  This is the only sash window in the whole barn and must have looked very smart when it was installed.

 

Hopefully no surprises there!  This week, one surprise was enough.  As the hokey-cokey of cow/grass management continued (you put your cows out, bring them back in...etc), yesterday, Dad discovered this little beauty frolicking in the Poor Field (according to the records, either two weeks late or one week early).

Let this be a lesson to you all;  surprises like these make year-round calving even more fun!