School Holiday Fun Day 9th August
FUN DAY for free
Open Fun Day (9th August) at Rails Farm
Free entry to Fun activities
from 1pm to 4pm
Healthy snacks, original German waffles, ice cream and more
Arts & Crafts activities, make your own creative piece of art
Maths, Science, STEM competitions, e.g who builds the highest Jenga tower
African crafts, beautiful items from Africa made from recycled material
Shetland sheep, alpacas, ducks, chicken, bees, being part of feeding times
How to make honey, from the bee hive into the jar
How to spin wool, from fleece to wool to a knitted jumper
Pond digging, generating a new habitat for nature
Sit on a tractor, experience the view from a classic International 484
For more details call 01963 23818 or email railsfarm@phonecoop.coop
Rails Farm 1st Open Day Review
It was a very successful fun event with about hundred visitors calling in and having a fantastic time. Particularly the children experienced the versatility of smallholding life and all the attached crafts and techniques needed to manage the daily routine.
They looked into an empty beehive with all its different compartments to enable the bees to build up their colony. They touched and smelled a frame, admiring the beautifully built hexagonal honey combs, and had a look at the honey extracting apparatus.
Another very important part of our smallholding are our lovely animals, the hens, ducks, geese, our flock of Shetland sheep and our two alpacas, Mabel and Anita.
After shearing, the very soft fleeces of the sheep and alpacas are spun to provide the ingredients for a lovely jumper, a pair of gloves, or a scarf. Some of it is hand spun, some sent off to be professionally spun, and some will be hand-dyed. The visitors could see
how you get from the shorn fleece to carded tops, a bit like brushing it with a fakir’s hair brush. Our lovely helper, Janet, demonstrated those techniques the whole afternoon and offered the young people to give it a try.
Another home-made product at Rails Farm is apple juice or even better, a small-scale production of one of the finest dry ciders we ever tasted. More fun for the kids crushing apples with the big fly wheel apple crusher
and then pressed the apples juice with a traditional apples press.
Can you see the girl power and determination. However the slightly more mature girl Gaby looked a bit confused. Maybe the powerful torque was a bit too much for her.
I am sure, most of the children have never tasted fresh apple juice before and were probably expecting a very sweet and bright yellow or orange liquid. Surprisingly most of the children actually enjoyed drinking the naturally coloured unsweetened juice. This was really good fun.
As a healthy and balanced diet is a very important part of Rails Farm’s life philosophy, our guests enjoyed homemade delicious snacks. Our highlight was our traditional German sweet waffle which was completely sold out by the end of the day. They were all made and served by my German mum in law.
Another highlight of the open fun day was the feeding time of our sheep and the two alpacas.
Mabel cannot wait to eat her favourite food but the sheep are chasing her.
Mabel loves me, she is so tame, very unusual for an Alpaca but she is my girl.
The children in particular enjoyed hand feeding the sheep.
I must not forget to mention other crafts and activities our visitors enjoyed. The big Jenga.
Our friend Ross helps the youngsters using a paint spinner to create individual artistic work.
Wow that looks really impressive. Art at Rails Farm it cannot get better than this.
Being international, our two friends, Faye and Imogen lived many years in South Africa and exhibited and sold their beautifully crafted South African products, made from recycled materials. This is a very good and honest support of young artists on a far away continent.
Another friend, Peter Snelson who also lives in Holwell is an expert in wood craft and dry wall building, showed the children how to use a shaving horse.
You can see the start of our new dry wall Peter and I started to build this summer. I hope will finish it this year. Hedge laying is on the Menu for this winter.
We were of course totally shattered by the end of the afternoon but in a very pleasant way because so many happy people enjoyed our smallholding.
We celebrated the successful event with our helpers with some bottles of good bubbly and the first thing they said was, ‘when are we doing the next open day?’. That was the best complement Gaby and myself could ever get. So, is there one thing I would do different next time? Yes, I would like to have live music and even more activities for the children. Hence, if you the reader has any wishes or suggestions please contact us at www.railsfarm.co.uk .