Our animals
Our Dorset smallholding holds a tame and healthy livestock and fresh veggies of all sorts.
Our Livestock
Home Hatched Hens
We hatched our current eight girls during the Covid lockdowns, using an incubator and fertilised eggs from our previous group of brown farmyard hens plus cream legbar cockerel. It was heart warming watching them emerge from their shells, dry off and turn into cute little fluffballs. When a few days old we gave in to the urge to hold and cuddle them, so now as adult hens they are still extremely friendly and trusting. As they are descended from a cream legbar cockerel, the hens of which lay blue-green egg, and brown egg laying hens, ours now lay greenish-khaki coloured ones. Outside of avian flu ‘flockdown’ they are free to roam our fenced-in orchard, with the occasional one breaking out to explore the farm. The girls are fed organically certified layers pellets and mixed corn, plus windfall apples and anything they find in the orchard.
Ducks
We only have two ducks these days, one Khaki Campbell and one Khaki Campbell/Muscovy cross. Outside of avian flu ‘flockdown’ they are completely free range. They are searching for unfortunate slugs and such like all day, and are also given access to organic layers pellets and mixed corn. Sadly they don’t lay many eggs, so we rarely have any for sale.
Our geese
Our two ladies were born on the farm, and are going to remain a feature as they can grow to over 20 years old. They are full of character – they get upset when separated from the sheep, but bully the lambs for no reason other than that they can! They are rather loud and look intimidatingly like big white swans, but only seem to bite lambs and chase the ducks around – we humans have been identified as the provider of food, so are reasonably safe. Geese are amazing when it comes to remembering people, so it is advisable not to annoy them.
Between roughly Valentines Day and May they lay huge eggs, which we often sell. At the moment of course every bird is confined and netted due to avian flu, and as geese find that immensely stressful they might lay less eggs and later in the season, so please keep an eye on the produce page if you are interested in buying any of their eggs.
Shetland Sheep
At the moment we have 22 Shetland sheep on our smallholding. Shetland sheep are one of the oldest breeds of sheep in Britain, and renowned for their soft fleeces that naturally come in different shades. That was one of the reasons we chose the breed, as we had always wanted to try out hand spinning. However, our starter flock of five, who we bought in 2013 from a breeder in Tisbury, was also chosen for another reason. They were advertised as bucket trained, and therefore easy to manage. In fact, they were so tame and cuddly that we helplessly fell in love with them. Over the years we had a number of lambs, which was always very enjoyable, and have started to spin some of their fleeces. All our sheep have names, and some are rather characterful.
Shetland sheep are lovely to keep on a holding. They are attractive sheep, coming in different shades of colour and often have badger like facial markings. They are pretty tough and live more or less on grass with very little additional feeding. When available we treat them to willow prunings and wind fall apples. They are agile, mischievous and very inquisitive, which sometimes makes it challenging to keep them from jumping fences to explore areas on the farm we’d rather want to keep them out of. Apart from grass and hay (unsprayed, unfertilised meadow grass) we occasionally feed them small amounts of organic concentrates to keep them tame, and to allow us to pen them in when we need to deal with any problems. They are kept according to organic principles, i.e. they are only treated with medication if there is a problem. We avoid using fly strike treatment, unless unavoidable.
As hand spinning all their fleeces proved far too time consuming, we had batches of fleeces processed by the Natural Fibre Company in Cornwall. Currently we can offer for sale:
Double knit yarn, 85% Shetland/15% alpaca, approx. 110 m/50 g, in natural cream colour.
The natural colour is lovely on its own, but is also easily overdyed to add colour to a project. Occasionally we can offer small amounts of yarn dyed with Ashford acid dyes.
For spinners we can also offer 100% Shetland tops in natural grey.
If you take a liking to any of the yarns mentioned above, or are in need of a gift for someone who would; you can find their prices on the produce page. Later in the year we expect more batches to be processed, and they’ll pop up there too when available!
Alpacas
Why do we keep alpacas? The honest, real reason? Christoph fell in love with them….
Despite the fact that they are known to spit and kick, object to being handled, and don’t cope well with British weather.
To be fair, they do have their good sides, and we all fell in love with them. They are very beautiful animals, with huge eyes and lovely soft fleeces. Unfortunately, they don’t naturally like being touched, unlike sheep, so are not as cuddly as they look. But in the years since we had them, they were relatively trouble free apart from skin issues due to the wet weather, and have yielded bags of lovely fluff, waiting to be spun. Another good reason to keep them though is that they keep our sheep safe. Alpacas become part of the flock, and are very fond and protective of the lambs. Whenever they perceive a threat, for example a dog, they utter alarm sounds. Amazingly, that makes all the sheep hurry over and hover close to the alpacas, until the threat has gone. Why that works, considering that alpacas and sheep originate from different continents, is beyond me, but it is certainly an interesting phenomenon. Alpacas are used a lot in Australia to keep sheep safe, and are known to attack and kill wild dogs.
We currently have four alpacas: cream coloured Mabel, who is a cross between two different types of alpaca (suri and huacaya) and bizarrely has hung on to her milk teeth, so now has two rows of teeth; white gentle Tula and her big, brown and white son Maximo; and one brown alpaca, Olympia. Unfortunately, her mother Darcy (the brown on the right) passed away at the end of January after a long and happy life at a very old age of 24 years, which is very unusual for alpacas.
This year we will arrange for some of the fleeces to be professionally spun. Please keep an eye on our produce page for availability and prices.
Gaby’s bees
Keeping bees was always one of my dreams, and I eventually started keeping bees in 2016. It turned out to be an interesting activity, although much more labour intensive and at times frankly scary than I had anticipated! At one point we decided to shift the hives from the garden by the house to the far end of the field – bees occasionally have grumpy days for a variety of reasons, which made gardening in their vicinity rather challenging. The honey we got off the colonies was absolutely amazing.
Keeping bees also made us even more aware of the lack of food for pollinators. Keeping bees can add to the pressure on wild pollinators as they can compete for food, therefore we increased our efforts to provide food for both ‘farmed’ and wild pollinators. We have planted lots of willows and other pollinator friendly trees all over the farm, as well as trying to fill the garden with flowering plants and establishing a pond. We will continue with these efforts over the coming years. Sadly, my colonies died last year; apparently it was a difficult year for lots of beekeepers. Plans are to restock this year, however, as colonies need a year to build up numbers, I am not expecting to have honey for sale this year. We are pleased to announce that we have a swarm of bees that took up residence. Hence, we have lovely honey to sell again.