The Hacknell Chronicles

March News 2012

An Easter Egg Hunt on the farm

Today (20th March) is the Vernal Equinox marking the first official day of Spring. March, half in winter still but with glimpses of warmer days to come, feels like the gateway to Spring. The daffodils and primroses bring bursts of colour to the fields and hedges, though it will be a few more weeks until the trees grow their leaves back again. Midway through our lambing time and we are always a bit weary from round the clock checks in the lambing shed but seem to be surviving O.K! When I looked in on Tim just now as he was busy numbering lambs to match up with their mothers before they go out to the fields, I asked for his ‘soundbite’ for the newsletter, and he was surprisingly upbeat considering how long he’d been up for! He commented how this is the third year running that we’ve had pretty good weather for lambing after about 20 years when we’d get 3 weeks of rain, wind, hail storms and gales! So climate change, if that’s what it is, has done us a favour for now. We’ve also got a fair bit of grass for the ewes to turn out on. There’s nothing they like better than fresh spring grass and of course they then milk well, which make the lambs grow almost before your eyes!

Grass is the key to our organic farming system. In Spring and Summer for grazing and as silage and hay for winter feeding. It is why our grass fed beef contains up to 11 times more omega -3 fatty acids (the good one!)as well as higher levels of cancer-fighting conjugated linoleic acid and lower total fat. It is also completely different from the way in which so much US beef is raised in feedlots on a diet of mostly grain. This is why we have to question the relevance of the widely reported recent study by the Harvard School of Medicine which claims consumption of red meat is linked with early deaths and also be aware that beef in the US is allowed hormone growth promoters which are banned by in the UK.

A more positive report was the one conducted by the Countryfile BBC programme broadcast a few Sundays ago about the animal welfare claims on different food labels, comparing Soil Association organic with others such as the Red Tractor and Freedom Foods. In all the examples they gave-such as minimum space for poultry and maximum transportation times for livestock, the organic scored highly whilst others often only met minimum EU standards. I think people sometimes don’t realise quite how much the organic label means; it covers pretty much everything we as farmers do in terms of managing the land and wildlife, the livestock and then right through to the abattoir and in the butchery. Every ingredient and recipe has to be licensed by the Soil Association and inspected, so the integrity of organic produce is genuinely traceable from field to fork! My next job today is getting the new merguez and Hugh’s herby pork sausages which we are making for the River Cottage Canteens in Axminster and Plymouth registered with the Soil Association Certification and trying to get my head round the operations of the weigh scale machine to make it print the ingredients correctly. It’s easier making the sausages than working out the labelling!!

Easter is not far away-apparently it always falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. Good luck working that one out!!!

I hope you have a Happy Easter.

Best wishes from

Jo, Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

January News 2012

We are well into January now; it’s a month that goes by quickly here, as we get back into our normal routines after the busy weeks of Christmas. I can’t tell you how relieved we were not to have another white Christmas! I’ve not even complained about the continual rain which blesses the We(s)t Country! However it has caused us a few headaches lately and got into our phone lines, so I apologise if you have had problems calling us. It’s now fixed! I’m also not going to grumble about the extravagance of running an Aga. It not only provides us with wonderful slow cooked casseroles and Sunday lunches but saved us over £500 in repairs to our weigh scale and labelling machine recently. When we found it wouldn’t display any weights or prices in our first week back after Christmas, I discovered I was in for a big repair bill or new scales, until Ann suggested warming it up in the kitchen. After a couple of hours sat on top of the Aga, it dried out the damp and came back to life! We’ve used it to revive quite a few newborn lambs over the years, but this was a pleasant surprise.

Our team at Higher Hacknell Farm Butchery has some new faces, Richard and John, our butchers, to join myself and Ann who pack and keep an eye on your orders, as well as Tracy, our chef. They have plenty to do, especially now that we are making the sausages and bacon, as well as supplying meat for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Canteens in Axminster and Plymouth. Following our two awards last year-winner of the Organic Food Awards with our cottage pie and the Taste of the West Award for the beef lasagne, Tracy is building up our range of ready cooked meals which are becoming increasingly popular! I think it’s hard to find anything to compare that tastes home made and uses real quality ingredients in the supermarkets. We supply several nursery schools and children’s centres , as well as our footballers-Wolverhampton Wanderers-with their post match meals. We are looking forward to the months ahead, we have the Exeter Food and Drink Festival in April, and our usual Thursdays at Exeter Farmers Market and 1st Saturday in the month at Crediton. In the meantime, we hope to hear from you and receive your orders either on line at www.higherhacknell.co.uk or do phone me on 01769 560909. I’m always happy to discuss your orders with you or you can talk about a particular cut directly with the butcher. If you can’t see what you’re looking for on our website, it’s always worth a phone call: if it’s part of an animal we can usually supply it!

Out on the farm, Tim, and David, our neighbour who helps us, are also in their winter routines of feeding animals and bedding up the cattle sheds with plenty of straw to keep them clean and warm. Tim is getting slightly nervous as tomorrow we are scanning the ewes and will find out how many lambs they are carrying. Hopefully we haven’t got many barren ewes or find they are mostly carrying singles, but we’ll know soon enough. The scanning is pretty accurate and it helps us to feed them correctly, as a ewe carrying triplets needs a different nutrition to one with a single lamb. Wrong feeding causes problems later on, so if a ewe with a single eats too much, her lamb can grow huge, and if she’s fat she’ll have more difficulty giving birth than if she was fit; and obviously ewes with multiple lambs need a more nutritious diet. It also helps to know which ewes have ‘doubles’ so we can look out at lambing time for them. There are all sorts of little farming tricks we do! If a ewe has triplets and another is lambing a single at the same time, it can be quite easy to foster the extra lamb onto the other mother, which usually benefits them all!

I really enjoy getting outside, even at this time of year it’s easy to see how beautiful the countryside is. When the weather was colder last week, flocks of hundreds of starlings flew in across the fields, dancing backwards and forwards, up in the sky, their wings catching the sun and changing colour in the light like a kaleidoscope. It’s been a great start to 2012 and we wish you all a very happy and healthy year ahead and thank you for your continuing custom.

with very best wishes
from Jo, Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm.

November News 2011

Halloween weekend is the time when we make cider here at Higher Hacknell. This year we had Rosy, our eldest daughter, back from University, my nephew Mark and his mates - the usual crew, plus George, the amazing lambing student who helped us a couple of years ago! The hardest part is getting everyone to pick up the apples, but luckily the sun shone, it was a warm autumn day, and with lots of breaks for cider, and tree shaking to bring the apples down, we got enough to make the cheese. It’s an annual dilemma, whether to keep the sheep in the orchard to keep the grass down so we can easily pick up the apples, or keep them out so they don’t eat or do anything else on them, but then the grass gets too long and you can’t find the apples. It was the latter this year! Then we build the ‘cheese’, layering apples and straw in a huge press which is squeezed between the pound in a very traditional way and the juice is poured into old oak barrels to ferment until after Christmas. It’s our big weekend of feasting and celebrating the last harvest of the year after the summer months of making hay and silage and combining the barley.

Cider apple 'cheese'

Now that the clocks have gone back and we’ve got 4 barrels of cider fermenting away, it’s time to start our Christmas preparations in the butchery. The Christmas catalogue is on line at www.higherhacknell.co.uk where you can order all the usual favourites and add to them with your choices from the other beef, lamb, pork and poultry sections. You’ll be pleased to know that turkeys and geese are the same price as last year, but in slightly shorter supply, so please do order soon. If you leave it too late the popular cuts such as rib of beef on the bone, fillets of beef and gammons can ‘sell out’! If you’d like an order before Christmas and another one for Christmas week, it is easier if you make 2 separate orders. Christmas orders will be delivered on Wednesday 21st December, and do tell us where it can be left if you are out. As well as ordering on line, you can phone me to order or discuss what you’d like on 01769 560909 as we are always happy to help and advise on sizes and cooking tips. You can collect from Exeter Farmers Market on Thursday 22nd December or from the farm on the 22nd and 23rd December.

In the meantime, Tracy our Higher Hacknell chef is busy making lasagne following our Gold Taste of the West Award. It was the winner of the ‘best of ready meals, soups and light eats category’ and Rick Stein, one of the judges, apparently enjoyed it’s home made flavour. Our rack of lamb also won a Gold Award.

If you are following the River Cottage series on TV, don’t be too alarmed by Hugh FW’s conversion to summer vegetarianism, as you can enjoy delicious Higher Hacknell meat dishes in his Axminster and the ‘about to open’, Plymouth Canteen and Deli. We are also making all the sausages and bacon to Hugh’s special recipes to supply his shops and restaurants. I was surprised at how much pepper went in Hugh’s Herby Banger but the proof is in the eating, as they are very good and impressed the quality controllers in our butchery here!!

It is quite mild still in Devon, but we’ve seen flocks of starlings coming in and landing in the fields in their hundreds which is usually a sign of hard weather on it’s way. There were huge numbers of them last year, so I wonder if we are in for more snow. I hope not! There aren’t quite as many holly berries around though as last year, so I’m crossing my fingers that the Arctic winter will hold off until after Christmas!

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best wishes
Jo

September News 2011

Tig the sheepdog

Michaelmas at the end of September is the start of Autumn and for us its really the beginning of another farming year, a time we look forward as well as back. It was 26 years ago when Tim and I arrived at Higher Hacknell Farm is a small bright blue van with our new young collie dog, ‘Nip’! It was an exciting time, and though Nip is no longer with us, he was succeeded by Ned and now Tig, so the years have passed and each one is never the same as the last!

Every season has its routines and rhythms. It’s a relief to reach this ‘end of year’ knowing the harvest is in. Certainly this year has been better than the last one, despite the dry spring. At least we reckon on having enough grass, hay and silage for the stock over winter, whereas last year we had a worrying shortfall. There has been a good crop of barley which we have clamped in storage and lastly we dug the potatoes. We only grow a few rows at the edge of the corn field, enough for the house and our ready made meals, mash for the award winning cottage pie!

The first event of the ‘new year’ is getting the rams ready for tupping. They get their job done in about 2 to 3 weeks, going in with ewes at the end of October when the daylight hours are shorter and they naturally start to be ready, going on heat. It’s really important for good conception and plenty of lambs next spring that the ewes and rams are healthy with good nutrition, so having plenty of grass still growing will hopefully help the job! With a few weeks to go before work starts, the rams are getting impatient and often let out their frustration on each other by fighting, so we have to keep an eye on them as we don’t want them to injure themselves at this stage!

It is also peak time from now, moving towards Christmas, in the butchery. I’m not one for getting the decorations out in September, when you’re still basking in scorching sunshine as we were last week. So the Christmas list will go on the website this month with more details in the next newsletter. Our ready meals are continuing on the road to success with a Gold Taste of the West Award for the Beef Lasagne. We also picked up another Gold Award for our French-trimmed rack of Lleyn Lamb. We are really pleased to get this kind of endorsement for our products and we also particularly value your comments so if you feel inspired, do put a product review on our website www.higherhacknell.co.uk - the review button is on each product page but you need to be logged in to create a review.

With Halloween to come at the end of month, don’t forget the sausages for roasting on the bonfire! We’ll be celebrating too at our annual cider making - lots of apples this year to turn into the amber nectar!

With very best wishes

Jo and Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

August News 2011

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I hope you are enjoying the summer and having some holiday time. It’s always busy here on the farm in August but we did dash up to London the other week to receive the Organic Food Award 2011 for our Cottage Pie, winner of the prepared foods category at Clarence House. It was a fun evening, though slightly strange for us to be sipping champagne with royalty!

We have extended our range of ready made meals to include several chicken casseroles as well as pork dishes and a lamb curry so we hope you’ll give them a try. The judges were impressed by our ‘good home-made flavour’ and gave ‘ full marks for proper ingredients’.

The days of summer are rolling by and the harvest is coming in. The last couple of days have been dry so we managed to get most of the spring barley combined and today Tim is busy baling the beautiful golden straw. The straw is almost as valuable to us as the grain and ensures that the animals have a very comfortable bed in wintertime. The fields will soon look completely different, cleared of crops, then on the muck, before ploughing and putting in a catch crop of turnips for the sheep to graze overwinter. We’ve had a lot of rain this summer (it did rain on St Swithin’s day) so we haven’t enjoyed basking in sunshine, but there is plenty of grass and the cattle and sheep have done really well. The grass keeps growing and we’ve more silage to make in the next few weeks and there will be enough forage this winter.

The new season lamb is now ready and especially good at this time of year when it is so tender. It was the winner of last Years Organic Food Awards, described by the judges as having a great ‘wallop of flavour’ Our large lamb boxes are fantastic value at only £75 still or choose your own cuts from our full range. The loin chops and cutlets are brilliant to grill or give a quick sizzle on the barbecue. We enjoyed some last night with mini roast potatoes with spicy tomato ‘bravas’ sauce, and the first picked runner beans from the garden. Hope it’s making you hungry!!

Best wishes
from Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

July News 2011

It’s been a busy few weeks making silage between the showers and we just managed to bale hay last week. This year has been a ‘catchy’ grass harvest with the weather forecast always giving a chance of showers, so it’s been a stop/start job.

We’re not complaining as we really needed some rain. It’s certainly increased the grass yields and helped the spring barley to grow and the grain fill out. It’s just turning colour now, still a little green, so we are a few weeks away from combining. Looking across the fields last week I couldn’t believe how many butterflies there were hovering over the crop. They almost made my eyes dizzy watching them! Butterflies are all very beautiful until they land on the cabbages in the garden! It’s a bit like the swallows, lovely to see them swooping and diving in and out of the farm yard, but as we’ve just given everywhere a fresh coat of paint, all the smart red barn doors are now daubed and splattered white!

It’s been a good season for the stock, the cattle looking really sleek and golden at this time of year, the calves growing up fast beside their mothers. The ewes were shorn at the beginning of June before the flies could get to them and lay eggs in their wool which can cause terrible problems. Tim brought the sheep in this morning and has selected the first of the new season lambs. Our lambs finish naturally on their mothers milk and grass and we don’t force them to be ready earlier with concentrate feeds.

Keith, our butcher has been busy making chorizo sausages which are now organically certified. They are great for cooking with, like a special stock cube, packed with garlicky flavour. We have enjoyed developing them and tasting the various recipes! Tracy too has been working out new recipes in the Higher Hacknell Kitchen for our homemade meals which we are supplying to football teams and nursery schools as well as our regular customers.

With the holiday season upon us we are happy to deliver anywhere in the UK, if you want us to send somewhere different where you maybe staying. Don’t forget to stock up for when the children come home and raid everything in the fridge! Our cooked salt beef and sliced ham are great for picnic lunches and our sausages and burgers are perfect for outdoor cooking. Talking of holidays, Keith our butcher is taking his and Tim and I are attending a special event too, so we will be *closed for the week 25th -31st July*. *If we receive your order by 18th July we can deliver on 21st or 22nd July with the next deliveries on 4th and 5th August.

As always thank you for buying your meat from us at Higher Hacknell Farm, we really appreciate all your lovely comments and feedback. We are really grateful to receive acknowledgement for what we do here and if you are able to nominate us in the food and farming awards it would be fantastic.

I’ll finish this rambling on and wish you a great summer

June News 2011

Please accept my apologies for the glitch with the newsletter which you received many times over last month. Our website manager was on holiday so I pressed the wrong button. It won’t happen in future as he’s removed the other buttons, so I can’t get it wrong again!

The wet weather and showers today are worth a penny a raindrop as Tim said, but it’s come just as we want to start silage making ! We’ve been desperate for rain, the ground is hard as rock and the grass is burnt off in places. It looked more like August in April, but now it’s come we also want a few dry days!! Getting the grass harvested by making silage and hay is the main job to be done in June.

Last Saturday the sun shone for shearing , so the sheep are pretty cool now, looking good with their sleeker look! I met someone at the farmers market the other day who runs a spinning group, so after 30 years gathering dust I’m determined this year to get the spinning wheel out and start turning the odd fleece into yarn. If you are a spinner or felt maker and would like fleeces please let me know as they can be sent to you. Also we supply our own gorgeous sheepskins which are great camping mattresses at this time of year!.

Our work on the farm is completely weather dependent so planning ahead is impossible when it’s so unpredictable. June is a great month for parties, picnics and barbecues so I hope you’ll be lucky with your plans. Our barbecue box has got it all and just the job to have ready in the freezer for whenever that mini heatwave hits us! We can also cater for larger parties and events, so phone or email me if I can help you with catering. When you are busy at home or even on holiday, our ready made meals, lasagne, cottage pie and beef casseroles are a perfect solution, home made, slowly cooked in small batches with real taste. We are happy to send to any UK address, wherever you plan to spend the summer.

Hardly a day goes by without a food or farming story hitting the headlines. Good news this week: the government are publishing their proposals on conserving nature. It’s exciting that at last they are talking about putting a value on the countryside and recognise it’s wider benefits, but we think that food production should be a part of the process. Do we want a divided countryside of a few mega farms intensively producing food on one hand , with a protected ‘zone’ for tourism, recreation and a few rare species on the other? Organic farming may not be the complete solution, but it’s the best system for producing food with least damage to the environment and careful use of resources that’s around, touching on so many issues. Bad news: the e-coli outbreak has become much more than a food poisoning disaster, and it’s a reminder of the importance of antibiotics for treating humans and the potential danger of misusing them in intensive farming systems. The organic standards emphasise that good husbandry and management are the best tools for healthy livestock with antibiotics used only for emergency treatment and not routinely.

And finally, our ‘Ruby Red’ cow has calved at last. She was so enormous, wider than she is tall, so every day we thought would be ‘the’ day-how could she get any bigger? Last Sunday morning our neighbour rang to tell us she was wandering up the lane about half a mile away, so we jumped out of bed, rushed up the lane to get her and bring her back.She had probably gone on her journey to find a nice place to calve.A couple of hours later I was transplanting lettuces in the vegetable garden and Tim said he needed a hand. The calf’s leg had got stuck so she needed some help, and with a bit of assistance all was well. But it was only the one calf, by the size of her I can’t believe it wasn’t twins. Hopefully she’s now settled and won’t be wandering off any more, at least not on Sundays.

With best wishes

From Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

May News 2011

What happened to May? It feels more like April than May with gusty winds and showers and April was more like May with the bluebells and blossom coming early; somehow the months are the wrong way round! We look forward to May, not only because everything looks so beautiful, but when lambing is over for another year, the animals are out at grass with only a few of the cows still to calve,we have a bit more time before Tim starts making silage and hay in June.There has been so little rain, even during the winter, that we are hoping it isn’t going to affect the grass yields like last year, so a few wet weeks would be good for us even though I love the hot sunny weather.

One job we have to get on with now is fencing-When the stock are all at grass, if a post is worn out, or there’s a gap in the fence or hedge, they are bound to find it and usually when it’s an inconvenient moment! Last thursday we had Helen Browing, the new head of the Soil Association, and some fellow organic farmers round for a meal and to discuss general organic matters when the phone rang; our cattle had got out into someone’s wood! First we rounded up our daughters and they went with our neighbour to get the bullocks back (apparently with some difficulty which didn’t have anything to do with Ellie’s mini skirt not being practical farming wear). Today Tim has taken his post basher,tools and wire netting down to Mullybrook, some land we farm over the other side of the village where every year our cattle get across the stream and are not very welcome on the other side! Although it’s a favourite picnic spot of ours by the brook where it would be nice not to have a fence, chasing around after straying cattle is no fun either, so we have to be practical! With our numerous small fields which need to be fenced both sides of the hedge to protect it, there’s always work to be done and after 25 years we are now having to re fence and repair the fences we put up when we first arrived at the farm.

Back in the butchery, with the wonderful weather, the barbecue season has started early this year. We’d like to tempt you with some of our melt in the mouth, tender fillet steak which is on offer at £10 off per kg it’s normal price for a limited time only! Also I’d like to let you know that the butchery will be closed from 23rd to 30th May when Tim and I are taking a holiday- and it makes sense for Keith, our butcher, to take time off then too. Please let me know by Monday 16th May if you’d like an order delivered next week either on line at www.higherhacknell.co.uk.or do phone me on 01769 560909.

I hope all is well with you

Best wishes from Tim and Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

April News 2011

We are great followers of the old sayings which year on year seem to be a more reliable forecaster than the latest meteorological data. However as March ‘came in like a lamb’ , we’ve been expecting it to ‘go out like a lion’ but it seems we’ve been blessed with almost perfect weather this month! It makes such a difference when newly born lambs and their mothers can go straight out to grass and you see them skipping about the fields instead of huddled up sheltering under the hedges. It’s so much better for us farmers too! Trudging back and forth to check constantly on the sheep in wind, gales and mud is no fun and wearing T shirts instead of layers of waterproofs is a lot nicer too!

We had a welcome shower of rain last night which will help the recently planted barley to grow and the grass seeds to germinate. Another saying - ‘A speck of dust in March is worth a King’s ransom’ meaning that it’s worth a lot to be able to get crops in the ground early on in March - also comes to mind! The cows are calving now, a bit earlier than we wanted, because we try to get over the lambing before calving starts, but Tim couldn’t hold our new and very eager bull back last year! The cows seem to be having the heifer calves OK on their own but we’ve had to help some of the ones with large bull calves. Then we have to keep a good eye on them to make sure they can feed from their mothers and that cows don’t have too much milk for them.

Easter is a busy time in the butchery as well, Christmas come early! Lamb is the traditional favourite, either legs and shoulder joints for roasting or our great value lamb boxes. The chickens have been growing well, so hopefully we’ll have some large ones for Easter and we even have some (frozen) turkeys if you’ve got a houseful to feed. Following Easter is the extra holiday for the ‘Wedding’, and if you are throwing a party, why not barbecue some proper sausages or try our bumper BBQ box!

If you’re not having your own celebration, do come and see us at the annual Exeter Festival of South West Food and Drink 29th April to 1st May where we will be cooking our delicious steak-burgers and have a great selection of meat!

Please note that delivery dates due to the holidays are different from our usual days. In Easter week all deliveries will be made on Wednesday 20th April, no deliveries on Thursday 21st or Friday 22nd, so I would very much appreciate your orders to be made by Monday 11th.

With very best wishes for a Happy Easter.

Tim, Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

March News 2011

The sun is shining and the sky is blue here at Higher Hacknell Farm and with the birth of the first calf calf of the year today, Spring is surely on its way. You may remember last March I wrote on our blog about buying the new bull at the South Devon Cattle sale and at least he’s proved his stuff! There will hopefully be many more to follow in the days and weeks to come.

It’s quiet out in the fields as the ewes are tucked up inside the lambing shed where we can keep a close eye on them as they are still a couple of weeks away from lambing. Once the lambs are born it all gets incredibly noisy, with bleating and baaing in every barn and across every hillside! It can all get a bit much, especially when we bring a poorly lamb in to warm up by the Aga, it seems there’s no escape! So we are enjoying a bit of calm now before it all begins-especially as they say ‘if March comes in like a lamb, it goes out like a lion’. Tim said the weather forecast is good right up to the day when we start lambing, when, guess what, it’s due to rain !

The weather has been pretty kind since Christmas when the snow caused havoc everywhere. Since then Keith, the butcher and I have been planning new boxes and products as a result your ideas and suggestions from the customer survey last year. Many of you asked for smaller size boxes as either your families have shrunk or your appetites! So we have a small mixed box which has all the useful cuts, a joint, some treats and sliced cooked meat for lunch or sandwiches at only £55. Also if you like your meat as a luxury but at an affordable price, we have a box of purely steaks and cuts which are quick and easy to cook. Since many of you like to add extras to our very popular mixed box we’ve developed a larger family box with more variety and many of your favourite choices such as bacon, sausages and chicken pieces.

We think these boxes really provide great value for money as well as offering all the Higher Hacknell Farm quality and taste. When we asked you why you bought from us you gave us lots of great feedback about the quality and service, how you liked buying from a family business and that knowing where your food comes from and animal welfare are important to you. Above all, it was because we are organic, but I think when people ask me to explain why organic is better, I am sometimes aware that I’m talking about lots of different issues and this can be confusing to people. There’s no single issue, such as fair trade or free range because organic encompasses these and so much more, from the environment to nutrition and health, so there is a new campaign which explains all this probably better than I can www.whyiloveorganic.co.uk. The Soil Association are also actively campaigning against the increasing industrialisation of farming in the UK, having opposed the mega-dairy in Lincolnshire, they are now asking for support for the welfare of pigs and are objecting to a proposed indoor pig factory of 2,500 sows. If you’d like to join their ‘Not In My Banger Campaign’ details are www.soilassociation.org/Takeaction/Notinmybanger.

Easter being towards the end of April will be a good time to celebrate with family and friends, especially with extra holiday for the big wedding. Whereas everyone plans Christmas months in advance, Easter often catches up pretty quick, so please don’t delay with your orders! Our award winning lamb is the traditional favourite or maybe you’ll be getting the barbecue out? We still have some turkeys (frozen) and our chickens are growing very well at the moment, so are larger than usual. Keith the butcher will take a weeks holiday the last week in March so we’d prefer to avoid doing deliveries that week, by sending more out the week before or the week after. Keep an eye out for specials on the website www.higherhacknell.co.uk where at the moment beef topside is 15% reduced.

And lastly, as we’d love you to try out our new boxes, we’re offering free delivery until the end of March on the new large mixed box!

Best wishes
from Jo, Tim and all at Higher Hacknell Farm