The Hacknell Chronicles

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope you all enjoyed a peaceful and delicious Christmas! It was a very white Christmas here, and we just managed to get the family back home and the orders delivered! We could not have coped without 4 wheel drive vehicles and tractors as we had to deliver all the boxes to the main road at the bottom of the steep hillside.The snow has melted and life is getting back to normal now. It’s a great relief for Tim as the water has been frozen, so he’s had to let the cattle out in groups to get to the pond for drinking water. He decided this was easier, albeit the ice took a bit of breaking, than defrosting the pipes to all the different troughs every day. The sheep and cattle have had to be fed more silage and hay during the snowy weather so we are hoping there is going to be enough fodder to last us through the winter. We are quite short as it was a difficult summer and yields of grass were down. There is an old saying that if there is enough ice to hold a duck before Christmas, the rest of the winter will be wet and muck - so maybe not as picturesque but certainly a lot easier! Let’s hope they are right.

We are back to work in the butchery next week with delivery starting from Friday 7th January (and then the following week on Thursday 13th and Friday 14th January). If we receive your order by Monday midday, you can usually receive it the same week on a Thursday or Friday, whichever day suits you best. New Year is a good time to start on our loyalty scheme with details on our website blog as well as some wintery scenes of the farm. We want to thank you for your custom and support in 2010 and look forward to hearing from you soon and wish you all the best for a happy 2011.

Best wishes
Tim, Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm

It certainly looks seasonal outside! We haven’t got any snow but there is a hard frost on the ground and a bright blue sky so the farm is looking very picturesque! In reality though we have frozen pipes and troughs and lots of extra work feeding the animals and getting water to them all. Tim said he almost couldn’t get the tractor up the lane today though I’ve managed to get out to the farmers markets as well as getting our deliveries to you.

With Christmas almost upon us, only a couple of weeks away please take a look at our Christmas range of meat. We have delicious bronze free range organic turkeys, , home cured ham and gammon, as well as tasty and tender beef joints such as sirloin joints and rib of beef on the bone. Some cuts are always popular and sell out so if you haven’t placed your order already, please phone or order on line as soon as possible.

We would very much appreciate your orders by next Monday,December 13th so we have time to organise the many deliveries which will be going out the Christmas week. You can choose your Christmas orders delivery date for either Wednesday 22nd December or Thursday 23rd December. As always please let us know where it can be left if you are out and if you have not received delivery by 4pm on the expected day, please PHONE me on 01769 560909 so I can check all is well!

You can also collect orders from the farm here on Thursday 23rd and Thursday 24th December, when Keith the butcher will sure to be in festive mood! I’ll be at Exeter Farmers Market on the 23rd which is also a convenient place to collect orders. After Christmas we will be closed until 5th January. We can send some meat boxes (without chicken) for delivery on 7th January and start fully the following week beginning 10th January.

If you are looking around for Christmas presents, we are happy to send our boxes to you friends and family, just order in the usual way. We also have some beautiful sheepskins for sale which make lovely, lasting luxurious presents.

We wish you all the very best for Christmas and hope you are keeping warm out there! P.S. don’t forget the organic sausages and bacon for making pigs in blankets.

Tim, Jo and all at Higher Hacknell Farm