We also have a few unusual gifts too and we will keep you posted on Southlands Farm “Parma Ham” coming soon!

For those of you who are local we are having our first “FARM SHOP OPEN DAY” on SUNDAY 11th of DECEMBER OPEN 10am till 4 pm. All very welcome… Come and see where we are ,whats in the freezers and to make your trip feel festive a complimentary mince pie or or two!

Hopefully see you then,
Charles and Dee

With the wind bashing our trees recently I have had rather a lot of fallen apples to deal with. Now the weather is getting colder we have an excuse to make all those delicious cozy puddings.One of our family favourites is Tarte Tatin. It is the perfect way to use your apples and tastes delicious too!
This classic French tart is made in an ovenproof frying pan, you can purchase a Tarte Tatin dish from cookware shops, not cheap but I use mine time and time again,

Ingredients;
6 large eating apples
4 oz/125g butter
4oz/125g granulated sugar
8oz/225g puff pastry
Oven 400F, 200C, Gas 4

Firstly melt the butter and sugar together in the pan,
Peel, quarter and core the apples,
Arrange in concentric circles around the outside of the pan, on top of the melted butter and sugar.Continue filling the middle with apple this time going the other way.Repeat until the whole pan is filled in.This is what makes the pretty pattern of apples.
Place the pan over a high heat until the mixture begins to caramelise.This will take apron 30 mins.When the bottom of the apples have begun to caramelise (apron 20 mins) carefully turn each one over so the other side also goes a rich golden colour.
Remove from heat and cool a little.
Roll out pastry into a circle apron 1 inch bigger than your pan, the thickness of a 2p coin.
Place over the top of the apples and tuck in any extra pastry down the sides of the pan/dish.
Prick the top 3-4 times with a fork,
Cook for 15 to 20 mins until brown and crisp.
Leave to rest for a few mins then loosen around the edges with a flat knife and turn upside down onto a flat plate.
If the odd apple sticks just lift out the pan and replace on the tart.
Serve with a dollop of thick double cream or a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
(p.s. DID YOU KNOW ….. We are now stockists of the delicious Doddington’s Ice cream in our NEW FARM SHOP! I find their hint of ginger or honey ice cream goes really well with this recipe. You can also substitute the apples for pears. )

The potential applications for this discovery are huge, not least being what it will do to the electric car’s future, imagine being able  to fill your car up with electricity as quickly as you now fill it with fuel.

The difference in the roots of perennials compared to annuals, staggering.

The other bit of hope comes from the National Geographic’s Big Idea article this month, in which they take a look back in time to ask why we chose annual rather than perennial grains for our crops and imagines a world  where we use our knowledge of annuals to develop perennials and how that could change the face of agriculture and our food supply. Well worth a read.

The day was spectacular, I was in two minds camera or shotgun, I can’t do both. I opted for the gun for an hour or so by which time we had five pheasant (one white), a good haul for our lunch, and some roe deer that Charlie had shot the day before and marinaded in salt. At this point it was decided that a “various” would just finish it off, started so Charlie, Charlie, John & Justin went to look for a snipe while I (the other Charlie) fired up Old smokie.

As ever the food was delicious, even old pheasants smoked for 20 minutes are delicious. there is no better way that I know of to eat this bird. And the Roe was sublime, Charlie had salted it for two hours, and we chopped it into medallions and served it on fresh bread with green tomato and onion chutney and a slice of red pepper, oh so so so so good.

As the afternoon wore on and the temperature dropped the wine got a bit chilly so we had a bit of fun improvising as you will see from the photos, as lads days go it doesn’t get much better than this.

Worth a look if you enjoy a book. Now in it’s 4th year and growing, lots going on all week  for everyone. I’m particularly looking forward to Friday when there are some food and horticulture events.

http://www.hexhambookfestival.co.uk/home/

Thanks to Mr “B—-y” Fox we have been without chickens since Christmas, but I promised myself I would wait till spring and brave it and get some more.
My aim had been to adopt some battery hens. Sadly due to the change in rules of housing battery hens (Well done Compassion in World Farming and Chicken out keep up the good work!) there is a big hold up in supply for some reason and I was not able to get any for some time. I have signed up as a fan of re homing battery hens and have become a member of  The Battery Hen Welfare Trust. I will still endeavour to house some as and when I can.
In the meantime I found a new supplier on the web  C & G Farming, Hagg Farm Teviotdale. Suppliers of good quality birds at and not too far away. After talking to Grant Shields the owner I reserved fourteen birds.
I love my old hen house that Hector made me but the winds had bent the roof hinges and it is a bit tricky to muck out and a little on the small side for the 14 birds I had enthusiastically ordered. So I decided to keep the old hen house and store it away to use if we ever had a broody hen.
As for our mounting housing crisis we had a brain wave… to convert my old underused potting shed into a des res hen house.
The old apple tree had draped its boughs over the  shed roof and it had rotted through so we replaced that with new struts and plywood then cream sheets of corrugated metal. There was already a shelf inside and Charles added some high up roosting bars.
Years ago in our old kitchen I had painted a set of shelves turquoise blue I found them again  in the garage and they are now screwed on the inside back wall,  filled with straw and very “shabby chick” nesting boxes. For the door Charles cut a cool Indian inspires doorway to add a little style!!!! And an ingenious  pulley system to open it from the outside. Two sturdy bolts on the door and to finish it off I painted it “our” farm pale green. Aesthetics being high on my priority list!
We collected the chickens and shut them in the new hen house for a couple of days.
It is wonderful to look through the window and see a huge row of chickens all roosting along the bar. We have a mixture of: Two brown Goldline, four White Star, three Light Sussex, two Black rocks and three White Ambers, fourteen in total.
Now they are happy settled chooks pecking away all day and I have been rewarded with small but perfectly formed eggs of speckled, pale brown and brilliant white. I feel every day it is such a treat when there is an egg or two lying in the straw …and best of all they taste amazing.

The title of this post “Racing Pigs and Giant Marrows” is infact the title of a very entertaining book by Harry Pearson and well worth a read to get you into the “show season” spirit.

It’s hard enough getting up to feed the animals in the middle of a freeze, without listening to am ill-informed zealot spouting about cows killing our planet by farting. What this person on breakfast TV (I didn’t pause to write her name down) was asking for is a “meat free Monday” an idea that I agree with, we eat more meat than we need to. A classic case of right message, wrong reason. Ed Hammer wrote a very interesting article on the matter in Septembers The Ecologist as I pointed out in my post “Can cows stop climate change” . Graham Harvey has written a very good article in The Times (04/01/10) headed “Belching cows can help to rescue our planet” in which he explains about “mob grazing” and how its aids carbon sequestration, locking carbon into the soil. So I recommend both articles to you if for no other reason than to bring a bit of balance to the hysteria….. that includes you too Macca.

Cartoon: http://www.squidoo.com/fartingcow