It’s time to blog again and it would be wrong of me not to mention the great horse meat scandal that is currently going on.

Is it demand for cheap processed food that has led to this or the busy lifestyles and inability to cook and prepare food?

It was shocking to read in The Times yesterday the journey meat takes to end up in a supermarket prepared lasagne. A Swedish firm employs a French company to make its ready meals. It gets meat from its factory in Luxembourg from another French company and it in turn employs an agent in Cyprus, who uses an agent in the Netherlands, to source meat in Romania. This is a lot of food miles and leaves a lot of scope for dodgy deals! What is really shocking is that it is still cheaper to go through all these middle men, than to source the raw meat here in Britain. No surprise really that corners get cut along the way.

The child in me eagerly awaited the snow but alas it was more like icing sugar on a green sponge cake! It is a relief not to have so much rain as the fields are still saturated and desperately need to dry out for the return of the animals and for the grass to grow.

January is normally a quiet month on the farm but we have had increased activity on the bird front( Farmer Chris cannot say the same!) as we have been trying to attract more of the wild birds into our patch.  I think our feeders have been most welcome in this cold weather and we have had a foray of tits, finches, robins and woodpeckers all enjoying the nuts. We also have one very cheeky squirrel who hangs upside down on them in order to feed!

Wishing all our guests a very Happy New Year.

Hope to see you very soon.

It was a difficult decision whether to wish our past and future guests Happy Christmas with a photo of Farmer Chris and I wearing silly Christmas hats or to use one of the animals.

As you can all see Cynthia by far is the most photogencic!

Just to let all my avid readers know there is now 33% off all River Cottage cookery courses in December and we can offer 10% off our accommodation if in conjunction with the courses.

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