Apologies to those wondering why there haven’t been blogs for a while. We have been very busy and unfortunately it’s easy to get out of the habit!

Our new web site is about to go live www.townendfarm.org.uk, we  are both very excited Wendy and Meg have been busy getting it all working (Wendy is a graphic artist who happens to be one of Jackie’s school mates). Currently if you visit it you will just find a holding page but within days this is what you will see.Our first guests will be joining us in less than 3 weeks. We are 98% there, but it seems like the final 2% is very time consuming.

Many of our friends thought we were cutting ourselves off by moving to a village, how wrong they were not only do we get milk delivered… collect our own eggs….. you try and get this type of doorstep service where you live.

This is one of our fertilised eggs in the incubator
You can clearly see some blood vessels developing in the egg, which is due to hatch on Sunday 17th of May…can’t wait.

We have done OK, out of the 20 Buff Sussex eggs 13 appear to be developing and 7 out of the 12 Blue Wyandottes are also on their way. Watch this space!

Jackie has always wanted chickens, but we felt that the courtyard was not the place to keep them. Step in our neighbours Meg and Simon, they have chickens and in November last year we first helped out on feeding duty.Subsequent conversations over supper brought in the concept of a poultry partnership… they have the field, hen hut and some chickens…we have a deep desire to have all of those things!  You may ask what are we bringing to the table? well, looking after them takes time and some commitment and we can provide that which also gives them some time off. The concept has come to reality today; we attended a rare breed auction and fought of stiff competition with aggressive bidding and have successfully bought  some fertilised eggs. These are now in to our poultry experts incubator and hopefully fluffy chicks are on the way. We have gone for some Buff Sussex and Blue Laced Wyandottes, these will be added to the existing chickens and so our poultry partnership is now a reality.So if you come and stay with us we can provide fresh free range eggs and if you are up early enough you can even help collect them!

Over the Christmas period we have had a visit from the Berry clan. Jean has not seen the boiler installed since she helped us out with a loan to help us buy it. So we hid a big ribbon behind the boiler room door and literally opened the door and handed her a pair of scissorsUnfortunately we only had one chance of the picture and George hadn’t quite managed to get into the frame….sexy right ear and hat though.

We have had some grief from some of you recently that we haven’t up-dated the blog for a while! There is a reason for this, we have had a major job that we wanted to show from start to finish and now we can.

We think the West Barn was one of the things that stopped folks from buying Town End Farm.
Because of the dangerous nature of the building we could never have opened the Long Barn for business until we had made the West Barn safe. It was quite a process to get from before to after, so if you’d like to see the eight step plan of how to re-build a barn click here.

Every October Pickering hosts a wartime weekend where people make an amazing effort dressing up in fantastic costumes.What makes this even better is that the steam railway get involved and there are different events at each station on the line.  A lot of thought goes in to the costumes, everything from evacuees to generals.We even got into the act this year with Jackie being a land girl and Ian a sailor.

After all of the disruption of digging the yard up to install our pipework, the boiler is now installed and heats the house as well as the long barn, the west barn and the pig pens.This is Richard, Callum and Chris from VG who spent a week installing our system. Deciding on installing a biomass boiler has meant lots of extra work as we had to re-roof the pig pens, put floors in, connect mains water and electricity. If you want to see some extra images and a video of “making the doorway safe”! click this link.

As a kid I had a toy dumper truck and always thought how fantastic it would be to really drive one. This week we have hired a mini-digger and dumper to dig out the floor in the West barn in preparation for the new floor.
I can honestly say that after a day of rattling and breathing diesel fumes my thoughts of being a dumper truck driver have been shattered!
Mike and I managed to fill five and a half full size skips today

The Tour de France will hopefully showcase what a beautiful place Yorkshire is

This is the peloton just before the centre of Ilkley. The crowds were really enthusiastic and there was just a fab atmosphere with the keen cyclists explaining the finer details of the race to the rest of us who didn’t have a clue but thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We hope the global coverage may get us visitors to the Long Barn from all over the World.