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 Hello and welcome to the new look website. I hope that the blog will be my chance to give you a flavour of what we’re about here at Swallowtail Hill and to share some stories of life on the farm and our efforts at sustainable living. So here’s a quick introduction from the top of Swallowtail Hill.
My partner in grime is Christopher. We began our lives in the Sussex countryside three years ago. We were then pale-faced townies with lots of enthusiasm, little knowledge and no experience. Now we are ruddy cheeked (not alcohol related – at least not today!), worn out most of the time, can bore for England on sustainability and are very much part of rural life.
Getting to this point wasn’t easy but we made it, in an awkward, often accidental, and frequently scary, way. We continue to muddle through and while we began as two, there are now 98 of us. There’s me and Christopher, Dottie and Mabel, Sid and Nancy, Hilary and Smiler, Geoff and his girls – Sylvia, Digby, and Maureen; Anna, George, Ricky and Nicky and Nicky’s three children. Look ok I know you hardy country folk warn against giving farm animals names but all I did was name the dogs, and then the goats, some of the pigs, the cockerel and his hens and the rabbits. I stopped short of naming all of our sheep and the rest of the pigs. Basically if you haven’t got a name and you live at Swallowtail Hill, be worried. You’re for the freezer.
So that’s the population of Swallowtail Hill, but what’s the view from the kitchen window? Well it’s 40 acres of diversity – I look out onto the area we laughingly call the garden. I say laughingly because we don’t have anywhere near the time to adequately tend to the shrubbery, the rose bushes and the flowerbeds. I can see the chicken coops, the goat paddock and beyond them the vegetable plot and the orchard. The pig paddock is in the distance – near enough to enjoy pigs and far enough to avoid the smell on a warm day! The marker at the top of this stretch of land is a huge oak tree, under the shade of which my husband and I were wed nearly three years ago. And so begins the interesting stuff: first the wood – mainly sweet chestnut which we coppice traditionally. Then there are the wildflower meadows – expertly grazed by the Romney Marsh sheep. Dotted around the place we have ponds and reed beds, laid hedges and restored and restocked hedgerow.
Wow, sounds idyllic described like this and of course to me it is. But behind all the wonderful flora and fauna and the satisfaction of knowing that we’re doing our bit to retain a small part of traditional English countryside there’s the hard slog that most people don’t see. The long hours, the mud, the rain, the vermin problems, the vet’s bills, the slugs in the veg patch, the flat tractor batteries and the total exhaustion. But we wouldn’t have it any other way!
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