Pints to Pig Muck

So I've made it out of London! Currently at my first Help Exchange in the town of Woolfardisworthy (or Woolsery) in North Devon, on Ford Mill Farm. It was about a four hour train trip to get here, though it was a bit longer than planned since the first train ran late, so we missed the connection. The train company had to put the 25 or so people in a minivan and taxis and drive us the last hour...so I eventually met up with my hosts and got out to the farm. Julie and Dave are really nice and so welcoming. They have a lovely house, the original parts of which date back to the 1600s, and two much loved basset hounds called Phoebe and Hector. They run a small pig farm breeding a rare breed called Gloucester Old Spots. There are 4 sows, a boar and five or six groups of litters at different ages. One pig is due to have piglets in the next few days so I that'll be cool. I haven't really been around pigs much so the opportunity to see a bunch of cute piglets will be great! There is also a couple of lambs being bottle fed and a few dozen chickens. Julie and Dave also have guests staying at a luxury self contained holiday cottage and run a small butchery. I'm going to be helping out in the butchery a bit next week so that will be really interesting.

So far I've helped out in the morning and evening animal feeding, moved some pigs into different pens, topped up the food and straw levels and helped Dave take a load of stuff to the dump. The first thing I helped with was cleaning out the front of one of the pig pens - literally just shovelling pig poo and mud into the digger bucket for a couple of hours. I found this quite funny after living in London for awhile...pulled my last pint on Sunday and got right into a pile of pig muck by Wednesday haha...This was great though - straight into feeling like I'm really helping. And of course it's not all going to be like that, it just happened to have needed to be done this week. As well as butchery stuff next week it sounds like I'll be helping with things like cleaning out the kitchen cupboards and painting the cupboard doors and stuff like that. It's freezing today (Thursday) so we've all been inside by the fire (so nice!!), I might do some vaccuming or something soon. So pretty laid back, I'm loving having a break from city life at the mo and being able to check out a pretty, new part of the country :)