The Field

 Yesterday, I sort of threw away a comment that I had decided not to carry on with leasing the field.

I didn’t mean for it to sound dismissive.

It was just time for it to go.

Once, a few years ago now the field was filled with the chatter and movement of animals, activity surrounding four large allotment beds crammed with neat rows of vegetables, fruit bushes and the like.

The Ukrainian Village housed nearly 100 hens in one summer, with satellite houses providing a home for the dim hysterical Runner ducks, a gaggle of geese and the slow moving, delightfully morose turkeys who glided around the paddock like galleons in full sail.

Four pigs lived in the sty in the corner triangle right at the bottom of the field and up in the Ash trees on the Church borders came the noisy chatter of the guinea fowl who serenaded the entire village every morning and every dusk for years and years and years.

The Open Allotment days eventually turned into a successful  village fete with a giant marquee housing, Sylvia and Irene’s famous table busting cake sale ( over 100 homemade cakes donated from the village ladies) and the Name the pig, save the pig Competition  raised hundreds of pounds towards the Church Fund and  The Motor Neurone Association 

I’ve had a wander down memory Lane this morning and have picked out a few photographic memories to share with you all today. 

Enjoy…..

The Ukrainian Village

The allotment beginnings 

The hysterical runners and young cockerel facing off a strange cat in the field 

The villagers at the open day

My brother doing the raffle whilst he was ill

The villagers at my very first open allotment day

The biggest fete open day

The indomitable Sylvia with her record busting cake tent

Halleh the duck who thought he was a hen

The nasty guinea fowl Angostura, pecking at the gentle Boris

( she was named because I always thought she was bitter)

Hughie, Ivy and Alf who lived for years in the Church trees

camilla Parker Bowles as a gosling

Bingley and gentle old William

The famous Ghost hens, the battery broilers who taught me a great lesson about animal cruelty

The allotment was not only filled with vegetables and animals , great swathes of it was planted out to wild flowers

Jesus, the cockerel that just turned up on Boxing Day

The hysterical runners being hysterical

No 21 the nasty old spot sow and the gentle no 12 the saddleback boar as piglets

Camilla after she had crash landed on the binman’s lorry

The sausages made from the pigs

The field has been a good friend to me

And has been one to the village too

I’m not sad to be letting it go

It’s time

And I have new things to do

Hey ho

The huge blind rooster Cogburn

The original Mary ( the injured wild rabbit in her own hutch)