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
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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)