Broome Park Farm, Farmhouse Bed & Breakfast Accommodation Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire

Pallets for the bonfire

Tonight is the Cleobury Chamber of Trade Annual Bonfire and Firework event. We have been storing pallets from the local Box Factory for the last few weeks to keep them dry ready for the fire. This morning John loaded them up and the firemen have kindly built the bonfire in a field in the village.

The Chamber organise the event in part to promote fire safety and safe handling of fireworks at this time of year so the local Fire Brigade come along, give out leaflets and advice. Our Chairman is able to buy fireworks direct from a local manufacturer and I am told last years display was fabulous! I am looking forward to tonights event - which starts at 6.30pm.

Apple pressing

We had a great day yesterday pressing apples and pears ready for cidermaking. Once again with 2 presses in use we struggled to keep up them - the scratter (that pulps the apples before pressing) is quite temperamental and doesn’t like being over filled - Annette is busy bodging the apples down with a custom made tool! This years innovation was to use a colander to get the apples out of the washing barrel.

It is definitely a social activity with even my guests having a go! And a great time to catch up with old friends who always come to join in - Dick was very proud of his speciality cider apples - blagged from a farmer near his home - until he looked at those John had picked locally and saw they were just the same!

Next Sunday we are planning our Annual Cider Making day and John has decided he would like to try and make perry as well; so this morning we headed off to a neighbour’s farm where there are several old perry trees. Unfortunately since John had spotted the pears and gained permission to pick them most had dropped and been eaten by the sheep - lucky them - not so lucky for us! However we did find 1/2 a bag of small yellow pears and 1 bag of hard green fruit - this tree was absolutely dripping with fruit - so we shall see how much juice we can extract next week.

You may remember seeing fields of plastic in the spring - that was maize being planted! Maize needs a long growing season to maximise the nutritional value of the crop so the current trend is to plant the seed under bio-degradeable plastic. This allows the seed to be sown up to 2 weeks earlier and hopefully yields a bumper crop. This year we have planted fields using the new method and by traditional drilling but as the Autumn has been warm and dry there has probably been little advantage to the new method.

Whilst the crop has the appearance of corn on the cob it is not really intended to be eaten as such - it is still under ripe and will be turned into silage to feed the cattle through the winter. The earlier sown crop has already been silaged and the remaining fields will be harvested this week - we use contractors with specialist equipment so have to wait for their arrival!

Since we went back to school at the beginning of September the weather has been glorious and yesterday was no exception, so I persuaded John to abandon clearing out his new workshop and come for a walk. We headed for what is one of my favourite spots on the farm - Titford Bridge. The bridge crosses the River Rea between Stepple Hall and Detton Hall and is on the Simon Evans Way - the route he took as the village postman, after being gassed in the 1st World War. It is such a peaceful spot - we have seen kingfishers skimming up stream in the past, but unfortunately not this time!