Good morning everyone. Here is the last of our guest posts. We are very lucky to be off to the UK today to visit with Anne in East Anglia. She blogs at Life in Mud Spattered Boots. I will be back on my farm on Sunday night and see you all bright and early on Monday morning. Until then: Welcome Anne!
One of the best things about reading blogs is discovering how different life is on a farm in another country. I come inside complaining about the cold and damp only to switch on the computer to see Cecilia struggling through snowdrifts and farmers in Australia battling with dust and parched fields in 40C heat. Perhaps the only constant is that farmers everywhere depend on the weather.
So, welcome to Slamseys Farm where daytime temperatures currently hover around the 8C mark, the fields are wet but spring is just around the corner (fingers crossed). We live about forty miles from London, neighboured by housing estates to the north and a racecourse (the newest in England) to the south. Sometimes it feels as though Essex is disappearing under a sea of new roads and houses, but look eastwards and westwards from the farm and the fields stretch out in the traditional patchwork pattern of the English countryside.
On the farm we grow wheat, oilseed rape (canola) and field beans, willow trees for cricket bats and Christmas trees that we sell from our Christmas Tree Barn each December. The name Slamseys is thought to come from the Old English for “sloe tree enclosure on the hill” and there is still a great deal of blackthorn (which bears sloes) in the hedgerows that form the boundaries to our fields. One of our daughters has a successful business making Sloe Gin and other fruit gins using fruit and flowers that we pick from the fields and hedgerows around the farm.
At the heart of the farm is the farmyard with its mixture of traditional and modern barns, a pond that would have been used for watering livestock and the farmhouse. In Essex, our traditional barns are timber framed with steeply pitched roofs and walls clad with horizontally laid black weather-boarding above a brick plinth. Many traditional barns and farm buildings are too small or awkward for modern machinery so farmers rent them to other businesses or convert them into offices, houses, shops or wedding venues. We recently renovated The Barley Barn with its beautiful medieval timbers into an art gallery. Twenty years ago the yard was very quiet and a little bit lonely with only Bill and one other person working on the farm, but now the yard’s a bustling place again with other businesses based here in various buildings. Even the fields are busy at weekends when people walk their dogs along the public footpaths that criss-cross the farm.
There haven’t been livestock kept commercially on the farm for over fifty years but we have a few hens and guinea fowl that wander around the yard, ducks on the pond and horses kept at livery, which means I can gaze at beautiful horses grazing in the fields without the hassle of looking after them. Oh, and pigs. We used to have a beautiful Gloucestershire Old Spots sow called Ermintrude who raised over a hundred piglets but now we just buy in a couple of weaners to fatten through the summer. They may all be pets, but I don’t think it would feel like a proper farm without them.
Thank you Cecilia for letting me share our farm with your readers.
Anne
The Kitchen's Garden 
70 responses to “Slamseys Farm”
From one Essex lass to another I was born in Basildon)..well done….If you tell me where you are in Essex I could drop in to visit on one of my few visits back to UK….It has been an honour and a privilege to read about Slamseys Farm and learn about Sloe Gin…daughters bottle design is delightful…so carry on the good work…and thank you so much for letting us peep into your life
Another Essex girl! We’re a bit further north than Basildon, in Braintree.
Wow! The green is a feast for my eyes at this time of year! Beautiful barn, and it looks like a big operation you have there. I wouldn’t mind trying some of that gin, either :*)
The gin is very good. I get to help with the tasting sessions when my daughter is trying to perfect her recipe, which is a pretty good job and certainly makes up for all the cold fingers picking the sloes.
So lovely to see you here, Anne, as c’s guest writer. I’ve followed your blog and interests and developments on the farm for years, and thoroughly enjoy it. Here’s to the quick arrival of spring (although we had snow this morning in West Sussex!) xx
Hello Misky. Snow this morning! It looks overcast here and is cold this morning but I hope we don’t get any snow.
This was a lovely post, thank you. Reading the word ‘hedgerow’ in your post seems so very…British, and quaint, and fills my head with visions of farming and that countryside you describe.
Thank you. Hedgerow does seem very quaint doesn’t it? We have no stone walls around here so we have lots of hedges.
Beautiful story and loved the photography!
Thank you.
Lovely post Anne. I’m a big fan of sloe gin and your daughter’s bottle looks very tempting. Can I ask what you are using on your oil seed rape now that the neonics ban is in place?
The oilseed rape was badly hit by flea beetle and now getting decimated by pigeons. We’re looking for a crop to replace it, so may not grow it much longer.
Sorry to hear that. Was the crop hit as a result of not using neonics, do you think? Or is it hard to tell?
Neonics. Several crops around here were re-sown so at least ours weren’t that bad.
What a beautiful picture of your fruit bounty. I have never tasted Sloe Gin. Thanks for showing us around your Farm and I am definitely going to explore your blog quite a bit more. Laura
Thank you. Sloe Gin tastes very good, which is surprising as the sloes are disgusting.
Just love the picture of all the colorful fruit lined up! Gorgeous! And to read about your GOS sow Ermintrude! We have these heritage pigs too, and just love them. They are rather rare in the US. You certainly do have a lovely piece of paradise. Thank you for sharing it with us!
GOS pigs are my favourites. Apart from a scary time when Ermintrude tried to eat her first litter (we gave her a sedative and Bill went to the pub for a pint of beer for himself and a quart for Ermintrude) she was docile and a wonderful mother.
Thanks for sharing! I see you do a Taxidermy class. Might need to get some tips when our old Siamese kicks the bucket. 🙂
Taxidermy is a bit different but very interesting. I’ve only done a mouse so far but hoping to try something bigger.
Oh Jean, you made me laugh , thank you.
I loved your photographs! The barn is especially lovely, and I wonder who designed the label for the sloe gin bottle – it’s beautiful! Thank you for sharing about your farm! 🙂
Thank you. The labels were designed by a London company B&B; John Ray (who was a famous naturalist and classified flora and fauna) lived down the road and so the labels reflect the link.
Thanks for your lovely contribution to our guest week! I thoroughly enjoyed it. Lovely photos!
Thank you.
Slamseys Farm seems a very enterprising place, as well as beautiful. The guinea fowl are lovely in the photo, but maddening to live with due to their constant raucous croak. They are definitely better on a plate! Do you run the art gallery, or is that one of the rented facilities? My husband is on his way home from Essex as I write – his son lives in Colchester and his daughter just over the border in Suffolk.
Small world! One of my daughters runs the art gallery. The guinea fowl are noisy but highly entertaining.
How wonderful to see your farm. And very enterprising to make products from the “fruits” of your labor. Tho not a drinker myself (I have a bit of a problem with all things alcohol, runs in the family), the bottle is beautiful and I love the graphics! The art gallery is a wonderful idea. I love the idea of turning what you have into something functional, productive and beautiful at the same time. Thank you for the inspiration, Anne, and for the look into your wee spot of the England countryside.
Thanks Kim. It’s very satisfying making the most of what we have.
Hello Anne, this is so wonderful, like a hand-picked, lovely, boutique blog hop! I loved seeing a glimpse of your farm and now will pop over to your blog to learn more about you. I also live about 40 miles out of London, OXON, but only part of the year. You know what? In late summer I also make hedgerow jam and pick sloe berries for sloe gin. Last year I bought a small bottle of gin, poured half out into a water bottle, stuffed them both full of berries and brought them to Vancouver, where I divided the sloe gin and berries into a third bottle. Lovely treat at Christmas time. I had very little idea of what I was doing, but it turned out great! Off to visit you now. 😀
It sounds as though you know what you’re doing with the sloe gin. Hope it tasted good. How wonderful to live in Vancouver and Oxon. I love Oxford and Vancouver is on my list to visit one day (trouble is that it’s a very long list and gets longer every year).
“Oh to be in England now that April’s almost here!” Such a lively farm with so much going on and only 40 miles from London. Sounds idyllic, Anne. I love the fruits and flowers so beautifully arranged. Wish I could identify them. I’m going to have to visit your blog now too. I could spend my whole day visiting farming blogs. City girl asks, what is that machine called? Is it a combine? And oh that barn! I just took a deep breath thinking of it and could almost smell it! Thank you so much for inviting us to enjoy your life. I’m amazed you have so many compatriots so close-by.
The fruits, from the top, are Hawthorn Berries, Wild Pears, Blackberries, Crab Apples, Rosehips, Sloes and more Haws. Yes, it’s a combine cutting wheat last year.