Untimely births and a look ahead at 2026

Welcome back to another video, folks. I thought I'd give you an overview of what's going on at the farm.

In deep winter and a look at the year ahead.

So winter is the time for rest and we've had a wonderful holiday. Just has zipped to Thailand, which is somewhere I've been dozens of times in the last 30 years. And that was nice to have a little break away from the kids. It's been a very intense year for us. A lot of financial stress, a lot of lack of sleep and a lot of time to just come back together and work out a better plan for 2026. I'm really excited about 2026. I have two trainings aboard. One back at Henbants in the spring over in Wales, and that's a seven day regenerative agriculture training so that people only need to take five days off work. Excited for that and to be back at Hembant. And then in the autumn we're going to be doing our first ever USA course, the nine day Regenerative Agriculture Training, our signature training. It's the first time we've been able to bring that to America. Details will be coming out in the following weeks, but if you're over in the States, which I know many of you are, it will be fantastic to connect and run that training over there. I'm really excited for that and to release details shortly. So many of you will know the sand garden that I'm standing in now is hibernating for the winter. And this has been one of the most special things I've built at the farm. It was a really big project and it's been incredible to just watch it really come into its own. And it's an incredible haven for wildlife. This is purely for pleasure and recreation. It's got no financial value on the farm, although of course you could use a garden like this and run garden tours. You can use it essentially as a perennial plant nursery. But for me it's really important, after spending my entire adult life growing things to make a living from, to have flowers and beauty just for the sake of beauty. And I've been busy since I got home. I've put together and finished the hundred page PDF guide on how to build a sand garden, including site selection, groundworks, all the species we use, the types of sand and what's important to consider if you're building one of these for your own. Now, this is a really big sand garden. It's 650 square meters and probably most people wouldn't be building such a big one but you can apply the same principles to any sand garden. It's such a joyful thing. It's probably my favorite thing other than the natural swimming pool which is also available as a PDF guide. I've just released that, that's in the links below and hopefully that will help many more of you create some beautiful natural, low irrigation, low maintenance gardening. You can actually see the way that we leave the garden over the winter. This will sit like this until spring and probably one of the first jobs when the snow melts in spring will be to come and deadhead everything, take it back to the ground, remove that organic matter. So this garden works by having very low levels of nutrition, a bit like the plants in a natural swimming pool. There's no real source of nutrition but plants seem to thrive. It's kind of counterintuitive having spent my entire adult life building beautiful, no dig, mulchy rich compost filled beds to bare root plants and put them into hot dry sand. Just felt crazy when we were building it. But the plants are doing spectacularly. The garden's really come into its own. And yeah, I really recommend this type of garden if you want to create something beneficial for insects, beautiful to look at and be in, then you can find out about that in the links below. So one thing that happened the day we got back on New Year's Day, we woke up to two untimely calves, both female. And so the herd has grown and this is obviously the worst time of year to have calves and we weren't expecting them. We mistimed taking away the bull obviously in the spring, but they seem to be doing fine. It's been minus 8, minus 10. They have a shelter. In fact they have two shelters. But being mountain cows, they've chosen not to use their shelters, which by law we have to have a shelter. And same with the neighbour who has Icelandic horses, they never use the shelter. These are fjallcu, the hardy mountain cows that used to be left up in the hills in common grazing and not necessarily even fed any hay or anything over the winter. So they're extremely well cold adapted. And whilst it's a little concerning having calves out in this, they seem to be doing just fine. It's going to go down to minus 17 this week, so that's really going to be a test. But we've made provisions so they do have shelter if they need it. So we're on the winter feed that we cut from our other farm, silly Gordon up in the village. Hopefully that will see us through and that's really nice if we have enough of our own grass rather than buying any in. So we're not hoping for any more casts. But one thing we are hoping for is lamb's next thing. And we've introduced a Gotland ram from a farm not far away from here. He's a young ram, but he seems to be doing what he's meant to do. So hopefully next spring we'll have a whole flock of lambs that may well go over to Siligorden. One of the jobs of winter is keeping heavy, heavy snow off the the bigger tunnels. These are rounded tunnels not suited to high snow loads. We've put reinforcements inside, but when we get a super heavy downpour, I like to clear those just for peace of mind to make sure those tunnels are safe. The reason I have such tunnels is they were so much cheaper, less than quarter of the price of buying a pointed gothic style tunnel here. And at the time when we invested in these infrastructures, that made total sense to save the money and invest it elsewhere. So still happy about that decision, but it does create a little bit of work. It takes me half an hour to go around both the big tunnels, just pulling off the snow. I use a sort of long handled shovel that you use for clearing roofs around here. So it's really quiet time now. There's a few kales left standing, but you can't really overwinter anything in this climate. And so everything's shut down for the winter. We use this time for doing all the accounting, planning the next season, planning the gardens and the crops and the animals and doing a bit of riding and things like that. I'll show you the crop plan.

Well, it's a bit of a mess in my office, but the crop plan has changed quite a lot from subsequent years as we start to tailor our production to the restaurant needs. Now we have quite a short season at the restaurant. We're just going to open for six weeks but. But we're opening more often and we didn't really get a chance last year to optimize our production towards the restaurant.

Now we're still producing eggs and broiler, chickens and beef and mutton and forest raised pork. But we've narrowed down our production window for vegetables to the weeks that were open at the restaurant. And we're not going to focus on selling those outside of the restaurant business or the meals that we serve here. Currently we have these beds covered and we're farming mainly on the north beds. We've also got the south beds. But this year they're going entirely down to flowers. We're putting in bulbs as well as root cuttings and things for different ornamental flowers for the restaurant. East and west beds are now covered up with the sandgarden, so that marks.

A big shift for us. It's going to be less vegetables than normal, but still a substantial amount. We serve 10,000 meals every summer at the farm as well as the restaurant. We're going to be opening Friday evening, Saturday evening and Sunday for breakfast brunch. And so what we're trying to do this year is really gather the data of what our production needs are to supply the restaurant entirely. And that's really how we want to run the restaurant. Everything coming from the farm. We also have the farm expanding up there. We have some vegetable gardens up at Silligorden, and we're going to probably take the sheep and lambs to graze over there, maybe even have an egg mobile over there too. We really want to connect customers to the food supply, but we'll see how that pans out. We've got exciting news with the team we're organizing for the summer, and details of that will be coming out shortly in the following weeks. But that's how our crop plan is.

Looking for this year. Same vegetables as ever, but just we've.

Really got to marry it down to the restaurant's needs now.

One very nice addition to the farm this winter has been our sauna. I'm just going to make this wide angle. Here's the natural swim swimming pool outside the back of the house. You can see the bubblers are still working. And we've put in this incredible sauna, which is much easier to heat up in the winter due to the small size. It's quite hard to get down to the big sauna in the winter with all the snow and it takes so long to heat it up. It's built for 15 people. This one is suited for family use and it's perfectly situated on the swimming pond so we can go in and have cold water dips. Beautiful. It's magical this time of year. One really exciting bit of news is we're holding and hosting the first regenerative agriculture festival in Scandinavia on the 22nd and the 23rd of July over at Siligorn. And we're inviting people who want to give lectures, workshops to fill in the form you can find on the Ridgedale website. You can also find that in the links below. And we invite people to come from all over Europe and Scandinavia. We really want to make this grassroots really in it together, helping prepare food together, celebrating together, learning, networking and really just bringing people together to share and network and have a lot of fun together. Over the beautiful restaurant space, we're lining up a concert and we're going to have a chef there so we'll have someone leading up the cooking, but we really want to get people together, hands on and make it a lot of fun and uncommercialized. It's a not for profit event and you need to sign up if you want to take part in workshops or buy tickets if you want to join us for that. We hope there's people there representing grazing, pastured poultry, forest raised pigs, market gardening, microgreens, mushroom growing, all aspects of produce production and sales and marketing as well as composting, soil labs, etc. We want people to really get creative and come together and so please check it out and let us know if you want to come. You can fill in the form and we'd love to have many more people presenting. We're going to jam pack the spaces with multiple events happening at the same time and it should be a lot of fun. So we're only running two trainings at the Farm this summer and that is our nine day regenerative agriculture design training that's running from the 20th to the 28th of June this year and you can find links for that below. There's also a six week internship program running from 19th of June to the 3rd of August. Six weeks of intensive study and field practice, learning everything about how to design and plan, install and manage regenerative agricultural systems. To my knowledge, this training has created more successful startup farmers than any other training I'm aware of on the planet. It's an amazing time to dive deep and that's the only offering we're going to run at the Farm this year, aside from our nine day training, so you can find out all about that in the links below and look forward to meeting you from all over the world to make this place the incredible learning space that it is. All right, that's it for the update folks. I'm going back to clearing snow before late breakfast. Enjoy being outdoors in this beautiful crisp air and I hope to see you in video soon as we document our journey this year, second year with the restaurant and our 12th year at the Farm.