The Longest Month of the Year

December and Christmas are a busy time at Out and About, the house is bursting at the seams with people. Food is being prepared and served left right and centre, turkey everywhere and there is just a lovely shiny sparkly glow to everything, The New Year arrives and the house is suddenly quiet! The barns are silent, the house empties and the children go back to school. That first morning of getting back to normality is bliss, I sit and drink a hot coffee in peace, do a little work and catch up with the housework. Then January drags on, the longest month of the year with its cold and its grey skies and writers block well and truly sets in! Not this year however, not this January! Now there are two ways to ignite my writing spark, ply me with alcohol or make me angry. I’ve been dry for two weeks now so its the other that has got the keyboard fired up this time. So what has fired me up on this dark January evening, what has made my blood boil to the point that I felt compelled to pick up my laptop at 11:15pm at night! The…

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First Time Farmer

It’s about 11pm, unusually I’m not sat writing with a gin in hand, but I am sat in bed with my laptop (I know really sad). I’m catching a few minutes of writing time before the day ends and tomorrow arrives. I’m in the midst of the six weeks holidays and my role as a farmer has had to take a bit of  a backseat along with any time for myself; as I now have become a fully fledged holiday park style children’s entertainer! The spotlight has well and truly been on agriculture over the last few months and some pretty high profile twitter campaigns have flagged up many questions for the farming community. One that came up over and over was how do I get into farming or agriculture if I am not from a farming background? As a first time farmer myself I wanted to share my experiences of joining the agricultural world for those who are thinking about a career change themselves. As a former Banker, no I did not cause the banking crash of 2008, and a city dweller; deciding to spend time shoving your hands up dead turkeys backsides to make money is not the…

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Bog Brushes, Bleach and Backing British Farmers

It’s Sunday, I’m sat doing a bit of admin and I may possibly be enjoying a glass of grown up grape juice, kids are outside in the apple and plum tress gorging themselves on fruit. I love this time of year, the kids self feed, winner! So at Out and About this week will officially kick off turkey selling season, the prices are set and will be uploaded to the website, the letters to our stockists will be prepared and applications for farmers markets completed. Like it or not Christmas is on its way. But something else is happing this week, Wednesday 12th September is the NFU’s Back British Farming day. It’s  a dedicated day on social media where farmers and others connected to the agricultural industry talk about what they do, why they do it and why they love it. It’s aim, to connect the public with how their food is produced and ask them to back farmers in these uncertain times. So whilst looking for inspiration about what I would like to say on Back British Farming day, I was flicking through my Instagram feed and I came across a lady who cleans her house and videos it.…

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Integrity

The Oxford dictionary states that Integrity is “The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles”. The day I realised my time working for a corporate company needed to end was the day that I realised they had no integrity and I was beginning to question whether I had any left. You may have read the back story to Out and About and you may be aware that I previously worked in financial services for a large corporate company. What I have never discussed is some of the decisions I took in order to leave this world and what drove those decisions. I have received numerous emails from followers telling me that they would love to quit the rat race and the corporate world and move to a simpler and more wholesome life, asking me how I achieved this. I have answered many of these email and passed on information and details but at the same time I don’t think I truly conveyed how I felt at the time and what forced my hand to finally ask for my P45. The beginning of the end for me, was my return from maternity leave and the changes that had taken…

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Every Day is a School Day

Hello, did you miss me? I’ve done the typical blogger thing and disappeared for a while. There is no air or mystery to where I’ve been. I literally have had nothing to say that warranted taking your precious time. So what have I been up to in my quiet period? I have actually been rather busy, so busy that my poor baby brain could not quite get the words out on to paper to keep you in the loop. Things are starting to calm down now and a sense of normality is resuming.  As normal as life gets at Out and About Poultry! I thought it was time to show off my super duper shiny new blog site, you know you’re a proper blogger when you have your own blog site! If you follow Out and About Poultry on social media you may know that we took delivery of our turkey poults and goslings at the end of June. There was never any intention to take all the birds in at the same time because space is always an issue when there are different flocks of day olds. They each have their own needs and cannot be mixed, so space…

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