Introducing Pip!

Hello boys and girls, my name is Pip and I live with Farmer Joy at Cronkshaw Fold Farm.

Our farm is a really special place because as well as all the animals on the farm Joy has lots of other interesting things. The boys and girls can learn about the countryside and food and farming by playing and exploring.

The farm is in a beautiful place up on the hills above Helmshore village. It is so good to breathe the lovely fresh air and look at the beautiful views of the countryside. Joy has made lots of interesting new activities for children to try which are good fun as well as educational.

Some big boys and girls come to help. They have been making a new rabbit area so that the children can give the rabbits a cuddle. We have also been making a Nature Detectives Headquarters with all sorts of fossils, specimens and pictures for you to look at.

I have been practising rounding up the sheep with Joy because at Easter time the sheep will be having lots of lambs and I need to be able to get them quickly into new fields so that Joy can help them. We have a really old pony called Bonny, we think she is 39! She loves apples and carrots and she loves children giving her a pat and an apple core!

PIP'S PAGE Summer 2009

Dear boys and girls,
I can hardly believe how the time has rushed by. We have been so busy here at the farm. The summer holidays activities have been very popular. The boys and girls on Tuesdays have been learning how to tie special knots, light camp fires safely and make dens down in the woods. On Wednesdays Laura, our artist, has been making some beautiful felt farm animals, paintings and key fobs with the boys and girls.

We have some new goats kids, Bournville and Fudge. They are delightful but so noisy. They are Boer goats. The Boer breed has shortish legs and is a meat breed. The nannies only make enough milk for their kids, not enough for milking. Bournville and Fudge are still babies really, they were born on 5th March 2009. We won't breed from them until spring 2011.We will have to wait a long time.

We have 2 lovely black calves Ella and Eartha, they are a dairy Friesian and Aberdeen Angus cross. They are twins which is quite unusual, they have kept inside until August but now they are outside until the weather is really bad in December. Their mummy was a dairy cow in Bashall Eaves. The calves were taken from their mum after a few days. We bought them when they were a few weeks old and we fed them on milk for about 8 weeks. Even now they love to suck our fingers and make them all sloppy.

We have been lucky enough to have 3 aeronautical engineers staying with us. They were volunteers from the 'Workaway' web site. We registered as hosts and our daughter Dorothy registered as a volunteer. She went to Croatia to work as a wrangler on a farm and the three young engineers from Kansas who had been made redundant from Sessna came here. They rebuilt our home made wind turbine and did lots of other jobs to help at the farm.