Home Farmer Magazine December 2016 issue Back Issue

Welcome to the December issue of Home Farmer. We have decided not to become too overtly Christmassy, as most of you will be encountering more than enough of it over the coming months, but we didn’t want to ignore it either, so we’ve made it a Home Farmer affair. Our tribute to Christmas dinners is based entirely on home-grown vegetables, and delicious it is too, and we do have a few suggestions for useful prezzies for the home farmers in your lives, and a section on Christmas puddings, complete with a history and some old and new alternative recipes. Other than that, however, it’s business as usual. In fact, we have some particularly useful features this month to help you get the best from your plot in the coming year: ten easy winter steps to get your beds off to a flying organic start; advice on getting early crops by harvesting some of your produce as baby veg; tips on crop rotation and getting the most from both old and new seeds for your 2017 harvest; and using willow rods – which are best planted in winter ‒ to grow a living garden fence; or ‘fedge’ as they’re apparently called by those in the know. We’ve also got lots on livestock, too, from turkeys to sheep, a fascinating feature about a Hampshire micro-dairy that is bucking current trends for the industry by thinking local, and an in-depth article about poultry nutrition by an industry expert – the first in a series which will be followed by pig nutrition next month. We even have the classic Melton Mowbray Pork Pie recipe from original purveyors, Dickinson & Morris of… Melton Mowbray, of course – a shrine I myself have visited when attending livestock sales at the local auction mart! And of course there’s much more too, including Dot Tyne’s smallholder diary, our regular foraging feature, more country wine recipes, and a simple weekend DIY project to create a suspended kitchen herb planter that should be a real kitchen talking point.