PIP'S PAGE January 2009

What a busy month boys and girls.

Did you know that this last week, at the end of January has been Farmhouse Breakfast week? All through January we have been learning about how important it is to eat breakfast and how people that eat breakfast, even a slice of toast, can think and work more intelligently than those who don't. So give yourself a better chance; eat something before work or school!!!

All the food for breakfast comes from farms. Oats for porridge; bacon and sausages from our pigs; Eggs from our farmyard hens; potato cakes from lovely floury Wilja, grown here in Lancashire; marmalade from Spanish, Seville oranges and lemon curd with lemons also from Spain. Did you know there were farms just for fruit?

Geoff Riley from Riley Brothers butchers at Crawshawbooth was kind enough to come and give a really good sausage making demonstration. It was really interesting to find out exactly how the meat gets into the sausage skin and to help turn the handle on the sausage filler. The students found linking the sausages a real puzzle. It looks easy enough but getting all the links the same size length ways and in ‘fattness’ was really tricky. There were some moments of absolute silence while the students concentrated.

Philippa James who writes for Lancashire Life's cookery page came and showed us how to make delicious potato cakes. We tried different flavour variations, chopped spring onions and grated cheese. Spring onion were the favourite.

At the end of the month we had a brunch party cooking all the things we had made together. We grilled the bacon and sausages, made scrambled eggs the microwave way, sauted some mushrooms and baked some potato cakes. We invited some guests, Ian Hart our countryside officer and our 2 hedge layers Ralph and Eddy came in for ‘brunch’. Delicious was the comment made most often. Eddy asked when they were going to repeat the performance. He is always hungry! The students, layed the table and washed up as well.

On the 13th January the first piglets of the year were born. We have 7 little black wrigglesome things that squeal and squeak. Their mummy, the sow, is very good she lets them feed all the time they need. Sometimes the sows get cross with the piglets and as they are so large and the piglets so small they can really hurt them. Often the sow will accidentally lie on the piglets. The sows have a sort of language of grunts. When they go to lie down they sort of get half down, like a dog sitting, and then they do soft sort of grunts and lower themselves down gently. This is when the mum finds out which of her children listen to her!!!!! What a way to learn.

On the 30th the eggs in our small incubator hatched. We collected the eggs with students and set it all up 21 days before. The incubator kept the eggs warm and moist and rocked them from side to side. At the 19th day we stopped the rocking and then on the 21st day they started to hatch. Did you know that a chick has a tooth on the top of the end of it's beak for one day only? That is the day it needs to ‘pip’ it's way out of the shell. Like incredible hulk . Amazing.