News archive for 2013

2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

28/11/2013

Delighted to hear Burlington Junior School has got chickens and received this award. We visited this school a couple of years back with the farm and obviously inspired them to take on their own chickens. Well done Burlington! Read the article here

13/08/2013

OK I've been told off for pretending the arrival of 3 guinea pigs is our most exciting news... Farmer Tom and Farmer Sarah are delighted to introduce our newest arrival and a very precious, miraculous member of the MCFE team. Jonah Matthew Main, born Wednesday 7th August 7:16am, weighing in at 7lb 12oz. We are over the moon :-) He has met lots of the animals already and looks forward to finding out what MCFE is all about on a booking soon. He already has had a perfect personal uniform made :-)

12/08/2013

Life is full of surprises! Our work experience student popped the guinea pigs and rabbits all out in their grass runs this morning. When we checked back an hour later, one run had doubled the number of occupants! Not quite a planned venture...more a mistake a couple of months ago when all our guinea pigs were put in together for 10mins by accident....

10/06/2013

After two busy summer village fair bookings on Saturday, we arrived home to find Cleo had given birth to Sebastian the baby donkey. Both are doing well and we hope to have them out on visits once he is at least a week old

09/05/2013

Lambing is over for another year! It seems to have been very spread out this year....here are the stats....

19 ewes, 17 were in lamb, 48 days, 30 live lambs, 5 sets of triplets (only one set with all 3 living), 11 sets of twins, 7 lambs stillborn, 1 lamb died at a couple of weeks old, 2 C-sections, 3 dead ewes

Ewe lambing percentage (live lambs only) 175%. Pretty pleased with end result - not as good as some years, but as Ofsted would say "satisfactory" or is it "requires improvement" now!

Jenny the goat gave birth to two female kids (Jane and Jezebel) on Saturday 4th May, completing this years kidding. The stats for our goats are as follows: 3 nanny goats, 7 kids born live, 1 set of triplets, 2 sets of twins, 4 girls and 3 boys, 2 female kids died within the first week

The first ten ducklings hatched in schools are doing really well too

19/03/2013

Gemma gave birth to triplets yesterday - very sweet! John, Jim and Julie all doing well. Gilly gave birth to twins today - Joe and Jemima both seem to be thriving as well!

14/03/2013

Lambing has begun in earnest, with 12 live lambs being born to 8 ewes so far. An unusual feature this year is having to take 2 ewes to the local vet for c-sections (one in the middle of the night!). For the younger ewe, we saved her life but not that of the lambs. However, for the older ewe, we got there in time to save the life of one of her lambs. Both ewes are recovering well. We also had 4 baby rabbits born in February, the result of two of our rabbits excaping the hutch one night in January.... For pictures of our new arrivals take a look at our gallery page

16/01/2013

And Faith had 7 piglets on 14th January - ready to be sold in pairs from mid-March. So small - gorgeous!

14/01/2013

Chocolate and Toffee, two beautifully marked rabbits were rehomed with us recently. Chocolate is particularly good at being handled - we are training Toffee up.

13/01/2013

Here are two rabbits which we have taken on (not named by us) - the right hand one is called William and comes from Manor Farm, Botley. The left hand one is called Robbie and comes from some friends in Hedge End who decided to stick to just their female rabbits (!) So we have Robbie William in the hutch. :-) And there is a the guinea pig in the background too, that wasn't getting on with the other male guinea pigs, but loves his rabbit friends!