Tag Archives: community cafe

Volunteer Stories

Andrew has been volunteering on the farm twice a week for 8 years! He loves coming, and turns up whatever the weather, rain or shine.

His favourite jobs are collecting the eggs, refilling the poultry drinkers and giving the chickens their corn.

Today Andrew was collecting windfalls for the pigs. We have Gloucester Old Spot pigs – another name for them is Orchard Pigs as they used to be kept in the apple orchards that were once very common in the west country.

Andrew is also branching out and volunteering in our Community Cafe at weekends. He likes working there as it is very different from the farm – he has to dress smartly and stay nice and clean.

Andrew used the farm’s tablet to take some pictures of his favourite animals.

: Collecting elderflowers in Water Vole Woodland

: Andrew loves these chickens

Cafe Build 3

On Monday work started again on the cafe. A huge mobile crane arrived to lift the floor blocks in place – with the help of Pete!

: Pete in charge

: Liftin the blocks

: Putting them in place

: All done

By the end of the day everything was in place, ready for the next stage.

Cafe Build 2

The building of the cafe has now stopped for the summer holidays, and the fencing has been taken down from the middle of the farm yard.

So far the contractors have dug the foundations of the cafe and training facility, filled them with concrete and started to build the base of the walls from breeze blocks.

: The concrete is poured from the mixer into the trench. Photo by Bob Pitchford.

: Many children found watching this as interesting as the animals. Photo by Bob Pitchford.

: Photo by Bob Pitchford

: Once the concrete has set it looks like this

: The beginnings of the walls

Apart from a very large delivery sometime next month, the Farm will (almost) be back to normal for the duration of the holidays. Once September is here, the contractors will be back and the building will be in full swing again with a likely finish date of early January 2015.