Meadowview Cottages
Self catering holiday cottages in Northamptonshire

We were very excited to hear from guests staying in Larkrise last week that they had spotted a deer in the garden of the log cabin. It's not unusual to see muntjac deer on the farm but our visitors were sure this was something a bit different as it had proper antlers. We were very excited by this, imagining that a full grown stag had been spotted ambling about but when we calmed down we thought it best to ask if they had managed to take any pictures; luckily they had! So here

We have had a very hectic start to calving on the farm this year with nearly 50 cows giving birth in the first 20 days. Cows are pregnant for around 9 months and when we think they have all been in calf for between 6 and 18 weeks we go through a similar process to pregnancy scans carried out in a hospital. An ultrasound machine is used to check if the cow is pregnant, give an idea of when she is due and also find out if she is carrying twins or not. The due dates given are us

Autumn hasn't quite arrived yet but there is still plenty of colour in the fields with pheasants being particularly noticable at the moment. We get a lot of birds moving to the farm from local shooting estates such as Althorp and the chap pictured above is looking particularly fine! He also has a rather unusual mate that we haven't managed to photograph yet; a completely white hen pheasant. She is very shy but we will post a picture of her when we manage to capture her on cam

Our farm covers approximately 450 acres with most of the land being used as arable or grassland. The average field is around 15 acres meaning that we have a lot of hedgerows and ditches offering important nesting and hunting habitats for wildlife but we see our role as farmers as more than just producers of food. There are some areas on the farm which are un-economic to crop so rather than invest time and energy in to trying to do so we have instead turned them in to a variet

Welcome to the first post on our new blog! We are going to use the blog to keep you up to date with what is happening on the farm as well as special events which are taking place locally, hopefully giving you a better idea of the range of activities available when staying with us. If you have any suggestions or comments about our blog please let us know! At Perkins Lodge Farm we produce wheat, oats, barley and oilseed rape as well as running a beef herd of around 90 cows. Har