A day at the farm

Here's a lovely peacock showing us how incredibly important and desireable he is - unfortunately, his only audience was a 40 (nearly) year old woman, a very cute 5YO boy, two giggly teenage girls (no affiliation) and a couple of chickens, so frankly, he was wasting his talents. Still, it IS rather impressive. It was loud, too, but there's no sound with this photo, luckily for you. [Which reminds me of when I was in university, my dorm was near the President's house, and several peacocks lived on campus and mainly on the lawn of the President's House - lemme tell you, the last thing in the world you want when you have been having a drink or two the night before is to be awakened by a dawn chorus of peacocks - the first time it happened I thought someone was torturing babies - hideous noise those creatures make!]

Anyway. Alex and I took a trip to Deen City Farm today - the weather was quite nice for a change and he is off school with impetigo, which is contagious but doesn't make him feel particularly unwell, so we really needed to get out and run some energy off.

We started out at the garden centre at Morden Hall Park, had a long walk up to the farm (well, long by 5YO standards), which is ideal as it involves not only a river, some bridges and assorted wildlife (if you are lucky) but also a tram line crossing and had a little picnic lunch in their lovely picnic area.

We then browsed around the farm - after having been greeted by the peacock - and saw various other (not highly exciting) wildlife, such as chickens, sheep, pigs, cows, horses, various caged birds, rabbits, some baby chicks (I think - not sure, could maybe have been ducklings, but I think they had pointy beaks, which presumably baby ducks don't have) and some alpacas. Here's Alex looking through the fence at some cows - and a close(r) up of the cows.



They also have a really cool garden area at the farm, where they put a lot of emphasis on recycling and so on - including a lot of plants in interesting containers and reused materials. Alex and I particularly liked this "flower bed" and I really liked the display of plants in old wellies, etc.



It's not the sort of place that will hold the attention of my older kids, but it's a good place for small ones, and if you park at the garden centre rather than next to the farm, you get a nice walk out of it as well - he had an ice-cream for the way back, and we finished at the garden centre (where there's a nice NT tea shop, which we didn't indulge in this time) with a few needed things - a box of pansies and a new doormat, plus I bought a pair of gardening gloves which I think will work nicely for quilting - and if not, well, we can use them for gardening! Oh, and the other thing I like about it is that it's free (though it usually costs me at least one ice-cream, which I reckon is a price worth paying for a few hours' entertainment).