Welcome to the Hunters Farm blog, and my very first post in the blog.

Hunters Farm is a small estate of approximately 25 acres, near Brightling in East Sussex.

It will be lived in by me, my wife Caroline, and four of our six children (the older ones have left home).

Unusually for East Sussex, there is no mains electricity to the house.  We have been quoted a cost of £60,000 to bring electricity to the house, so we are thinking of going off-grid.  In fact we are passionatly commited to the idea of going off-grid, if we possibly can.  We have everything to learn about going off-grid, and one of the objectives of starting this blog is to share with others anything I learn during this process.  And to attract helpful comments, so that we can learn from other peoples’ experience.

What else are we trying to do?  We’d like to figure out if there is a way we can make money out of the place, and I expect to have more to say about this in later entries. Defensively, though, I feel the need to say right now that I am will aware that a “real” farmer would say that 25 acres is not a “real” farm.  Smallholding would be a better term.  Perfectly true but I shall continue to refer to it as a farm.

The other thing that we want to do is to preserve the buildings.  The farmhouse and the buildings are Listed Grade II, and as long-standing member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings I am very keen to conserve them in line with the Society’s principles.  Lime mortar, allowing the buildings to breathe, sympathetic repair and so on.

We’d like to put the farm into better order – it is somewhat run down at the moment.  We’d like to be as “green” as we possibly can and I plan to share our efforts and experiences in this area.

Finally, I’m struggling to get to grips with WordPress’s features. I’m used to blogging on Typepad, and my initial reaction is that WordPress is not as good. But then to be fair I don’t know my way round it. I will persist for a while.