On Friday 25^th November from 12pm until 7pm, the Museum of East Anglian life will be getting in the Christmas spirit with our Christmas Event, including a Christmas craft fayre, Santas grotto and as always our beautiful Christmas trees on sale.

With our craft fayre, we will have a selection of quality craft stalls, selling a variety of goods that will make interesting and original Christmas gifts. Held within our beautiful thirteenth century tithe barn, and with free entry, it truly is worth popping in and seeing what’s on offer.

Old Saint Nick is waiting for you to pay him a visit! Santa and his faithful elf will be here to add a bit of Christmas magic into you and your children’s lives. Santa will be available on the 25^th November, and subsequently on every Saturday up until Christmas

If you want to capture the true Christmas spirit, a plastic tree just won’t do it! Nothing says Christmas quite like that authentic Christmas tree smell when you walk through your front door, so come along and check out our fine selection of trees for sale. Christmas trees will be on sale alongside Santa’s grotto.

With just one month till the day itself, the Museum of East Anglian life’s Christmas craft fayre is the perfect place to find some of your Christmas essentials, as well as joining us in a bit of Christmas spirit and celebration.

Entry to the Craft fayre is free of charge.

Santas grotto will cost £2 and will include a small gift

For more details Tel: 01449 612229

Website: www.eastanglianlife.org.uk

Email: enquiries@eastanglianlife.org.uk

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Our trainer for the course is Jim Kemp who is an occupational therapist instructor in Ipswich.  He has been teaching in this capacity for the last 12 years and through this he has qualified as an art instructor.  He has been teaching art in many mediums for the past 7 years.  Prior to his teaching experience he has been an amateur painter for over 40 years specialising in watercolour landscapes.  He has worked professionally with various well known artists in Suffolk.

Jim is very enthusiastic and especially likes teaching beginners; he almost always helps them see their potential even when they lack confidence.

For a full schedule of what the course will include you can access our outline here Watercolour Course Level 1 INFO

The course will cost £115, for more details contact Paul Palmer either by phone 01449 612229, or by email enquiries@eastanglianlife.org.uk

Details of further courses will be added when they become available

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Come along to two grand days out at the Museum of East Anglian Life this half term!

On Monday 24th of October from 10am ‘til 1pm, see Wallace & Gromit in their cracking film The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)! The film follows Wallace and his loyal dog, Gromit, as they set out to discover the mystery behind the garden sabotage that plagues their village and threatens the annual giant vegetable growing contest.

Alongside the film showing there will be two Were-Rabbit Walks and a Gromit Aeroplane Art workshop. The walks will involve surprise and humour, strange vegetables, and tactile touchy things ….all linked to the Were-Rabbit! Children who join us in the hunt will be given a map and an Anti-Pesto Rabbit Round-up Bag to help catch the crafty carrot cruncher.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit will be screened in Abbots Hall Barn from 10.45am-12.00am, with walks taking place at 10.00am-10.30am and 12.15am-12.45pm. There are only 25 children’s places per walk so please book in advance through the Tourist Information Centre in Stowmarket on 01449 676800. This event is part of Film Flurry – a Suffolk-wide, two week event celebrating children’s films, cartoons and animation.

Get your pencils at the ready on Thursday the 27^th of October when the museum will be holding its annual Big Read, Big Draw in the BIG Barn, 10am – 3pm. This year children’s author and illustrator Lorna Murphy and artist Laura Haines will be running art workshops in Abbot’s Hall Barn based around the book ‘Maisie’s Mountain’ by Lorna Murphy.

‘Maisie’s Mountain’ tells the story of Maisie, a little girl who can’t stop collecting things and never, ever, throws anything away. In fact she collects so much that she creates a mountain of objects that stick out of the roof of her house!

Visitors will be able to hear Maisie’s story, meet the author, create their own characters and add drawings of their favourite things to a 3-D Maisie’s mountain. The Big Read, Big Draw is part of a nationwide event taking place throughout October by The Campaign For Drawing.

For all of October half term, fantastic free entry for children with a paying adult!

Admission £6.50 for adults, children age 6 –14 yrs FREE for October Half Term (no more than 3 children per adult). There is no extra charge for the activities.

For more details Tel: 01449 612229

Website: www.eastanglianlife.org.uk

Email: enquiries@eastanglianlife.org.uk

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The land in use has had a chequered past; sometimes it has been an arable field, at other times a meadow and also a car-park. All these activities have involved considerable stress to the soil which needs some revival from time to time. Our land is good but its strong clay base means the fine soil grains get very compacted with use. During the ploughing over the last couple of years it has become clear that we have developed a ‘pan’; in other words the soil below the vintage plough depth has been well hammered down, forming a crust. This prevents good cultivation and stops nutrients and moisture moving in the soil.

The first task then is to break up the pan. To do this we deployed my recently restored sub-soiler. This is a simple piece of kit which fits onto the three point linkage of the tractor. It consists of a frame carrying a single tine, or leg, which is pulled through the soil down to a depth of about 17 inches. A modern sub-soiler often has seven legs and is pulled by a four wheel drive tractor with a 200 horse power engine but we are operating in a gentler age! My one leg sub-soiler is pulled by my 60 year-old David Brown Cropmaster with only 35 horse power available. It is a slow old job and once the sub-soiler gets down to working depth it is like driving a subterranean ice breaker. You can see the land moving some distance from the implement as the underground crust is broken up. The size of some of the lumps pulled up by the tackle shows just how hard the underlying soil has become.

Once the land is loosened, it was time to make a seedbed for next years’ wheat. A pull through with the duck-foot harrows soon knocked the lumps out of the soil, levelling things off to resemble a half decent field. Our newly acquired Smythe drill is not yet ready for action  so, as in previous years, we did the sowing the traditional way, broadcasting the seed by hand. Another harrowing followed and finally a slow rib rolling put the seed in contact with the soil leaving a smooth surface for the binder next summer. We’ve become quite good at these jobs and are hoping for a decent crop next year.

We are really looking forward to getting the Smythe seed drill working for the barley and turnip sowing in the spring which will complete our crop rotation.

As we packed up for the day, we started putting a list of jobs onto the blackboard ready for our winter labours. It’s a fairly long list, we are in for a busy time!

As I drove home past the day’s cultivations, a small squadron of rooks had already landed to check out the new menu – twas ever thus.

Peter Gibbs – Steam Team Member

October 2011

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Throughout Abbots Hall, we are investigating the ideas of home and belonging. What makes us feel at home? Can we feel at home when we are not in our houses?

This is where you come in; we want to find out just how important the garden is to our sense of home. According to the National Trust’s Space to Grow report, published earlier this year, “Over 70 per cent of the population think that spending time in gardens is important for their quality of life.”

We want to hear from you! What does your garden mean to you? How do you use your garden? Do you garden for pleasure or is it a chore? What is it that makes you proud of your bit of garden space?

We’re looking for images of all types of garden, from large ornamental gardens such as Helmingham Hall, right through to terraces and allotments. But most importantly we want pictures of you actually doing things in gardens; throwing parties, mowing the lawn, working as a gardener, having barbeques, or just relaxing on a sun lounger! These pictures will help us to understand the importance of gardens to the people of East Anglia and will form the basis for part of our Garden Room display.

If you can help, please email jed.howlett@eastanglianlife.org.uk or write to us at How Does Your Garden Grow? Museum of East Anglian Life, Stowmarket, Suffolk, IP14 1DL

You can also contribute images through flickr, find out more at: http://flickr.com/people/howdoesyourgardengrow

For more details Tel: 01449 612229

Website: www.eastanglianlife.org.uk

Email: enquiries@eastanglianlife.org.uk

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‘Autumn is the time in our farming year when we get to realise whether our labours have been in vain. We harvested what seemed to be a reasonable crop albeit with rather short straw for an aged binder to cope with. However, the crop was successfully stacked on the old rick stand.

On Sunday 18^th September on a warm autumn day we pulled the Ransomes thrashing drum out of its shed, connected it up to a Burrell agricultural traction engine and after getting about 160psi of steam we were away. Getting the traction engine and drum lined up together can be one of those jobs which takes for ever. If they are not aligned quite right the belt keeps falling off, this time all went well first time. It is a lovely sound hearing the revs increase on the engine with the drum slowly coming to life and settling into a very familiar hum with the sound of the sieves ‘jiggling’ in the background. Standing on the top of the drum feeding the sheaves is like standing on the deck of a ship at sea but it doesn’t take long to get the feel of the machine and all its moving parts so that sheaves are fed at the right speed to prevent the whole thing blocking up.

We have yet to find someone who has a baler we can connect to the drum, this would enable us to leave the straw in a more manageable form for the estate staff to feed to the museum animals. So the straw was stacked loose back on the rick stand for later use.

This year we grew both wheat and some barley. The barley was cut in mid-August and we had some concerns that it was a bit too green. However the technology of our forebears, stooking and stacking on a rick stand ensured that the crop ripened in the stack and was ready for the thrashing drum.

In the end we produced nearly half a ton of wheat, much the same as last year with a few bushels of barley as a bonus. Some of the wheat and the barley will be milled at the museum for animal fodder.

A little distance away from the thrashing scene was one of the museum volunteers working away with a vintage tractor beginning to prepare the seedbed for next year’s crops. Farming is a never ending process but a fascinating endeavour in trying to put into action old farming practices using vintage machinery.

It is interesting to reflect upon how harvesting has changed. Today the harvesting of cereals would be done by one person on the combine and a couple of others driving the corn carts. For us the reaping takes two people, one on the tractor, one on the binder. Carting takes four people, one driving the tractor, two pitching one stacking. Thrashing takes five people, the engine driver, a sheaf pitcher, someone to feed the drum, a sack man and a couple of straw stackers. Our harvesting reflects the work done in the 1930s, and the numbers of people working on the land – how times change.’

Peter Gibbs – Steam Team Member

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Coming up this week we have:

Wednesday 31st August- Seed Workshop, make your own biodegradable newspaper plant pot and plant it up!

Friday 2nd September- Bird day, make bird feeders and birdie art activities

Saturday 3rd September- Tradtional Music Day

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The Steam Team’s activities this year have explored the traditional agricultural journey from broadcasting to bread (seed to slice)! After ploughing and harrowing, Wheat and Barley were sown, broadcast by hand, resulting in a fine, even wheat crop. Hard grained bread wheat was chosen which we hope will result in a good grain yield and useful straw of normal length.

We are currently planning to harvest our crop on Sunday 7^th  August – depending on the weather – using a reaper–binder from the 1930’s pulled by a David Brown tractor from 1953. We are hoping for sunshine on the days that follow so that the stooks (tied bundles of ripening corn) can be left to dry, both in the field and on the rick-stack. Later in the year, we plan to thresh the crop using our Ransomes threshing drum powered by the ‘Empress of Britain’ Burrell steam traction engine. This will be followed by milling the wheat grain using the Alton Watermill, a quern (a hand turned millstone), or a small portable mill.

The proof of the pudding will come when we use the resulting wholemeal flour to bake our own bread!

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Come along to the Museum of East Anglian Life this Summer Holidays for some fabulous fun drop-in activities! We will be making Suffolk rusks, pond-dipping in the mill pond, making butter, making scarecrows and more!

The first week of the holidays will have a free activity with museum entry everyday (25th-29th July). Visitors will be able to make scarecrows and have a go at doing the washing Victorian style! This is part of the On Landguard Point Cultural Olympiad project and is part of a series of events taking place across the whole of Suffolk.

From the 3^rd of August there will be activities every Wednesday and Friday up until the 2^nd of September from 10am to 3pm. These include making biodegradable plant pots and planting them up, baking Suffolk Rusks and making butter to go with them, pond dipping in the museum’s mill pond and bird days making bird feeders and doing birdie art activities.

The museum also has a number of quizzes and trails for families to use across the museum site.

For more information have a look on the museum website www.eastanglianlife.org.uk or email jo.rooks@eastanglianlife.org.uk

There will be a small charge of £1 per activity user for the activities. No need to book.

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