Month: February 2011

The weather has not improved much has it? The duck pen is looking like a world class mud wrestling ring and although the ducks dont  mind the same cant be said for the chickens, drastic steps had to be taken this week to move them from their muddy, wet enclosures, out onto the grass paddocks, we should have moved them at the beginning of Winter really, a lesson learnt ready for next year. Now you would think this would be a simple enough job, and it would have been if we did it my way, but my Husband decided that the huts needed moving to a fresh patch, it’s too wet I told him, in fact I told him constantly over two days! He chose to ignore my advice (and admitted later that he  wanted to prove me wrong, silly man, I am always right!) and consequently got stuck in the mud! With the van firmly stuck for the day we had to revert to plan A and leave the huts in situ until the fields dry enough to be able to get on them. We moved all the chickens over by hand and they were in their element, until bedtime, then at dusk they decided they wanted to go back to the old place! The sensible thing to do is move your chickens at night into the new hut and then let them out in the morning so they know where they are to go that night, but sometimes being sensible and having the time don’t fit together. So there we are chasing chickens all over the paddock trying to coax them into their new des res, a tin of sweetcorn later and they are all safely inside for the night!

The vegetable garden is still too wet to get on and do any weeding or digging over so I spent the day in the greenhouse on Saturday. The broad beans have been planted into seed trays and will hopefully get going in the next few days, and I have planted a couple of trays of salad leaf which will sprout very quickly and be the first home-grown greens of the year. The Rhubarb is coming up nicely and if you have not had it since you were a child I suggest you try it again, its one of those tastes that you forget you actually like, especially with custard! I have an excellent recipe for a Torte that I will publish on here separately, it was originally for Strawberry Torte but you can use it for any fresh fruit ( I made an apple one yesterday), it is very easy and quick to make, plus it does not seem to go wrong so that is a bonus!

I have quite a few Strawberry plants taken from last years runners, so I bought some hanging baskets and decided to make strawberry hanging baskets and sell them at the farm gate, likewise I have left over herbs from last year that I will do the same with those, it will be interesting to see if they sell, I am hoping they do and that I may even have to take orders!

As March is almost upon us the pace will begin to pick up, the first job will be to draw out the crop rotation plan so that we all know what is going where, when it was just me doing the gardening this wasn’t necessary as I had it all in my head, but now Hubby is helping I have to keep him on the straight and narrow or he is inclined to plant his potatoes wherever he wants to, he is keen so I don’t want to dampen his enthusiasm but he has not quite grasped the concept of rotating crops around each year so that soil pests and disease dont mount up and cause a crop failure. To be fair he has done an excellent job with the potatoes for the past 2 years, we had a good crop this year and have only just finished using them, we would have still been doing so if it had not been for such a hard winter, the storage area we used had snow drifting in and then it froze and so we lost a couple of sack fulls, yet another lesson learnt!

When it was first suggested I do a blog, I thought, what would I find to blog about? Now, whilst I am going about the daily routine, I find myself thinking, that would make a good subject and start thinking about how I will write it instead of concentrating on what I am doing!

Egg production is now in full swing, most hens are laying an egg a day, and we are picking up about 21 dozen a week and selling them just as quickly. Our local Vicar came to the door at 6pm last night, he was cooking the roast and had no eggs for the Yorkshire puddings, he was apologising for the lateness of his call, ‘not a problem’ I said, and it really isn’t, a sale is a sale at anytime of the day and besides it is a good feeling to be a useful part of the local community.

I usually collect the eggs at the same time I feed the chickens their afternoon corn, yesterday I picked up the smallest egg I have ever seen, we measured it and it was only just over 2cm long! This was from a large fowl chicken, but she is getting on a bit and so I guess she is going into retirement! I had a quick look online to see if it would make the Guinness Book of Records and found many more ‘smallest chicken egg in the world’  claims, it is obviously a common thing. The eggs you see in the shop are rather like your bananas or cucumbers, they have to conform to a particular shape and size, but over the years I have seen eggs come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, they can have wrinkles, calcium lumps attached to them, be a very squashed oval shape, very large or indeed very small, there is nothing wrong with any of theses eggs, generally they are laid by older hens at the end of their laying days and their internal workings are not as finely tuned as they once were.

One of the same batch of hens has gone broody this week, the eggs she lays are not fertile as they have no cockerel running with them, normally you would just keep taking them away until she gets the message, but as I had some Maran eggs with me at the time and they will be fertile I swapped her one egg for 3 Marans, I may even swap those for duck eggs tomorrow, hens will hatch any egg that is underneath them and they are not in the least surprised when they hatch that they don’t look very chicken like! I have even seen a hen sitting on top of a baby goose, that is a sight to behold, the gosling is about the same size as the hen! A broody hen is very useful as it saves electrical incubation, the problems begin when you have more than one broody hen in the hut, you are supposed to separate them but sometimes that is not practical, the hens begin a daily ritual of stealing one another’s eggs. One day a hen can be sat on a clutch of 6 six eggs the next day she has ‘stolen’ some from the other hen and now has about 12, this will go on for the next 20 days, until they finally all hatch, as long as one of the hens keeps them warm it doesn’t really matter and they all share the duties when they are born.

An advert for goats got me very excited this week, I made an appointment to go and have a look, then I began to do the research.  Lesson one, always do your research before you agree to have a look and get the owners hopes up that he has a buyer! I spoke to a lady who has bred goats for over 40 years and so knows what she is talking about, she gave me a list of questions I needed to ask about the goats and a list of things I needed to know about keeping goats. When I had finished my conversation with her I realised I had let my heart rule my head, I had no idea what I was going to do with these animals in terms of either breeding from them or milking them and using the milk. I had to call the owner and apologise profusely and explain that I would not be coming to look at them after all. The thing is with a small holding, it is very easy to get carried away, we are still learning and so take some valuable lessons from this experience, do the research first and have a definite plan, otherwise you end up with more mouths to feed and no income from them (a bit like children!)

The weather couldn’t have been more different after my last blog, cold, windy and raining, still we did manage to get a few jobs done in the sunshine, that’s why the ‘make hay while the sun shines’ quote is one we always follow here on the farm.

We have managed to ‘goose proof’ the veg patch putting up stock fencing and a new gate, hopefully it will keep them out, we lost a bed of spring cabbage to the geese at the latter end of the year and don’t want to make that mistake again!

I have fixed the greenhouse glass, as it slips in the wind over the winter and the next job is to clean them out ready for the planting of seeds, which is something that most gardeners cant wait to get started on. We have doubled the size of the veg garden this year and so will have lots of seedlings to look after in the run up to planting them. I have decided to grow broad beans this year too, I don’t like them myself but I can always sell them on or feed them to the chickens who will welcome some greenery after the hard winter.

We had an exciting addition to the livestock this week, baby rabbits, 8 of them in total! I have a Giant English and my daughter has an Old English so we decided to put them together and see what we got, I was just in the process of moving her to the outside run for Spring when I spotted the nest and it was moving, I immediately phoned my husband and said ‘guess what we have got’ ‘something good by the sounds of it’ he replied, I think he was hoping for a good tax rebate or a midweek lottery win, ‘yes, 8 baby rabbits’ I replied, ‘great’ came the disappointed reply! He loves it really but he would have prefered the money in order to repair some of the dilapidated fencing! If anyone out there is after a new rabbit, they should be ready for news homes in a couple of months time.

The subject of lambs is important this month, we need to decide, what, and how many we are going to get. We usually buy in day old orphan lambs, these are not necessarily orphans, some will have lost their mother, others will have been one of triplets and a sheep can only feed two, so unless they have an adoptive mother they can use, they are sold on. They need to be bottle fed every 4 hours, so it is like have a newborn, it is a very tiring 6/8 weeks of up late and up early! To start with there are volunteers, but they soon fade away, the question this year is, do we buy already weaned lambs? Not so much fun to look after but less manpower needed and more sleep gained! At the moment we don’t keep a flock that we could lamb ourselves, this is partly because having horses on site we don’t have enough grazing for a permanent flock and they would also need to come in for the winter which would use up valuable stable space. It is something I would like to do eventually but for now we will buy them in.

The chickens are laying very well and we sold 8 dozen last week! The hope is that the customers who come for eggs will also buy some veg or herbs when they are ready, its lovely to sell your own produce to people who then come back and tell you how delicious it was, last year we sold some courgettes to Tony  who is the chef at the Messina Cafe in Witney, he said that he hadn’t tasted courgettes like that since his grandparents grew them in Italy, praise indeed, and it makes all the back-breaking work worthwhile 🙂

Well the weatherman didn’t disappoint and the sun today holds as much promise as the year ahead. I am waiting for the frost to thaw, then I can get on with the job of clearing the old to make way for the new. I can’t be too hasty as the sun is like fools gold at this time of year, tricking us into believing that Spring has arrived, but if I plant too early a cold snap will undo all my hard work! Today’s jobs will be to pull up any remaining leeks before they rot in the ground, that will mean making a large batch of leek and potato soup for the coldest of days yet to come.

The chickens will enjoy the sun as much as we do today, having had no rain for the past couple of weeks the ground will be dry enough for them to dust bath to their heart’s content. The egg production has increased with the amount of daylight hours and the young point of lay are beginning to produce for us as well. After 10 years of keeping chickens I still feel chuffed when a youngster lays her first egg, she is always as surprised as I am to see it laying there! Sadly I had to dispatch one of my old chickens this morning, she was not doing well at all and I didn’t want to prolong her distress, there is always a downside to the cycle of life 😦

I think the greenhouse will be my first destination, as it will be at least 5 degrees warmer in there, I have potatoes to chit and sweet pea seeds to plant, as well as some early lettuce and spinach. Then when the sun has warmed the rest of the place up, I will venture outside to clean up the herb garden, not only for the herbs but it is also where the tortoises live when they come out of hibernation in a month or so, that is when I will know that Spring has sprung!!

Enjoy the sunshine 🙂

So what is our aim here at Friesland Farm? Well to grow our own delicious  veg and fruit without the aid of anything artificial, any surplus we sell at the farm gate and to friends and family. We also have a range of poultry and again sell eggs to a growing number of people. Our original aim was to be self-sufficient, it became obvious that total self-sufficiency is very difficult to achieve from scratch without a good deal of investment! So our plans are to work towards doing it as best we can with the resources we have. When we came here there were no veg beds just very overgrown paddocks and rough areas, after three years we now have a very large vegetable area, 3 greenhouses, and a large fruit cage, this year we are hoping for a good crop of fruit. We were lucky enough to have a small orchard of 3 plums trees and a walnut, we also have an avenue of hazelnuts which produce an amazing amount of nuts! We have added a pear tree and a sweet chestnut tree although I don’t expect to get a return from that for a few years yet. We are a family of meat eaters and so we also raise sheep, pigs and chickens for our own consumption, this was something very important to us after years of being ‘food aware’ and knowing the conditions that animals have to live in for commercial production.

To get added value from our crops I have been making jams, chutney’s and herb oils, at the moment they have been for our use and for family presents but I hope to be able to sell these as well this year. I also invested in an apple press, last year our enormous tree had so many cider apples that I had to give them away on Freecycle, this year I intend to make full use of them myself!

The ‘good life’ yes but a hard one! It requires strength of character to keep going at it, we are very in touch with nature here and now know how long winter really is, nobody can prepare you for the amount of mud after a hard rainfall and the bone chilling cold of continuous days of below zero temperatures. There is no chance of looking out of the window and thinking ‘ I’ll stay in today’ the animals still need feeding, watering and cleaning out. That said it is a delightful way of life when the sun is shinning and all is well on the Farm.

If you want the good life, go for it if you can, it is extremely rewarding, but no one can prepare you for what lies ahead, I made a living from gardening before this and so was used to the outdoor life and the great British weather, even that was not preparation enough!