Month: April 2016

There I have said it, I have tried to refrain from moaning about the weather  over the last few months but honestly this would try the patience of a saint. It’s a good job I have held off of planting anything much in the garden, if I had put in spuds on good Friday as tradition tells us then they would be frosted a good few times by now. As it is the ones in the poly tunnel have suffered some nipping but they should recover, yesterday I covered all the plants in the greenhouse with fleece and it was a good job I did, the temps must have gone down well below freezing never mind frosty. We all know what will happen next, straight into high temperatures and sunshine causing havoc in the garden (could be a bit of wishful thinking there 😉) 

I have sown a few rows of carrots and onions on the sunny/dry days, yes we did have some, but apart from that nothing else, instead I have concentrated on seed sowing in the greenhouse and poly tunnel. In the latter I have been harvesting raddish and lettuce, the peas are growing well as are a couple of rows of carrots and broad beans, the new potatoes are up and the spring onions are slowing unbending. In the greenhouse I have a bit of everything growing and have started potting on the runner beans ready for planting out in May, providing the temps go up of course and there is no guarantee of that! It is a waiting game but I hope it changes soon or summer is going to be short 😝

Elsewhere on the farm Hubby has managed to break the tractor again, this time catching one of the hoses on a branch and snapping the fixing clean in half, I swear he does it to get out of any work 😋 We had a chicken with a broken leg that we had to dispatch, I couldn’t work out how it had happened until the next day we found a dead chicken without a leg in the coop, the fox had been going underneath and getting at them through the narrow bars, this has now been covered in and no more leg problems. The geese are sitting on eggs so there are none for sale at the minute, I have known them since they were tiny but even I am not brave enough to go in there and get them off. The din they make when you go near them is high in decibels and I have to protect the back of my legs with a bucket as the males come running at me in a head down going in for a kill stance. 

As I mentioned, we have had some lovely sunny days and the scent from the blossom on the trees has wafted deliciously teasing us with what might be eventually, and on those days I have been hoeing and tidying and waiting but I feel like I have been doing it a bit too long now, everything is ready except for the weather. The horses are waiting to move paddocks as there is no point moving them onto new pasture if it’s going to rain constantly , it would end up looking just like the Winter paddock, the geese are looking on the thin side waiting for grass to emerge, they have been on pellet food all Winter and are longing to get the other side of the fence. The chickens however are doing just fine and we are getting plenty of eggs, trays of them in fact which I am trying to sell on various selling sites so that we don’t end up with a mountain of them. The rabbits are happy in their run although they keep trying to dig a warren, they dig it out, I fill it in, every day same scenario 🐰I am hoping I will be able to feed them plenty of beneficial weeds/herbs soon rather than mostly pellet feed, I have been buying them carrots and greens from the shop so they haven’t gone without but when I can pick my own for them I will feel much happier . 

Hubby is still getting over his accident, did I mention that? Probably not but he has, every day for the last few weeks, his van was written off and luckily he was ok apart from whiplash but it has meant that not much has got done for a while, then he had an abscess and a tooth out, put that together with the weather, did I mention that 😉, progress has been slow outside, roll on warmer temperatures it will make everything feel so much better. In amongst all that we have had the arrival of our granddaughter who is totally gorgeous 💕 in all honesty I don’t care what the weather is like when our grandchildren visit because I would rather spend precious time with them than doing anything else 😍😍

Have a great week whatever the weather ❄️☔️🌞🌦⚡️💨

I like the moment I decide to make a cuppa and sit down to write my blog, sharing the ins and outs of daily life with you is one of life’s little pleasures, not that there is much to tell to be honest. 

It’s been pretty hectic some days, constant streams of egg customers, people coming for free manure, deliveries of compost, plants, the phone ringing, people buying chickens, everything always seems to happen at once, especially on the day I decided to make the lemon curd, more about that later.

We have taken delivery of 100 new point of lay hens, 80 to replace the laying flock and 20 that have gone into the sale pen. The old ladies had to be moved under cover of darkness, rather more for their benefit than for ours as it’s easier to catch them and they are less stressed. As always with most jobs it got left until the absolute last minute and of course it rained incessantly that day, luckily it had lessened to a drizzle by dusk and so we spent a hour catching, crating and moving 77 hens from the front paddock to the far back paddock, I think it was four trips with the crates precariously balanced on the wheelbarrow. By the time we finished it was pitch black and we were having to use the torch to pick our way through the mud puddles, as you can imagine there was much muttering from both hubby and myself mostly about his wheelbarrow driving and my navigation 😆 The new ladies arrived just before the weekend and have settled in well, the old ladies are a little put out at having their roaming space reduced but are on the whole enjoying the relocation, most of them anyway, a few have decided to ‘go over the fence’ everyday and try to get back to the front paddock but they go back in the evening so we just let them get on with it. 

I have finally got under way with sowing seeds in the greenhouse, I was panicking, thinking I was behind when the last bit of dry, sunny weather was here, but I held off for a while and then decided to invest in an electric heater for the greenhouse. This goes against everything I believe in really but the truth of the matter is that if I want plants ready to go when the weather turns, I have to give them some heat to begin with, we are quite exposed which usually puts us back around two/three weeks, so I figured that I would counterbalance that with heating the greenhouse for a couple of weeks, we will see if it works out that way. So far I have sown a large range of veg, from beans and peas, to tomatoes and peppers, all doing well at the moment. In the poly tunnel a couple of weeks ago I planted, lettuce, radish, beetroot, peas, spring onions, garlic and potatoes, everything has come up except the potatoes which should make an appearance any day now. 

I spent one whole day just hoeing and cutting back dead stuff, raking the paths and putting the contents of the compost heap on the garden, a most enjoyable day that I felt I had accomplished a fair amount, which was abruptly undone by the small flock of unruly, free range chickens scratching the dead stuff, newly added to the empty compost pile, all over the pathway, one step forward, two steps back 😖

Mostly we have been busy tidying, that includes cutting back trees, bushes and hedges in the paddocks, picking up Winter debris ( which is a surprisingly large amount of twigs and branches) Hubby has also been setting up the other water tanks to collect more rainfall although they are not yet connected eventually they will hold around 14,000 litres of free water 😃

The geese have been laying well and last weekend we sold 11 goose eggs in 10 minutes, egg sales have been constant but I did keep a goose egg back to make Lemon Curd, however, it was a disaster  as it would not thicken up despite a good half an hour of stirring 😔 I didn’t waste it though, I turned it into a cake instead, I will have another go at some point and follow a different recipe, I will let you know how it goes. 

I gave my youngest sister a couple of goose eggs for her birthday and look what she did with one of them.

  
Our youngest daughters boyfriend revealed a useful talent a while back which I put to good use recently, his stint working in bars left him with excellent chalkboard skills, so I set him to work on our roadside board which now looks a whole lot better than my slanty, disappearing lines of writing 😃

  

Hopefully, although we are getting a fair amount of April showers, the ground temperatures will begin to warm up and the grass begins to grow as well as the veg and fruit, because grass is an important crop for us too as far as the geese and the horses are concerned anyway. 

Have a good week and I hope the sun shines for you ☀️