Monday 19th April 2021: Monday again yay 😜 Today it is Mia’s 5th birthday so we will be popping over to see her later 🎂 John went to work this morning after doing the rounds and I have mostly been pottering out and about in the garden. I have had to do some watering as even the plants that like it dry are beginning to struggle a little. Most of the plants that are in the beds or in the ground are fine, anything I had recently planted needed water and plants in pots need some water. I don’t have many pots now as most of them have gone into the new beds but there are still a few that I haven’t put anywhere yet or that will stay in pots elsewhere. I watered the veg plants I put in last week and also the raspberries and blueberries that are all in pots. Everything else will still be able to get some overnight moisture or deep ground moisture hopefully. There is no rain on the radar at all 🥴 certainly no sign of any April showers 🙄
I dug up the few plants I wanted to move, the water I gave them last night has done well and the rootball was still damp this morning. Some I have planted straight in the ground and some have gone into pots to bring on either to sell or plant where I have a bare patch. I have tried to get a broad a range of flowering plants and shrubs as possible, this includes different heights, strength of fragrances, some with evening fragrance, different colours and sizes of flowers but nearly all are single open flowers which are what the insects need, I do have a few flowers that are double but not many. In other areas I have included grasses for the wildlife that prefer those and I have the small (tiny) pond which has water plants. I keep contemplating a bigger pond, the one I have is literally a large tub but it works well enough as a wildlife pond. As long as I have water areas around I suppose they don’t need to look like a pond just do the same job.
I had my lunch sat outside which was glorious, all I could hear were the birds and myself crunching on an apple 😀 beautiful day. John came home mid afternoon so we went over to Sams early so that she could go and pick Mia up from school while we looked after the twins, and then saw Mia and gave her some birthday presents.
Back home and I cut the grass in the front driveway, I have left some squares so that the grass gets long, the insects will appreciate that. John then cut the lawn before we had something to eat, we had a delivery of an old cupboard I have bought to put where the Rayburn is once that goes and then we popped round to see Mum and Ken for a cuppa as it was such a nice evening.
The amount of eggs the hens and ducks are laying is verging on ridiculous 🙄 we have about six trays to try and shift. At one time I could advertise on Facebook but the algorithms have put paid to that as soon as you mention any animal species, I even heard of someone having a horse manure post declined. I think I will have to make lemon curd, lime curd and orange curd and give it to people, then a batch of cakes for the freezer maybe some pickled eggs, John is already eating eggs for breakfast every day 😂
Tuesday: Beautiful morning 🥰 Last night driving back from Mums the sun was a fireball and early this morning it was the same.
By 7.30 I had breakfasted, dressed, got the first load of washing on and cleaned the windows. With the sun finally shining the dusty windows were getting a bit annoying, I am not fanatical about my windows but they have not been done all winter, we don’t have many and they are not very big so any light I can get inside is welcome. I don’t spend too long faffing just a soapy cloth over and then the squeegee any marks left behind can stay, they will soon get dirty again and I can think of better things to do than meticulously getting them to be perfect, besides, I don’t stay inside on a sunny day looking out of the window 😜
I spent the next two hours outside sorting out a few plants, re potting some shrubs that I have now placed in an area that is looking pretty bare. Under the Oak tree is fenced off because there was a hawthorn there, which has mow died off after years of cutting back and also a dog rose which I cut back hard each year, both of these have viscious thorns and I don’t want the children getting tangled in them. It means I have a fenced area with not much in it, over the years I have filled it with pots of things but now most of that has been planted in the beds. I did have mock orange, a dogwood, a euonymus and a white buddliea which I have grown from very small plants, these are now bigger, potted up and sitting nicely in that bare space. The white buddliea was quite big, about three feet but it was really struggling where it was and so I dug it up the other day, put it in a bucket of water with some feed ready to move elsewhere. It was only when I was looking around for things to fill the space that I decided it could go in a big pot and hopefully it will like it in its new place. I also scattered a few packets of flower seeds to see how they do, it should look nice and full by mid summer.
John came home mid morning, I hung the washing out and then we decided not to waste the day so we went out for lunch! Oh how fabulous was that to sit outside by the river having a pub lunch and a cold drink, very fabulous I can tell you 🥰 People were happy to be getting out and about and doing something normal, we went for a short walk along the river before returning back to town to get some shopping.
Wednesday: It’s mid afternoon and I have come in for a sit down after a very productive morning doing various jobs in the garden. I have to pace myself otherwise I won’t have the energy to haul myself around later this afternoon and get the dinner etc. I know when it’s time to stop as my feet hurt and my legs won’t carry me much more, definitely sit down time. So what have I been doing? Well I started off planting four rows of root veg, two rows of turnips and two more rows of beetroot, that’s four lots of beetroot at the moment and we don’t even eat that much but it does sell well and it makes a great chutney. After that I watered it all in and watered a few other bits and then planted more potatoes, that’s all of them in now so it’s just a case of waiting. I checked the carrots and as always they are spasmodic so I topped up the rows with more carrot seed, I am determined to have a lot of carrots this year. I have done some hoeing (a lot actually 🙄) I have fixed down weed membrane in unused areas like the compost area so that I don’t have to worry about weeds growing everywhere and I have tried to dig out the comfrey root on one of the beds that has not been planted yet. If you get comfrey, and it is a great plant, make sure you get the bocking 14 which does not readily seed everywhere and cause a big problem later on like the one I have 😂 I have dug up a trug full of dandelions to feed to the torts and Guineas and I have picked purple sprouting and asparagus for dinner later. There are probably lots of other little things I have done but can’t recall now that the time has passed. I feel like I have definitely made some headway and no longer feel that I am lacking behind. I have had a good look at the areas that are still to plant up and decided what will go where, I just need to wait for the tender plants to get bigger and the weather to stop plunging back into artic mode 😜
Everything in the greenhouse is doing well, although we are getting a lot of frosts the temperature over night in there must be staying reasonably above freezing which is great. I was tempted to plant the tomatoes in the tunnels but as they would be directly into the ground that might not be such a good idea so I will hold my horses. Talking about horses, I observed that biscuit was lying in the paddock this morning when I started gardening, a couple of times I spoke to her as she was just the other side of the fence, she didn’t seem overly unhappy, but after she had been there at least two hours I went into the paddock to give her a thorough check over. I gave her a nudge to see if she would get up, nope, I gave her a shove to see if she would get up, nope, so I walked a way to go and get a head collar to put on her and see if I could force her to get up that way. By this time I was slightly concerned that she couldn’t get up of her own accord, I turned and walked away and up she jumped 😂 little sod was just having a lovely sunbathe and resented my intrusion I think lol.
Oh my days we have so many eggs at the minute I am seriously going to have to do something with them. Not sure where all our egg customers have gone 🤷♀️ two regulars that always had a lot of eggs each we have moved recently so that makes a difference and I guess so does the fact that we sold so many chickens last year 😂 Right I am off to find out what recipes use an enormous amount of eggs up, I guess I could make pasta but we don’t eat that much of it so it will have to be cake for the freezer!
Thursday: Lovely sunny morning again, a tad cold first thing but soon warmed up. It’s 9.30 and as yet I have not done anything else except have my breakfast and make stuff. I have a batch of lemon curd on the go in the slow cooker, yep in the slow cooker, I could have stood and made it but I figured this way I could get on with other things. In the oven at the moment I have the fail safe Mary Berry orange and sultana cake and a lemon drizzle cake, 16 eggs used in total so far 😜 I know what will happen, I will use all these eggs and then the hens will go on strike and we won’t have enough eggs 😂 can’t win, it’s never a dead cert either way so I am just rolling with it. At the moment I have not pickled any eggs, I need to check I have enough vinegar to do a large jar full, not quite sure what I will do with them then as John doesn’t eat them and it’s not something I would think about having very often but luckily the boys in the family do like them so they will probably go to them 😀 Great with a pint and a packet of crisps I am told though never tried lol. I also made some little cakes for the children, light lemon flavoured ones. I know lemons are not grown here so technically not sustainable but I need to use up eggs somehow and so lemons it is 😜 On the subject of lemons, it is possible to grow them here so I’m not sure why it’s not done on a bigger scale to be honest, plenty of people have them in the conservatory and they produce half decent lemons, maybe it would cost too much on a commercial scale 🤷♀️
John has gone off to work again today, that’s two in a row lol he will be tired out by the end of the week. The semi retired thing is working well so far but I wonder how long it will be until he is booked up again.
The wind is a bit chilly and if you are in the shade or not moving around very fast it can feel colder than the impression the sunny bright blue sky is giving. In the greenhouse though the temp has hit 40c which is amazing, it feels lovely in there as long as you don’t spend too long inside 😜 You can definitely feel the difference when you come out again.
Sam came over with George and Lucie for a couple of hours over lunchtime, we went for a wander round the farm introducing them to all the animals, George spends his time saying cock-a-doodle do and Lucie gets busy exploring everything she can.
The cakes and the lemon curd are resting nicely on the side, I am hoping the curd does set, home made lemon curd is totally amazing, zingy, tasty and not over sweet like the shop bought stuff so if you ever get a hankering to make it then go for it you won’t regret it.
I spent more time, much more time, than I would want to, trying to sort out a printing problem, basically I eventually found out that my iPad would not talk to my printer for some reason, kids 🙄 A few updates and resets later (and you all know how long they take) and I was back in business. The object of the printing was to print pictures of the plants I had out for sale, it’s all very well putting greenery out there but if someone has no idea what it will look like eventually then they probably won’t bother, well now they know 😊
Friday: Another lovely day of wall to wall sunshine (if you can tolerate that sort of thing) I never have a plan of what I am going to do, I may have a vague idea of things I want to get done but these days I don’t stress over it. I wanted to strip the bed and get the covers washed first thing and on the line, one bit of cleaning leads to another and before you know it the morning has largely passed. That is a bit of a school boy error for me because ideally I should get outside while it’s still cool. Anyhow I didn’t and so mid morning I decided to then get out on the garden. The birds, bees and beer bed has done well for around five years with hardly any work needed. Lately it has got a little wayward, stingers have taken hold and are big strong plants, I have a tree growing through a blackcurrant bush, the golden hop has gone berserk and twined round everything, the gooseberries are suffering due to not enough air circulating. It is time to address the problems, we began back at the beginning of the year by digging out one of the gooseberry bushes and trying to get the roots of the hop out but it was so wet and claggy it was near on impossible so I have left it. Today I started to tackle it again but it is incredibly dry 😂 and digging is almost impossible. The sun was getting hotter and hotter and there is no shade there, it is one of the beds that is most difficult for me to tend because it gets all day sun right from the off. There are four trees which are now pretty big, a cherry, an apple, a mulberry and a dual pear, plus three blackcurrant bushes and three gooseberry bushes, there are wild strawberries growing on the ground in one area but the rest has weed membrane down because I can’t get to do it easily. There is rhubarb and the hop as well, it is a very productive area and mostly I leave it for the birds and bees, the hop part was for the beer but that has never happened yet 🙄 Over time the trunks have got large and round and the membrane has come away allowing the stingers, docks, keck and dandelions to take hold. The idea was to get all those out and then adjust the membrane to cover the soil again, but I can’t dig a lot of it out as it is entwined in the fruit bushes, the dilemma is, do I forsake the bushes and start again or leave it for the time being and tackle it at the end of the year when the ground will be softer. I would have to make a proper plan as I will need Johns strength to help get those plants out, the roots will be deep. I was enjoying doing what I could but I could feel the sun and the heat beginning to affect my skin, (a kind of prickling feeling) there is nothing more I would enjoy than being in a vest top digging away and to be honest it pisses me off that I can’t but I also don’t want to induce a flare so I am limited in what I can do. For today I have now left it, I have been able to adjust some of the membrane and cover gaps but that’s about it, still, every little helps I suppose.
John was home mid afternoon, with flowers 💐 at this point I can here you asking ‘what has he done wrong’ because that’s exactly what I would think normally except that we had had one of those conversations the night before. You know the ones, long time married discussions, he says to me that I am a pessimist and so I explain that once upon a time I was an optimist but was regularly disappointed and eventually because a realist 😜 One of the points I made was that he prided himself on the fact that he bought me flowers ‘once every twenty five years’, each birthday, Valentine’s Day, anniversary I would hope to get flowers and they never came so eventually you stop hoping and face reality. I’m not sure if that shocked him to hear that but the result was a lovely bunch of flowers today so I’ll take that 😁
I picked a few bunches of rhubarb in the afternoon and a bunch of asparagus all of which went out for sale as I won’t be using it today. I noticed quite a few spindly stalks of rhubarb so I will probably pick those and make rhubarb jam either with vanilla, orange or ginger haven’t quite decided which one yet. Ginger might be too wintery and I don’t have an orange thinking about it so it will most likely be vanilla lol.
Saturday: Ooosh busy morning this morning doing various garden jobs, lots of potting on, putting plants out for sale, various other bits up for sale, trying to move on some of the ‘stuff’ we have lying around 😂 We had a tragic start to the day mind you as sometime overnight the fox has got into one of the huts in the paddock and slaughtered 17 hens 🙄 At first we couldn’t work out how it got in but further investigation shows that he has some how managed to lift a very heavy side panel and get through some tight bars to get access. That’s the end of that lot and I won’t show you the graphic photo of the aftermath I will leave that to your imagination 💭 They were our oldest lot of hens but they were still laying well and that’s about 12 eggs a day we have now lost 😠 Typically I literally just sold the 13 point of lay hens we had left otherwise we would have just kept those, the old law of the sod and all that.
John has been on the tractor moving heavy stuff around to tidy up and also cleaning out some of the other birds as well as the morning jobs of feeding, watering and egg collecting.
It is sunny with blue skies today but there is quite a breeze and it’s a tad cold. April is normally a month you can enjoy with warming temperatures and showers but this one has been cold all the way through, I do hope May has better things in store for us. There is no sign of rain for at least a couple more weeks and the wind direction is predicted to be either from the north or the east so it will stay chilly. Not until the first week of May does the wind start coming from the west 🙄
Blimey trying to get the washing off the line in this wind was a mission 😂
Sunday: We started off well this morning, no frost but still windy and it’s coming from the East but with the sun out as well it’s not bad. John did the feeding, no more Fox attacks, and then he got on with cleaning out the point of lay pen. This pen we built around five years ago at a cost of around £1000 and when the batches come in for sale that’s where they go. We have now decided because it is fox proof we will house one of the two permanent flocks in there and let them out in the daytime and use a stable for the point of lay when they come in. Makes much more sense to not loose our flocks overnight, the huts are great, they are over 100 years old though and they were used back in the day when foxes were controlled as that is no longer the case we have to move with the situation.
While John was doing that I started a bonfire to burn some paper rubbish, dirty shavings and some bits of wood. While I was doing that I noticed that biscuit was lying down again, this time I decided to get her in as that is not normal daily behaviour for her. She is a bit pottery on her feet, the ground is rock hard due to the lack of rain and her feet need looking after as it is so I got her into the stable. I didn’t want to leave her there because she is better off outside but I needed to put up the electric stakes and tape. This would have been a ten minute job if John had not just gathered it all up and dumped it in a heap when we dragged the fields. Anyone who has ever had to untangle electric horse tape will know this is a pig of a job 😂 I got that sorted and moved the water bucket, got John to fix a piece of the fence that was broken and got biscuit back outside with some hay. All the time she was in Jack was wellying up and down the paddocks making a racket, if you regularly see two or more horses in a field and then one on it’s own going a bit mental, the reason is because they have been separated from their friend 🙄 Once they were both settled again we shot off to get a little bit of shopping.
When we got back I went out to sort out the guinea pigs etc in the orchard. As I was in there I looked up to see a chap walking up the drive, he spotted me and then turned and walk back out and off down the lane. I said to John something doesn’t feel right and John went across the paddock to the wall by the lane to see where he went, he had carried on and then went off to the left down scrubs lane which is basically a dirt track that goes to a few properties and eventually out across the fields. No problem I thought, it’s just a walker and maybe my intuition was not right. However, 10 minutes later we were stood in the drive talking to Sam and Luke who had pulled up in the car and he walked back past the bottom of the driveway. This then does become odd as if he was out walking I wouldn’t expect him to be back 10 minutes later, it means he didn’t go far before turning round and coming back rather than continuing his walk. He was almost dressed like a Walker but not quite, dark clothes a flat cap and a small backpack, let’s just say he looked like he was trying to blend in with Walker but definitely didn’t. He may have been totally innocent but my instincts were telling me differently and you get a feel for things like that over time. I flagged it up on the rural watch page I am on just in case there are any other reports.
I then spent another hour weeding the front beds, I figured if he came back a third time I couldn’t really be seen until the last minute and might catch him coming up the drive again.
We nipped down to the local pub for a drink in the garden with Sam and Luke who had been to the wildlife park. I did pick some dandelion flowers beforehand and they are now sleeping overnight ready for dandelion honey tomorrow.
frieslandfarm (flowers) 