Author: frieslandfarm

Well the snow is still laying on the ground and I prefer it to the rain and the mud but just at the moment we could do without it. With numerous members of the family hoping to fly away to warmer climates it is touch and go as to wether the flights are going or not. Our eldest has managed to make it to the Caribbean and hopefully is enjoying the Sun, we are dog sitting Alfie for them while they are away and he is getting used to the routine of the place, it is nice for Mia to have someone to run around with who has as much energy as she does. Our youngest is hoping her flight will take her back to Australia tomorrow so that she can do her second year travelling, she has been a great help and we are going to miss her when she has gone 😦

The horses are being turned out in the day now the snow has stopped falling, they are coming in at night though as the temperatures are falling so low, it was -5 at 9pm last night so goodness know what it went down to in the middle of the night. It’s not too cold in the shed as long as we can get the Rayburn to kick into action, but yesterday it took me until gone one in the afternoon to get it to burn. I had to light it four times in all, sometimes when there is a low cloud base this stops the chimney pulling and the fire just dies, very annoying to say the least.

The chickens are hardly venturing outside, they don’t like the white stuff and as a consequence they are not laying many eggs at the moment, I think we picked up five yesterday, luckily they were laying well before and we have a good stock. I took a look at the sheep, I still can’t tell if they are in lamb but they still have another 10 weeks to go, I could have a look at the teats but I want to leave it a while longer so as not to upset them too much at this stage.

We are not able to do much else around the farm, everything is frozen and covered in snow, there is only so much cleaning one can do and I have started on a mission to lose a bit of weight and so baking is out as well. I have looked through the seed catalogues this week and made a list of what I want to grow this year, I have also ordered a roll of wire to put around the bottom of the fruit cage where the rabbits have chewed holes so I am progressing even if it is a little slower than normal. I need to look at the rotation plan for last year and update it for this year so that when we can get going we know what we are planting where.

As there is not much to tell you about the farm I thought I would tell you a bit about our journey and how we ended up here.

It started over twenty years ago really when our youngest was born and was ‘failing to thrive’ after weaning, it took a few months more for them to diagnose her with Coeliac disease which is an intolerance to gluten. This is when I had to start looking at the ingredients that pre packaged food contained. I was mortified one day when I discovered drinking chocolate that contained flour, obviously used as a bulking agent to make more money. I slowly learnt that better quality products were more nutritious but there were an awful lot of foods that were normally fed to children that my child could not tolerate. So that she did not feel left out I had to make these things from scratch, fish fingers, burger, cakes, I even had a go at making doughnuts once. I realised that you did not have to have food full of fillers, hidden fats and salt, they could be easily made using fresh, wholesome products. At about the same time my interest in gardening began and when we moved to a house with an established vegetable garden and fruit patch I began to grow my own produce, then I was given six bantams by the next door neighbour and we were having fresh eggs for the first time. Up to that point I was gardening the old way using slug pellets and numerous chemicals to eradicate pests and disease because that’s the information that was passed on by other gardeners. I decided that was not for me and began to garden more naturally, letting nature take care of itself, it took about three years but there was a definite increase in bird activity in the garden and gradually the ladybirds took care of the greenfly so I knew I was on the the right track.

I signed up for an Organic gardening course to learn more about the techniques I could use and about biodiversity, the course was one day a week for a year and I learnt so much in that year that I was eager to move forward and live on the land. The only problem was that we needed to move away from the area in order to do this and a strong family bond made me wonder if I could go ahead with it. A friend had a smallholding in a village nearby and every time I went there I would wistfully image myself living somewhere like that. During a conversation with her she asked if her ewe gave birth to triplets as they suspected, would I be prepared to take it under my wing at home and bottle feed it for her for six weeks, of course I jumped at the chance. The lambs were born and we took one home to hand rear, that was us hooked and although he returned back to their farm when he was old enough I knew then that was what I wanted to do. By that stage we had started to eat organically, I grew some veg but we also ordered a weekly veg box from a well known producer and started buying organic meat. I became very aware of the conditions that animals for meat consumption were kept in and tried to buy welfare friendly products though that was not always possible back than as the whole movement was still considered to be a bit hippyish. Out of the blue we were given the opportunity to buy the farm, it was five acres and close to where we lived, how could we turn down a chance like that, we couldn’t, we didn’t really know what we were doing but we went for it anyway!

We never factored horses into the equation when we were dreaming but as this was a working livery yard we had to work with what we had, nearly everything we have done was for the the first time without much guidance and so we have made a few mistakes along the way. The pigs did not go to slaughter when they should have and got a bit too big to handle, we have built things in the wrong place and had to move them again, we bought individual bottles to hand feed the lambs and discovered that you could expect a stampede as they got older and so we changed it to a bucket with teats. We have had fox attacks because we did not secure the fencing correctly, fly strike in older sheep because we were not vigilant enough. Time and time again we get things
wrong and have to put them right, but we always learn from our mistakes so that we can move forward, we have amassed a wealth of information much to great to write about on here.

We still have a long way to go on our quest, we are hampered by the usual things like the weather and a lack of funds, we would like to go completely off grid with all things including water, I would like to increase my flock so that we are producing more meat, and I would like a permanent pig pen, again to increase our meat production, the meat would then be sold to cover the costs of our own meat. I would even like a house cow so that we could produce our own milk, butter and cheese, I would like to be able to cut and make our own hay one day, we would never produce anywhere near as much as we needed but it would good to try. All these things need investment of time and money so we may never get to do some of them but its great to dream and who knows so far some of our dreams have come to pass maybe the rest of them will too 🙂

Well this morning we were greeted with a lovely carpet of snow, that has now turned to rain and is currently being washed away. If the forecast is correct we can expect a fair bit of snow over the next three weeks, I would rather have that than rain at least the animals enjoy playing in it.

Looking forward is the object at the moment although I have yet to find any enthusiasm for looking through the seed catalogues which is unusual for me as I have normally done it by now, must be the weather that’s putting me off.

We have been doing a bit of tidying up and cutting back, a row of nut trees at the front were invading the driveway more and more so we decided to cut them down by half, the amount of light that now floods into the kitchen is amazing, however the downside is that they were a good noise filter and we now hear more of the general sounds of traffic than we did before. At the latter end of the year we noticed that the five large mirrors in the school were swaying in the wind and so took them down before they fell down, this weekend they went back up with nice new wood to keep them secure. It was a freezing cold day and the boys did an excellent job under the conditions.

The sheep are having to be fed now, at the very least they are having hay each day and on colder days a scoop of ewe nuts, the trick is to keep them healthy for lambing but not let them put on too much weight or the lambs could be too big and difficult to birth naturally. The grass is nutritionally poor at this time of year plus with all the rain there is not much of it left under the mud patches. I was going to bring them in to lamb but an older and wiser soul than me advises that they are best left out, they don’t like being penned inside, as the lambs are hopefully due and the beginning of April it might be ok weather wise, if its takes a turn for the worst they will come in, I don’t fancy sitting out in the field with a torch when it’s cold or wet!

The chickens are still laying well and the egg numbers have only just started to tail off over the last few days, the lengthening of the daylight hours should encourage them back to full production soon, this has been the first year we were able to supply a decent number of eggs all through the Winter and I think it was to do with bringing the in beforehand and getting them in good condition.

Mia has enjoyed her first Christmas and New Year, she likes to get as dirty as doggly possible every single day! Her favourite games are still pestering the cats, even when she gets a swipe from one of them, and chasing chickens. The chicken game started out in good humour but she was caught red handed with the leg of a chicken in her mouth yesterday, the chicken was still attached and very much alive but I wonder how long it will be before she realises they could be a tasty snack! She will need some close monitoring and some stern discipline so that she does not become a killer 😦

I have had some much appreciated help from our youngest daughter while she has been home although her time is nearly up and she will be jetting off for another year in Oz all to soon, we shall miss her greatly but it’s an opportunity not to be missed. On Saturday I spent a day away from the farm with our middle daughter, her fiancé and his mother, looking at wedding venues for next year. We had talked about having a marquee at the farm for the reception but they want to get married in March and that is probably not a good month as far as the ground is concerned. We found a lovely barn venue with a country feel and that is what they have decided to use. It’s all excitement for the girls at the minute as the eldest is jetting off on her holiday at the end of the week, lots of much needed sunshine in the Caribbean, alright for some.

Hubby has had the job of putting our other house on the market, with a bit of luck we will sell it this time (sale fell through before) and we will have a much clearer idea of how we can move forward with the farm. The original plan was to sell it at the time we bought this but the housing market collapsed and we ended up with both, luckily we were able to rent it out but it meant that we did not have any disposable income to invest in the farm as we had planned, we may eventually get that much converted tractor yet!

I have noticed the bulbs are beginning to shoot up in various corners of the garden, that’s always a favourite indicator of mine that the warmer weather will soon be coming our way, (fingers crossed) though what we will have to endure in the mean time is anybody’s guess. I am not convinced by the arguments about global warming, climate change, yes definitely, but maybe it’s all part of the bigger picture, one that as a species we are far too inconsequential to be consulted by Mother Nature about!

We made it, the world didn’t end, we didn’t kill each other because we spent too much time with one another over the holiday, though the temptation was there I am sure, and as yet we have not been washed away by the rain!

Thankfully the latter has taken a hike for the time being although it is taking a while for everything to dry out, we got into a bit of a muddy state for a while and it is still tacky but getting better, as long as it stays away for a bit longer we should be fine. The fields look like they have been ploughed but that should all come back in the Spring provided Mother Nature is kind to us.

I hope you had a great Christmas and New Year, we had a lovely time and it was full of surprises for some members, firstly our youngest daughter came home from her travels to spend the holidays with us, that was the longest secret I have ever had to keep, we surprised our other daughters with her arrival on the Sunday night before Christmas and it was lovely to have them all back together. Secondly, our middle daughter was surprised with an engagement ring on Christmas morning, she has been with her partner for nearly 8 years so it was a long time coming but they got there in the end and this coming year will be full of wedding plans for 2014. Luckily the eldest daughter was not left out of surprises either, her partner had booked a Caribbean cruise for the pair of them as a present and so she is jetting off to warmer weather at the end of this month. Hubby and I got socks! (just kidding girls)

The farm has tickled along over the hols and not much has changed, we have had a visit from Mr Fox at night and he managed to get a hen that had snuck off to roost elsewhere, silly girl. I have moved the sheep to a drier paddock and begun to feed them a little in preparation for the Spring and hopefully arrival of newborns.

The main focus for the next couple of weeks will be planning and deciding how to move forward through the year. We have been here for four years now and have made a few mistakes along the way, its time to rectify these, nothing serious just putting pens in the wrong place and not utilising areas properly. We also need to plan for the apparent climate change that is heading our way, if, as they say the summers will be wetter and the winters wetter still, we need to improve our drainage so that the water moves around the buildings and not through them! This is also the time of year to plan what I want to grow and what to move, what to do again and what to not bother with. I have already started by planting the patio fruit trees in the end bed, this gets all day sun and is too hot (in a normal summer) for me to work on during the day and the fruit trees will just get on with it as long as they get watered in the evenings. The wind has blown out a lot of the greenhouse panels and it keeps happening to one particular one and so it is time to assess if it is needed and if so how to prevent it happening again, if not we will take it down.

The Christmas tree sales are another area to discuss and plan, we almost broke even, selling forty-three trees, not bad for our first year although with hindsight we bought too many, we will do them again next year but cut the number to around  fifty. I have to say they were lovely trees, every one that I have heard from said what a lovely shape they were and I can vouch for the fact that they were indeed non-drop.

I don’t make New Year resolutions because they nearly always get broken, instead I have changed it to aims, and my main aim this year is to look at how efficient things are, including me, what works, what doesn’t, what needs more organisation, the paperwork is first on the list and I have started well by using the diary to record incomings and outgoings, hopefully I will keep up with that one and wont have a big sorting out job when the books are next due. Everything will be under scrutiny, is there a better way to do that job, if so what to we need to do to make it happen, all sounds so simple, I will keep you posted on that one.

I think that is enough of my ramblings for now, welcome back and I hope you continue on my journey with me during the next year 🙂

 

Christmas is fast approaching as  is the Winter equinox, life continues in full circle and moves towards Spring, personally it can’t come soon enough!

Those of you that know me personally will know we have a large family and Christmas time is a special time, not just because of presents and food but because it’s a time we all come together and just appreciate the strong bond we have with one another. We had our family meal last night and with extended members there were 40 of us all eating, drinking and making merry, we also had our secret Santa pressies. Instructions were, spend up to a fiver, what can you get for a fiver these days, some very good gifts it would seem judging by the smiles from everyone. I thought I would start the blog off this morning telling you about my gift which I feel is actually priceless, someone took the time to not only listen and remember a comment I had made but then personally scribe onto a piece of slate the most wonderful poem. I love Hares, for me they are highly symbolic and almost magical and one day I would love to own a large brass of a frolicking Hare, this what was heard and remembered, when I opened my present, inside was a pouch containing and tiny Hare and this poem scribed onto a piece of slate:

Magical Mystery

By day I am a shadow that hides in the light

By darkness a moonbeam that dances the night

I am the spirit that runs with the moon

From Springtime to Harvestime, in time with Earth’s tune

I am the spirit of fresh greening fields

I grow with the year till her harvest she yields

I am the last sheaf bound up with the corn

The spirit of Earth forever reborn

I am a shape changer, I change like the year

I fly as the Owl and run as a Deer

The eggs of the Lapwing are left in my care

For I am thy mystery and magic

I am the Hare

So if you should see me lying close in my form

I will run through your dreams

From darkness till Dawn

 

There are many things that money can’t buy and they are the most treasured gifts of all.

This will be my last post until after the festivities are over so I would like to take the time to thank you for reading my blog and sharing the week to week activities of the farm, thank you to those that support us by buying our eggs, our meat, and this year our Christmas trees, thank you to our liveries that share a large chunk of what happens on the farm, we appreciate it very much.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all wherever you are, from all of the inmates at the funny farm! x x x

 

The Christmas Tree venture is a little slow to say the least, at this rate we will probably only just get our money back, but that’s fine, nothing ventured, nothing gained as they say, so if you have not got your tree yet get down here and buy it 🙂

The weather has been eventful again this time the strong wind was causing the problems, I sometimes think it would be easier to strip the greenhouses of all the perspex and glass before Winter! We have now lost most of the roof panels in one of the greenhouses and the next one was stripped of three panels during one day. Hubby spent Sunday morning fixing them back into place, but for how long? The fact that we are very exposed and the wind whips up the small valley means that it is quite fierce when it gets going, something we should have thought about before siting them, but as they were erected in the Summer months we didn’t give it much thought and now have to mend them most Winters. The poly tunnel is standing up well to the wind though, probably because it is very taught, as it gets older and slackens a bit we may have problems with that too. We did put up a wind break around the whole garden but it is only waist height and was primarily to protect the growing vegetables, I think a six-foot high wall might do the trick but we would have no views across the fields!

The rabbit is still around and its delightful to watch her helping herself to the Kale in the veg garden, she almost has to stand right up to reach the best bits, each morning I go out and at first I don’t see her and think, that’s it she has gone, then she turns up somewhere unexpected or I see her scuttle out from a corner in the yard and I am amazed she is still around.

Mia has been a minx this weekend, while we were out feeding, Hubby came down the yard carrying her in his arms, she is limping badly and can’t walk he said, put her down and lets take a look, I reply, so he sets her down and she promptly runs off as right as rain, the livery and I burst out laughing and tell him he has been had by a five month old puppy! I think she just wanted a free lift from one end of the farm to the other.

We had an incident at 1.30 Saturday morning which I am convinced was human, the dog started barking as if to say get up there is someone out here. If you have dogs you will know that they have a different type of bark for different things, if it is an animal of some kind the bark is usually excitable the same as if they are playing, if it is someone they know it is a friendly bark, this was none of the above in fact it was quite fierce and so Hubby got out of bed and turned on the lights. This usually does the trick and by the time he got dressed and got the torch the barking had slowed indicating that the threat had moved on. I think they were probably after a tree, we had been warned that Christmas tree thefts were quite likely which is why they are in the front yard with the guard dog. It’s a sad state of affairs in this day and age when you are trying to make an honest living that some folks think its okay to take what belongs to someone else, it might only be  a tree but we have already paid for it so keep your mitts off or the dog wont be the only growling thing you come up against!! There was an incident earlier in the week along our lane, a stolen car lost it on a bend at 6am on an icy morning and went straight through our neighbours fence, one offender was arrested and one of them legged it, if anyone ever says they are moving to the country for a quiet life, put them straight will you 😉

Apart from that things have been pretty much normal around here, the colder weather means that watering is more of a problem as all the outside taps freeze and so carrying endless buckets of water around the farm become the norm. A hearty stew becomes the staple diet of Winter, nice for dinner to have been cooking all day and ready when you come in from the cold and a good apple pie always goes down well. I tested the cider the other day, it is still cloudy and its possible that it wont clear because of the pectin but it tastes good and it fizzes so I will count that as a success. 

The farm accounts have been taking up my time this week, I always think that I will keep up with them on a monthly basis but life gets in the way and now I have a ‘urgent response required’ letter from the accountant :s Sorting through receipts that have just been stuffed in a drawer all year long is not much fun and so my New Years Resolution is to be more organised and do it regularly, one a year is regular, right??

December has finally arrived and we can all get busy making preparations for the festive season. The Christmas trees were collected on Saturday and we have sold a few over the weekend so are hopeful they will all go by the 24th!! Hubby had to go and pick them up and decided he would be able to get all 80 in the van, he came back with sixteen! We hitched up the horse-box and off he went again to collect the rest, meanwhile I sold the first tree to a chap from the village so I was very chuffed. I have seen a couple of photos of them out in their new homes and they look very good, a nice shape, being the first time we have sold them we didn’t know how it was going to go and good trees are obviously what people want so we are glad that they appear to be that at least.

Thursday morning was an early start, we were up at 6 to load the geese, sounds like we have lots but there are only two, they were however still out in the paddock, so we had to cajole them towards the unfamiliar cage that they would be transported in, to be honest it was much easier than we had dared hope, and they went in easily. We are now waiting for the phone call to say that they have been processed and that’s Christmas dinner sorted 🙂

We have had a nice frozen couple of days, normally that would not be my chosen phrase but after all the rain it was a brief respite, however the rain is back today and we are almost back to square one, hopefully the forecast will be accurate and that is it for a while. The small paddock that the sheep came back to is saturated and so they were moved to the larger paddock once the geese had gone, I need to keep a close eye on their feet in this prolonged wet because they can end up with foot rot, not very nice, apparently you can smell it a fair distance away 😦 It was impossible for them to be in the paddock at the same time as the geese because the geese had decided that the very nice pig ark shelter would be their home, they are not very clean and tidy creatures and before long the ground was disgusting meaning that the sheep would have nowhere to sleep. I do miss their noisy morning acknowledgement though and they were no trouble apart from terrorising the chickens, chasing the dog, crapping absolutely everywhere and lunging at your bucket for food every time you went up there 😉

We have had the dreaded forms from ‘The Ministry’ arrive this week, they provoke terror in the hearts of smallholders everywhere, bit of an over reaction but you know what forms do to people. It’s a bit like an electoral roll for animals, we have one from the GB Poultry Register to record how many birds and what varieties we have  and one from DEFRA for the sheep, we also have to fill in a farm register to record any other livestock, the date for recording is Dec 1st and the form has to be in by Dec 31st, failure to do so will result in having headphones duct tapped your ears and being forced to listen to Jedward all year! Actually it increases the risk of inspection, the ministry arrive to check you have what you say you have and that all animals are tagged and legal. They will also check that feed is kept in separate feed bins for different types of animals, and you thought this lark was oh so simple didn’t you, some feed has fishmeal in such as Cat, Dog, and Chicken feed, this is not allowed to come into contact with Sheep, Pig and Cattle feed because of the food chain. It was all so much simpler before the War when people just got on with it, the Ministry took over to ensure the country didn’t starve which is fair enough but once they were in they didn’t want to go and now its form after form after form. This in itself would not be so bad if the left hand knew what the right hand was doing, but invariably it doesnt and you get a call to tell you they are inspecting 40 of your breeding ewes, you would like to tell them sharply that if they knew what they were doing they would know I only had four lambs at the time, the paperwork must have been there for them to consult. Being a polite type I informed the lady at the end of the phone nicely that I only had four lambs to which she replied, ‘well you have got off lightly then’  bloody jobsworth!

The chickens are still laying well, I am surprised at this as the egg numbers usually fall quite sharply during the colder months, feeding them extra and making sure they are in good condition before Winter obviously did the trick, coupled with the fact that we have had to let them fully free range because of the wet paddocks means that laying has hardly dropped off at all at the moment. It does mean that there is not a lot left of my brassica bed in the veg garden, they have been helping themselves on a daily basis but its a small price to pay and they love it.

I still find myself thinking about Milly on occasion, especially when I get the dogs in to feed them, although it is very much quieter as she was the yappy one that always wound the other dogs up. Kai, the guard dog, discovered he could open the side gate the other night, at first we thought it had just been left open but after shutting it, it was open again and he was round the side near the quail barking his head off. We tied up the gate and thought that would be the end of it, but he has now spent three nights in a row scrabbling at the gate trying to get back round there, I keep hoping he will give it up as it is right near our bedroom window but each night he tries his luck just in case we have forgotten to tie it up. One of the nights Hubby went out to try to get him to stop and he heard a din in next doors paddock, he took the torch and two foxes were fighting, they were so intent on killing each other that they didn’t even notice him watching them, they are definitely here again and we will need to be vigilant during the day and thorough with our shutting in round at night.

I made three dozen mince pies in the week, plus two dozen jam tarts after running out of mincemeat, most of these are in the freezer, if I left them out I would be making three dozen every week from now till Christmas Day, mince pies are that much loved in our house. I am really enjoying the run up to Christmas this year, for the past eighteen years or so I have been involved with a local charity pantomime which was always performed the weekend before Christmas and took up a great deal of time, all for a good cause, but this year I decided to take a year out and have enjoyed having the time to do things without time constraints or pressure to get things finished. Panto still goes ahead without me though and this year its Aladdin, its on the weekend of Dec 14th, 15th & 16th at the Community College in Carterton, if you want some pre-Christmas fun, get your tickets from Giles Sport in Carterton and go along and support them.

Tis the season to be jolly fa la la la la, la la la la 🙂

Sadly, this week we lost our Border Collie, Milly, it was a bit of a shock to say the least as she had been fine, no indication that she was ill at all. I came home from an appointment on Tuesday, let all the dogs out, went to get them in a while later and she was laying under the nut trees. I knew as soon as I looked at her eyes she had gone and I promptly burst into tears, sobbing her name, she was 11 so not a bad age but we always thought that Max who is nearly 14 would go first. She was the first dog we ever had from a puppy, the others all came from the pound and so we had a special bond, together with the fact that she was the most loyal and obedient dog makes her going a great loss to all of us. That evening was a surreal one, digging a hole in the pitch black pouring rain by torchlight, I remarked that I knew how Burke and Hare must have felt, we decided to bury her in the lawn so that she would always be with us when we were working or relaxing, she never liked to be very far away so I think that was a good choice. Goodbye and thank you for sharing your life with us. (I am blubbing at this point)

Mia and Max don’t seem to have noticed much beyond that first afternoon when they were unusually well-behaved and quiet, as long as Max gets his dinner and a can spend the day in the warm he is not too bothered, Mia was straight into Milly’s bed so I guess she has moved up a rank! Mia has now hit the manic, tearing around stage where everything is such fun, for her at any rate, I don’t think the chickens and the rabbit quite see it like that. Much to my amazement the rabbit is still pottering around the yard and has taken to living with the chickens in the back stable, although there has been a strong smell of Fox in the yard in the last couple of days. I need to keep my guard up during the daytime at the moment, due to the weather we have been letting all the chickens out on a daily basis, it wont be long before Foxy works out there is a free buffet going at Friesland!

The weather is a constant drain at the moment, we are not in imminent danger of having the house flooded nor is it a life and death situation but nevertheless it is still hard work that we could do without. When I said after the last deluge, that the worst I have ever seen it, you can scrap that as we have moved on a level! This time the hay barn and the feed room were flooded, luckily we keep everything up on pallets so nothing was spoiled but the mess underfoot adds to the daily grind, the fields are more flooded than ever and the horses are in, then turned out for a couple of hours then back in again. It’s a catch 22 situation, do you keep them in and save the paddocks from being trashed, only to let them out for a couple of hours where they proceed to thrash around churning up mud because they have been in for 24 hours, or do you leave them out to churn up the grass and only get them in when they can no longer tolerate the continuous downpours. Having them in for so many hours a day means mucking out two stable twice a day, I do the morning shift and my eldest daughter does the evening shift, we are going through hay and straw at a great rate but its all adding to the muck pile which make great fertiliser so at least some good comes of it.

Hubby collected the sheep this weekend and they are now back in the smaller paddock, only time will tell if we will be lambing for the first time ever in Spring. If they are pregnant, at the very least they will have one lamb each, they could potentially have three, that would mean hand rearing one of the triplets as sheep only have two teats, not too much of a problem as we have hand reared for a few years now and will be buying in other store lambs as well.

The geese have been booked in for slaughter and they will go this Thursday morning, they are non productive and so in my drive to tidy up all loose ends they will serve us better in the freezer. The cockerels really need to be dispatched as well but at the minute I am having difficulty with my wrist and so plucking is out of the question, it is likely that I may just have to cut the breast meat from them and save the rest for the dogs, I could really do with that plucking machine at times like this.

I have a list of Autumn jobs that really should be done but the weather is hampering efforts, Winter pruning is one that I still have not got round to, after doing the animal rounds in the morning, then the horses, ending up soaked, by the time I come in and get dry I don’t want to go back out again! Some of the nut trees need thinning out and the fruit trees need a prune, the raspberries also need sorting, hopefully the weather will get better soon and I can get on with it. At the weekend I pulled up a few leeks, well I say pulled, that was an impossibility as the clay was hanging onto the roots for dear life, so I tried digging them up and the amount of mud that was stuck to the fork made it heavy work. Because of the amount of water standing the leeks have started to go soft and I didn’t want to lose them all so it seemed like a good idea at the time, I managed to get a fair few up and made a batch of leek and potato soup, I also pulled some of the parsnips which are also beginning to suffer. While I was digging I discovered a bunch of carrots that had been missed when I dug them up in the summer so that was a bit of a bonus and they seem to be fine and are drying nicely in the poly tunnel ready to use in the next week or so. I have started to use the Kale, I find that at this time of the year I begin to crave some proper greens and Kale fits the bill nicely, it’s a lovely dark green variety with good flavour, it stands well over winter and its easy to pop out and pick it fresh right when you need it. The other cabbages have not done so well, not because they are spoilt by the rain but because I have had to let the chickens out of the run, they have quickly discovered the Brassica bed and greedily feasted on anything low growing, ah well at least it will produce good eggs!

The fruit trees arrived this week and we got them into the ground as soon as we could, they are planted in the bed where the leeks are at the minute, partly because it is not much good for anything else as the ground is too heavy, also they are patio sized trees and it is my intention to make a small forest garden in that bed. The idea being that you layer the canopy, so fruit trees, then fruit bushes underneath and then low growing crops under that, it is an ideal bed for it because it gets full sun all day, eventually we will have a structure for the grapes vines to grow up too, if it all comes together it should be quite a productive bed fingers crossed.

The weather is set to change for the rest of the week according to the met office and just for once I will look forward to a cold snap, if we don’t see rain again all Winter I will be very happy. The Christmas trees are coming in this weekend and I would rather be out there in the cold with a mug of hot chocolate than stood with water dripping down my face and soaking every part of me 🙂

The weather has been fairly kind to us this week and the ground is drying up quite nicely for the time being. It is helped by the millions of leaves that have now fallen all over the farm, we don’t pick them up, firstly it would be too long of a job and secondly if you leave them long enough the worms will take them all down and do the job for you. They are also making a good dry layer to walk on at the moment, it will be a different story once it rains as they will become slippery in places but we will deal with that if and when we need to.

Two weeks ago I decided to let the remaining giant rabbit out to roam free around the farm, you will remember that the dog killed the other one and she was all alone in her cage. To be honest I didn’t think she would last long but she is still pottering around having the time of her life, much nicer to see her being able to practice some normal behaviour, she has five acres to run around in and she is making the most of it! If you remember I hatched out a batch of Quail in the summer and although I sold some there were still a few left, I also released these as they were surplus to requirements. I could have fattened them up for the freezer but to be honest the amount of work involved for such little meat didn’t seem worth the effort so off they scuttled, they didn’t do so well and lasted only a few days before I found remnants of them here and there. I like to think they had a few days of total freedom before becoming dinner for the cats etc.

The cider has been fermenting away all week and the next step is to rack it off into a storage vessel, I have a barrel for this purpose and it will be exciting to get the first taste of my home-brew, I just hope it tastes good! I can’t wait to go on and try some wine next, it gets to be a bit of a bug and to be honest it’s so easy , especially with a kit, I can’t belive I havent tried doing it before. It will be lovely to offer visitors a glass of cider and maybe even mulled cider at Christmas.

On Friday I had a day out in London, we went to watch Scrooge at the London Palladium, it was a fabulous show and really got us in the Christmas mood. We decided to make a good day of it and caught the local London connection arriving around lunchtime, the minute you step off the bus the contrast of worlds hits you, the noise, the people, the smells all in epic proportions! It is nice to visit a different world now and again but I deduced that I like the quiet of the countryside, I also couldn’t help thinking that the people who live there must have permanent levels of stress of one kind or another, there is no escape from the noise, it is a constant bombardment of the senses. Having said that I did love it just for the day, the Christmas lights alone were worth seeing, huge drapes of lights everywhere you looked, the local town lights will be a bit of a disappointment in comparison. I felt like a country bumpkin when the store assistant in a large department store laughed at me for taking photos of the sweet display, it was like being in Willy Wonkas factory and my eldest daughter couldn’t resist seeing if the larger than life chocolate house was in fact made of real chocolate and broke a bit off the roof to see, she wasnt the first one to have done it judging by the amount of broken tiles 🙂 It was a very long and tiring day but full of fun and discovery and we were very glad to be home amoungst the greenery, quiet and with just the Moon to light up the sky.

Hubby went down to visit the sheep at the weekend, they have the exclusive attention of the ram and so the possibility of lambing in the Spring looks like a good one. The chap who had kindly had them with his flock for the last couple of weeks is talking of giving them up next year, you will recall that he is seventy and it is all getting a bit too much for him, he has a flock of about twenty ewes and Hubby talked about buying them from him when the time comes. This would take us into new realms of full scale lamb production which would be quite daunting but very exciting at the same time, I will let you know if that is on the cards, we will need plenty of customers for home reared top quality lamb.

I spent Saturday morning picking and processing Brussel Sprouts, the weather in the Summer was not the best for them and then an attack of caterpillars meant that they had either ‘blown’ or had been nibbled. Having said that I still managed to picked a good haul of nice tight uneaten sprouts, not that I am keen on them but for some reason a lot of men would not consider it Christmas dinner without them, I personally think that the after effects appeals to the little boy that is still inside each of them :s personally I prefer mine raw in a salad. The manuring of the veg beds is now finished and Hubby has worked tirelesly to get that done over the past couple of weeks, it will be left now for the Winter to do its work and break it down so that the worms can turn it over, it is the easiest way of doing it, although I have been taught to double dig the old fashioned way I am all in favour of making light work of it with the same results in the end.

I have a list of garden jobs that need to be done, cutting back and storing pots of Dahlias so that I don’t lose them over winter and the large Bramley Apple tree needs a Winter prune to keep it under control and maintain a good shape. It is at the end of the drive and so it can’t be left to just grow as eventually we wont be able to drive past it without scratching the van. My sister and I gave it a good prune about three years ago to bring it back under control and it has kept a good overall shape, it is quite a difficult job as you need someone on the ground to be able to see and direct the pruner so that it does not end up lopsided. The fruit cage needs a bit of attention to tidy it up for the its winter rest and the netting has a fair few holes in it resulting in the birds being able to get in, so that needs some wire tacked all around the bottom third to prevent them stealing fruit next year. Apart from that the veg garden is pretty much redundant now until spring, there are leeks and parsnips to be used up over the next few weeks and there are the sprout stalks to be lifted, these will go to the chickens to pick over before going on the compost heap. Then it is all about planning for next year, getting the crop rotation right and deciding what to plant, the order will go in just after the new year and it will be time to begin all over again, the circle of life is never more evident than in the vegetable garden 🙂

 

This weeks title is dedicated to my laptop! It was slow until I spent all this morning, uninstalling, defragmenting and optimising, basically giving it a technical boot up the bum, hopefully it should run a bit faster now and I can get this weeks post out on time 🙂

Lets think, what has happened this week, it started if I remember correctly with a glorious sunny day on Monday, I spent the day gardening, well weeding mostly, I collected the last of the cucumbers from the poly tunnel amazed that I could still pick them in November. I had quite a little haul from the tunnel including some potatoes that I had planted a while back, they seemed to bolt quickly and I didn’t think that there would be anything from them so it was quite pleasing to find a couple of boilings beneath the surface, those together with some brocoli and some french beans made a lovely addition to some lamb chops for tea. Hubby has been busy putting more manure on the raised beds that are now cleared of any produce, and I am still waiting for the fruit trees to arrive, I need to chase them up I think or the ground will be frozen and we will be unable to plant them.

Monday was also the day that the mower was scheduled to be picked up after we sold it on Ebay, various text messages informed me that the transporter driver was coming from Germany and would arrive at 6pm. He was on time and his transporter was huge, he couldn’t get in the drive and so we had to load it up in the lane. Now you would think that if someone was collecting a ride on mower they would have ramps to get it up onto the lorry wouldn’t you, it appears not, luckily we have some ramps but the incline was so steep that it had to be pushed up, this coupled with the fact that the driver hardly spoke a word of English made it quite entertaining, although poor hubby ended up with backache, he is not getting any younger you know 😉

The weather went into decline after that first day and it became quite a bit colder, the fire went out over night on one occasion and I took the opportunity to clean the flueways on the Rayburn before relighting it so that we don’t accidentally  poison ourselves. I have also fed my christmas cake this week, I had cleaned out my store cupboard and found various bottles of unopened alcohol in there including some miniature Whisky which I decided was just the right amount to lace the cake with. I found half a bottle of Vodka which is now steeping in raspberries and sugar to make a nice liqueur ready for Christmas, and I have begun the process of brewing Cider, which I am especially looking forward to tasting! Talking of Christmas  (we can now as December is only a couple of weeks away) I have been looking through the various produce I have been making ready to box up as gifts, I have amazed myself with my organization this year and found I only needed one or two more items to complete my list. The Christmas tree enterprise is going ahead, we have now paid for the trees and eagerly await their arrival at the end of November, I still need to make a board for the front but I have been putting it on all the Facebook pages I am a member of so hopefully people will remember where they saw them advertised and come and buy one. We are delving into the unknown a bit and just hope it works out ok.

The weather for the rest of the week has been a bit uninspiring really and does not beckon you outside and so I have been tidying various areas indoors, one of which was the store cupboard where I found enough unused alcohol to see us through this Christmas without the need to buy any more! I also tided and cleaned the room where the dogs sleep, not that you would be able to tell now as they soon mess the place up again. I changed their floor cushions for thicker ones as the weather gets colder, they are getting on a bit and need more padding underneath them than they did before, don’t we all, I can hear you say 😉 There are plenty more areas to be sorted, just as well really with the weather on a downward spiral.

The sheep have been penned with the ram at their temporary accommodation, they seem to be getting star treatment, the chap left a message to say that our sheep are pregnant “how does he know”, I asked hubby,” he is 70 years old” was his reply, as if that fact alone would verify it! The rest of the animals are getting as fed up with the declining weather as we are, the oldest of our dogs, hates any hint of rain or cold and is reluctant to go outside even for the shortest time, barking to come back in the minute he has finished his business. The chickens are still laying pretty well considering the drop in temperature, we have moved the coop in the big paddock onto new, clean ground nearer to the gate so that we don’t have to walk too far with the water buckets in Winter, the horses always look sorry for themselves when the wet weather is constant, the only one who love it are the ducks , they are not phased at all by changes in weather patterns, I suppose if I had a permanent, waterproof, duck down duvet on, I wouldn’t complain either.

I just took a quick look at the blog posts for this time last year to see what comparisons I could find, apparently I was feeling full of beans due to the brisk wind, hopefully the brisk wind will replace the rain later on this week and I will be full of beans again!

This is apparently my 91st blog post, that is almost two years of weekly postings, well done to anyone who has been with me from the beginning, please feel free to leave a comment and let me know who you are and why you are still reading!!!

My first post was at the end of Jan 2011 and was only 167 words long, by August of that year I was up to just under 1000 words, the busiest viewing day was Feb 21st 2011 with 42 people reading it, my top commentator is David and the blog has been read by at least one person in 38 different countries, the highest number of people reading it is in the UK followed by Australia the USA and Indonesia!!!

It has been a very wet weekend and as a result we now have a small river running all the way through the bottom paddocks, it doesn’t stop there, it then spills over into the lane and continues into the fields opposite, we have stables that have water coming up through the dirt floor and very soggy looking chickens. Hopefully the sun will shine and most of it will be gone in a day or two, what is worrying is that it is only the beginning of Winter and we seem to be at saturation point already, we could be in for an interesting few months.

The girls have gone on a three week holiday and hopefully they will come home pregnant, I am of course talking about the sheep 🙂 We loaded them up on Saturday morning, it went quite well considering they had never been in a trailer before, we took the opportunity to give them their injections and spray them with a colour mark so we know which are ours when we return. Hubby and daughters boyfriend then drove them a few miles down the road and offloaded them into the field containing their new beau. On Sunday morning we had a phone call, because of all the rain the chap looking after them had got them in to the shed, he was worried that they were looking too cold and wet, another reason we need some sun, so that the business to be done is successful!

My domestic (inner) goddess 😉 appeared to have left home for a short while one day this week, I decided that it would be a good day to make a panful of chicken soup and some freshly made
bread, I loaded up the bread maker with a sourdough mix, following the usual instructions and chopped up left over chicken with some onions, garlic, veg and stock that I had in the freezer. The soup was looking good and tasting great, it looked a bit too chunky so I decided to whizz it in the blender for a minute or two, this is when it all went badly wrong. I left it in too long and the result looked like something the cat threw up, it didn’t end there because for some reason the bread mix didn’t rise and there was a heavy lump of cooked dough in the bread maker, I hope the goddess comes back soon, I can’t face another meal like that 😦

Mia has reached the stage where she has selective hearing, she has gone from an obedient little bundle of love to a delinquent fur ball and a mostly filthy dirty one at that! She has suddenly decided I am no longer to be listened to unless one of the words is dinner or ball, she is certain to ignore any phrases that contain, bath, here or in. Her new favourite game is cat stalking closely followed by teasing the geese, even though both of these are likely to end with her getting a swipe or a peck, she shows no fear which is not always a good thing. Once she is in for the evening and cleaned off she is the delightful little puppy we were hoping for but during the day she is very much a tomboy dog, tearing around in the dirtiest puddles she can find and usually getting up to no
good. The training will continue and hopefully she will blossom into a well behaved dog, fingers crossed, she has been quite good up to now, I should have known it was the calm before the storm.

I did get busy this week with a few of the jobs I mentioned in the last post, cleaning out the poultry was the biggest and most urgent job, my back was aching by the end of the day but I was satisfied that it had been done and they were all nice and clean, and then the rain came, turning the pens into a bog and with the subsequent mud that was traipsed into the coops I wondered why I bothered! I still have not got round to doing anything on the veg garden it is generally too wet to work on and it won’t hurt to leave it for a while longer, but I will try and get into the poly tunnel this week and clear anything that has gone over. I ordered some ever bearing strawberry plants at the end of the summer and they will be going into the tunnel for and early crop, they should keep flowering from early spring until well into October giving us a good continuous supply of fruits next year. It might seem premature to be thinking about next years produce already but it is a good time to start planning the rotation and making lists of what you would like to grow, what worked and what didn’t, I have had a request to grow ‘spaghetti squash’ not something I have tried before so that will be interesting. Squash do fairly well in our soil on the whole, the pumpkins grown especially for this week just gone were carved out in splendid form to celebrate All Hallows’ Eve, I will definitely be growing them again next year.

You can tell how the weather went yesterday when this weeks blog is pressed and ready to go just after 7.30 on a Monday morning! Have a good week everyone x