Author: frieslandfarm

August is upon us and this is the time of the year when as a gardener you take a look round and assess how things are going, what went right and what went wrong, why, and how to change it or improve it for next year. Unless you are a gardener extraordinaire there will always be something, I need to plant more in succession next year instead of jumping the starting gun and ending up with too many  of the same veg all at once. If you can hold yourself back enough to do this you will have small amounts of each crop to keep you going and then some to store for Winter, if you can’t, you end up like me in a mad panic when everything is ready at once and you spend all your time picking and freezing stuff!

The happy accident comes in the form of runner beans, at the beginning of the year I accidentally planted 4 rows of french beans, thinking they were runner beans, then something ate all but 3 of the plants. I found the runner bean seeds which had fallen down behind the bench and so planted the meagre few I had left, my Mum then bought me a whole load of runner bean plants from a car boot sale, the result is three different coloured runner bean flowers! Whats great about that you may think, well the french beans are the first to produce beans and they have a pink/purple flower, you will remember that there were only 3 plants left, in amongst all the greenery of the other beans I can easily spot the purple flowers, work my way down the stalks to the lovely little beans hiding at the bottom 🙂 Saving me a great deal of time searching, especially as I will then spend the rest of the day blanching and freezing them!  As each different type of bean begins to bear fruit I will be able to find them easily even in amongst the other types of bean.

Another mistake I made was planting the courgette plants too close together, they look very small and lonely when newly planted and so you tend not to plant them too far apart, but, and this is a big but, as they begin to grow, they swamp the whole area and begin to overcrowd each other, the huge leaves reach for the sky covering every inch of visible ground. Thats when the hunting begins, foraging around in the undergrowth to find the courgettes, undoubtedly I will miss one or two and they will be certain contenders for the Guinness Book of World Record as a Marrow! Strangely enough I planted the Sweetcorn too far apart and as they are wind-pollinated the plants on the outside of the patch have no cobs! I have also noted that I didn’t plant enough Broccoli or Cauliflower and far too much Kale! All this will be noted down and totally forgotten about by next year, and not only will I probably make the same errors in my rush to get sowing but I will make a few new ones to boot!

The animals are all enjoying a bit of sunshine, although keeping up with the water buckets is nearly a full-time job, as is watering the plot, the plants need watering morning and night just to stop them keeling over, what on earth was I talking about last week when I said I felt a nip of Autumn in the air!

Good morning, and at last we have had a few sunny days in a row! Make the most of it, there is definitely and Autumn chill in the air in the mornings!

Last night we lost our electric supply at about 7.30pm, luckily we had just finished eating our roast but after about an hour and a half I was concerned that the incubator would start to lose too much heat. This is the second time we have lost power during an incubation period although the power was only off for an hour last time. I decided on emergency measures and rang my Mum to see if I could take them over to her and plug it in, it is lucky we did that because the power was not restored until 4.30 am the next morning, by which time the eggs would have got cold and the embryos would have died. They are due to hatch in 6 days time and I hope they are no the worse for their ordeal!

I put some of my surplus birds up for sale a couple of weeks ago and within 2 days this week had sold them all 🙂 A lovely family came all the way from Windsor to buy five ducks, they left with five ducks and five chickens! One of the chickens was a cockerel that had been giving me a bit of grief over the last week, they can start to attack you at feeding time which is what this one had done. Normally I am ready for him with a bucket of water or just the empty bucket, but he caught me unawares one day and made a nasty bruise on my leg! I was telling this story to the family and how he would be Fox bait by the Sunday night, the Father asked me if he could have him, I told him, if you can catch him, you can take him free of charge. With one swift movement, he picked the cockerel up and carried him around for the rest of the time they were there. He was telling me how he used to live on a farm in Kenya when he was a boy and loved animals, and you could see he really had a way with animals as this feisty cockerel sat there very contentedly in his arms the whole time. It might, however be a different story when he gets him home!

The baby rabbits are just over two weeks old now, they all have their eyes open and are starting to move about a lot more, one of them is a little squealer, you can pick up all the others with no problem, but as soon as you pick up this one it lets out the most piercing squeal, which does the job it is supposed to as you very quickly put it back!

I have been picking, pulling and freezing again this week, although we are almost upon August and still no ripe tomatoes, we have had a couple of cucumbers though and the chillies and peppers are beginning to swell nicely. One of the new fruits I have grown this year is the Japanese wineberry, not a very remarkable plant to look at while its growing but as soon as the fruits begin to ripen it is totally transformed. The berries are like the most exquisite little gems, they shine brilliantly in the sun, starting off yellow and turning to a beautiful red, they are a delight to look at and they taste very nice too! Blueberries are one of my favorite fruit and although I have grown some this year they did not yield nearly enough, so in the local supermarket they had them on offer and I bought just enough to make 3 pots of Blueberry Jam, a real treat, we used some to make a victoria sponge yesterday which was delicious 🙂

I have had the first two installments of the farm cat stories, Felix the Farm Cat, and hopefully will have enough time in the week to get them on here for next weeks blog. The cats don’t get much of a mention but they do have some ‘mini’ adventures which are well worth reading about.

Baby Rabbits £10 each ready in 4 weeks

Lets hope the sun continues to shine throughout the summer holidays, its only fair after the awful weather we have had! Although we should remember it’s not as bad as others have it, congratualtions to Sandra and her family, she reads my blog all the way over in Australia and has just moved back into her home after the terrible floods they had there at the beginning of the year, I hope you are all settling in well 🙂

I feel compelled to mention the weather again this week, awful, is the only word I can use, but if you thought it was a modern phenomena think again. I happen to have a diary written by a chap in the locality, it is for the year 1901, he was a farmer and most of what he writes relates to his livestock and the fields, he also records the weather for each day. Out of curiosity I read through July and in 1901 it was pretty much the same July as we are having now! The news gets better however as August went on to be lovely 🙂 Global warming or natural weather patterns?? My jury is still out on this one, although mankind is obviously not helping the situation, I am inclined to belive that we are not responsible for everything that is happening to our weather.

Talking of rain, we are divided in our house about the welcome over the frequency of its arrival! On the one hand, Hubby loves it when it’s pouring down, we really need it for the paddocks to grow well, and it fills up the water butts, my view is slightly different, apart from the fact that it can get disheartening, we really need some sunshine to ripen everything. The tomatoes are staying stubbornly green, and other greenhouse crops that should be romping away are barely limping into existence, lets hope that August brings some long lazy summer weather!

The 12 week old chicks are causing some concern this week, I have had to cull 3 already, at this stage I am unsure if it is genetic or viral. At the moment I am treating it as genetic because the three birds are all the same breed, however I have also had to put in place disease control measures, these include disinfecting boots and hands after entry to the pen and before going to any other pens, all a bit time-consuming but very necessary.

We lost a lamb yesterday but luckily it was only playing hide and seek with us! As it gets dark, its Hubby’s job to go and make sure everything is in bed and close doors, he came back down to the house last night and told me there were only seven lambs in the field. Have you checked in the field shelter, was my first question, yes he had and no sign of the lamb, so I donned my wellies and went to help look. The paddock is totally stock fenced so there is no way they could get out but Hubby was correct there were only seven lambs, by this time it is getting very dark and we had forgotten to bring a torch, but we wandered round the paddock in search of the lamb. Two minutes later Hubby shouts ‘over here’ and we could hear the lamb bleating away, now apart from a field shelter and goose house the only other thing in the paddock is a ‘Cambridge roller’ this is a large heavy roller that is used to flatten the field in Spring, somehow the lamb had managed to get under the towbar and wedge itself in, after some huffing and puffing to lift the front end the lamb was freed and ran off in the direction of its friends. How on earth it got stuck under there we will never know, but they are creatures of habit and so if it goes missing again, we know the first place to look!

As I mentioned last week, we have been cutting back hedges and generally tidying up, behind the front hedge at the bottom of the drive was a huge old trailer, at first I thought this would be great to do up, but when we got to it we could see that is was in a state of disrepair, so it was cut up for scrap metal and firewood. This has now opened up an area that we are planning to develop over the coming years. At the moment there are 3 enormous conifers and an even bigger Eucalyptus tree planted there, we hope to be able to take these down and replace them with a couple of Apple trees and Hubby has plans to build a dry stone wall (he has his uses!) which will make a welcome change to the rotting fence that is there now.

I am always saying ‘ I have a list of jobs as long as my arm’ and I really do, some of them are day-to-day and some of them are more long-term, sometimes we get stuck in and can cross a fair few off and sometimes we spend all our time doing other jobs that are not even on the list! We have goals, aims and projects aplenty, some of them will be achieved, others will be shelved and some will even be rubbed out as undo-able, but I have realised this week that you need this ‘list’ in order to keep moving forward, lets hope we never get to the last job to cross off!

 

I tried writing the blog yesterday, but it just wasnt flowing so I thought I would leave it until today when I might have better focus!

Not much out of the ordinary has been happening this week although we have been very busy cutting back hedges, and generally smarting the front up, we have had a bit of help from my parents and got quite a lot of weeding and clearing done so thank you to them. Hubby’s hedge cutting skills have a bit of a way to go, it was supposed to be straight and when Sam came home she asked if he was making the hedge into a caterpillar shape!!  After the cutting back comes the bonfire to burn it all, the smell of a bonfire on a weekend morning is something I love, luckily there are no neighbours near enough to complain about their washing 🙂

Lucy the British Giant rabbit has had her second litter of the year, she gave birth to 10 babies, but sadly the two smallest have died, the other 8 look as though they are growing at a great rate so I think they will be fine. The tortoises have had a bath this week, they get a scrubbing with a small brush and then we oil their shells, you can use baby oil, but we use Emu oil, once they are done they look very shiny,  as the weather has warmed up they have started to eat quite a lot, I introduced them to Avocado and they tucked into it with gusto, I try to feed them as natural a diet as possible but they get a treat occasionally. The other animals are much the same as usual, the lambs have had fun following hubby round on the mower when he topped the paddock, I think they thought it was a new sheep! The new chicken batch has settled in well and hopefully they will start to lay any day, the egg situation is critical at the moment as none of the others seem to want to lay, not good news for my customers, I have to keep saying that we should have more laying by next week. Chickens can’t lay an egg a day all year I know, but why do they all go off lay at the same time, they could at least lay in relays couldn’t they?

The Strawberries have now gone over but luckily next come Raspberries, Summer Raspberries taste delicious and they are more of a delight to pick than Strawberries as you don’t have to bend right down, they are very good at hiding though and you have to be thorough, I swear they also ripen while your back is turned! You think you have got them all then turn around to leave and you spot some more. The cucumbers are growing steadily as are the courgettes, as yet we have not had enough Sun to get the tomatoes really going, and the Peppers are slow to flower too. The root crops however are a different matter all together, they must be loving the weather, the Turnip, Swede and Beetroot are growing fast as are the Carrots, at the this rate I will have to sow a second crop because they wont store over winter as it’s too far away yet (hopefully). The nut trees are absolutely laden and now is the time of year to start clearing up the ground underneath them ready for when they fall in September, they are easier to see and pick up if you do that first otherwise you are scrabbling among the weeds and stingers and give up fairly quickly! The Bramley Apple tree had a poor year last year but totally making up for it this year, most Apple and Plum trees have one good year and then the following year not so good. Typically, the Cider Apple tree has hardly any fruit on it  this year, it must have known I had bought an Apple press! We do have an Apple tree in the front paddock that grows ‘store’ apples though and that has a good crop so I will have a go at making Apple juice from those.

I have grown Dahlias this year which are a total delight, hubby asks why have I grown them since you can’t eat them, two reasons really, one, because they will bring in Bees, Butterfly’s and pollinating insects, which will in turn pollinate the veg, and two, because they are pretty and you need to have something that is just for pleasure. I have found it very difficult to separate business from pleasure on the farm, especially when my pleasures include gardening and breeding chickens, the temptation is to only grow things to eat or sell and likewise with the chickens, only buying in what you are going to sell back out. So I made a decision this week to keep a few hobby chickens just for my pleasure, the postman has literally just arrived with 18 hatching eggs that will be going into the incubator tomorrow, I want a collection of different Orpingtons, and hope to have Buff, Black, Blue Splash, Gold Laced and White, then I want to cross-breed some of them and see what colours I can hatch out, I just hope they have made it through the great British postal system intact!!

I usually write about general day-to-day goings on around the farm and the little things that are funny, but I read an article this week that reminded me why I got started in all this in the first place.

The Food Standard Agency has  ‘approved  the sale of food from cloned animals without labels’. Shoppers will have no idea if meat has come from cloned animals, even though a large percentage of shoppers oppose the cloning of livestock.

If you find that a worrying statement, I am with you, if you don’t, then you should!

Food shortages are inevitable with the worldwide population growing as it is, but surely this is not the answer, those in favour say it will ‘create herds of supersize animals able to produce vast amounts of milk and meat’, all the while making bigger profits too of course. Those against say there are ‘ a high number of miscarriages, deformities and gigantism’

It seems that the money and power of the big companies win again, at this point I would also normally say that as the consumer you have the power to withdraw your spending on those items and if many people did it they might listen, however in this circumstance you will not know what you are buying, which is the most worrying bit of all.

All of which takes me back to why I raise my own meat, I like to know exactly how the animals have lived, what they have eaten, how they have been treated. I am lucky enough to be able to do this, most can’t, but what you can do is make more of a noise about what you are buying, read the labels very carefully, ask questions, don’t feel silly its your right to know what you are eating. If you see a campaign to get these clones labelled, and my guess is you will, sign up, don’t let the people who produce your food ride roughshod over you.

Quite by sheer fate, I read a book this week called, Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a book about cloned Humans, farmed, for want of a better word, for thier organs. A lovely little book, not Sci Fi or scary, just about the life of a clone, far fetched……………who knows!

I am conscious that every blog seems to have a weather report of one kind or another so today I am not going to mention it at all!!

I kept my camera with me today and took three photo’s, one that made me laugh, one that was taken during a relaxation moment and one of the recent fruit harvest that I am chuffed to bits with.

The one that made me laugh was of the Tortoise, usually there is not a lot you can say about these, they spend their days in the Herb garden wandering around not doing anything exciting, today I thought I would let them out into the big garden for a couple of hours so that they could forage on something different. They go for things like clover, plantain and dandelions but I caught Livingstone having a sneaky go at my Strawberries.

The second photo I took while having a break, sitting (well laying actually) under the Oak tree, I looked up and just thought how lovely it looked and so here it is

The third photo is not the most exciting and I will never be on a par with David Bailey, but it gave me great delight to gather and open freeze the fruits, when I mixed them all together in the bag they looked great, and it will be a real treat in the winter to be able to get it out to make some kind of pudding with. The mixture is Strawberries, Raspberries and Blueberries 🙂

The Goose is still sitting and has not hatched any goslings yet, I will give her a few more days just to be on the safe side, we have been busy moving and cleaning out Chickens, we are expecting a large batch in tomorrow morning and everything has to be cleaned and disinfected, especially this time of the year when maggots are such a problem, it is best to keep on top of the situation rather than find you’ve left it too late and something has flystrike. We caught our third fox as well this week, and we know we still have another prowling around, the little Light Sussex bantam disappeared the night before last, and yesterday evening we were having a cuppa in the garden about 9pm when one of the cockerels at the back starting making a heck of a row, we couldn’t see anything when we went up there but he and his girlie were both sat up on top of their house, a sign we have learnt to recognise and take heed of so the trap will be staying for a while longer yet!

We have a wild bird that we have been unable to identify, we think it may be a Nightjar or a Wheatear, it is mostly active at dusk and makes a distinctive call, if there are any twitchers out there that can help, we would love to know what it is.

I am hoping that the new chickens will not take to the trees again like they did last time, or Hubby will be up the ladder again!! He is busy weeding at the moment and there are an awful lot of them, he thinks I am in preparing the dinner so I had better wrap this up and go make him a cuppa and pick some strawberries for pudding 😀

I’m a bit late doing the blog today but with good reason, after a trip to dermatology, I am not allowed out in the midday sun, so needed to get all the jobs done first and blog later!! It’s a bit difficult with a lifestyle like mine but I am having to move with the shade!!

The weather has been great, as far as veg growing is concerned, showers one minute, and sun the next, excellent, not so good for people out and about in it though!

As it is perfect growing conditions the harvesting has certainly speeded up, even the turnips are ready to pull and that is a couple of months early, I am picking strawberries by the kg and making jam every day! People have started buying veg at the gate and yesterday I had a lovely couple who were motorhoming around the uk stop to buy eggs and veg, they are the best days, when you have a chat to folk from different parts of the country who have stopped to buy something from you 🙂

We caught another dastardly fox, a young vixen, although I did feel sorry for her, once they are trapped they are as vulnerable as any other animal, but I know that if we let her free she would be back to kill my chickens and we can’t let that happen. The other goose is still sitting, and I had to read back over the blogs to find out when she first started, by my calculations she has probably another 10 days to go so I will keep you informed.  The chicken selling is going from strength to strength, we have made a bigger better sign and have had three people in already this weekend, one was for an order of 30 hens!! A large delivery is due in next week of Blue Beechwoods and Rhode Rocks which will sell out at £15 each with discounts available on larger numbers, if you know anyone that wants any send them this way 🙂

Feel free to comment on the blog by the way, I know you read it because you tell me but if you want to ask any questions or know anything different just ask and I am happy to reply 🙂

I have a date with a pig later!! and a cow! We have gone halves with a friend who lives a couple of villages away, she keeps them at hers as she has more land, so we are off to visit them tonight so see how big they are getting, a cow is a year and a half before its ready for the freezer but the piggies will go aged about 7 months, these are baconers so we will have plenty of bacon, ham and sausages to look forward too :p if you are in the area  on a Sunday morning after October pop in and I will make you a bacon sandwich. 

Yesterday was the most awful weather here in the Shire, non stop rain and high winds, each time I went out to do the feeding I got drenched! On a day like that there is nothing more to do than light the woodburning stove, put the dinner in to slow roast and watch as many movies as possible, which is exactly what we did 🙂

We have had new arrivals in the form of chicks this weekend, remember the ones that were in the incubator when the power went, well so far 9 have hatched, not a great hatch rate out of 24 but better than nothing! Five Blue Splash and four Gold Laced Orpingtons, one of them was so stuck in its shell I had to get a warm cloth and clean it off before it could uncurl itself, that is usually caused by a humidity problem during hatching and we don’t normally help them out, if they don’t manage to hatch by themselves it is because they are weak and they are best left which seems cruel but it is kinder in the long run as they nearly always have problems and have to be dispatched eventually.

Hubby has been very busy cutting wood ready for the winter, we have been lucky enough to be given piles of wood from various people and have now got a wood pile that will last a few winters! The ancient woodburning stove we have is being replaced this year with a shiny new one 🙂 We have decided to invest in one that will run the heating, hot water and do the cooking, as well as dry the washing above it, a big investment money wise but one that will save us in the long run, we are totally reliant on electric here and you know the price of that at the minute. If we can cook, heat and wash for free that will drastically reduce our electric bill and I am all for that, we would love to go off grid completely someday but that will take time and more investment.

Although the weather is not what we are used to at the moment, the veg is beginning to take off, this week I have picked large quantities of Mangetout, I have also harvested, Broad beans, Gooseberries, Blackcurrants, Rhubarb, and Strawberries. I am picking about 1kg of Strawberries a day now, and after the first few days of eating them as they are, I have also made the first few jars of jam. There is nothing to rival the smell of Strawberry Jam as it is cooking and you can’t help going to the pan and just inhaling deeply! I have had to issue the warning to Hubby about this being a luxury item and not to use heaps of it on his toast in the morning so that a jar only lasts a week! Otherwise I would have to make 52 jars of the stuff and even my strawberry patch wont run to that!

I have spoken to lots of gardeners and everyone is saying the same thing, the flowers and the veg seem to be fruiting early this year, the plants are barely getting going and they are already flowering, even nature is confused by our weather patterns it seems, either that or it knows something we don’t! The dilemma is whether you let them carry on flowering and they then peak too early or if you delay it by taking off any early flowers, the risk being that if the weather stays cold it is possible they wont throw anymore flowers. I am going with nature on the assumption that it knows what it is doing, and so I will be leaving mine on and picking early this will probably mean smaller than usual veg but at least I will have a winter store.

While the heavens continued to open yesterday, I painted my new ‘Hens For Sale’ sign, I was so pleased with it that I have taken a photo to share it with you :). At the end of the month I am expecting the arrival of 25 Blue Ranger hens, at this precise moment I have no idea where I am going to put them, so one of today’s jobs will be to assess what is surplus to requirements and can go to auction or into the freezer!

 

Apologies for last weeks post as I forgot to add a title!!

We are fast approaching Mid Summer/Summer Solstice and as yet do not seem to have had much of a summer at all! A traditional way to celebrate Midsummer’s eve is with a bonfire, quite appropriate this year as the temperatures have not really got very high so far. A couple of nice days last week gave a bit of a growth spurt to the vegetation, that coupled with the odd splash of rain did wonders to the vegetable patch and as a result we are now harvesting plenty of mange tout and strawberries.

We have been eating the strawberries with balsamic vinegar and if you have never tried it, I can recommend it, put a few teaspoons of sugar on the bowl of strawberries and let it soak in for a couple of hours, then add some cream of your choice and a splash of good quality balsamic vinegar, I have no idea why it works, it just does!!

The mange tout are delicious, I can even be caught eating them whilst I am picking! Luckily, these can be blanched and frozen to save a taste of spring for the winter months, but they are great for salads, stirfries and boiled quickly for a couple of minutes as a side veg. Normally I grow peas but they are quite labour intensive at picking and podding time, they also are prone to pea moth, so very often you can go to all that hard work and find little maggots in the peas,  this year I opted for the mange tout which are proving much easier.

Last week I told you about the Light Sussex bantam that had hatched two chicks and one had died, I also mentioned at the time that I had caught her treading on the other by accident, I went up to the run after finishing the blog to take a photo of the remaining chick and it was alas already dead, so she had sat on her eggs for 21 days and they had lasted all of 2 days once they were born 😦

We had a bit of a drama in the week when the electric went off, I phoned the electric board and it was going to be off for a couple of hours, I have 24 eggs in the incubator (sods law), they were half way through incubation, after trying, and failing, to start the generator, I had to wrap the incubator in a thick blanket and just hope! They should begin to hatch next Sunday, so I will be able to tell you on Monday if my life saving technique worked or not!! Talking of eggs, the goose is sitting tight on hers now, everyday I tell her what a good girl she is, I just hope she manages to hatch at least one gosling. She is a young goose, this being her first egg season, they say that if a goose sits in her first season she will sit every year, so I have to let her have a go, even though it is a bit late in the year.

As well as this blog, I have now started a Facebook page for the farm, I can update on a daily basis and load lots of pictures, so if you are interested, just find Friesland Farm and ‘like’. I will be using the page to let you know what products I have a surplus of,  and how much it costs, so if you want anything just let me know and you can either pop up and pick it up or if we are out and about we can drop it off.

I thought I would leave you with a couple of photo’s this week, one of the goose sitting on her nest, the other two are of the young chicks and the ducklings that have now been put outside in the pens, the only problem with the ducklings is that they run away from you every time you go near them, so the photo is of them making a getaway!!

I hope you all had a relaxing Bank Holiday Weekend, although the weather was pretty miserable wasn’t it!! The temperatures are not very good for the time of the year and as a result the vegetable garden is struggling, today I have ordered some proper wind break to try to create a microclimate in order to get them going. The runner beans should be half way up the poles by now and are still only a couple of inches high! The root crops are doing well though and I will need to sow a second lot of them to have a continuous crop. It seems to be a battle against everything at the moment, the rabbits, the pigeons, the wind, the lack of rain and sun, next it will be too much sun and then the caterpillars 😦

On the bright side we had a new arrival, the Light Sussex bantam has hatched a chick, she did have two but one died on the first night, I am not sure how long the other will last, when I fed her this morning she stood on the poor little thing.

I moved the other chicks during the week from their small run to a larger one, I put them all in a box, proceeded to carry them to their new home and the bottom fell out and so did all the chicks!! They were running around the yard amazed at the freedom they had just accidentally encountered, both cats were in the vicinity probably thinking how lucky they were that breakfast had come to them, one of the chicks found an old fag butt and proceeded to run around with it in its mouth while the others, thinking it had found a tasty morsel chased it round and round. Meanwhile, I am hissing at the cats and daring them to come any closer, Sam went to get a net and after about half an hour we managed to round them up and deposit them safely in the new run. The ducklings are due to be moved outside but again its a little too cold, they have not yet fully feathered up, which means I can’t risk them getting wet! Ducklings that are born with their mother are coated each day by her with a waterproofing substance from a gland, ducklings that are hatched in an incubator do not have this protection and therefore cannot get wet or they will catch a chill and die.

I have had to rescue the potato growing from Hubby, he is new to gardening and it seems that after decades of growing potatoes a certain way, he has decided to rewrite the rule book! After watching painfully for a few weeks now, I could no longer stand by and watch the crop amount to nothing,  his idea was to dig a trench and earth up as the plants grew, but without boring you of the details of sub soil etc, I told him exactly why it wouldn’t work! I hope I have managed to get to them in time for them to produce some tubers :p

The rhubarb champagne had its first tasting on Saturday, it definitely fizzes, it tastes nice, but I have not had enough of it yet to let you know how alcoholic it is, I was hoping to enjoy a glass or two out in the sunshine over the weekend but it will have to wait until the sun finally comes out to play.

I watched a programme about the wildlife and the real truth of it last night, we have quite a range of  wildlife but there is always more that can be done. We have plenty of native trees and hedgerow, but grass and wildflower are not as abundant as they could be, this is partly due to the fact that we keep grazing animals and it never has chance to go to seed. I had always thought that there was enough to sustain birds here and that feeding them would be silly but the common thought now is that feeding garden birds is more likely to help them flourish than leaving it to nature to provide. I already grow Sunflowers to provide seeds for the chickens and will be looking into other garden crops that will do a similar job after all without the birds the mass invasion of caterpillars wont be far behind!!