Tag: asparagus

Posted in Friesland Farm

A pub lunch 😁 eggs galore & a Fox attack 😩

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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.

Lemon curd, sooo delicious 😋

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.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Surprise! Mid week interlude 😀

Posted on by frieslandfarm

I thought I would do a quick round up of the photos of produce I took over the 2020 growing season in date order so you can see how the year progressed. I love how vibrant the colours all are and can’t wait to start harvesting again this year. What I really should do is weigh everything to see exactly how much I get, the photos represent probably 1/2 of what I actually harvest so it would be interesting to have an accurate record.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Wall to wall sunshine, endless watering means early mornings 😜

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 25th May 2020, Bank Holiday Monday: Time and tide wait for no Man as the saying goes, nature keeps doing its thing regardless of any pandemic (and getting on better because of it I suspect) and the natural flow of the year gently rolls on 😀 I, and others I know, have enjoyed the enforced lockdown, initially it was a bit weird but we soon got into a rhythm and the more sedate pace of life we have easily slipped into is as good as meditation and definitely soul healing, of course we have had good weather which helped enormously and we don’t have children at our heels 24/7 😜 I shall be sorry when the human population is busy racing here and there again, hopefully a percentage will have re-evaluated what is really important in life and what they can manage without 😜

We were up early again as the day is set to be hot, early morning cool air is wonderful and I can get on easily. Watering, planting the second lot of sweet corn, hoeing, sowing some seeds, potting on and potting up all done before 8am. John did the feed rounds, Sam came over on her own to do the horses and give them a bath and we popped round to Mums to drop off all the veg plants I have been growing for her so that she had something to plant when she came home, all at a social distance of course 😀 A bit odd seeing your Mum for the first time in 5 months and not being able to give her a hug but hey the time will come. John cleaned out a few of the bird houses, I did give him the option of that or housework, he declined the latter🤪 We popped out to get some take away burger and chips from The White Hart in Minster Lovell, it was very tasty, I can highly recommend that and back home for the afternoon resting period 😀

One of the first jobs I did this morning once the sun had got round was to pick elderflowers heads. They need to be warmed by the Sun to get the best perfume and flavour, they are currently steeping in hot water along with lemons and an orange and the wafting aroma is amazing. If you like elderflower cordial it’s so simple to make you really should have a go, you will feel very proud of yourself once you taste it 😀 I have a sambucus nigra which is the black elder and has pink flowers, it’s only in its second year but next year I can’t wait to make pink elderflower cordial 🥰 If you want the flowers I have plenty here you can pick 😀 Once you have made the cordial it’s pretty versatile, you could add more sugar, boil it a little and make it into syrup for ice cream or add it to whipped cream for a lovely fresh sponge cake or you could freeze it into ice cubes ready to pop into a glass of Prosecco on a summers evening 😀

I use the River Cottage recipe but it’s very simple, pick around 20 heads of sun warmed elderflower, shake out any bugs (kind because you are about to pour boiling water on them otherwise but don’t worry if you miss one or two as you will be straining it) add, three unwaxed lemons and an orange chopped and squeezed a bit to a bowl along with the heads and pour on 1 and a half litres of boiling water, leave to steep for 24 hours. Strain the liquid through muslin or a clean tea towel after the 24 hours into a pan, add 1kg sugar and heat gently until sugar had dissolved then simmer for a couple of minutes then bottle into sterilised bottles. You can use citric acid which will help it keep for a few months but if you don’t have it, keep in the fridge and if you haven’t used it all up within days it will keep for a couple of weeks 😀

A perfect evening this evening, it cooled down to a nice level it was still and quiet, the sunset was pink, just lovely. We did what has to be one of my favourite jobs, moving the geese, they herd nicely and we moved them from the front to the back again. Two reasons, one the grass is nice and green at the back compared with the front which they have kept eaten off and two the goose that was sat on eggs, which were duff (I got in and had a look finally, some half matured embryos but mostly duff) insisted on sitting back on an empty nest. She has lost condition sitting as it is so we decided to move them all up to the back to break her brooding, seems to have worked and she was soon head down grazing away. I often think that I would have liked to have been a drover, for geese anyway, my romantic notion is wandering along leafy lanes taking the geese to market. In reality of course I probably would have been the drovers wife waiting at home for him to return with his wages and anyway I’m sure the weather would be cold and wet at the time geese were taken to be sold but a girl be wistfull now and again 😜

I did a bit of watering in the tunnels and cast an eye over the garden, some things are running to seed because it’s so dry, fine if the seed happens to be a fruit or flower, not so good if it’s a root veg 🙄 Still you can only do so much and the rabbits will eat the tops of the swedes and radish that have done that.

John managed to flood the back chicken pen, he left the water on and the poor hens were up to their knees in water, luckily it didn’t quite reach their fluffy backsides 🙄 So we had to spend half an hour or so sweeping water out of the pen lol, on the plus side, clean out was done in a jiffy 😂

Tuesday: I woke at 4.45 but I didn’t get up, I kept falling asleep again and eventually got up at 6.30. I’m struggling a bit today, I feel tired already so today will be a gentle day. First though, after doing the rounds we sorted out the Light Sussex pen, this was originally for rabbits until they got Mitzi and so while we should have concreted the floor all we did was put boards down. The edge is concreted but either rats or rabbits had dug under the boards and there were little holes down into the ground. One hen is sitting tight on eggs and once they hatch I don’t want the little chicks falling down the holes never to be seen again so we took up the boards and made the pen secure enough so chicks can’t get out and dug over the ground. Now the hens can scratch at the dirt they are busy dust bathing in it, bit of a bonus for them.

After that I came inside and finished off making the elderflower cordial, it made just over 1 and a half litres with a bit left to have a lovely drink of it. I will make some bread but nothing too strenuous for me today lol.

We went to the supermarket for only the second time in 10 weeks, whoop whoop let me loose 😜 it was pretty quiet and organised and we were like kids in a sweet shop, shall we, yes might as well 🤣

After dinner I did do a bit of hand weeding for an hour or so and John finished off creosoting the hen hut at the back.

A lot of the weeds I pulled went to the torts, they like fleshy thistles and dandelions. I set their little area up so that that could forage for themselves, clover, dandelion and thistle were all sown deliberately so they could feed themselves with extras given to them on the side. Over the years of being kept though they seem to have forgotten how to do that, until just recently that is, I have noticed that they are now beginning to attack the stalks of the weeds thank goodness 😅 I like to try and feed animals as close to their natural diet as is possible, that’s why the rabbits and guineas get bucketfuls of weeds and various tree branches, more of a balanced diet than dried feed and hay.

Wednesday: Up at 4.45 😀 woke up felt hungry might as well get up and get on 😜 I did some watering and some weeding and by 8am I had also sown 3 more rows of carrots and a row of beetroot, go me 😀 John got up about 7 and did the feed rounds then he set about topping the front paddock and taking the gates off the muck pile as Martin is coming to fit new ones tomorrow, a lit bit more that will look tidy. Mum lost a lot of her herbs while she was away so I dug up some parsley, oregano, mint, mace and chives for her and dropped them round mid morning. I came back with a nice chunk of succulent and some cuttings of a very pretty jasmine that she has growing. Time for the afternoon rest to recover enough for some more work later.

Evening work consisted of weeding, hoeing and watering, the usual lol then an in depth discussion, and by that I mean ‘words’ about the hose connectors to the taps. I have struggled with the watering for a few years and so this year I got soaker hoses to go all round only the connectors keep blowing off the taps, only when I finally loose my shit does John tell me it’s easy enough to sort out 🙄 well why the f…ing hell hasn’t it been sorted by now then, 10 weeks in lockdown, me swearing all the time and complaining that they don’t work and you didn’t think to tell me way back then you could sort it easily 🙄🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤷‍♀️

Thursday: Another Sunny cloudless day ahead with no sign of rain for weeks to come 😏 so I’m up at 4.45, breakfasted, out in the garden in my PJs doing what needs to be done. I had left myself a note last night to sort the polytunnel, cut back the parsley, chard, pull up weeds and tie in the tomatoes etc, otherwise I get distracted and then forget. Onto picking asparagus, carrots, mangetout and strawberries (only a few) Indoors at 7 for a shower and then back out to do a bit of pricking out, potting on, filling up the horses water buckets, sorting out what bits we have already to get these hoses secured and working out what we need to get to make the who,e damn thing work properly and give me a break 😂 Move a load of plants that have been overwintering so they get some good sunshine and hopefully put on good growth, put the washing on, hang it out, put out the recycling and the milk bottles, put out the veg for sale that I’m not going to use and finally finish at 11, that’s nearly a six hour shift already 🤪 I sit down, literally just sit down and Martin arrives to do the gates 😂 quick discussion with him and I sit down again and someone arrives who wants a phone number, I’m pooped I need a lie down 😜 And it’s hot already, blaring down onto the gravel, I can feel it starting to make my skin itch, I like the heat, I really do, I would rather have heat all year than cold but the my body doesn’t like the Sun. Its the enemy as far as my antibodies are concerned, who gave them permission to decide that, not me that’s for sure, I would love to be able to work away in the garden without worrying about UV rays. When I see people running/cycling to flat out sunbathing I do think to myself, do you even know what that is doing to you, never mind the sun damage to the surface there could be something bigger going on inside, it doesn’t look healthy to me but maybe that because for me it’s not!

10pm and I’m exhausted, we have been busy putting in more taps and sorting out the soaker hoses, a couple more to do and I will have nine taps in and around the garden that gives you some idea of how big it is I was working with three before 🙄 I made pins, out of wire we have had sat around for years, to pin the hoses down and now I just need to wait for connectors and at last I will be able to turn on the hoses, maybe even more than one at a time, and go and get on with something else. It takes too long to water it all by hand, there are still some areas that I will need to do like that such as the fruit cage and the garden area but it should free me up to weed, hoe, prune, pick, plant the list is endless. When I get tired I get very grouchy and a bit despondent especially tonight as the ground is so dry I despair, not just in the veg garden but all around the paddocks there are fissures opening up. The trees we planted were in the little paddock at the back are only small and I think they will need some water to keep them going as the ground water must be pretty low if there is even any left lol. If it carries on we will be going into drought and who would have thought that after the amount of rain we had late winter 🙄 and 🛏 💤

Friday: Up at 4.45 again and this time John got up with me and we cracked on, he had some taps to finish and I started on watering the beds, this time thought the connected soaker hoses. It works 😀 and by that I mean time saving as well as actually watering. I was able to get on with other jobs and so that’s what I did, I have hand hoed the brassica bed, the asparagus bed and lots of other little spaces in between rows of growing veg. I have managed to cut back things that were in need of cutting back and hoed pathways as well as pot up random things growing and general sorting bits out. By 9.30 I was wandering around looking for jobs to do instead of chasing my tail lol, I still have plenty to reorganise but I feel like that is achievable now and that makes me happy. It also means I will have plenty of time for picking and prepping which will be the next big task.

I feel I should explain about the watering lol, I don’t water just because it’s dry, the small veg plants and seeds that have gone in need molly codling until they establish themselves and then until they put on some good leafage they need watering because the ground is dry, once they bush out a bit they will provide their own cover and the soil will keep more moisture, but until then they are like small babies that need all the help you can give them 😀 As it is mainly planting and sowing season now it seems that all I have been doing is watering (that’s because it is all I have been doing)

Later this morning I have bloods to get done and then this afternoon there is a real treat in store 🥰 Charlie is wedding dress shopping, not shopping as in going out and about but a strictly by appointment only at one shop and I will be going along, we have worked out all the social distance arrangements and I will have a mask if I think I need it, a little bit of excitement in all the madness of the world at the minute.

Hedgerow flowers and grasses can make a bouquet every bit as beautiful (if not more so) than shop bought flowers don’t you think 😀

With my new found spare time 😜 I can now do the things I want to be doing and wasted no time in picking chive flowers. Highly prized by chefs apparently, they can be eaten sprinkled on salads etc, no doubt there are many dishes they can be used in but I wanted to make chive flower vinegar. A simple recipe and I have not made it before but the thought of vinegar and onion flavours together seems perfect. Pick the heads and give them a shake off then dunk in water and shake again to remove any bugs and dust etc, then give the a good dry by shaking them about (not rigorously) pack them into a jar, heat up (don’t boil just hot) enough white wine vinegar to cover them, pour the vinegar over the flowers, submerge and keep somewhere dark and cool for two weeks. Strain the flowers from the vinegar, you will end up with a blush coloured vinegar, then pour into sterilised jars with vinegar proof lids. Stored in a cupboard it will keep for up to six months probably longer.

I took a picture of something that makes me smile everyday, this is a cheeky little Diascia I bought last year, it’s supposed to be on the other side of the fence where the flower border is but it’s decided it rather likes this side better 😂 It’s delicate looking flowers have long been one of my favourites and especially this pinky salmon colour. I’m surprised it went through the winter to be honest but then as it was a mild one quite a few things have survived that normally wouldn’t have.

It would have been Dads birthday today so later in the evening when it had cooled down I picked some flowers from the garden and we went over to Swinbrook to put them on the grave. We met my sister over there and sat in the graveyard talking about the family history and the cottage we used to live in when we were small, I was only 5 but I can remember quite few things, such a lovely village and hasn’t really changed much in all hose years.

Saturday: Another early start, well an extra half hour lay in this morning 😜 and then on with the jobs of the day. I had thought about what I wanted to do as I was getting off to sleep last night but it never pans out that way as I always spot something else that needs doing. One job was to clear the patch that I can’t get to from about 8am as the Sun is already on it and stays there all day and I to the evening. I have decided to collect seed from things like calendula, borage, poppies, chives and possibly move the artichokes there as well, it can pretty much do its own thing then and I don’t have to worry about it. One thing I will have to move are some asparagus crowns because at the moment they are there but they don’t do very well as it’s so dry and weedy. These are crowns I grew from seed a few years ago, I was very pleased with that accomplishment so need to do them a bit of justice really. I nipped out the tops of the broad beans as we are into blackfly season and I have already seen clusters of them, luckily they seem to be on my sacrificial plants at the moment so that plan is working 😀 I did a quick bit of hoeing, a few bits of potting and I cleaned out the water trays in the greenhouse, checked over the peppers and aubergine which are growing big and strong now with fruits developing, I moved the chilli plants out of water now they have established and all those will stay in the greenhouse and hopefully produce something worthwhile this year. I still have a few things growing on in there, plum tomatoes, they need to get bigger before I move them and some outdoor toms which won’t go out until mid to end of June. All in all I am quite satisfied with progress this year, I just need to make some adjustments to cope with the weather change patterns and my difficulties of working in the Sun but, yep, happy days.

Coffee break time and I thought I would take an hour to sit in the shade and listen to a podcast 😀

Mid afternoon we popped down the road to the local campsite, they are doing ice creams on Saturday, nice little treat 😀 I mostly stay inside on days like these until it cools down much later on. Made fish pie for dinner and we are having the first of our home grown carrots and asparagus, I would do mange tout as well as they have developed now but John doesn’t like them and I couldn’t be bothered to do lots of different veg so we had peas. I have been a bit lazy of late with the whole cooking from scratch thing, I think half of it was a loss of appetite, but that has now returned, and if you don’t feel hungry, you don’t get any inspiration to make anything 🙄

I turned the water on for the squash and sweetcorn about 7pm went about the evening as normal, watched the space rocket go over, went to bed and then had to get up and go and turn the water off as I had forgotten 😂 That bed won’t need a water for a few days now 🙄

Sunday: Another early one for me, I’m quite liking it, it helps that I am not tired due to the steroids and it’s lovely and cool first thing, I get plenty done. This morning I planted the runner beans and the rest of the sweetcorn plus some more cauliflowers and some welsh onion. I have nearly planted everything now I’m just waiting for the plum tomato plants to get a bit bigger before putting the in the poly tunnels and then outdoor tomatoes which will get planted out in a couple of weeks. Then I did a bit of picking, asparagus, rhubarb and mangetout and all the while I had some watering going on 😀

I spotted a hen that had obviously got stuck behind the water system in the back pen, I don’t think she had been there that long (this was mid morning) but another hen had started vent pecking her. It sounds odd behaviour but it’s common for chickens, they see either an egg, poop or the pulsating of the vent and they have a little peck and then they keep going and before long they have broken the skin and then it’s bleeding and despite what some would have you believe, chickens are NOT vegetarian they see blood and meat and they will eat it. We got her out, cleaned her up, purple sprayed her and put her separately in a stable where she should recover quite quickly.

I had an hours sleep at lunchtime, it’s great that I am able to do that as it re energises me for later in the day. No idea how I am going to do if and when the temps cool down again lol, means I will have to do one full day instead of split shifts 😜

Have a great week, stay safe and only do what you are comfortable doing with regards to lockdown easing 😀

Posted in Friesland Farm

Garlic harvest, wildlife mornings & a tad of the wet stuff.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 18th May 2020: A new week 😀 still in a global pandemic and life has taken a slower pace for a majority of us. I wonder how many will continue to take it much slower once the threat is over. John has decided that when he goes back to work he is going to go later and come home earlier, I have heard that before mind you 😂 and of course he has the luxury of choice, we don’t have a mortgage, the bills are fairly low and he is self employed so can please himself to an extent.

He is going to do a job today, a leak under a floor which is regarded as an essential repair, he is going to do the hens and ducks before he goes though and will be home to do the afternoon rounds. This is because the temps look set to be pretty high and I will struggle out in the sun. The paddocks are ridiculously exposed areas and had we known 11 years ago that I would end up with this disease we would have started way back then planting many many trees so it was easier for me to move around in the shade lol.

We set the alarm this morning as we have things to get on with and seem to be sleeping in longer and longer! John did the feeding and letting out, I did the ponies and then we went to try and establish if the goose eggs were worth letting her sit on them for very much longer. You take your life in your hands really as the rest of them are not happy you are apparently ‘attacking’ the other one 😂 I did manage to pick up two eggs and they feel heavy enough to contain something so we put some food and water in for her as she is losing condition bu not coming off the nest.

Next I had to rig up electric fencing across the slip rail we repaired yesterday because although Jack has free run of some pretty big paddocks he has decided he wants the grass on the other side of the fence 🙄

John then left for work and I got on with some gardening jobs. First I pulled all the rest of the garlic that I grew over winter, it’s ready now and I want the space for more tomato plants, it’s now drying in the sun. I planted some leeks, they are a bit late going in but will catch up, you need firm ground that you can make good deep holes with the dibber for leeks. You just drop the tiny plants into the holes and eventually they will swell to fit the holes, leeks are a great staple for winter and they are kinder on the stomach than onions so if you have IBS try leeks instead. Then onto some more weeding and I took the hens a bucketful, the tree spinach I grew last year has self seeded everywhere but it’s good for the hens, rabbits and torts so it will come in handy. After that I found a tree stake and put that in next to a dwarf apple I planted in the veg garden, it a bit blowy today so I thought it could do with staking before it snaps off. A great day for drying the washing so two loads are now out on the line as well, at that point I figured a short sit down had been earned 😀

Leeks, I planted about 15 in all and I have plenty more seedlings, I might just spread the rest around in spare areas or inbetween rows of other crops already growing, you can never have too many leeks 😀

After my sit down my aim is to clean the bathroom, Hoover and polish the sitting room and give the kitchen a clean plus decided what to have to dinner tonight.

I got the jobs done that I wanted plus I made bread and a sultana and orange tray bake (Mary Berry) one of the simplest and foolproof recipes I have ever used and tasty, great if you have a sad looking orange sitting in the fruit bowl lol. We are having fish cakes for dinner, John will have chips and peas but I am having some of the salad leaves from the garden, the wild rocket is particularly tasty and I have a good bed of mixed salad leaves waiting to be used up.

I went with John this evening to fix a leaking outside tap, on our way back home just up the lane we saw a beautiful barn owl flying low over the field, life is good 😀

Tuesday: John has to go and finish the job he started yesterday but did the animals first, I helped a bit before getting on with watering the poly tunnels before it gets too hot. Then I spent the rest of the morning (until 11am) potting things on, I have a lot of shrubs/trees and plants that I have been growing since last year and they won’t get much bigger unless I give them some tlc. Bigger pots, fresh compost, plenty of water and some feed should see them come on in leaps and bounds now. I planted a few things out into the flower beds and then it was time for coffee and recharging my batteries 😜

I am trying to work out what is the best thing to do with our front area immediately out side the house, it’s basically been a gravelled area for about 10 years. I have filled the area in front of the house with pots, this is because at some point we need to reclad the front and so I didn’t want to dig a border or bed as it will get trampled down, so pots are a great option however they do have to be watered every day. The other problem is weeds growing in the gravel, some I don’t mind, some are a pain and unsightly but I also am not inclined to use too much weedkiller because of the wildlife, so you can see I have a dilemma lol, which I honestly don’t know how to overcome at the minute. The area opposite the building has got weedy and untidy but I have started putting a few plants and shrubs in that bit to brighten it up and I have the catalpa tree coming which will also get planted there. Another problem with the area is that it gets the sun from early morning until late afternoon, south facing, not too bad for sun loving plants but for me it’s difficult to spend much time on it each day, so I can’t make an impact within a few hours, more like ten minutes here and there which is not much use. The other day the sun went behind clouds so I went and got the hoe and by the time I got out there the sun was back out lol, I did his about four times before giving up completely. I need an overcast day but all we are getting is sunshine at the moment.

The afternoon I spent indoors and had a cheeky nap as I felt a bit tired. John came home in time to do the egg collecting and feeding, we had dinner then went in search of ice creams 😀

When we got back it had cooled down enough for me to go outside and get the Indian Bean Tree planted, John did come out and dig the hole for me as it turns out there was some kind of footings right where I had chosen to put it, so an iron bar was needed to break it up. I carried on outside, hoeing, sweeping, tidying and watering until almost 10pm. It was a lovely cool evening so I made the most of it 😀

Wednesday: I was up with the larks this morning lol, 5am i woke up and thought, I need a wee, I’m hungry and I could do with a cuppa so I got up made a brew and went outside where the air was lovely and cool, there was a low mist and the pink sunrise sky made it almost magical. I had a shower went out and did watering, weeding, planting, sorted out the horses with fresh water, poo picking and putting Biscuit back in her lockdown paddock after letting her out overnight to have some time with Jack and some fresh grass. I came back in to get some breakfast and John still wasn’t up lol. Eventually he hauled his sorry arse out of bed and did the feeding rounds and then we went off to a local landscaping yard to get some new pots and I came back with a tree 😜 We also called in at the local Smokery where I bought some fresh fruit, freshly made sausages and some strawberries and cream 😋 The afternoon was spent inside in the cool as it’s far to hot for me and we decided that we would wait until it cools right down and spend the evening outside working again.

Another evening stint, cutting the grass, repotting and re positioning plants, watering, so much nicer when it’s cooler lol. John spent the evening digging up nettle and plantain clumps in the front paddock and helping me move heavy pots etc. I ran out of time to get a photo of the most beautiful aquilegia, in the evening light it had a wonderful glow, if I remember I will try and get a pic tomorrow, it probably has an optimum glory time which I just missed 😜

No filter needed for this beauty 😀

Thursday: John is off to do another job today, easing himself back in slowly, he will have to be careful about hand washing etc and the customers have to stay out of the way and hopefully all should be ok, he was enjoying not working but you can’t stay like that forever unless you have a big bank account 😜 So far though he has kept his promise about doing the morning rounds before he goes, this is so I can get on with watering in the garden before it gets too hot. I have to water in two stints, one in the morning and one in the evening, two different half’s of the garden and mostly because we have had no rain for weeks. The water tanks are almost empty, that’s nearly 20,000 litres used in various places, they need a refill. I was up early again, 5.30 this time, dressed and out with a cuppa in my hand, love the cool mornings. I had plenty of wildlife experiences this morning, firstly a deer in the far paddock grazing away oblivious to the fact I was watching. Then as I was watering in the garden a heron flew straight over the top of me, they make quite a bit of noise when flying unlike other birds, after that I found baby bees hatching in the hay, literally hatching right there and then, cute little bumbles. The last is worthy of a paragraph of its own 😂 in all the years I have kept ducks (around 20) I have never seen an elusive duck penis, yep you read that correctly lol, but this morning was the morning. Now this one was still attached to the drake, there are fabled stories of drakes discarding them now and again, if you have not read one of my previous blogs on the matter, they can be up to half a metre long and fit the chosen mate so if the mate dies they grow a new one. Anyway there it was when I came round the corner this morning, fascinating, as I said, still attached and slowly retracting but definitely a first for me 😜

This mornings main job was to tidy up bits of the garden that just get left and to clean out the pirate ship for whenever the kiddies can use it again. I found a nest in there while I was sweeping and it has eggs in, I’m guessing Robin, it’s quite high so I left it undisturbed. Sweeping down the decking area and giving the table a wash, tidying up the seating area under the oak tree and making it look like someone cares 😌 Put up the hammock, just in case I get a fancy for laying in it today, potting up some self set plants that are coming up round the garden, huecheras and daisy type flowers. Feed the torts some thistles, spinach and sorrel, plant a tomato plant that arrived (black tomatoes, they sold well last year and are very tasty) Back indoors to get some bread on and decide what’s for dinner later, then a well earned break after all that is a five hour stint I have done already lol.

An evening spent watering, the ground is sooo dry it’s ridiculous and I know rain is forecast but in my years of experience never rely on it to come unless of course you don’t want it because you are having an outdoor event 🤣 then it pours down!

Have a look at this photo, just a dog laying on the ground right? Zoom in and look again, the blob to the right of the dog is a fledgling blue tit. The baby bird was flapping out squawking and Mia just sat watching it bless her, I’m surprised she didn’t try to catch it as she is always trying to catch bees 😂

John was concerned about the fledgling, it can’t fly, shall we pick it up? No, is the answer, it can fly or at least it’s learning to fly, the parents will be very close by encouraging it to take flight by cheeping at it. Sure enough within a couple of minutes it was making progress and eventually went up the tree albeit by climbing the trunk 😜

This bit of the garden always make me smile as I go past, the flowers are a mix of old fashioned type plants, common varieties and wildflowers (some might call weeds) BUT it is always teeming with bees and insects which was the intention so I’m more than happy with that 😀

Friday: An altogether different morning this morning, blowy and although it has tried hard to rain all we got was a ‘spit‘ and unless we get anything else we are going to be in a bit of trouble for watering 😏 John is working again today, once it starts it won’t stop, but he did the animals beforehand, just as well as I feel under par today and I actually went and had a lay back down and 15 minutes sleep at about 8.30, I think the early mornings and working evenings finally caught up with me. I spent a couple of hours tidying up the greenhouse, going through old seed packets etc, making sure everything that needed potting on is done and has sufficient watering needs. I sorted out plants that will be going to Mum, they are at this moment making their way back across France and should be in the UK by tomorrow, they will then probably have to self isolate but they will be very glad to get home. I have been growing a few veg plants for her so that she has a chance at getting a crop this year, we had no idea how long they would have to stay in Spain for but luckily she will be in time to get some stuff in the ground 😀

Saturday: Still very blowy, unseasonably windy they said and it’s a pain as it has already broken off my splendid artichoke plants 😏 Still it has bought a bit of rain with it, not enough to fill the tanks but enough to chivvy along all the veg growing outside, they respond quickly and strongly to rain unlike tap water or even water from the rain butt for that matter. It’s the chemical reaction that is sparked that charges the ground and the air and motivates the growth. As the temps are set to rise again next week I will take whatever we can get at the minute.

This morning John had to go and sort out a hot water issue and I got on with doing some bits in the garden, quite a few bits actually. Firstly, last night I had a plan lol, I have grown some marrow seedlings because I had them but they take up a lot of room so I have put a tub, half filled with manure and half filled with compost, in the front area where it gets really weedy gravel. I planted three plants in there and hopefully they will grow well and produce some marrows, if not they will at least produce lots of foliage which will spread and help cover the weeds. I also have a trellis out there which is doing nothing so I am going to grow a couple of cucumbers up it, plenty of sun out there so they should produce something and again the foliage will be better than bare trellis. I potted up some Hyacinth Bean which is a climbing flower also to grow up the trellis, potted on all kinds of things, sorted out what is going to Mums for her to continue growing and put some bits out for sale. I barrowed two lots of muck, one for the melons, tomatoes and cucumbers in the poly tunnel and one for the pumpkins and dwarf beans, they will need as much mulch as they can get without any serious rain coming any time soon.

I discovered a few greenfly on a couple of peppers and aubergine in the greenhouse, I then started the hunt for a bottle of neem oil I have somewhere in the boot room but do you think I could find it, nope, everything else but that, in the end I used thyme oil diluted and hopefully that might work just as well 🙄 On a wider note about greenfly and blackfly in the garden, I seem to be doing ok this year so far🤞 last year was a bad year and lots of things suffered but I’m hoping I have a good balance this year which is helping. I stop feeding the garden birds around the beginning of May, the weather is better and there should be plenty to keep the birds and youngsters going, I help them and then they help me and I have seen plenty of little beaks filled with grubs and bugs so it’s working well. I do have some powdery mildew on the brambly apple tree in the front though 🙄 this is due to the prolonged dry weather and as it is a large tree Im not sure that anything I can do will be sufficient, it’s only on a few leaves at the minute and I am tempted to leave it to nature and see what happens, theoretically the balance of nature should sort it but we will see.

One seasonal fruit I like to tell people about are oranges, there is a season for them even though you can get them all year round 🙄 Orange season is just coming to an end and if you buy oranges get them from around the end of Feb to May, you will find they are at their tastiest then, you can thank me later 😀 After orange season comes lemon season so we are just coming into that now, I think, fingers crossed, I am going to get my very first ripe lemon this year 😀😀😀 very exited about that. I had a chat with an egg customer the other day about lemon curd (which I love) I can’t make it, by that I mean I can never get it to turn no matter how much I try, do it in the slow cooker she said, whaaaaaat, I didn’t know this was a thing and so I am definitely going to give this a go, I will have to buy lemons this year but once the tree is producing lots I shall use my own. The other thing I have growing for the first time this year, and I don’t want to jinx it, are kiwi, the vine is about four years old and usually gets frosted so no fruit, but this year I can see a few small fruitlets forming, another exciting first. It’s not all good mind you as the grape vine that produced masses last year looks to have died over winter, you win some you lose some, that life 😜

We nipped to the local garden centre this afternoon, I wanted a couple of packets of seeds for another project, a climbing rose and I bought some plants for hanging baskets 🤷‍♀️ wtf, I don’t even do hanging baskets 🤣 impulse buys 😂 It was nice to get out even if it wasn’t the usual gentle stroll around, but the system they have was flawless and they have worked hard to make sure it’s all socially distanced. We treated ourselves to an ice cream and milkshake from the pop up coffee shop afterwards, lol funny how we feel the need to treat ourselves, goes hand in hand with the impulse buys I think!

I am pleased to report that the thyme oil appears to have killed off the greenfly on the peppers, now all I have to do is make sure it doesn’t affect the growth of the plant leaves or the peppers 😀

Sunday: A busy morning again this morning, I did some watering first thing, pots and poly tunnels, then I spent a while sorting out plants that need to go to the cold frames and holding area ready for growing on either for autumn or next spring. It can be a slow process sometimes waiting for plants to establish and get going especially when like me you hate paying silly money for plants so get the small ones lol. It’s the time of year for semi ripe cuttings and I’m not very good at cuttings despite the lesson Mum gave me last year, however all I really have to lose is some compost so I set about identifying what I wanted to take cutting from. The pot of compost wants to be free draining so I added grit to it for that purpose, they also need to be in the light but not in the sun so they are under the greenhouse bench, they need humidity so after watering they have been placed in a propagator (not turned on) and hopefully some of them will strike. I have done rosemary, lavender, olive, clematis, sambucus, japonica and the new climbing rose I just bought. I have tried my best and fingers crossed I get something from them lol.

Meanwhile after doing the morning rounds John started on creosoting the hen hut at the back, the hens (which were being picked off by the fox and are now secure) will go back in there once the creosote is dry and isn’t giving off odour!

Ooops just had a notification of some other seeds I’d ordered, is there a group for ‘Gardeners’ anonymous’ 😜luckily they were only £2 but they are jack fruit which I’ve not tired before, love trying new stuff 😀

When he finished that and I had finished doing all my bits we shot to another garden centre to pick up some more compost (I need to get a bulk delivery next year I think) of course there were a couple of plants that went into the trolley and a pot for the new climbing rose I bought yesterday. It’s my weakness I have to admit 😜 I would rather go to garden centre after garden centre than shopping centre after shopping centre 😂 The plants are big ones so I can easily divide them and get at least two if not three out of each one so in my eyes it’s money saving (apart from the fact that I didn’t need them 😋)

Another evening of watering and working and it’s around this time of year I start wondering why?? The winds were awful and they have taken off all the apricots and peaches that were growing, the artichoke which were in their fully glory are now on the ground so I have had to salvage what I could and chop the rest down 😏 The weeds are gaily growing away fiercely unlike the veg which is struggling due to lack of rain, the slugs are managing to find the strawberries before I do, and I’m finding more and more greenfly, yep definitely the time of year I think I might just give up 😜 On the plus side the mangetout are beginning to get big enough to pick and the broad beans are developing, I do have small kiwis and there are lemons, the apple, pear and cherry trees are loaded with fruit so are the gooseberries, blackcurrants and raspberries so it’s not all bad. Maybe it’s just time to get rid of what fails and stick with the easier stuff.

Another day and another week tomorrow, always onwards and upwards lol, stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm
Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 11th May 2020, still in the midst of a global pandemic and this feels like the 33rd week we have been at home lol though in reality I think we are going into week 8?

As always there are plenty of jobs to keep us busy here and for that I am very grateful. Today as the weather is not as hot, generally cloudy and a bit windy, it’s perfect for me to get out on the veg garden and get some weeding done. John is also helping with the weeding which is great as we get twice as much done and are managing to get it under control. The weeds are being fed to either the hens or the rabbits/guineas and they are delighted I can tell by the squealing and clucking going on.

Tuesday: I felt tired today so didn’t achieve much, a bit of weeding and that was about it.

Wednesday: I have bloods this morning and don’t feel too bad in fact I was up first. I got dressed and opened the curtains to find a pony munching on the grass outside the window 🙄 Biscuit had managed to get out and was enjoying breakfast, I got her back in and got on with doing the feeding rounds until John came out to help. Then off to get the blood test done, stop in town on the way back to pick up a loaf of bread from the bakery and back home to get on. I watered in the brassicas I planted the other day and watered the tunnels, then some plants arrived so I potted them up and did a lot more weeding. Meanwhile John power washed the side of the stables, we need to sort the front really bit the cladding is powder coated (now peeling) so wants replacing fully I think.

I went with John in the early evening as he had a leaking outside pipe to look at, when we got back home I could see the pony had broken out again🙄 A couple of small rails had come loose and this is where she keeps getting out, when we got round to the paddock we found Jack was out as well. John grabbed a hammer and nails while I coaxed them back into their respective areas, we fixed the fence and then rigged up some electric across the gateway to keep Jack in his field as he has now broken the slip rail posts. To be fair the posts are totally rotten so it doesn’t take much for a half ton horse to push and break them. Looks like fencing will be on the to do list tomorrow 😜

I keep breaking out in little rashes everywhere and they are really itchy and driving me mad, I have had them on my thighs, stomach, arms and hands urgh I will be glad when they can sort out my meds and get back to something near normal.

Thursday: John did the morning rounds while I had a shower 😀 and then he went off to do a small job and I pottered around in the garden. I planted a few little bits and then stood back and had a look at the garden, I’m pretty pleased with how it is all going this year. The notion of a small forest garden is actually staring to come to fruition, the beds are a good mix of flowers, fruit bushes, fruit trees and vegetables, it’s not there yet but defiantly going in the right direction.

I had a call from the doctor and although the white bloods cells have gone up, the platelets haven’t, it’s definitely a Lupus flare and so what they have decided to do is hit it hard with steroids (which is what I always say needs doing in the first place lol) and change my immune suppressant drug. The methotrexate never seemed to control the Lupus and so I am moving onto a drug called Mycophenalate a disease modifying drug that still needs blood tests to monitor the liver and kidneys and make sure they are not adversely affected. We wait with baited breath the see how it goes 🙄

I have realised just how much I have fallen in love with flowers again now that I have plenty more growing. Geums and aquilegia are my favourites at the minute, the geums are delightful, vibrant and bring a lovely splash of colour to the garden, the aquilegia are romantically reminiscent of a garden in an age gone by, probably why they are known as granny’s bonnet 😀

Friday: I have been quite busy today, after waiting in an hour queue for meds that is lol. I have been gardening and planting in between the sun going behind the clouds which is far more difficult than it sounds 😜 I had a look at the long range forecast and have hedged my bets on planting out the squash plants, so courgettes, patty pan, butternut squash are all planted along with the first block of sweet corn. I weeded and hoed the bed that the pumpkins are going into but haven’t planted them yet, I will have to keep and eye on the forecasts and cover them if it looks like a frost but I can’t see one coming for a couple of weeks at least so I’m taking the chance.

Apparently I ordered something called yacon which arrived today lol so I have planted them as well.


‘Part of the gourmet roots collection. Yacon means ‘water root’ in the Aztec language. The largest tuber you can grow in the UK, producing very crisp and juicy red roots. Sweet tasting due to the amount of inulin present, which is good for diabetics as its not sugar. Tall plants which produce sunflower-like blooms. Can be eaten raw or cooked, tastes like fresh pear/water-chestnut.’

Late afternoon the farrier came to do the horses, glad to say they are looking good at the moment and no sign of laminitis fingers crossed they stay that way 🙄

I ordered some anti bird netting for the cherry tree, I am determined to get at least some of the cherries this year, last year it was the blackbirds that stole them and the year before the crows, I don’t mind some of them but they strip the trees before the cherries are even ripe 🙄

We managed to get a claim in for the self employed help from the government, it was just for John as his work has been adversely affected but I won’t be claiming as the Farm did better throughout than it normally does due to high demand for eggs and plants 😀

Saturday: Another nice day and another day dodging the sun between the clouds, makes for a long job I can tell you 😀 I had an objective and that was achieved so I am pleased about that, I wanted to get the rest of the peas in and the dwarf beans, that fills a bed and then I put the drip feed hose on which is buried under ground so that the roots all had a good soak. I did want to get the pumpkins in but not quite managed that today. John has been busy cleaning out the hen hut, just waiting for some creosote to arrive and then he can do that before the hens go back out there. We fixed some of the fencing first thing and then went to pick up the rest of my prescription and called at the garden centre on the way back as I wanted some big pots, the queue was quite long and in the sun so we gave that a miss lol.

I had some daisy type plants arrive in the afternoon so I potted them on, most will be going out for sale once established but some I will keep for the garden. I am enjoying filling blocks of the garden with flowers, in the beginning it was all veg and for a good few years after but now I am changing my outlook and loving it. Some areas of the garden need a total rethink because I can’t get to them to weed them very well, the sun bits first thing in the morning and is there all day long so I need some serious research on what to put there to keep it under control a bit better without too much work.

Sunday: oooooh we had a lay in today, most unusual for us but we didn’t get up until 8.45 😱 A lovely morning though, overcast but warm by the time we got out there, I spent a good while watering a few things just to get them firmly established. Feed the ponies, feed the tortoises, make sure the greenhouse is all watered for a warm day ahead, chat over the gate to eggs customers. John did the rest of the feeding rounds and we have an egg from the new pullets 😀 just need the other 11 to lay now. He did a bit of weeding around the rhubarb, the weeds go to the hens that are inside a secure pen at the minute because of the fox trouble we have been having.

I ordered some Oca tubers to grow, I have done these before and they are small and fiddly but nice tasting and something a bit different.

And then I ordered a takeaway Sunday roast from a local pub as a bit of a treat, roast beef with all the trimmings and a pudding to boot, happy days 😀

Totally delicious and I had a strawberry waffle for pudding so now I’m totally stuffed and need a lay on the sofa for an hour or so 😂

Have a great week and continue to stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Keeping busy, drying herbs & VEDay celebrations.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 4th May 2020: We are still in the depths of the global pandemic, not that anyone needs reminding but it’s good to look back in a few years time and see what was going on lol. We escaped for a few hours today, a few hours we will never get back, queuing 😜 We decided to venture out and get some shopping, a big shop, the first we have done in six weeks! To be fair the queue into the shop was non existent and doing the shopping was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated and we got a lot of shopping. It should keep us going for a few weeks more and most importantly I know have choices when it comes to lunch and dinner which is a real treat. Up to now either the girls have been getting us stuff or we have popped to a small shop to get the odd bits and pieces, but it’s good to get all the odds and ends that you never think of when writing a list for someone else to get. They have their own shopping to get as well and so I don’t like to burden them with a massive list lol, anyway now we have done it once we will probably do it again but not for a few weeks. Then we went to the surgery to pick up my prescription of steroids, another queue and wait times with social distances always at the front of your mind. How we are going to progress through this I don’t know but we have to move forward somehow and probably need to start creeping forwards soon.

We only did the basics for the rest of the day lol, getting a bit lazy now.

Tuesday: We have a busy day ahead of us as the next batch of point of lay hens are coming in. Half are going straight back out but we are keeping half of them as we cannot keep up with demand for the eggs again. We should have kept some back from the second batch but hindsight is a wonderful thing 🙄 Before they arrive John has had to go and fix a leak for someone, those are the only jobs he is going out to do at the moment, he also went to pick up some sawdust and collect an order from our local builders merchant. It’s a long process, you have to e mail them with the order, then wait for them to confirm they have it then call them to arrange a collection time. Gone are the days when you could just nip down because you need some screws etc, one day I am sure it will all be back to normal but for the time being everything takes a few days.

Meanwhile I have been pottering, I am not feeling the best today, last night I broke out in a rash on my legs and was very tired, today my arms hurt and it’s an effort to lift them. I have done a bit of seed sowing in the greenhouse, the hoovering some washing and a wipe round of the bathroom but I am struggling. I had decided not to take any anti inflammatory today but I caved in around 10.30. I had an idea that I would go through my wardrobe and put anything with holes in the rag bin, anything that I don’t wear in the charity shop bag but I didn’t get very far with that. Sometimes, jobs can seem huge when you are not feeling up to it and I think I really need to be in a great frame of mind to sort stuff out otherwise it all goes back in the wardrobe. Johns work clothes I am able to sort though as his get pretty tatty, I have ordered him new jeans, trainers, t-shirts and sweatshirts so he will have a whole new lot and if I can sneak out the old lot without him seeing all will be good lol. He has favourites that he will spend days looking for if they get thrown away 😜

I also ordered a mini greenhouse/grow house that will go out the front to put plants for sale in. Some plants that are ready for sale can’t go out because they are annual and it’s a little too cold especially with the exposed area we have and so in order to move them on I need something for them to go in so that people can still buy them, as sitting in the greenhouse is never going to work 🙄

I picked a big bundle of oregano to dry in the dehydrator, I normally forget to do this as it wants picking well before the flowers appear and I always leave it too late. The plant will recover easily and I can use that fresh through the summer but have dried oregano for Winter use. I would like to make up some jars of herbs de Provence and I will try but it means picking various herbs as the others dry, if you do it all at once you can’t tell what’s what 😂 they are all green bits lol.

I have taken a few photos of plants I am loving in the garden at the minute, the mighty Angelica which has reached well over 5ft this year a beautifully architectural plant that I put in the tortoise run to give some shelter with the huge leaves. The ranunculus, which is the pink one in with the tulips, I adore these romantic flowers, lovely open blossoms perfect for bees and insects. And then there is the red Maple, again another mood lifting colour which goes particularly well with the clematis behind it, my intention was always to plant this tree in the front paddock but at the moment it’s still in the pot lol.

Ranunculus
Angelica, used for medicinal purposes and you may remember the green sugary sticks on granny’s trifles.
Red Maple, beautiful colouring, maybe one day I will get it planted into the paddock 😀

We have been at home for a good few weeks now and although we haven’t argued there are a few things beginning to grate 😜 one is every time the phones rings either house phone or mobile, John turns off the radio, I have told him it’s mobile for a reason, so you can leave the room 🙄 I wouldn’t mind but he never turns it back on again and I hate the silence with tinnitus. The other thing is that he keeps swilling out his cup and then leaving it right under the tap, now if I am wanting to wash my hands this means that soapy water is going into his cup, at first I would completely move it but now I’m like, if it tastes of soapy water, tough luck 😜 There are, as you can imagine, many more little things like this and I’m sure for him too, but we are muddling through as best we can just like everyone else 😂

This evening we were busy selling point of lay hens straight back out but have managed to keep a dozen for extra eggs.

Wednesday: We have been busy today but not really achieved much 😜 Thinking about it I don’t actually know what we have done just seem to have buzzing about sorting lots of little things. Sam came over with the children to poop pick biscuits mini paddock and Mia was able to get her a brush, we all kept a social distance but it’s hard when the twins are crying and Sam is trying to manage by herself 😏 Shelley came over with the children to get some eggs and they sat in the garden for a chat, again at a social distance. We have enough space here that we can easily do that and as they are coming to get essentials we figure that’s ok. I think many people are getting restless now and so hopefully we will be able to start some kind of shifting soon.

We got busier in the evening, I did some weeding and cut and edged the lawn while John made the tops for my cold frames, they are not exactly what I would have liked, I like the ones with old windows lol but that’s not very practical with grandchildren around and also they are pretty heavy so we have some lightweight safe ones. We had just finished up when we heard a commotion in the back paddock, John ran up there and there was a young fox trying to grab a hen so we were on fox patrol for the rest of the evening. By the time we had shut everything away it was 9.30, time to come in and get some supper as we missed dinner 😜

Thursday: Another fine warm day ahead and I had a good night so I feel fine today 😀 We got off to a start with the usual feeding and letting out then John had to get some petrol for the ride on mower as we want to mow the little back paddock later when it’s cooler. I moved all the plants that need hardening off to outside in the cold frames and did a bit of hoeing plus moved the fire pit which for some reason was right in the middle of the lawn. I then had to take up the bricks it was standing on and put some grass seed down, the fire pit is now near a bench which makes much more sense and I am likely to use it more.

It’s VE Day tomorrow and up to now I have only been able to find a tiny Union Jack, I considered printing out paper bunting but I don’t have enough ink to print colour ones or paint to paint plain ones so I raided Johns work t-shirts and made some bunting 😀

Pretty pleased with how these turned out 😀 🇬🇧

The new mini greenhouse arrived so we put that together in between proving and baking bread and rolls 😜 and I will fill it with plants for sale as soon as I think I can get out there I.e I need a passing cloud for cover lol

In the evening I cut the grass in the little paddock while John cleared up the burning patch and was on Fox watch, it appeared but because he was up there with the dogs he soon disappeared again. Even so, John spent the rest of the evening up there keeping guard. We did our claps at 8pm though and I had Mia on FaceTime as she wanted to do it with me 😀

Bank holiday Friday: VE Day 75th anniversary and we all have to celebrate at home 😏 as there wasn’t much point sitting out in our front garden to wave to the occasional passerby, we put up bunting and offered chocolate in the egg shed 😀

The day was spent pottering around, it was pretty hot early on and so that’s me counted out lol, I did manage to get a few bits potted on in the greenhouse and sort out plants to put out for sale. I’m not quite sure what else we did, but we will be busier outside once it cools down, I have some watering to do and John will be on fox watch again 😏

Saturday: Another fine hot day, I am looking forward in a strange way to the cooler weather coming in, at least I will be able to get on the garden. This morning and actually through the night I have had pains in my wrists and ankles and I fell exhausted so not much done today. John did all the morning rounds and then some weeding for me in the brassica cage to get that ready for planting. It should have been done by now but it’s just been too hot for me to do it. Meanwhile I potted on some runner beans, for a strange reason and I have never seen it before the beans started to grow upside down, in trays and in pots, very bizarre, all of them not just a couple, the roots coming up and the leaves under the soil. I have now turned them the right way up and hopefully they will continue to grow normally.

Sunday: We did a good mornings work as expected with the weather much cooler. Yesterday John clears the brassica cage for me and so today I was able to go in and plant 12 cauliflower and 12 broccoli in there. Meanwhile he was busy weeding the next area for planting up which will be the sweet corn and butternut squash areas. I am slowly getting everything in the ground and looking at the longer range forecast I may take the chance to plant these things out and possibly cover with fleece if it looks like frost but there are only 1 or 2 cold nights on the radar until the end of the month so a ch ace worth taking I think. I also planted up a few flowers that have been growing in pots and potted up some phlox that arrived yesterday. The plant sales have been amazing, really amazing and I am chuffed to bits with how much I have sold. The eggs are still in huge demand and we never have enough for the amount of customers but can’t increase the flock as once this is all over half of the people probably won’t come lol. W

We had someone take without paying this morning, as I came out of the garden I just caught a look at the back end of a lorry with motorway maintenance on it, that only means one thing round here as we are pretty far from any motorway 🙄 and we knew exactly what was in there and how much money should be there, luckily it was only a couple of boxes but still it makes you cross.

We had some rain, yippee that will save me watering tonight.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Rain, Dads funeral & getting on with it.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday again! 27th April 2020, not a year we will forget in a hurry, a worldwide pandemic that has had massive impact on the way we live. There have been negatives but I’m hoping there will be some real positives that will change the way we do things both for the benefit of the environment and for our metal wellbeing. Time will tell but one thing is for sure we are living through one of the biggest historical events that will be written and learnt about for centuries to come.

Meanwhile I have been busy this morning doing a bit in the greenhouse, there are always plants to water and move round so they get a fair share of the sun, I potted on the peppers, they will continue to grow in the greenhouse as they did so well in there last year. I did a bit of hoeing to keep the weeds down on beds that are waiting for plants to go in and mulled over where things will get planted, I think I have a good idea of where everything will be going now. The sweet corn will be planted and underneath them will go pumpkin and butternut squash, they grow entirely differently, the sweet corn straight up and the squash will sprawl so double up the use of space. The same applies to melon and cucumber in the poly tunnel, the cucumbers are happy trailing along the ground, the melons like to climb so they will be planted together, the trailing plants will shut out the light and prevent weeds, another bonus. John has done a sterling job of clearing and cleaning out the back area which had yet again become a dumping ground, at least we have a space to dump everything I suppose but a lot of it is again stuff that we have collected and never used so it’s gone in the skip.

I feel like I’m just marking time, anyone else? I am trying to read articles I wouldn’t normally get the time to do and I really need to get back into listening to some podcasts, I think that would be a good idea. We are forecast a few days of rain so maybe that will be the time to chill a little.

Tuesday: Today is Dads funeral but before that we have the usual jobs to do and today because it is raining and likely to rain all day I am getting the horses in. Two reasons, one it’s not nice standing all day in the pouring rain and two the rain will make the grass ‘flush’ this is not good for them as the sugar content in the grass will go up and this could cause laminitis. If the horses were in work this would not be such a problem but because they are not using up that energy it would cause issues. I had a few other jobs to keep me busy, paying the end of month suppliers bills, John went to the chemist to pick up my prescription and then it was time for the off.

The funeral was a simple affair and I did reflect that Dad would have loved it, a few songs that were right up his street and a short eulogy and prayers, then we had a whisky toast at the grave side and said our goodbyes, we shared a few memories in the churchyard after the event and then it was time to come home. What is sad is that we could not have that all important wake after, a time to chat and remember with family and friends, many of whom lined the route but when the time is right we will have that get together as I suspect will may families around the country.

It has been raining all morning and when we got back we lit the fire and took the rest of the day off, well until feeding time later that is.

John did the feeding and egg collecting and I sorted them out ready to box up. The eggs sales are steady now, not manic like before thank goodness.

I had a lovely FaceTime session with all my brothers and sisters but mainly spent time just relaxing until it was time to go and and top the horses up with hay while John put all the birds to bed. Then I did something I never do and that is come back in and get into my PJs, normally I wouldn’t do this as you never know what will occur after dark but today I am making an exception and besides it will save time later when I can fall into bed and hopefully get a good nights sleep as last nights was a bit restless.

Wednesday: Raining again, good for the garden, that’s what I have to remind myself although it’s a tad chilly with it after the hot days we have had recently. This morning I turned Jack back out into the paddocks but at the moment Biscuit is still in and we will be making her a pen so that she does not gorge on grass once it starts growing. I then fed the rabbits/Guineas, turkey, light Sussex and quail and I was supposed to let the geese out but forgot and only realised after we returned from getting my bloods done, ooops schoolboy error. I did a bit more seed sowing in the greenhouse, some strips of peas, sweet corn and dwarf beans these will be for putting out for sale when they come through. I potted on some cherry tomato plants that Shelley had grown as well. Then it was time to go and have my blood test and on the way back pick up a few essential items from the shop. We probably won’t do much more than the usual today we have got into the habit of watching the lunchtime news and then the afternoon easy watching programmes 🤣🤣

This morning I noticed feathers under the hen coop and said to John that a hen must have been out over night and the fox had got it, when he went to clean them out later he discovered that actually the fox had chewed the legs off of a hen that was inside the coop. There are slats which let the poop fall through and onto the ground and normally the hens roost up on poles but this one obviously sat on the floor of the coop and that is what can happen. The mains electric was on but we need to watch out as this could be a problem fox.

I turned Biscuit out to be with Jack overnight and tomorrow Sam is coming to set up a strip for her to graze in.

Thursday: I had a bad night again last night and I just can’t figure it out at all, it starts off with me feeling the cold which turns to shivering and I can’t get warm all night, I get up in the night and take ibrufen and then I’m sweating. The doctor called with the results of the blood test and my platelets are still low, they have come up ever so slightly but nowhere near enough so I’m still off the methotrexate and still on the steroids bit a lower dose. I did say to her that it’s not like a normal flare up and that’s the difficulty of this disease it doesn’t really follow patterns, it’s different for everyone and even for the same person the flare ups can be different and random.

Sam was here bright and early and used the stakes and tape to set up an area that Biscuit will have to stay in for most of the summer now, she has a field shelter and some trees for shade and we can get in and out of the gateway without having to go through any other paddocks which is useful. If you have ever had a pony or horse you will know that they are on the whole not very respectful of fences 😂 but Biscuit is a real sweetheart and when Jack breaks out she will just stand there knowing she shouldn’t be following so I don’t envisage too many problems there.

It’s mid afternoon and it’s been peeing down all day, I have been inside cleaning the kitchen and doing a bit of baking and John has been in the stable block giving that a tidy up. I had some melon plants arrive which I had totally forgotten that I had ordered way back at the beginning of the year.

Friday: Mayday 😀 the beginning of a new month, a month of plenty to do and this morning I have been planting tomatoes and melons in the big tunnel, I did a bit of weeding in there and then a bit of watering, the strawberries that I put in last year are doing really well with plenty of fruit setting on them, I will look forward to eating those. With the rain comes plenty of weeds bit I can’t hoe until the ground is dry again and it’s supposed to be dry and warm again next week.

Meanwhile we caught the fox and had that dealt with and John has been edging the last bit of the lawn that needed doing (for about 5 years 😂) Then it hammered down, hopefully it will blow over and we will have a nice afternoon, fingers crossed🙄

Sunday: No idea what we did yesterday but it was probably similar to every day! Today has been pretty productive, we have cut a few areas of grass before it gets too long including the front paddock. We also spent a good couple of hours digging out patches of nettles that have sprung up in the front paddock, I don’t mind nettles but not when they begin to invade the middle areas, the edges they can stay as long as they don’t encroach too far. Nettles are probably one of the most beneficial plants you can find both for humans and wildlife, they support a huge range of insects and are supposedly good for many human ailments including chronic inflammation but as yet I have not tried them and of course you can make string and clothing from them though the process is long and hard going, but if we ever find ourselves in a situation (and never say never 🙄) nettles are the one thing you do want growing 😀

We have done plenty of other jobs inbetween, some hoeing/weeding, sorting out more plants lol, I have also weeded an area in the front that is looking scruffy and I have popped a few plants in to brighten it up a bit. It’s in the front compound area and the weeds tend to get a good hold so I have put a few thuggish plants in, if there is an area that is difficult then thuggery is the answer, the shasta Daisy is one such plant, things like periwinkle and lemon balm, borage, calendula, they will all grow no matter what you do to them and hopefully smoother out the weeds plus give a bit of colour against the drab fence. I always wanted this area full of lavender but the dogs we had when we first came trampled everything so I gave up on the idea, the dogs we have now are not so clumsy but still they do manage to tread on stuff and break it so lavender just won’t cut it.

John spent an hour or two metal detecting again and no we can’t retire on his findings, a few bits of twisted metal isn’t going to get us anywhere lol.

I found some duck breast in the freezer this morning so we have had those pan fried with crushed potato, purple sprouting picked fresh from the garden and a red wine gravy, tasty 😋

I am beginning to see and feel the steroids working albeit slowly, I do feel better than I did this time last week so hopefully it will be onwards and upwards, that is always the plan sometimes is jumps track 😜

John has gone back out after dinner to move the chicken fencing in the side paddock so that the hens are on fresh ground. We have another delivery of chickens tomorrow but we will be keeping some of these to add to our laying flock as the demand for eggs has not eased much, it will be good to be able to provide eggs for everyone that wants them.

Gosh, reading back it’s hard to believe that Dads funeral was at the beginning of the week it seems a lot longer ago, time feels like it’s dragging somewhat now but I guess we all have to hang in there and hopefully there will be light at the end of the tunnel. A customer said that her elderly Dad had died of the virus but actually that is the only person I know of, we don’t seem to have been hit too hard here or maybe once we get back out in the wider world we will hear of a few more 🤷‍♀️

I am sorry about the lack of photos, I keep saying that I know, must try harder Dawn, I can tell you that the fruit is all beginning to form, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears, cherries, there are tiny broad beans on those plants and plenty of foliage on the potatoes, the carrot tops are getting bigger so hopefully underneath is as well and the garlic I planted last Autumn is huge. The root veg seeds I sowed at the beginning of the week are already up (well some of them) so all in all the veg garden is coming along nicely. I did think about planting out the more tender stuff this week coming (sweet corn and squash) but we are due to have a temperature dip next weekend so I will leave it, there is nothing worse than nurturing plants for them to be ravaged by the cold or the wind so I must be patient a little while longer 😀

Have a great week, stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Muddling through, plenty of sunshine, still in lockdown.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 20th April: I am not sure how this week will pan out regarding the Smallholding blog, to be honest I think I will just be going through the motions 🙄

John went to pick up another load of wood from some trees a friend cut down, I have spent the morning between, watering the greenhouse and spending time on the phone with various people getting things sorted out.

Tuesday: I have been dealing with many phone calls and various processes including the funeral. Although Dad was living in Wales and has been for the past 20 years he will be bought back to his childhood home of Swinbrook and be buried in the churchyard with other members of the family. This is something that Sue, his life partner, wished to do for him which I think is lovely.

Inbetween all that I have been trying to do a few bits in the garden, and I am pleased to say that some runner bean seeds have arrived today, I wasted no time in getting them sown and underway, I did say to Dad ‘look after these seeds and help them grow’ 😂 not sure if it will do any good but I can use all the help I can get 😜

Sam came over with the children to give the horses a check over, I can cast an eye but I am no expert and so a second opinion is always welcome. They are doing well weight wise and their feet are in good order so we can leave them as they are for another couple of weeks without worrying that they are getting too fat. It amazed me that Mia understands that we can’t have any contact, at four years old it is a damn shame but also makes me proud that she completely understands the situation, she does however want to punch the germs on the nose lol and she is not the only one 😜

Wednesday: I had a terrible night, the inflammation decided to rage and it’s pretty awful when you feel like that in the depths of the night. In the end I got up and took naproxen which helped to calm it down, I was lying there thinking, have I got sepsis, meningitis, covid, nope just the good old Lupus flare. I’m glad it calmed down a fair bit although I can still feel it, I really don’t want to have to go to the doctors more than necessary at the minute 🙄 I am taking it very easy today and mostly indoors as it is supposed to be very hot and that only makes things worse. I did nip out and pick some rhubarb, asparagus, purple sprouting and three artichokes first thing but the rest of the day I will stay inside. It’s a bit rubbish when you really want to be out there doing the veg garden but needs must.

The flat leaf parsley is growing like billyo and it smells amazing, I have been looking for recipes to use it in, chimmichuri seems to be a good one or a pesto type dressing, I think I may make a parsley loaded frittata for lunch today and take advantage of some of the goodness. The herbs are pungent at the moment which if like me you love the smell of them is fabulous, I know some people hate the smell of fresh basil which I find odd as I love it .

Friday: Gosh I am sorry I am rather neglecting the blog but hopefully you will forgive me this week. I am doing ok both with the Lupus flare and with my emotions after Dads passing. I guess there is a natural process to go through, shock, grief, sadness then laughter and memories. Inbetween all that and sorting things out I have been trying to get a few bits and pieces done outside, all this constant sunshine is fabulous for anyone who can tolerate it but not so good for me getting out and working 😂 This morning I was up and out early so I could water a few things and do some weeding on the asparagus bed. I am picking lots of spears every day and I am told they are delicious but I haven’t actually had any yet! I then went on to prick out the cauliflower and broccoli seedlings and check on all the other seedlings that are growing nicely, I did take some phots so you can see how much I have on the go. I am aiming to get as much growing as possible both vegetable and flowers, I think we need plenty to make us smile this year don’t you?

I have been doing other things which I almost forgot to tell you about, animal related this time. This morning I noticed the rabbits eyes were weeping and she looked like she had loads of ticks on her head, I called John to give me a hand and got the stuff to prepare to remove them. When I actually picked her up I could see it was globs of gunk, which in one way was good as I didn’t fancy removing that many ticks (and I did wonder how come I hadn’t seen them before) She has had this before so I bathed her eyes and I have some eye drops I will put in when it’s cooler tonight, I also clipped her nails as her back ones had got a bit long. During the morning I noticed the turkey stag trying to mount the poor hen and then a short while later there was a commotion, he was at it again, I went over to get her but she had sadly died. Later on in the day I did a bit of a post mortem to see if I could find out why she had died, my thoughts were a blockage but normally that would kill quite quickly. I discovered that she had a hole in her crop, this is where the food goes first before down into the stomach, the hole was possibly made by something sharp like a piece of stick that she had eaten. The cavity at the top of her body was filled with fluid, this would explain why she seemed to perk up when we held her upside down and fluid drained out, she would then feel able to eat again which is what she did but it was never going to work properly with a hole in it sadly 😏

Saturday: We had a bit of a break in the weather today to begin with, overcast, which meant I was able to get on and get some things done in the greenhouse and outside. Firstly I cleaned out the rabbit cages and put in fresh bedding. Then round to the greenhouse where I have sown some more basil and coriander, always best to have an abundance 😀 Onto planting the melon and a cucumber plant in the polytunnel, I will hold some plants back just in case they don’t thrive then I have a back up plan. I planted some more mangetout plants outside and I have sown a raised bed full of turnip, swede, parsnip, beetroot and purple carrots. These are seed sown straight into the ground and so should produce after the seedling plants I planted the other week. My plan is to use the veg in the raised bed as baby veg so they will get pulled as soon as they are big enough. Normally you would leave them to get big enough to store for the winter but I think we will need these as we go this year. Lots of other veg plants are still in the greenhouse ready to harden off in a couple of weeks time, patty pan, courgettes, pumpkin, butternut squash, spaghetti squash, sweet corn, all manner of dwarf beans and runner beans. There are broccoli, cauliflower, leek seedlings and also peppers, chilli, aubergine, and tomato plants growing nicely. I think I have things covered 😜 I have ordered some ‘Jack fruit’ seeds as seen on Gardeners World, these are a Bangladeshi vegetable which can be grown here under cover so I’m giving them a go. I need to do more research into fruits and veg that are grown here for different cultures as I’m sure we are missing a few tricks with them, they are never in the mainstream seed brochures but they could prove useful in future years.

Sunday: Another day in paradise, another day in lockdown 🙄 To be honest I am happy pottering around in the greenhouse and garden 😀 I just wish I could do it for longer but the sun has been relentless, we are due so,e cooler weather and even rain though so it could be ‘all change’. I am looking forward to the ground being a bit easier to deal with, it’s rock solid on the beds so not much chance of getting anything in there yet, just as well we have a few weeks left before major planting begins after the risk of frosts. I did plant three tomato plants in the small tunnel, I figured they might as well go in there as in a pot in the greenhouse. John has been busy doing more tidying up, we have a skip which is now loaded with stuff he has been collecting for 10 years and never used 😂. At different times of the day and at a social distance, I have seen all of the grandchildren, Shelley and Martin and the children walked over to get some eggs and Sam and Luke came over with the children to check the horses. They are all pretty good at understanding we can’t go near each other, it’s just a shame, you spend years getting them used to each other and us and then bam, hopefully it won’t all be undone.

I cut the lawn and the driveway late afternoon, if it rains it will sprout and will be harder to cut so I wanted to get it done just in case.

Then prep dinner, tonight I am having homemade pizza with a garlic, basil and tomato sauce I made and froze last year, that’s when all the growing of various things become worthwhile, you can whip up a dinner with home grown produce 😀

Really must try harder on the blog, trouble is I usually sit down at the end of the day to write it and then I’m tired so I skip through it all.

Had a bit of fun this evening with a present I bought John nearly five years ago and he has never used, a metal detector, we found a grand haul of crap lol but the anticipation was great each time we had a ‘beep‘

Posted in Friesland Farm

Sowing and growing, reading & Easter 🐣

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 6th April 2020: And here we are again back round to Monday 😜 The weather is fair to good and so we were again working outside while we can.

I spent the morning watering the greenhouse, moving things around, potting some bits on etc and then planting the first lot of mange-tout out in a bed. I put a load of manure on the flower plants I put in the other week and then I did some watering because although we had a bit of rain last night it wasn’t nearly enough and the ground is really dry. Who would have thought that after weeks and weeks of endless rain we would be complaining 😜 Meanwhile John was cutting wood lol, burning some of the stuff that is no good and separating some of it, there are some big pieces that will make good raised beds but they are attached to ply and each other as they were from some type of shuttering. The nails I’m told are a right b*****d to get out so it’s kept him busy.

You may have noticed that I have slowed down a bit from the first week we were off, mostly this is due to the fact that I have had to stop the meds and it plays havoc with my systems, I feel tired a fair bit, my muscles get stiff and I’m am bloody freezing even when the sun is out lol, to the point I am sat writing this with three layers on 🙄 I generally do my work up to about 1pm and that’s it for the day, I have lunch, I read for an hour and then I have a nap if I’m really tired. Good job John is here though to be honest when he is not (in more usual times) I still do the same if I am not feeling up to it but everything has to wait if it can.

The turkey hen is still with us and I’m hoping she recovers fully, at times she must feel like me and does a lot of sitting around and then there are times when she is wandering about, I still can’t see anything that is physically wrong with her 🤷‍♀️ The torts are enjoying the warmer temps and have started to eat now, I’m picking any dandelion flowers I find as they love those.

Tuesday: Another nice day weather wise, not too hot but warm enough. We’ve done the usual jobs, I made bread and hovered and polished this morning then outside to water things in pots and the young veg plants, water the greenhouse and the polytunnels. It’s crazy all the rain we had a month or so back and now I’m watering because the ground is so dry. John meanwhile has been….you guessed it chopping wood lol, we have slipped into the easy routine of working till around 1pm and then lunch and a gentle afternoon which consists of a nap or some reading before egg collecting and feeding around 3pm ready for putting out at 4pm. After that we usually come in grab a cuppa and watch the update from Downing Street, of course we are all wishing Boris well and hope he makes a speedy recovery, whatever your politics are it’s not nice to fear for someone’s life at a time like this especially when he is the Prime Minister 🙏.

I have had a phone consultation with a friend that knows all about birds in the hope he can shed some light on what might be wrong with the turkey hen. She has no neurological symptoms, no respiratory problems, no mucky bum, she is not crop bound and she is not egg bound so I am struggling a little to work it out. She is pooing dark green and he tells me that’s because the stomach is empty (at least I learnt something new in all this) He suggested checking her over for ticks and mites and so John and I went out and picked her to check her over, she is a big bird and to double check she wasn’t egg bound and to get a look under her wings we carefully tipped her upside down. At this point clear fluid began to run out of her beak so I massaged her crop some more and more fluid came out, one of my suspicions was that she had a blockage further down which seems to be borne out by the fluid emptying out. The blockage must be further down possibly in her intestines and if that’s the case I won’t be able to do much more for her, I have given her a fair bit of vegetable oil in her water in the hopes it can help to move any blockage and it’s possible that gravity may have dislodged something, we will try again tomorrow and see what happens. Its such as shame as she was going great guns laying her eggs, and all of a sudden she stopped so it makes sense as nothing else fits the symptoms.

Wednesday: Another fine, dry day and we got a couple of jobs sorted, I started off by watering g the greenhouse and the newly planted stuff, I don’t know what John was doing but I couldn’t hear him cutting wood lol. Then I roped him into helping me, I had an elder tree that had started growing in one fo the beds, Mum tried to get it out last year but the roots were quite big so got John to dig it out 😜 The next job was to build a frame for the runner beans to grow up. For the last few years I have grown them the same in a dedicated bed up wigwam hazel poles but each year they grow well and then the wind blows them over eventually. This year I have decided to move them and I had a plan, this needed some muscle so John was on hand. We now have long lengths of wood leaning against the side of the fruit cage and stock fencing nailed to it, this will do three things, first, the wind can blow as much as it likes they won’t blow over, second, they will give shade to the raspberries and stop them drying out too much and third, the beans should hang down inside the frame so that I can pick them more easily 😀 It doesn’t look pretty but it is strong and functional and eventually will be covered by foliage 😀

The other job was to re cover the fruit cage with netting, quite a task which takes two of us and gets caught up in every single pokey thing around 😝 It has a few holes in which I will have to mend and sadly a bird had got tangled up in it at some point and died 😢 But it is now up and secured which is great because the Bush cherry I bought last year has flowers 😀😀😀 so I may get cherries this year.

I’m enjoying my ‘book hour’ it’s so quiet and totally relaxing. I sit and contemplate for a while after I finish reading and It occurred to me that if ever there was a moment in life to stop and re evaluate your life or areas of it, then this ‘situation’ is the perfect opportunity to do so. It has pushed to the front those that are considered lowly in their work and those that were taken for granted by many, and rendering useless those that are put on a pedestal or consider wealth/status to be the aim of life. I have always looked to the past to consider what is important in a ‘society’ take a large estate for instance, the people sat in the ‘big house’ on the whole were always mindful that without all the, ever decreasing in size, boulders underneath them they would be bought crashing down in an instant, they are nothing on their own, we are nothing on our own, we all need each other and each other’s skills (mostly 😜) for life as we know it to run smoothly. Long gone are the days when we each held all the skills needed to get by in life, those skills are now spread among all of us, we should remember this going forward.

Thursday: This morning began with a Group FaceTime call to our nephew in Australia who has his birthday today, they are practising social distancing but his friends came to the street to sing happy birthday and have cake, at a safe distance from each other of course 😀

Yesterday afternoon I had a FaceTime call from Mia and she cried and said ‘I miss you’ damn near broke my heart and definitely made me teary. So this mornings mission was to do a video of the farm and the animals so that the grandchildren know that everything is as they saw it last, I walked around chatting and showing them everything including Grampy cutting wood and then I tried to send it lol, too long apparently so I had to cut it into sections and send it and hope they came through in sequence 🤣

After that I got on with doing some bits in the garden, water the greenhouse had moving stuff around, it’s going to be hot today and I need to make sure everything gets it’s chance to grow well. I did some potting on, the squash family are doing really well and needed re potting. After that I planted a row of petit poi outwice, might as well get them out while the weather is good. I’ve just realised I haven’t sown and runner bean seeds yet so I need to do that later, I like to get them going inside as the mice usually eat them otherwise. I picked a couple of bunches of rhubarb to go out for sale and by that time the air was really heating up and I could feel the sun started to make my skin itch so it’s time to duck inside. Sometimes I hate this disease, just when I could really be getting on outside I have to go in, then I think the weather is bound to break eventually and I will be able to spend longer outside. Yesterday it was warm but cloudy so that was ideal, not many clouds today though so too risky for me. Had I known I was going to end up with this I would have sited the veg garden more in the shade but then you have the problem of what to grow as some things really would struggle.

I am in the middle of making hot x buns, well trying anyway the dough doesn’t seem to be rising 😏 at the moment I have the dough in a low oven to see if I can activate it a little, shame as the dough smells amazing, fingers crossed it rises a little other wise it will be hot x flatbread 🤣

Friday: Easter weekend, bank holidays, lovely weather, normally everyone would be over the moon but this year is very different, we need to stay home and help the NHS to save lives, I seriously hope people are doing just that.

I’m struggling a bit today, I can always tell as I go out to do some jobs and tend to end up just looking at things that need doing lol. This, I’m sure is because I am off the meds and normally I would take some anti inflammatory but I’m not quite sure about the information that is flying around about avoiding it at the moment 🙄 I came indoors and sat for a while and then decided to make a chocolate cake for the weekend, I hope it turns out better than my flat x buns which were a disaster, I baked it anyway and we have eaten a slice of it this morning, it tastes fine but is heavy.

Saturday: I have decided to take ibrufen, it’s definitely inflammation due to coming off the meds and as my blood test is not until next week I have to do something inbetween and with the ibrufen at least I can carry on. So this morning I have been very busy, watering everything and then I looked for my runner bean seeds and couldn’t find them anywhere, I am without runner bean seeds 😳 I looked online and some places are charging three times the amount they normally cost, my regular supplier haven’t even got any nor any seed potatoes and demand overall for seeds is huge. Two conflicting things I feel about this, one, I’m obviously delighted that people are growing their own, after all I am always banging on about it, two, I’m a bit peed off that I can’t get what I need lol. That will teach me to save far more seed in future years, it’s part of food security and I need to observe it more closely. So I have sown extra peas and dwarf beans, some basil, cauliflower and purple sprouting plus some seeds I saved from the welsh onions. I have planted more petit poi’s out and earthed up the potatoes I have growing in sacks. I sent John to get some more compost, luckily they sell it at a farm just up the road from us and I will carry on sowing and planting just in case we need it, if we don’t it will feed the animals so nothing lost there.

By 11.30 it was too hot for me to work on the garden so I came inside and to be honest didn’t do much inside either 😝 At 5pm I decided it was ok enough for me to go out and cut the grass on the lawn and the driveway. John offered to do it which is rare as in the thirty something years we have been married he has hardly ever been the one to mow the lawn, he thinks I’m stupid and don’t know that he was hoping I would cook dinner while he did it 🙄 Nope I can manage now you run inside and do the dinner, something else he has rarely done over the years, we had boiled eggs 😝

Easter weekend, definitely different to all the other Easters we have ever had and the same for everyone else I’m sure. Still the main thing is that we are staying home, protecting the NHS and saving lives, though many have lost the battle already 😢

I must include this in my blog, it was written by my middle daughter and it’s just so lovely 😊 and totes approp. Written by Shelley Silver 🥰🥰

Nana, when you watch the sunrise, we also watch it too, we also feel the same spring breeze that passes over you.
The buzz of the first few Bees, we know you hear the same, and in the sky when you look up we see the same grey plane.
Even though it’s been too long since we have played at yours, know that we are still connected through the great outdoors.
When you go to bed tonight, just look at up the moon and keep forever in your heart that we will see you soon.

All home produced except the tomatoes 😀

Sunday: Easter Day, we have decided to have a day off apart from feeding the animals of course but the rest of the day we have done nothing but sit around enjoying some leisure time. I could get used to this way of life very easily except for not seeing the family bit. We did pop out to see if we could get some bananas and some carrots, had to go to two different places but both were fairly quiet and there was hardly anything on the roads. We also went to de bunk the theory that we might be the only ones left in the world as it is soooo quiet 😜 I have a leg of lamb in the oven for dinner later, then we will have it cold tomorrow, I found some pastry in the freezer so will also be making a pie, living it up today 😂

The weather has been amazing, very warm, very dry but to be honest I’m looking forward to it cooling a little so that I don’t feel so tired and can get on and do some more in the garden and if we could just have a little bit of moisture so that the rhubarb and asparagus come on a bit, that would be perfect 👌

As always have a good week and stay home, stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Asparagus frittata, grapes forming & the ducks are a no show ☹️

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 29th April: I’m feeling full of positive energy today 😀 The Sun is shinning and before doing anything else other than breakfast and showering, I have been out and cut the asparagus and rhubarb to put out for sale. Some of the asparagus I have kept back and made an asparagus frittata/crust less quiche, whatever you want to call it. I am making an effort to do a bit of clean(er) eating this week and as the asparagus is coming through plentiful and we have eggs I thought this would be ideal for lunch. I used 3 eggs, a bundle of asparagus, a clove of garlic, grated cheese, a spoonful of sour cream I needed to use up, pinch of salt and a shake of black pepper, bake at 160c ish for 30mins give or take and voila, lunch is done for a couple of days before I’ve even fed the chickens 😀

So what have I been doing all morning, well first I wrote myself a list of things I wanted to get done, and then worked through it, nearly all gardening things but a couple of others too boot. Firstly I wanted to feed a tree that is in the front paddock, Cherry, it’s been in all winter but I felt it needed a bit of a boost as the soil is very shallow out there and probably not many nutrients either. While I was out there I wandered over to look at the wild garlic which has now flowered 😀

Burn a bit of cardboard rubbish that has been piling up, sort out plants I am putting out for sale, dig up the last few leeks ready to chop and freeze for later use, one I have left as it’s going to seed so I can collect that at the end of the year. Hang the washing loads out, should dry well today, pay an outstanding bill online, hand weed the carrot bed and sow more carrots. The carrots I sowed a few weeks back have not been very good, it was a shorter, early variety that I was trying but the seedlings are sparse so I have intersown with a more familiar variety (Nantes) and then the other half of the bed with a later variety. I potted on more plants that are steadily growing and starting to put everything hardy enough outside to acclimatise. The more tender plants will stay in for probably another week then I can start hardening them off. I planted a couple of pepper plants in the small tunnel, the other three are still in pots in the large tunnel until I decide where to grow them. I looked up in the large tunnel and was cock a hoop to see the grape vine has tiny bunches of grapes growing 😀

I have seen a couple Pinterest posts with sweet potato slips being grown suspended over water so I am giving that a try to see if it works.

I bought one of those boxes of scatter and sow seeds at the weekend so I have done exactly that and watered them in, I’m not sure these really work, I have tried before with not great results but fingers crossed these just might.

There are still of jobs on the list to do lol but I’m getting through them as best I can 😜 and of course keep adding to the list all the while.

In the afternoon I did some slightly more gentle pottering, last year I decided that I wouldn’t do pots of things as it was bloody hard work trying to keep everything alive but today I changed my mind 🙄 so I have been finding bits to put into pots to go on the decking area. While I was down there I spotted a rat! I thought the torts were eating rather a lot 😝 so I will be giving the rat(s) supper tonight 😜 John had other ideas about trying to shoot it though, I say trying, it was an entertaining hour watching him stalking the thing, he has no patience to sit and wait for it to come out, he is also by his own admission ‘a crap shot’ added to that he kept moaning he couldn’t see through the sight, needless to say I’m still going to ‘feed’ it tonight 😛

Tuesday: Nice sunny morning, looks like a promising day 😁 I had Mia today and roped her in to help pick/cut some food for the rabbits and guinea pig and get some sacks filled with hay for them. She bought a marble painting kit with her that she got as a present for her birthday, it’s a great little kit, well thought out, we expanded the idea a little with splodge pictures and got messier and messier 😆

I received the invoice for the ducklings this morning and suddenly realised that has crept up on me fast 😂 I now need to think about moving the chicks to another pen, they should be able to go outside in the next few days as they are all feathered up now 🙂

I’m glad a did the whole ‘pond’ thing last year although it needs some work again now as the chickens decimated the planting, hopefully I will be rehoming some froglets to add to it so I need to make sure the area is damp and dark for them, natural slug patrol 😁

After Mia went home and John came home, I gave him the job of feeding the birds and collecting the eggs while I went out to water the poly tunnels, feed the citrus trees and pot a couple of things on, by the time we ate it was nearly 8pm 😜

Wednesday: Cooler this morning with a nice heavy dew, good for the garden 😁 Got the animals all sorted and picked a few bunches of asparagus which will go out for sale today.

When I went to collect the post from the end of the drive I could hear grasshoppers 😁 that made me smile 😀

I showed you a picture of a guild last week that I had planted, here is one that has more or less sprung up by itself so I have let it carry on, this is a cherry tree, feverfew, comfrey, some sweet cicely, there are daffodils and violet in there as well as a bit of horseradish, quite a combination! All doing very well although the feverfew is a bit thuggish. One of the asparagus beds runs behind it along the back

I should have been full steam ahead this morning but I’m taking it a little slower, I have been experiencing a high heart rate at times and trying to work out why, obviously it’s to do with the medication and I had stopped the anti inflammatory because I didn’t think I needed it anymore but maybe I still do, so a quieter day back on that and see what happens.

I have mainly pottered about doing bits and pieces, I sowed a couple of rows of beetroot, I need to find out what I can plant along side them to do them some good, I moved a few things around and then I picked some chard to take to the hens in the stable block. As I came out I whacked my head a good un on the closed top bit, why I don’t know because I KNOW ITS THERE and even stooped to miss it but not far enough it seems 🤕 ouch, one those when you just want to cry, I even checked to make sure I hadn’t cut it open, luckily not, just as well I took the anti inflammatory 🙄

It seems that beans and peas can be pretty much grown with anything so I have sowed some more dwarf bean seeds to use dotted around the garden as companions, I sowed some yarrow, potted on courgettes and melons and sorted out plants for Shelley, she has a terrific little courtyard garden which has the potential to grow lots of food as it is sheltered and parts are a sun trap.

I just witnessed first hand the ‘crow’ problem that is causing concerns throughout the countryside. I opened the pen for the light Sussex to get out further than normal earlier, this afternoon I can see about 15 crows in there, the problem (for the crows) is that the wire roof slants upwards and they cannot figure how to get out once they are disturbed. I haven’t been able to see yet if they have attacked the eggs the hen is sat on or if they were drawn in because the eggs have hatched (due any day) or if they were after feed. What I witnessed was two very angry cockerels attacking any crow that came down to the ground, one crow was attacked four or five times, but they are pretty tough as it still got out eventually! And then they all came back but the cockerel got the better of one of them this time though it took a bit of doing, if you are wondering why I didn’t intervene, not a chance I am going in there with a cockerel on a mission like that, and the fact that there are two cockerels in there having a go is a definite no way.

Tonight for my dinner I have chicken with coconut rice and a mango and avocado salsa 😀

Thursday: I got the morning stuff done, then moved the little chicks out to where the quail used to be to make room for the ducklings which are arriving tomorrow morning first thing. Then it was off to Shelley’s for the day to help her with her garden it’s a lovely little courtyard garden but full of weeds and building rubble from their renovations, now it’s all tided up, weeded and pots filled with edibles from patio trees and fruit bushes to vegetables 😀 we forgot to take before and after photos though 🤪

John got the ducks some starter crumb and the chicks some growers pellets on the way home. I cleaned out the brooder this morning so we are good to go with duckies.

Friday: Well it started off well, I was up early, got the brooder lamp on, opened a new bag of starter crumb and was making a duckling proof waterer at 7.30am all ready for the delivery of ducklings, get a phone call at 7.45 to say they are not coming because the hatch was 300 short ☹️ I’m a bit pissed off to be fair 🙄 All that work in making brooders, getting feed in (a 20kg bag which I opened minutes before the phonecall) not to mention the anticipation, all for nowt. They are going to ring back on Tuesday to see what they can do, it may mean waiting for another hatch but I’m guessing they have already allocated those to customers 😕 meanwhile the ducks I have are laying poorly at the minute so not many duck eggs. The last lot I bought in Ffairfach when I was down at Dads and that was a few years ago, we are going down at the end of this month and I may have to see if I can find some in that area to bring back with us, honestly, who knew it would be so hard to get hold of ducks lol.

I did the morning rounds and got everything else sorted all the while thinking about how things look rosy for a while and then bump, down you come with a thud lol.

I spent the morning in the poly tunnel sulking 😝 lol, well potting on etc then I did some planting of perennials that I had split last autumn and overwintered. Sam and Mia came over at lunchtime, ‘do you fancy lunch out’ I said, ‘yep’ then let’s go 😀

Got back and did the feeding and eggs, I have sold 12 goose eggs today 😁

After that I had a sit down and I need a new purse as mine is on its last legs, well we are back to the light bulb saga for choice, it seems these days you really need to have a purse that is RFID blocking to prevent unauthorised scanning 😏 I need it big enough to get a medication card (I have to carry around with me) in it, I would quite like one big enough to get my phone in it if I am not taking my bag with me, and of course a multitude of loyalty cards, (mostly for garden centres 😂), some old one pound notes I was given as a birthday present many years ago and never spent 🤣, I choose one eventually and then found I could get it half price if I buy one in damaged packaging, yep that will do fine I throw that bit away anyhow!

Babysat Florence in the evening while Shelley and Martin took Josh to see Madagascar the musical which he absolutely loved 😁😁

Saturday: A cold North wind this morning, apparently it’s the coldest May bank holiday weekend for however many years, the weather patterns are so up and down this year. John went off to get feed and I did the feeding etc. I had a few larger plants in pots that needed moving to bigger pots and so thats what I did, meanwhile John cleaned out his van which took nearly all morning, I washed it as he was just going to park it back on the driveway and it was filthy! In the afternoon we went over to Cheltenham to visit our niece whose birthday was this week and she has just moved into a new flat there, good to get out and about, back home for an hour then over to Sam and Luke’s for a burger and some pooling of ideas for their garden which is about to have a huge transformation. That’s pretty much it for the day 😀

I have managed to find a couple of kittens not too far away and hopefully will be going to look at them next weekend 😀

Sunday: Brrrr still colder than it should be by now. Morning rounds first then I did some hoeing, the weeds are beginning to sprout everywhere, John went off to visit his Mum and when he came back he got the mower out to do the front paddock. We have kept the chickens off this paddock to give it a rest and get the sward thickened up, it’s looking pretty good although there are still some bare patches. He got bored after a couple of goes round so I took over while he got on with taking out a gate post near the back door that had rotted out and needed renewing. Halfway through that job we decided to go out and get something to eat, came back and he finished the job off while I did some pricking out and potting on lol my favourite jobs at the minute. I have put some runner beans out for hardening off as they will need to be planted up soon, I did put an extra cover of bubble wrap over the top though as it’s unseasonably chilly 😏

We had to light the Rayburn as it’s a tad too cold in the house, come back sunshine 🌞

Mostly garden tasks this week lol at the expense of everything else but I’m loving it so I’ll carry on regardless 😜

Have a good week everyone x