chickens – Page 5 – frieslandfarm (flowers)

Something different, something new & the return of the cat 😁

Posted on June 28, 2021July 4, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 28th June 2021: It is overcast but that’s fine for me, just how I prefer it, overcast but still warm 😂 I did a thing as Jeremy Clarkson would say 😜 I thought I would do a voice memo as I was going round this morning, actually I thought initially it would be for note taking but on playback I rather liked it. Then began the next couple of hours trying to get it onto some kind of platform so that I could transfer it to WordPress. You will see below that despite everything I did do exactly that, although I would have like to merge the recordings that seems a bit beyond the basic free apps, maybe I will pay for a good one so that next time it is seamless 😬 But here is a first ever audio of life on the farm, this is me with my local accent (which will sound strange to those readers in far off lands 😂) My voice is slightly huskier than normal due to this bug I have, normally it’s a lot tinnier, I prefer this husky one personally lol

Apart from faffing around for a long time trying to upload, download, offload the files 😜 I have done other bits of picking, chatting to a customer who came especially to get some fresh veg, organising what will be for dinner later, video call with shelley, and probably a few other things that I have completely forgotten about by now. The day has shot past, it’s already mid afternoon. At some point today I also whizzed up some strawberries to pour into an ice cube tray and freeze so that I can use them in smoothies. The strawberries are all little ones and so ideal for using up this way, you could always use the small amounts to add to fruit crumbles or defrost and add a bit of sweetness for a couli to have with ice cream or yoghurt, so many other things you can use them for really.

So as is typical of me once I had recorded that snippet for the blog I thought ‘I wonder if I can do a podcast’ 🤣 so guess what? That’s exactly what I did, yep seriously I found platform called Anchor and I recorded a podcast, well I would probably call it a shamble ramble actually but I was pretty pleased with the end result if I do say so myself. If you like podcasts and want a listen I will see if I can work out how to get the link on here. It is a little different to the blog, to start with it is about how we got to where we are and why. It is also a lot easier to talk about and convey your thoughts and ideas more easily than trying to write it at the end of the day when you are knackered. Basically that’s what I spent the rest of the afternoon doing except for the moment I spotted a fox! I had just finished recording a section and was sorting some interlude music when I looked out the door and thought, is that a fox? I couldn’t quite tell if it was or if it was a clump of dock heads but as I moved closer I could see it was a fox with its eyes firmly fixed on some hens in the paddock. I shouted it looked up at me and then back at the hens, I shouted again and by this time the dog had run round so the fox scarpered back through the hedge. This is the one that has black tinges and obviously the day time raider as it was only 4pm. I grabbed a stick and went out the the hedgeline and made as much noise as possible in the hopes it would bugger off, I then had to wait out in the garden until John came home in case it came back. Once John was back we got some corn and rounded up as many as possible for damage limitation and we house the geese as well. At the minute here are around 10 hens still out so we still have to be a bit vigilant.

There is still no sign of the cat and so I have had to call the vet again to cancel all future appointments 😕 One of the other jobs that need doing fairly urgently is moving the kittens and mum from up on the side in the boot room down to floor level. The reason being that the kittens, who now have their eyes open, began to start gentle exploration today out of the cosy little cat house they have been living in. In fact when one of them saw me it started mewing and coming towards me so it won’t be long before they are leaping about.

John is watching Andy Murry play at Wimbledon and keeps asking me ‘oh why is he using that drop shot’ or saying ‘he needs a double fault’ I am just trying to watch it in peace 😜

We bought in a dog crate and set it up on the floor then moved mum and the kittens along with their cosy little cat house down into the crate. I know what would have happened if we had left it any longer, we would have gone into the room to find one of them had fallen from the worktop 😏 we did a risk assessment and altered the situation for a better outcome 😜 We have left one door on the edge of the cage wedged open, the dogs can’t get past it but the cat can jump up and out so all should be fine for at least a week. They have started playing with each other now so won’t be long before they explore further.

Tuesday: Still overcast this morning but it’s warm enough, again it is rather a perfect day for me in mid summer 😬 I think it rained overnight, bonus because I don’t have to worry about watering 😁 I still have this dammed ‘thing‘ it’s really not that surprising because being on immune suppressants everything takes ages to clear up but I really wish it would do one so that I can have a clear head for once. In an effort to try and shift it I did do a simple sinus rinse this morning, ewwww, yes it is ewww but it gets rid of a lot of mucus and crap, still don’t feel much better but at least I can breathe through my nose now 🙄 I found a pot of eucalyptus oil last night which is more potent thank the jar of vicks and although it clears for a couple of minutes it is back to being blocked before very long.

What is on the agenda today? Good question, at the minute I am sitting having a decaf coffee, I am pretty tired from being awake half the night coughing so I am going to amble through the day I think 🤔 The ducks need clean bedding so that is on the list, I try not to set too much in stone because things change or I might spot something else that needs doing or I fancy doing and if I plan my day too rigidly it can become stressful and who wants stress 🤷‍♀️ I need to pick strawberries, they are coming in thick and fast now as expected it is Wimbledon fortnight after all. As always one job will lead to another so I won’t be idle just pacing myself. Oh and of course I will have to keep an eye out for the fox, we managed to get all the birds inside early last night, around 7 they were all safely locked away. We had put the geese in a stable about 5 as they were in that area anyway so we just herded them in. This morning John went out to let everything out for the day and he told me that when he got to the goose pen up in the small paddock he thought ‘oh shit we forgot to put them to bed’ he had totally forgotten that we had locked them somewhere different and had a slight panic for a moment 😂

So I actually achieved next to nothing today, not on the Smallholding anyway, I did manage to pick a good haul of strawberries and that was about it. Sam came over with the twins and we went out to a local garden centre to see the fish and have tea and cake. The crazy thing is that although the twins are nearly two, this is the first time they have done that 😢 it is very sad really that for the last year and a half they have not been able to do the things that their older sister was able to enjoy doing. So we went out on a socialising the twins mission 😂 I have to say they were really well behaved for a couple of toddlers on reins who suddenly are allowed to go out in the big wide world bless them 🥰

When we got back which was around 1.30pm, John was home and Shelley and Flo were visiting as well. Once they left I had to help John get a wire through the wall from the bathroom into the bedroom so that we could get the electric radiator in the bathroom working. We still have another to do in there and one in the living room but we need an electrician for those. A quick chat with a customer at the gate and then a cuppa in the garden as it was about the right time for the fox to make an appearance. John fed the birds, I put some lemon verbena and mushrooms in the dehydrator, then I took out the mushrooms because I don’t want the lemon verbena smelling like fungi 😂 I will dry them separately later, the verbena was almost dry from hanging in the kitchen I just need to crisp it up a bit. Lemon Verbena tea is supposed to be good for joint mobility, acne, soothing the stomach, anxiety and inflammation as well as a few other things, there is science to back some of it up and the rest is what people report back after taking it but there are drawbacks as well, it can have a laxative effect on some people and it is a diuretic so anyone with kidney problem should avoid it. Most if not all articles will say that you should seek advice from a doctor if you have an underlying illness or are on medication before consuming anything in the herbal section. That is great advice but not terribly practical is it 🤷‍♀️ I mean I am hardly going to give the practice a call for everything I want to try, I would probably try a little bit see if all seems well and go from there, but that’s me 😬

The kick off for the football is about to happen, England v Germany always a big match in whatever tournament they are playing. This is how seriously we take football in our house, the anthems play, John goes out for a smoke, he comes back in, they are about three minutes into the game, the conversation goes something like this: John ‘have we won yet?’ Me ‘yes game is over’, John ‘what colour are we playing in?’ Me ‘Pink’ John shouts are the telly a couple of times before leaving to go out and price up a job 😂 Not really football fans and quite honestly I would prefer to be watching the tennis.

We won! Many chants and posts of ‘it’s coming home’ yeah don’t count your chickens before they hatch 😜

We weighed up the fox situation and decided to pop to Mums for a cuppa, as John said we can’t just be here the whole time in case he comes, we did put the geese away first but the hens we left out as they are far more troublesome to round up, impossible even. As we drove back towards ours I could see that the verges had been cut and I was horrified to see that ours had been cut too. There are orchids growing out on the verge as well as in the front paddock, ffs what is wrong with the world wanting to cut everything back all the time, not the contractors fault I know but urrrgh humans 🤬 Luckily we have plenty this year inside our boundaries but still I am dumbfounded really, it’s not as if it’s on a blind bend, I could understand the need to cut it back but on a perfectly straight road it is not necessarily to do it until the end of the summer 🤷‍♀️ The hens were fine by the way, no visit from the pesky marauder this evening 😁

Wednesday: Another good day weather wise for me, sorry about the lack of sun folks but I’m fine with that lol. We did some very brisk trade at the egg shed yesterday in fact we pretty much sold out of everything we had which is fab. It did mean though that I need to be up and about early enough to put out the eggs for today before the customers, who call in on the way to work, get here. John did the animals and went of to work, this semi retired has pretty much gone out of the window as he is now booked up to mid August 😏 I did a bit of picking, not much today, a few peas and that’s it, I need to wait for the braid beans to fatten in the pods before a pick any more of those and everything else is slowly but surely forming. I then went to put some clean bedding in for the ducks and move the electric fence for the horses, I a, going to have to extend the tape again soon and put in more stakes as I am running out of ‘give’ with this lot. Onto the guinea pigs, I gave them a clean out, swept the floor, got them some fresh hay 🤔 That is one of those terms that is a paradox isn’t it 😂 fresh hay, it hadn’t occurs to me before now but dead grass is fresh hay 🤪 Anyway I sorted that lot out and picked them some fresh mint, lemon balm, dandelions and sow thistle they are very happy with that lot.

Back inside then to check the mushrooms I have had in the dehydrator, a lot of them are ready but some are still a bit soft. I took out the lot that were ready to whizz into powder, put that in a jar and left the rest to continue drying, they will be added later. Whenever you dry anything it starts off as quite a bit of bulk but by the time it’s dried it has shrunk to around 1/3rd of it original size and then once powdered the amount is minuscule, but it packs a punch with flavour which is the main thing.

My first ever podcast 😬 has been well received by family members and I didn’t even have to pay them or anything 😜 so I have already drafted up the second one ready to go next Monday. If you are interested or like podcasts you can find it on Spotify titled, Our Smallholding life warts ‘n’ all. I was going to keep it similar to the blog but I changed my mind as it gave me an opportunity to do something slightly different but there are cross overs on both.

In the early afternoon I went up to the back point of lay pen where we are keeping the new hens. For the last couple of days they a have been kept in because of the fox and I will have to be vigilant today now I have let them out. I let them out so I could clean the pen out, the water drinker they have works well unless they stand on the side and then it leaks out onto the mud part of the pen and then it becomes a stinking mess 🤪

Today has been the first time I have been able to sit for any length of time without coughing, and I mean coughing, the whole can’t stop, eyes streaming coughing fits 😷 So with my re-found ability I sat and watched the ladies tennis which was well worth a watch even though our girl didn’t win. Then as it went on longer than expected I could be bothered to start making dinner so we had boiled eggs 😂 Once we had finished and had a cuppa I got on with doing something with the fruit I picked earlier, raspberries, recur rants and strawberries are at this minute in the ice cream maker and we will have summer fruits sorbet in about half an hour. The ice cream maker I used to think was a bit of a faff because I used to keep the bowl in the cupboard but now I keep it in the freezer so it is always ready when I need it. I picked this one up second hand at a car boot sale a few years ago and if you have a lot of soft fruit it’s well worth looking out for one. It saves all that freezing, getting it out, stirring it round, freezing it again before doing the whole process at least one more time. Summer fruit sorbet, any fruit sorbet is easy really, this was 500g of mixed fruit, 185g caster sugar, 185ml water and the juice of a lemon. Heat the sugar and water together until the sugar dissolves then turn up the heat and boil a little to get a soft syrup, allow it to cool, then blend the fruit, lemon juice and cooled sugar syrup in a liquidiser and put through a fine sieve to get rid of the pips and stalks etc. Get the ice cream maker plugged in and going and pour in the liquid mix, probably takes 30/40 minutes depending on what consistency you want. Eat immediately if you want to or freeze in a suitable container. I think I will get some of those wafer cones and we can use it instead of ice cream, also great for those dairy intolerant of course 😁

So after saying the the machine will make light work of the sorbet, it failed to freeze it very well 😂 so I had to resort to freezing in a tub and in about an hour or so I will have to remember to go and give it a mix before leaving it over night 🤷‍♀️

Thursday: Yet another warm but overcast day, can’t say I haven’t had my fill of workable days this week can I 😂 This morning we were late up, the alarm went off, we fell back asleep and an hour later it ‘oh shit’. It doesn’t really make much difference to me but obviously John has places to be (even though he is supposed to be semi retired, I am going to mention that a lot 🤪) So in a good will gesture I offered to go round and do the morning jobs as long as I didn’t have to haul buckets of feed around, he assured me that only two lots needed feed. So off he went to work and I bumbled round letting everything out and feeding the ones that needed it, topping up water containers as I went. Then I sorted out the washing and got that on before doing the eggs and the egg shed and getting on with some watering and picking. Then I confess I recorded a podcast, I now have three in the bag, one published the other two scheduled. The problem is that once a topic starts rattling round in my head I have to get it sorted. Hopefully now I can have a week or two without thinking about it, is that likely, nope 😂 too much say!

John came home early afternoon which I wasn’t expecting but he is not here for the rest of the day as he has to pop back out again apparently. We had lunch and a cuppa together, watched the news and I now have the tennis on. Meanwhile John is bashing something about in the kitchen, I can’t even be bothered to go and find out what at the minute 😜 I can hear it involves a hammer and chisel so I guess it’s the rest of the tiles that he is taking off from the wall. I did ask, nicely I have to say, if we could perhaps finish the making good where the Rayburn came out 😬 I want to give the kitchen a good clean but there is no point doing that if the very next day he starts bashing about and plastering, so I’m guessing he has taken the hint and is getting on with it 😁

Bits of broken tiles all over the floor and John shouts are the grandchildren coming today? I do t think so I said 🤔……shit, it’s Thursday and the twins will be arriving any minute now 😂 hastily get the hoover out and all broken tiles down to the skip, cleaned up just in time 😜 It was a lovely day so they had their tea as a picnic outside before helping me feed weeds to the torts. George got a bit carried away and starting pulling off strawberry leaves from my plants to feed them 🤦‍♀️

After dinner my sister and her hubby called in for a cuppa and we sat on the decking in the garden. We spent over an hour watching a pair barn owls systematically going up and down the field next door and occasionally diving down once they found something tasty to eat, they are such graceful birds to watch.

Friday: Yet another overcast but warm enough day so I am having to make the most of it. It’s 10.30 I have just sat down for my first coffee break having been up and about since 6.30 this morning. First on the agenda was to buy a big walk in 6m x 3m metal chicken run. I said to John shall we get one of these be cause we can’t keep not going anywhere because of the fox or worrying when we absolutely have to go out. This one will attach to the front hut and it will mean that if we know we are going out we can let them out into the fresh air but they will be secure. It’s not being enough to do that all the time but it will be great to have the option. After I had orders that I got on with the usual bits, feeding, picking, watering, washing up, putting the eggs out, slug hunting 🙄 Something has made a hole in one or two of the little peppers in the greenhouse, picking up the pots and looking underneath them all I found about 10 small slugs in all. I fired them out onto the grass, I tend not to kill them after all they are only doing what slugs do to survive but they can go and do it on something less precious than my peppers 😜 I need to let the ducks into the garden in the autumn so they can hoover up as many as possible mind you we do have hedgehogs, I see the deposits on the grass in the mornings so at least they have something to eat. I still have this bloody silly cough though each day it is getting better but the minute I sit down I start coughing, standing up all day is the only answer 🤪

The goose died 😢 sadly despite doing what I could it died overnight. In my experience by the time you realise there is something wrong with a goose it’s already too late. Geese are extremely good at concealing the fact that they are unwell or injured unless it’s a blatantly obvious injury. It occurred to me that she may have received a puncture wound in the fox attack but stupidly I didn’t think to check for that, also in my experience a puncture would from a fox is pretty fatal anyway, the germs from the bite would be enough to cause infection. Then there is the site of any wound, depending on where that is, which would be hard to see under all that down, it is likely to cause maximum damage. But in all honestly I don’t know why she has died except that she was not in top form for some reason.

Once my coffee break and sit down are over I have to go out to the paddock and extend the electric fencing for the horses, I need add more tape and stakes again as I can’t get much more slack out of what is there already so that will be a hour or so to do that, good job it’s overcast, actually if it wasn’t I wouldn’t be doing it!

Did that job came back in sorted out peas ready to freeze and strawberries for pudding later. Sam and he twins came over and so did Shelley and Flo, they at school pick up time and I went in to watch the tennis 😜

I think we may have found the cat 😁 a local animal rehoming charity has put up a picture of a cat that has been at their place, he fits the description and matches the photo so fingers crossed we will get him back, and I will have to call the vet again and book him in once more 😂

Jack waiting for me to release the food 😂

Saturday: After emails back and forth the local rescue centre were satisfied that Jack was our cat and we made arrangement to pick him up mid morning. He had turned up a few days ago and being a rescue centre they thought he had been dumped, they managed to trap him and put out on social media which is where we saw him. He has now been chipped by them, I gave them a donation for doing that, and we bought him home. You would think that he had been away for months as at first he seemed very agitated and un settled and I was worried he would take off again. We fed him some very tasty sardines and within a couple of hours he had calmed down and realised he belonged here, even being uber friendly with the dogs much to their disgust as he wandered past them, brushing against them with his tail in the air, I am sure he was purring, it’s my family 😂

The rest of the day we spent getting a bit of food shopping and doing things like depositing cheques at the post office, paying a invoice at the wood yard, I paid some online bills and did a bit of paperwork while John made good the site the Rayburn came out ready for plastering tomorrow.

In the afternoon we discovered that the fox had taken two of our new hens 😕 We had left the one in the front locked away because he keeps going there but let the back ones out and he had been to the back and had those 🤬

One of the reasons we left them in was because we wanted to go out in the evening to watch the football and while we can get the hens at the back in easily, we can’t do them same with the front ones so they stayed in. Once everything was safely shut away around 6 we went off to collect fish and chips, go round to my sisters and we watched England play Ukraine and win! Hoorah, we seem to have a great team at the minute and there are high hopes that they will go far 🤞

Sunday: John was up early to watch the qualifying for the F1 as we were too late home to watch it yesterday, if he doesn’t watch it early he is likely to hear the results on the radio and then he gets mad 😂 He then did the animals and got on with plastering the bits of the wall and ceiling he made good yesterday. Meanwhile I did my usual bits and then went out to move the fence for the horses and dig up ragwort. There seems to be a bit more of it this year than previous years and I did a big barrowful but it started to rain quite a bit and so I will either do some more later or tomorrow. I just need to get it up before it goes to seed, it’s only just started flowering so we are ok for a few days. We don’t spray our fields as you can imagine and it is teeming with insects and a huge variety of different vegetation is growing. Many people prefer to just have grass for their horses but I like ours to have a good range to graze, clover both red and white, plantain, so many different types of grasses, various types from the dandelion family as well, it’s diverse which is great for them and the wildlife. Mind you it absolutely stinks of fox down in the corner of the paddock 🙄

Hopefully once John has finished plastering and it is left to dry we can go and get some paint, I can start to give the kitchen a good clean, spruce up the bits that need doing and give it a new coat or two of paint next week 😁 That will be another job ticked off the never ending list ✔️

Johns patching up, got to wait for it to dry and then painting can commence

Podcast number two will be released tomorrow if you are interested, let me know what you think 🤔

Just been pottering in the garden, it July and the weather is not July weather lol, it started spitting and then was obvious it was going to hammer down and that’s exactly what it did, it’s absolutely pouring down 🙄

In the end we didn’t go and get paint as we have some to do the undercoat and can pick some up one evening in the week when the shop is quieter.

Have a great week 🥰

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/our-smallholding-life-warts-n-all/id1574503311

Friesland Farm

Mid Summer, a rotten cold & a missing cat, again!!

Posted on June 22, 2021June 28, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 21st June 2021, Summer Solstice: The birds will all be kept in today and possibly tomorrow and the day after that, actually for as long as needs be, I am hoping the foxes will move on and be a problem for someone else and that they manage to get them dealt with because so far they have evaded all our efforts.

Been keeping myself busy this morning with some picking, strawberries, peas, mange tout, chard, baby beetroot and some carrot thinnings, not a bad little haul, some has gone out for sale some will be for dinner tonight. It takes a lot longer than you realise to pick it all and it will only be ramping up from here on in but it’s a lovely job to do, very fulfilling knowing you have grown it from seed to feed 😁 I did a bit of weeding around one of the rows of beetroot and then I have sown another lot of beetroot plug plants, trying to get this succession thing successfully working this year. Then it was onto planting the last of the squash plants, five more courgette plants (lol I have no idea what I will do with that lot as I have nine plants in total 🤪) Then I planted the rest of the squash plants in the menage, more pumpkins, spaghetti squash, crown Prince, table king and musque de something or other (I really must learn the name) Again if all these growq and produce I am going to have an awful lot of squash 😂 I had a look at what else is coming on, the broad beans have good sized pods but I can feel that the beans have not swelled enough to pick just yet. The tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, melon all have tiny fruits forming in good quantities, the aubergine are flowering, the runner beans, dwarf beans and French beans are all flowering. I am waiting for the onions, garlic and shallots to start dying off so I can pull them and dry them, another couple of weeks before that happens I think. I am picking a good big bowlful of strawberries every day and the yellow raspberries are starting to ripen as is the red currant. The blackcurrant bushes are loaded with berries still green at the minute though. The early potatoes are only just starting to flower, they are way behind 🙄 The rhubarb is still producing plenty though it will be time to slow down picking that soon. The sweetcorn are doing well and growing strong, I think that covers most things apart from herbs and salad which are tickling along nicely without much fuss. Next I will be panicking that there is so much I haven’t got time to sort and process it all 😂

I have started accounting for exactly what is put out on a daily basis and what has sold so that I can see what we should be taking, I say should because takings seem to be down despite selling well 🤷‍♀️ another depressing realisation that we are probably too slack and the honesty box is great for the honest but not so great for the no so honest 🙄

Despite the fact that we will not be replacing any more birds we still have nearly 80 in various forms so we will be continuing and I still will be growing veg so they will still go out for sale along with any plants I have grown. Who knows what other opportunities will arise or become apparent, today even though I am trying to chivvy myself along I feel as though I am going uphill backwards 😬

I did do a positive step forward job this morning, I booked our male cat, Jack, in for the chop 😋 he is not the father of the kittens but it wouldn’t be very long before he would be and I don’t want that. Besides we don’t want him wandering as they always tend to wander towards the road instead of the acres and acres towards the back 🤷‍♀️ Once Jill’s kittens are weaned I will book her in as well, this little accident was exactly that and we don’t want hundreds of kittens running around, that’s how populations get out of control. There is always a drawback though, we have spent hundreds on getting cats spayed and neutered only for them to either disappear or get hit by a car, another thing we may give up on if it all goes pear shaped again besides with less birds we won’t get as many mice hopefully. Lol I sound as though I am ready to throw in the towel on the whole lot but this time of year is the time I find I am furiously trying to combat one pest or another and trying desperately to keep my head above water.

After some lunch I managed to get the petrol strimmer working and strimmed the walkway between the menage and the big paddock at the back. One of the problems with the fox is that the grass is long enough for it to hide in, where I strimmed is exactly where John nearly tripped over the fox munching on one of our hens, neither of them saw each other until the last minute! I would have done more but it was making my arm ache from holding it and the vibration in my hand only stopped about half and hour after I did lol.

I prepped the bits of veg I picked this morning ready for dinner later, John will have fresh garden peas and baby carrots with chicken and potatoes and I am having a garden salad made up of chopped beetroot and the beet leaves, chopped baby carrots, mange tout, white icicle radish sprinkled with a few red currants I picked the other day which I will also have with chicken.

I have decided that his year I will use what I pick while it’s fresh, sell anything I won’t be using and not do massive batch freezing like I have in previous years. The reason being I grow so much we don’t get through it before the next lot is ready 😂 Also having now got just one smallish chest freezer and a back up under counter freezer I am not going to have the room to hoard 🙄 so I either use it, sell it, give some of it to the family or I process it to store in a different way by either drying it of jamming, chutneying it etc, I am not keen of fermenting we won’t eat it and I still haven’t had the courage to try canning, though I really ought to give myself a stern talking to in that department. One of the problems is in the UK they don’t make canning equipment it would have to be bought from the US.

This morning it was overcast but dry, no chance of seeing the sun rise on solstice day today 🙄 By mid afternoon it was raining, I’m not too bothered as I got the bit of strimming done and it’s watering in the squash I planted BUT it’s gone a tad chilly with it 🤪 the radiators are set at 18c and some of them have come on, I am sure I am feeling it because we had got used to nearly 30c and now it’s dropped dramatically but still 🤷‍♀️ There is definitely no relying on a standard weather pattern anymore.

So I did a fair bit of reading up about canning and decided against it lol, still,worries me and when I spoke to John he said ‘it’s a bit like having a bomb sat on the stove top’ 🙄🤪😂 which put me completely off even though I’m sure they are not that dangerous 🤷‍♀️ Anyhow I also researched vacuum packing and have bought a home use machine. I know this will use plastic which I didn’t really want to do but it will also preserve the food a lot longer than putting it into freezer bags as it does end up with freezer burn after a while. As I said before there is no easy answer to making the most of storing the harvest, I just have to pick what is going to work best for me. Shelley said ‘you can’t save the world everyday’ and she is right though I should still be mindful of what I am doing not just do it because that’s the way it’s always done. So methods of preservation I will be using are: dehydration, freezing including vacuum packed, it will also include jams and chutneys though for long term storage I will be processing the jars in a water bath to make them safer.

Tuesday: It was raining when I first got up but the sun ☀️ made a breakthrough before 9am so it should be a nice enough day. I got some indoor morning jobs done, washing, cleaning the countertop in the boot room, putting out rubbish, breakfast etc etc. Then I did a bit of printing out for my Mum who was struggling to get her printer to work, I know how that feels 😂 see previous blogs for that story) I still don’t feel 100%, the cold is still lingering although the throat and the cough have almost gone now, I have a hair appointment this afternoon so anything I want to achieve today needs to be done this morning. We also have someone coming later to see if they can deal with the fox problem so that we can let the birds back out, it wasn’t so bad while the weather was cool and wet but if it gets hot I don’t really want them inside all day for any longer than necessary.

I spent the morning doing various bits including sowing some more seeds, his time I have sown dill, coriander and basil for continuity and also some pak Choi and Chinese cabbage for sale later on. The reason being that the little gem and oak leaf lettuce I have growing will soon be smothered in greenfly, that my past experience anyway, so if I get some replacements on the go now I should have some salad leaves once that happens. Pak Choi will grow in the tunnel even when it’s getting colder, I haven’t grown the Chinese’s cabbage before so it will be interesting to see how well it does, might become a favourite who knows. I also watered both the tunnels, it’s tempting to not do them when nothing growing outside needs water but that can be downfall of the fruit that has already set so best to keep doing it even if it’s only a small watering and not a soaking. Then it was round to the paddock to move the electric fencing out a bit for the horses, they soon eat off the strips they are given 😂 the idea though is that they are not able to just gorge on everything and anything, Jack was getting a bit porky and restricting him will slow that down. If, like last year, we just had weeks of sunshine it wasn’t necessary because the grass was dying off due to lack of moisture anyway and so it was more like hay but this year with the rain it is lush and green and full of sugar which is not ideal. He is not happy and tells me when I need to move the fencing 🤪 he sees me out in the garden, starts neighing at me and I think, ah time to move the fence a little, actually I did throw some hay in today as well because the fence is almost as far as I can move it without getting more tape and extending it but I also need to bring them in later when they come to deal with the fox and if I leave them in overnight I can extend it in the morning before I turn them back out again.

Went out for the afternoon to get my hair done. During lockdown, like everybody, my hair didn’t get cut, it got longer and longer, it also got greyer and greyer but I kind of liked it. When I was young my hair was blonde, as a young adult it was golden brown as a much older adult I had resorted to dying it light brown 🤷‍♀️ So now I had long hair that was grey on the top and light brown on the bottom, the dilemma was do I continue to grow the grey or do I return to the box dye that I had always done. I bought the dye and it sat there and sat there and sat there, it was a rolling decision not to dye each week and eventually I thought I like it like it lighter so I will stay grey. As I said the problem was the bottom of my hair was a washed out light brown that I didn’t want to cut short, so the answer was highlights apparently. I say apparently because I have no clue about these sort of things, seriously, I had my hair coloured once in a salon about 15 years ago and that’s it 🙄 So now after being ‘done’ I have long hair that is even in light colour all over, fabulous, let’s see how long I keep it up for 🤪

Once back home there is no time to enjoy swishing my new locks around as it was straight out to get the horses in while John fed the birds. Then a job that I imagine a lot of people would refuse to do including John but I am not squeamish, never have been, I am one of those weird people who rather likes getting maggots off a sheep’s backside or pus out of a nasty cut, I am quite happy to watch brain surgery or open heart surgery on TV so this job was a breeze. We have dead hens, you know how that happened, and I gathered up bodies in the aftermath of the attack and bought them in overnight. The chaps are coming later to see if they can help sort the problem out but they need bait, cue dead hens, they need bait that isn’t easy to run off with though and so we took out a hammer and tent pegs and yes I hammered the tent pegs through the dead bodies to secure them to the ground. I don’t see this as a problem at all but John flat refused to do it and wouldn’t even look 👀 Let’s hope the chaps get here before the fox makes a meal of the skewered hens!

We are pretty diverse here in terms of things going on, personal house things, veg things, flower things, poultry things, pet things, Smallholding things, family things, so sometimes I completely forget to double back and update on things I may have mentioned in the blog. One of those things is a Smallholding thing that we did a round four years ago, might be three, definitely three maybe more 😂 The front paddock we decided would no longer be for grazing the horses, it would be for chickens/poultry only and with that in mind we planted a few more fruit trees, plum, cherry and apple and we used a grass seed which was especially for chickens. The grass is shorter and so matures quickly and sets seed readily, the idea behind this is that it self sows as you leave it long enough. There were also a mixture of herbs and wildflowers in it, herbs in the form of things like plantain not sage or mint 😜 and wildflowers in the form of what most would call weeds not pretty cornflowers etc, we also added red clover separately. The idea was firstly to provide the hens with a good range of more natural forage and secondly to build up the thickness of the sward as it had got rather sparse from constant grazing and the fact that during the war there were buildings on there and the foundations are pretty much still there just buried under the surface and not that far down either 🙄 Three (or maybe four) years later it is doing really well, the variety in there is amazing, mostly just looks like grass but if you walk through it you can really see the variety of plants that are growing. It is buzzing with insects which again is great for the hens they love to run and jump and catch flying insects. It has been a successful attempt to get a much healthier paddock than it was previously.

The only problem is that we don’t have the equipment to cut long grass lol, the ride on mower would just give up on grass that long and thick. We discussed cutting it by hand when the time comes and then leaving it to dry before stacking it or making a home made box to bale it, something I will have to look into. John thinks a strimmer will do, it probably would but wouldn’t it be nice to use a scythe 😁

Wednesday: It’s nearly 12 noon and I am having a little sit down. We were up early this morning, the sun was shining and it looked like it was going to be a warm day so we got on. Cup of tea first mine you 😂 Then John did the feeding rounds while I went out to the paddock and altered the electric fencing to give the horses some more grazing, I had to get extra stakes and electric tape as we had got to the limits of the first lot. 6.30am out in the paddocks it was quite lovely though I could already hear the traffic from the A40, all those commuters buzzing backwards and forwards, glad it’s not me. Then it was onto looking for the bodies that we pegged last night, rookie error here as I only found one body, and only 4 out of 8 metal skewers 🙄 The chaps never saw a fox at all last night but they are definitely here otherwise the bodies would not be missing. If they stay active only at night then that’s fine but I have a feeling they are chancers and will come anytime we are not around. We haven’t let our new birds out but the older lot are back wandering around, I have no idea where we go from here to be honest, I fully expect more attacks but these foxes are as cunning as they are elusive.

That done it was onto sorting the eggs and the egg shed and then some picking of peas. I woke this morning with the cold I had now pestering my sinuses and if you have ever had inflamed sinus you will know how I was feeling. At this point I came in and laid on the bed for half an hour as I felt truly awful, I had taken some up the nose spray so was waiting for it to work which it did after a short while. Once I felt I could actually breathe again I went out to clean the dustbin, I had noted a while back that it was in a shocking state 😜 so I was determined not to forget to give it a power wash and a scrub out while it was empty. I used some Zoflora and now it smells lovely. The next job was fed the Guineas and give the light Sussex pen a spruce up and a clean out. I raked the floor to get up debris which was still there from the ash tree we cut down, cleaned out the house, sprayed it with some diluted jeyes fluid and put in fresh straw. I also hung a piece of shading on the door to the run, not to shade but to keep the damn magpies and rooks from eating the feed. The top of the door has a metal grid but it’s big enough for them to get in, but it seems they are way to stupid to get back out again and then when they land of the floor the chickens attack them. Hopefully that will sort the issue and I no longer have to listen to the racket they make. The rest of the morning I spent watering the greenhouse and potting on some plants that I had grown from seed. I also sorted out a few plants that I have been bringing on for a while and composted anything that hadn’t made it, gave it all a good feed and a drink and then in for my sit down which I think I have earned.

Well I have tried on and off to get a few bits done outside this afternoon but the cloud cover is sparse 🙄 I did manage to dig up a few verbena seedlings and pot them but that was about as far as I got. I am hoping it will be a fair bit cooler later and I can get out and do some more then.

We did manage to get out again after dinner, we wanted to get some of the grass around the front chicken hut cut to try and give the hens a bit of a chance to see the fox coming 👀 It is a bit too long for the mower so we only did a small bit, I need to order that scythe 😂 My sister and brother in law popped over and we had a cuppa in the garden, we did a bit of target practice with the air gun, turns out I am better than I thought I would be. We were only shooting at a plastic plant pot but it’s good to practise.

My vacuum packing machine arrived and I can’t wait to use it, it should make the space in the freezer a lot more useable plus we won’t end up with freezer burn.

Oh yeah nearly forgot, had a panic moment when John opened the post to find that we had not paid the electric bill and they were threatening action. I never had a bill in the post, nor a red letter I searched for it everywhere but we just haven’t had one so no wonder I haven’t paid it! Paid it now so all is well.

Thursday: I keep waking up each day expecting to feel better but it’s not happening and this morning I feel worse. All over body worse not just my sinuses which makes me think that it could be inflammation throughout. I feel cold too, not the kind of cold that putting on an extra jumper will sort out, it is one of those ‘if you know, you know’ feelings meaning only anyone who gets chronic inflammation will know exactly what I mean. My muscles ache this morning and bending down getting the oat milk out of the fridge my lower back muscles felt like they were dried out bits of leather someone had just bent 😕 I do hope this is not the beginning of a flare and that it is the immune response to this lingering cold. Only time will tell, in the meantime I will up the anti inflammatory foods and see if that helps. Most of what I eat does come under the anti inflammatory section, plenty of fresh veg and fruit, low fat Greek yoghurt, wholemeal or whole grain foods, olive oil etc etc but there are a few things I could ramp up on specifically such as turmeric and ginger, maybe a orange, carrot, ginger shake with a touch of turmeric or a banana, pear, blueberry & cinnamon or even spinach, pear, red grape, celery, all good choices.

I made an orange, carrot, turmeric, ginger and, because I had it left from breakfast, half a banana smoothie, which was delicious and packed with beta carotene. Often over the years before I was diagnosed with Lupus I had researched my skin condition. It started when I was 21 and pregnant with out eldest daughter, the midday sun began to affect my bared skin, it would erupt in thousands of tiny blister like spots. I would look around and see who else had this problem and there was nobody, I could see heat rash but this was different. Back then there wasn’t really the wealth of information available like there is today on the internet so it was difficult and I ploughed through a lot of reading. I concluded I had polymorphic light eruptions, I didn’t go to the doctor back then as it was definitely seasonal but I tried a plethora of creams and oils including rose hip oil, beta carotene seemed to be a dominant ingredient in many things alleged to help. None of them really helped very much and so I just became used to either avoiding the daytime sun or suffering with the rash. The eruptions are the same as I get now if I am caught out but the Lupus diagnosis comes from the presence of a high level of antibodies which were obviously not there back then or they would have picked that up in blood tests during subsequent pregnancies. There are other symptoms they look for as well most noticeably the butterfly shaped redness across the nose and cheeks, actually it is not where near as pretty as a butterfly 🤣 and not much similar in shape but 🤷‍♀️ I plan to have a purely plant based day today, we don’t eat that much meat, well I don’t anyway and we had fish yesterday, I hardly ever eat processed food and I rarely drink so I should kick this in to touch pretty quickly fingers crossed 🤞 #igotthis 😋

Oh what a full on day I have had and not finished yet as it’s twin sitting day today 🤪🤪 I have been prepping and cooking, one of the things that happens when I, but probably anyone, who is not on form, is meals kind of go out of the window. Generally once I am hit by fatigue I can’t function but what I need more than anything is some goodness so I have been sorting that out today. I started off with the smoothie which as I said was delish, then I moved on to making a few things that can be frozen and easily thawed so that I still get some good nutrition. I have made a couple of batches of butternut squash soup, this one is just roasted butternut squash, sautéed onions, a teaspoon of make syrup and a grating of nutmeg, plus salt and pepper. I worried a little about what it was going to taste like but it’s lovely, and it’s nutritious and that’s the main thing. Then I made a large batch of roasted butternut squash and pasta, I roasted it with onions and garlic but also some pecan nuts and edamame beans, then cooked some wholewheat spaghetti and wilted spinach into it and mixed the whole lot together. One lot I have for dinner tonight the other two lots were vacuum packed and frozen. There were a few issues with the vacuum packing, user error I have to say but I got there in the end, actually ‘we’ got there as Shelley was here at the time. Again nutritious and easily cooked by reheating in a pan of hot water. I have also made some pork mince, which is exactly that with spinach, carrots, edamame (because I had them out) and a sweet potato mash to go on the top. John will have some for tea and any other portions I can freeze for another day. Of course there is always room for crumble in the freezer and so I made a blackberry and apple crumble, one portion for John later and possibly tomorrow and two portions for the freezer. Go me, and on top of all that I have been busy organising and booking a couple of things for later in the year and moving the rabbit hitch out into the orchard for Rosie (Shelley’s rabbit) to come and stay.

Literally just sat down with a cuppa and hope to get it finished before the bundles of mischief arrive 😂

Evening jobs were move the electric fencing for the horses, Jack was telling me it was time 😂 then watering the tunnels and the greenhouse before going back in to wash up do the egg sorting and feed the boot room crew, 9pm sit down, surprised I didn’t fall asleep.

Friday: Up early to get some picking done so I can put it out with the eggs, mange tout, peas and a punnet of strawberries today, not much today but hopefully soon there will be loads of produce available. Then onto a job I have been trying to get at for a few days but failed, cutting back the dying flowers on the lupin, delphiniums, geums etc, if I cut of the flowers that have gone over, they will make more, it’s like magic 😁 I also dead headed the roses and cut back the early flowering clematis as well as digging up a few self self verbena and planting them elsewhere. The clematis had quite a bit of foliage that I have taken some cuttings from, not too good at cuttings but nothing ventured nothing gained as they say 😜 Back indoors at 11 for a coffee that I really fancied, absent kindly made myself tea 🤷‍♀️ Absent minded because I was thinking I must find the cat (Jack) as he has his vaccination this afternoon at 2.30 and I haven’t seen him this morning yet 🙄 Need to give myself plenty of time to locate him or the vet plenty of cancellation notice if I can’t find him 😬

I couldn’t find the cat, not a sign of him and yet he is usually always there when I am gardening or pottering about, it’s like he knew 🙄 I have rebooked the appointment for next week and I will capture him the day before and keep him confined 😂

The weather turned out to be not as bad as I had heard, it was North winds and cold but it has been fine, great for me really because mostly overcast. When I was feeding the torts I spotted some lovely strawberries growing so I grabbed a pot and picked them. Along with others I had already picked I made some jam, Strawberry jam always smells amazing when it’s cooking 🧑‍🍳 I just made two jars both of which will never leave our kitchen as John is a strawberry jamaholic 😜John came home just after lunch, with some flowers I might add, it is our 38th wedding anniversary, after a cuppa he started taking up the broken tiles on the kitchen floor where we had taken out the Rayburn and the cupboard next to it. We managed to find some tiles that are almost identical, not an exact match but it will be difficult to tell the difference unless you know, apart from the fact that the new ones will be a lot cleaner 😂

The new tiles are now down and if you can’t really tell which are the new and which are the old ones so that’s good. The cat still have not a made and appearance at feeding time which is a worry as we have been here before, more than once and nearly always when we have a marauding fox about. They get to an age where they go a bit further around the edge of the paddocks, because they are not big cats, still only a year old and so fairly petite, I am convinced the fox has them, I mean I can’t be sure and I haven’t seen them do it but the cats disappear into thin air when they have been cats that are nearly always around 🙄

Saturday: I have the most ridiculous cough which has kept me awake a lot of the night and consequently I am not Mrs Happy this morning 😬 My sinuses are still playing up that’s the cause and the effect is constant coughing, whenever I sit down or lie down the coughing starts so I just have to be upright most of the day 😜 We started off with all the usual jobs then shot off to get a bit of shopping, stop and Shelley’s for coffee and to sort a couple of bits out then back home to get some work started. Moving the electric fence for the horses was first on the list and then John started digging up docks in the bit they have eaten off. Try the strimmer was my suggestion, it will be quicker, we got it out the line jammed, we took it apart and went back to digging them out because we couldn’t get it back together. I got the antique scythe out, John tells me I am doing it wrong, he has a go and breaks it clean in half, don’t why I bother sometimes, I left him to carry on digging them out with his spade 🙄 he is still digging mid afternoon 😂 Meanwhile I found other jobs to do, take down some bits in the kitchen ready for when John plasters the wall, a picture needed to come down and the ‘Shelia’ I don’t know if that’s the right name it’s what I have always known it as but it is one of those farmhouse airers that go over a fire and it has pulleys to lower it and higher it, anyway it’s down now. Then I went out and had a look at the onions, rather mortifyingly I find they have a ‘miner bug’ ffs, I think it’s allium miner, either way I have to pull them to stop any further damage. I will see what they are like when dried out a bit and see what can be salvaged and how. It means I won’t be able to store them but I will be able to either dehydrate them, freeze them or vacuum and probably a combination. The shallots are also affected though not as much and the garlic is only slightly affected but it has other issues. Where we had so much rain the garlic cloves have begun to grow again before the tops have died off ready for picking 😂 ha you couldn’t make this up, I seriously am considering having a year off veg gardening next year, it is too hit and miss with some things. The good thing is that the red onions I planted in spring seem unaffected, I am not sure if that is because of the colour or because they have not been in long enough to be affected. That is a problem with over wintered veg it has had longer to harbour pests, the struggle is real, oh well there is always next year 🤪

Sunday: An overcast day that, although rain threatened constantly, stayed dry until during the night. I am typing this up Monday morning so I’m a bit late but I actually couldn’t sit down without constant coughing so I spent most of my day up on my feet so give my ribs a rest (they ache like billio from all the coughing) I keep thinking, today it will move on surely, but nope each day here it still is like the unwelcome wasp buzzing round your head. It is getting a little better each day but I still feel thick in the head and sinus, once that goes I shall be fine 🤞

Between us we have grouted some of the floor tiles back in, cut the lawn, dug up docks, picked peas, weeded, hoed and swept the front driveway, investigated a collapsed manhole we found that we had no idea was there, I think it was from the MOD days as it doesn’t appear to be linked to anything current, as well as all the usual jobs that need doing daily.

I have cleared the peas that were growing with the tomatoes in the small tunnel, they worked well as an experiment, I had a good picking of peas shoots initially and then a decent crop of peas after but now they have got leggy and straggly and are blocking light from the tomatoes so it’s time to cut them back. One of two things will happen, they will either die off and release nitrogen into the soil or they will start to grow again, I suspect the latter and I will monitor that to see if I need to take them completely out or leave them for another crop it just depends on how well the tomatoes are getting on at the time.

That’s yesterday in a nutshell really, I still don’t feel well enough to expand on that lol.

Peppers, aubergine, melon, ginger are just some of the fruits beginning to swell in the greenhouse.

Have a good week, hopefully next time you read the blog the cough will have gone 🙄😬

Still no sign of the cat 😢

Friesland Farm

Kind words, the Rayburn is out and Kittens 🐱

Posted on June 7, 2021June 13, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday June 7th 2021: It’s Johns birthday today and he has this week off so naturally I am making him work here 😂 First off we got the morning stuff done and John let out the new batch of hens, they have been in over a week so time for them to explore. Unfortunately although they have plenty of acreage at the back to roam in they decided to come down to the front area 😜 I was not too happy with that as they will soon be scratching about in my new flower beds, we found some stock fence and corralled them back up towards the back and put them fence in place to prevent them coming down again. How long will it be before they find a way I’m not sure but for now they are not being a nuisance. Then John decided he was going to take out the old heating, he was going to wait until tomorrow but changed his mind, that’s why he is working on his birthday, not because I am making him really. He has disconnected the radiators and the heating pipes in the airing cupboard and will wait until tomorrow before draining the hot water cylinder because there is still a full tank that he can use tonight, best not to waste the energy that was used to heat it up 🙄 So from now on we are reliant on electric only, I think I will really miss the Rayburn itself but not the wood cutting, fetching loading and cleaning it out lol. While John was doing all that I was watering and then picking, peas, strawberries and asparagus today, I think that will probably be the last picking of the asparagus now, I wasn’t going to let it go to fern this year but I think it will be better for the health of the plant if I do. Then I went onto do some planting and tidying up in the very front bed just outside the gate, it has a few gaps so I planted some dwarf rudbeckia, chrysanthemums, a pheasant grass and a yellow daisy, should fill it all up nicely. Already growing are delphiniums, foxgloves, sweet peas, jacobs ladder, wall flowers (they have gone over now mind you) dianthus, day lilies and a few other things that escape my memory at the minute. By then it was lunchtime and Shelley and Florence came over with Rosie the rabbit, we had a cuppa and I trimmed Rosies nails, she will probably be coming to live here as she isn’t getting on with the guinea pig, she keeps biting it, they are not happy living together 🙄 We set up a run and had her out on the lawn and she seemed very content in there by herself. Shelley left and it was time for an afternoon sit down, I have bought just a neck massager for John for his birthday as he keeps having a real problem with his shoulder and neck. He has had it checked over by the doctor and had Bowen on it but it still gives him grief so a neck massager might just help.

Johns brother came round to visit just before dinner and then after we had eaten Sue and Shane popped round to say happy birthday on the actual day even though they were round yesterday with the others 😁

Tuesday: The sun gets higher quicker at this time of year so I am having to rush round to get stuff done. This morning was no exception, John did the animals and then went to do a small job he already had booked in, on his way back he is picking up materials to get the airing cupboard changed and sorted. After a quick shower I have been rushing about watering poly tunnels, pots, horses, doing the eggs, washing, sorting out plants and weed killing the side drive where some type 1 to dust has got to go down, can’t put it down with weeds on here or they will just grow through anyway. Quick sit down and an apple before I start again. The washing line is still a dilemma I can’t make a decision to save my life at the minute. It needs to be in the morning sun but by afternoon in the shade so that I can get it in without standing in the full summer sun. I was thinking that most people don’t get it but if you swapped the sun for Covid rays, imagine if they were rays and you had to protect your skin from them, then you might get some idea of what I have to do. Even factor 50 sun block only goes half way to stopping the reaction I get if I am caught out in it for more than five minutes and then add to that the amount of times I have to move around in between shade spots and you kinda of get the picture hopefully. I very rarely have bared skin apart from hands and face, my legs are usually fine, as is my torso and on the whole my arms though they do get affected even with long sleeves, but my hands, face, head and neck are all areas of concern. Ears are particularly difficult, putting sunblock on the ear is fiddly if I miss a bit I end up with itchy spots. Hats are great but in the heat I do end up with a headache from wearing it constantly, the neck cowl I have has been brilliant so far this year as that is a very sensitive area. You can see why in the heat of the day I prefer to be inside, it’s to hot outside with all those clothes on 😂 I really need to start setting the alarm for a lot earlier than 6.30 probably more like 5am, at the height of summer it will be 4am 🙄 just so I can get stuff done outside lol.

We are coming to the end of asparagus season but I did pick some yesterday along with some peas, I didn’t get to use them yesterday what with one thing and another so I am eating them today. I just googled asparagus and peas and a plethora of recipes came up, mostly risotto which I am not keen on. But one recipe caught my eye and that’s what I am making for my lunch, the dressing alone is amazing 🤩 and could easily be used instead of Mayo for potato salad or coleslaw. 1tbls Greek yoghurt, half teaspoon of honey and a teaspoon of mustard plus a squeeze of lemon. I use the Fage 0% so it’s really healthy as well 😁 Then chop the asparagus, and some bread (I just used half a bread roll) coat in a tbls of olive oil and roast in the oven. Hard boil two eggs and when they are all cooked toss in the dressing along with some peas, add a bunch of green salad and voila a seasonal salad. In my case most of it is home produced so that makes me even happier, the whole lot comes in at around 400 calories depending on the various amount you chose to use, I had 1/4 cup peas and 100g asparagus.

Trying to think what I did in the afternoon, pootled about a bit maybe. Although John was supposed to be off he had a job to go and do in the morning, then he came home around 11.30 had a cup of tea and had to go and do another job that he had forgotten he had booked in, it’s no wonder we never get anything finished around here 🙄 Eventually he came home, had a shower to use up the hot water and then drained down the cylinder, we got it out and he had take out some of the pipe work. The airing cupboard needs refitting and boarding out which is what he is doing at the moment (7.30pm) Meanwhile I had to go and feed the hens and collect the eggs, I had to leave it until the heat had gone out of the sun but it was still quite warm. I got the washing in as well which is also in the sun and now my energy levels have dipped quite a bit and I feel lethargic to say the least. It is really rather rotten sometimes I feel quite trapped inside when I really want to be outside.

Oh I remember what took me a while in the afternoon, downloading our coronavirus vaccination status, easy on my phone, not so easy on Johns 😜 And to add to the confusion both the Astra Zeneca and the Pfizer have now had their names changed, when you read it you think, that’s not the jab I had, but it is, they have just changed identity 🤷‍♀️

I put the animals to bed tonight as John was still working, I topped up the waters ready for the morning as I went and I also got Biscuit in from the paddock and put her on restricted grazing again. She does really well, she has had laminitis in the past where she was before but so far since we have had her we have managed to keep it under control. Jack is next for restriction as he is getting a bit fat, he won’t like that but he has no choice if he carries on as he is he will explode lol. I saw a barn owl flying low in the field behind while I was bringing biscuit in 🥰🦉

Wednesday: Lovely day, plenty of sunshine. Kicked of the day with the usual jobs then John got on with the airing cupboard and I went straight outside. I didn’t come back in for breakfast until nearly 10 as I wanted to catch as much shade as possible to get things done. I did get John to help me move the gazebo to an area I wanted to work on that gets the sun pretty quickly. I watered a few things first and the lovely Elodi clematis I planted the other day has been scratched up by something and broken pieces off, I have now covered it with a cloche and taken in the broken bits to see if I can root them in water. After watering one of the first jobs I wanted to get done was the big tunnel, don’t want to be in there once it starts to get hot 🥵 I weeded it all, despite putting down barrier to try and keep them under control they still managed to grow round the edges of the tunnel. And then I sorted out the strawberries, so far I have picked two bowls of them but the wood lice and slugs always manage to ravage them so I have tied the plants up in an effort to lift the berries away from the ground and hopefully that way I will get lots more. I had a few tomato plants that were in there that haven’t been planted, they are still in pots but there is no more room so I decided to plant them outside and if they produce, that’s great and if not it doesn’t matter much. The cucumbers are romping away in the tunnel but the melons are struggling, I need to do a bit of research to see what exactly are the best conditions as I never seem to get much from them. On then to the fruit cage, this is an area where bindweed is prolific, it strangles everything but once it is growing well I just go in and rip it up, it doesn’t stop it, I have tried for years to stop it, but it does knock it back and give the fruit bushes a chance. After that I weeded the broad bean bed and nipped out the tops of the plant, it already is showing signs of blackfly and taking the tops out will also slow the blackfly down so that the plant can do what it is supposed and produce beans. The blackfly is quite bad this year, I have noticed it on lots of things, I intend to blast them off with the hose later this evening. The last job before lunchtime was pricking out foxglove seedlings and potting on some dwarf rudbeckia, most of these will be going into the front beds when they are big enough, might as well fill them with what I have rather than going buying something else 😜 Going round today I have noticed how dry everything is again, we haven’t had rain for a few weeks, we don’t have any forecast for the next couple of weeks and the temps are set to keep climbing, looks like I will be watering a lot 🙄

When Kellee came to visit last week she took some lovely photos of the place, something I never really do and furthermore she wrote something quite lovely about her visit, I know she won’t mind me sharing:

and then there is the flourishing Frieslands Farm which is still in the family, owned, massively improved and tended by Dawn Pearse and her hubby John who have made this place a harmonious, ecologically perfect garden of Eden favouring the natural life cycles of all the creatures! How I thrill every time I witness this beautiful relationship Dawn has with this sacred land. Thank you Dawn. You are such a tremendous inspiration to me and hopefully hundreds of other people who care about the health of our planet. 💚

It was fairly overcast in the afternoon so after lunch and a sit down I was able to get on with some more bits and pieces outside though I can’t remember what lol. In between getting the dinner cooked I watered the front beds as some things are struggling with the dry, a lot of it is fine but recently planted needed a boost. I also planted some more dwarf rudbeckia in the front bed and one or two other things I have been growing on in pots, might as well fill it full, keeps the weeds down. Around 7.30 I went to water the fruit cage, I have a lot in pots, Bush cherry, olive, fig, blueberries and some yellow raspberries, they were all looking dry. I could see some storm clouds on the horizon, I could smell the rain and hear the thunder but I watered anyway, I have been here before where I have left it thinking the storm will come our way but it always goes round. It did spit a little while I was doing it but not much. Then shelley FaceTimed, well Josh actually, to tell me he passed his grading at martial arts 🥰 and it was raining well at her place. That is only a mile or so as the crow flies but as yet we still have not had a decent wetting here 😝 We are quite high up compared to the surrounding area, not high enough to have a magnificent view mind you but about 400m higher, that and the fact that the brook runs round us at a much lower level about 1/2 a mile away seems to be the reason that the weather fronts go around, they follow the lay of the land. So it’s 8.30pm and it looks like I will have to go out and finish doing the watering after all as I can see clear sky on the horizon now, bugger that 🤪

I went out and watered the squash as the rain never made here 🙄

Thursday: The week is whizzing past! Overcast from the start this morning but still warm, typical because today is the day of the partial eclipse but does not look like we will see much due to the amount of cloud cover.

John did the animals and then got on with the airing cupboard, putting it all back in and re fitting the shelves which have all had to be altered. The problem with the cupboard was the dust, because it’s in the boot room the dust seeps into the airing cupboard. Now he has reboarded it all and sealed all the joints so that it hopefully stays dust free, he has had to move the heater switch as well, it was on the inside and difficult to reach, now it’s very accessible outside 😁 I watched him do the copper pipe work last night, brought back plenty of memories of when I would go to work with him at the weekends way before we had children, he is still good at it although as I said to him, I remember when bending the pipe was a lot less effort than it seems now 😂 He has also taken off the ladder rails in the bathroom which were on the wet system, drained them down, cleaned them out and refilled them with thermal oil, they will also now be electric.

Meanwhile I was outside mostly weeding the front beds, I set an alarm on my watch for 11.05 to see if I could see any sign of the eclipse. I have mostly been weeding the ‘weedy’ bed, this one is slowly going how I want it to, it’s mostly a flowering shrub border but has other things that will readily self seed in there too. Love in a mist, poppies, verbena, forget me not, foxglove, sweet woodruff, creeping phlox, the idea is based on woodland really, a garden copse I suppose you might call it and I want it to evolve as naturally as possible. I have taken some photos and you will see that there are big gaps but I am hoping the shrubs will fill these (eventually) and the self setters will fill in the smaller gaps. I don’t want to rush this bed but it does mean I have to weed it all the time until the plants establish well enough, this time next year it should be fairly full.

The other beds also have their own personalities although these I am happy to keep adding to with plants I have grown or ones that take my fancy when I am at the garden centre 😜

This one is a cottage garden bed, full of roses, delphinium, lupin, nepeta, primroses, stocks, chrysanthemum, dahlia, Hardy geranium etc, still work in progress and yet to look at its best but getting there.

The third one which is in front of the building doesn’t really have a character as such but it is becoming a favourite of mine. It is full of spring bulbs which have now mostly gone over and a lot of my favourite plants, salvia, geum, achillea, huechera, aliums, asters. It also has a lot of summer flowering bulbs in plus bedding plants and the forest pansy tree, a mish mash of all things wonderful. Again a lot of this will fill out massively so by the end of the season it will look full and colourful. No doubt there will be things I want to move come autumn but that’s all part of the fun of gardening 🥰

My alarm went off at 11.05 and I stood up to have a look skyward, nothing but clouds so I carried on for another 20 mins. I stood up to stretch and voila a break in the cloud and I could see the eclipse, my phone was on the table by the door so I ran to get it and by the time I had the cloud was back 😂 However there was another tiny break coming up so I waited and…….

……here it is, the partial eclipse of the Sun lol.

I did a bit more weeding before stopping for lunch, I made John a sandwich as well and then Shelley and Florence arrived to help do some gardening. Shelley did some weeding in the fruit cage for me while I introduced Florence to vegetable growing 😁 we looked at the peas, picked a pea pod, opened it and ate them, then we went onto doing the same with the carrots and finally onto the strawberries growing in the tunnel. Florence’s words when she saw them were ‘oh my goodness’ it is fabulous to be able to teach children not only where their food comes from, how it is grown but also how amazing it tastes when it’s freshly picked. If I can pass on just a little bit of knowledge and spark of interest then who knows it may develop into a passion for growing their own 🥰

I seriously can’t say it loud enough or often enough, growing your own fruit, veg, herbs is one of the most rewarding things, the sense of achievement when you taste your first crop of the year never diminishes, not for me at any rate. That first strawberry, tomato, pea, apple, plum, carrot, whatever it is, is pure delight. The wait seems like forever in fact I was thinking the other day that if people even knew how long a crop of something takes to grow they probably wouldn’t waste anything. The onions alone have now been in the ground for about 8 months, they should soon be ready to harvest and dry for storing but don’t waste that half an onion people, use it for something else or chop it and freeze it 😜

John went off at just gone 4 to collect a clothes airer someone is selling for a fiver, bargain. I have one already and have decided that the line can go and will use these outside the back door which gets all the morning sun and then is shady in the afternoon meaning I will be able to get it in without shrivelling up in the blaring rays on blue sky days.

I am thinking I really need to give the house a clean but at the minute the weather is not too bad for me to be outside getting stuff done, at the weekend it looks like wall to wall blue skies again and even warmer so I will wait until then. Besides I have the contents of the airing cupboard stacked around the place at the minute, I need to go through it all. Why do we (I) keep so much, the trouble is I have cushion inserts and covers from the old sofas (approx 12) well they are feather you know and who knows when I might need them 😂 Also some lovely candy stripe flannelette sheets from years ago, why do I still have them, well wouldn’t you keep them if you could 🤣 a BIG stack of tea towels, most of them came from Johns Mums house, all new, I will never have to buy another tea towel for as long as I live but will I live as long as the amount of tea towels I have 🤪 Cleaning cloths, another pile, how many do I need in reality, I am only going to use a maximum of two at any given time I suspect, the other forty are just sat there waiting for their turn 😬 They have all been used at some point, at least I am rotating them I guess. Then there are the weird and wonderful things you keep, tablecloths that hardly ever get used but too good to let go of, cooking aprons of all different types just in case I get flamboyant 🙄 a couple of costumes last used many years ago, one a dramatic Halloween queen type affair (yes I did wear that) and one is an authentic, vintage Austrian costume that belonged to Johns Mum, she gave me it many years ago and there is not a hope in hell that my matronly bust will ever, ever fit into the tiny blouse, but what do I do with it 🤷‍♀️ And then there is the bedding, duvet cover sets, as Shelley said earlier today, do we hold on to them in case we crap the bed, not once or twice but three times or more one night 😱 We might need those extra four sets over and above the two we use on a regular basis, you never know 😝 How many hot water bottles 😮well one less now as that made a ‘crispy’ noise when I moved it so that can go in the bin. Then there are the single muslin sheets 🤔 at some point in the past they have been beautifully darned, not by me I can tell you, but you don’t see those anymore so I had better keep them, a double, white cotton sheet, well you never know when you will need a ghost costume do you! Two sleeping bags, a relic of the children’s sleepover days I assume, can’t see we will be needing those anytime soon, we prefer five star these days, but they may come in handy 🤣 The mysteries of the (my) airing cupboard, I reckon I could write a book on the contents therein! I have actually made a start on clearing out, no honestly I have, I have a small pile of ‘rag bin’ stuff mostly old tea towels and cleaning cloths, that’s it so far oh and the crispy hot water bottle 😬 oh and a pile of tea towels in the washing machine to go to the charity shop (depending on how good they look when they are dry) Is there a name for the condition ‘you never know when that will come in useful’ 😖

Friday: Omg what a day 😬 After all the usual jobs I began to put all the contents of the airing cupboard back where it belongs, that was relatively easy, there is more space than before and I have got a ‘pile to go’ 😁 While I was doing that John started on decommissioning the Rayburn ready to get it out, well that has taken us nearly all day what with one thing and another. First up was disconnecting the pipes, easy, then onto taking off the tiles on the wall so that they didn’t fall off and damage the Rayburn, fairly easy as many had come loose from the heat anyway. Then onto getting the flue down, hmmm not so easy, in fact hours of pushing, pulling, heaving, tooing and froing, sawing and unscrewing, plus a bit of brute force, it was inside a fireproof box which John built and let’s just say he used the belt and braces method when he built it. After a good few hours, filthy dirty hands, getting hit on the head by debris and soot, some swearing and some tetchy moments, we finally got it out and cleared the boxing. Then It was onto trying to heave the 340kg cooker onto rollers in order to move it into the boot room where it is currently sat. Finally we got that done, tidied away, filled the skip with the rubbish, John wanted to make a cuppa and sit down and I said, just one more job lol. I have a pine cabinet I wanted to put in place of the Rayburn so we got that in, cleaned it and put it in place. We have parts of the tiled fooor missing and a chunk of the ceiling missing, a battered plasterboard bit of wall is visible but the job is a good un. Now we just need to sell the Rayburn. I have ordered new tiles for the floor, luckily they still do them but I think it will be a while before it is all ‘made good’ 🙄

We went round to see Shelley, Martin and the children in the evening.

Saturday: Looks like it is going to be warm today and getting warmer everyday through to Wednesday. Got all the usual jobs sorted first thing as well as cleaning out the Guineas and then onto sorting out the back area. This is where my store room will go, it is on the North facing side of the building so it’s ideal for keeping cool, John will build it out of ply but the concrete floor will stay as that will help to keep the temperature down in the summer months. There is a lot of tidying and sorting out to do, we plan to only have one chest freezer instead of two, using the store room will mean I can keep root veg, onions, garlic and squash without having to freeze any of it, so one freezer should be fine 🙃

That and a quick pop to the shop took up most of our day. Around 5pm I noticed some tiny meewing noises in the boot room, what I haven’t told you before now is that Jill the cat is pregnant. I knew she was getting near time and so when we sorted the airing cupboard we also rearranged an area in the boot room to put a bed up higher in the hopes she would have them there and she did 😁 The last lot of kittens we had a few years back we’re born in the stable roof which was very difficult lol, we were afraid they were going to fall down between the walls and get stuck, so this is a result. She has had four beautiful tabby kittens, two are grey tabby 🥰 It is very difficult to find genuine farm kittens these days, ones that are bred to live outside the home, are comfortable in a farm/rural environment and are good at their job. Our two came from a farm, taught to mouse by their mother and they are very good at it which is what farms and smallholders need. They don’t need cats that have come from sleeping on the bed or the sofa and are used to being stroked all day long 😂 That’s not to say that they can’t go on to be domestic petted cats just that if they learn their craft first they will be better farm cats.

Sunday: I was up early, the sun was shinning in through the curtains and so I got up around 5.30, did some watering and sat with a cuppa in the early morning sun, bliss. We are off out for an early breakfast this morning which I am looking forward to.

Lovely breakfast out and then a mooch round the garden centre, got back around 11 and pretty much did nothing the rest of the day until about 4 as it was too bloody hot 🥵 John fed the birds and I sorted the eggs and then we went round to see Sam and family who had been away for the week on holiday.

Got back had a quick bite to eat and then began a mammoth watering session which lasted until 8.30 😬 I said to John that I’m sure when I first started this, nearly 12 years ago, I didn’t have to water like I do now 🤷‍♀️ The heat from the sun seems more relentless during the day than ever before, the things I planted back in autumn and early spring are mostly fine but anything that has been planted recently needs constant watering just to keep it going 🙄

I have written this before and I’m sure I will again but everyday is a school day and if you haven’t learnt something by accident that day then find something to learn, it’s good for you. Back to today’s lesson, as Gardeners we tend to learn from the experts, watching programmes, reading about things but sometimes it’s a good idea to jump track and listen to the amateurs. I have begun to follow a few people who are not trained Gardeners’ or horticulturists but regular people who have gardened for a long time. Strawberries, we are taught, do not ripen off the plant, wrong says one chap who daily picks his strawberries (many kgs) when they only have a touch of colour on them and ripens them in the dark. This is very exciting to hear because when you wait for them to ripen, so is everything else and by that I mean slugs, wood lice, birds so you only get a small percentage of your crop. Today I have picked mine twice, once this morning and once this evening, they are sat on the side in a tub under a cloth and hopefully by morning they will be ripe. If this works, this is another game changer just like the other game changers I learnt, also from amateur Gardeners. I will let you know how it goes, or try it yourself and see what happens.

That’s it for this week, I am pooped, it is muggy, gonna be a horrible muggy night, oh joy 🤪

Friesland Farm

Spring Bank Holiday 😁 glorious sunsets & the first peas.

Posted on June 3, 2021June 6, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 31st May 2021: Bank Holiday Monday, Sam and Luke are coming over today, Luke is helping John with a few things round the farm that he can’t do by himself including taking down the ash tree in the garden next to the greenhouse 🙄 I was going to do a roast but it was forecast to be quite hot so we scrapped that idea, we do t really do bbq, neither of us like standing there cooking over hot coals when it’s hot 🥵 so we are having a picnic in style. I cooked a leg of lamb in the slow cooker overnight we will have that cold in rolls along with various salads including an aubergine and chickepea salad which I have prepped this morning. Great use of that aubergine I was given, cut into thick slices, brush with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper and grill, then do the same to the other side. Meanwhile rinsed a can of chickpeas, make a dressing from paprika, honey, olive oil and lemon juice, chop up some onion, I used spring onions but any will do, chop some coriander, mix all together and add the quartered aubergine slices, mix again, enjoy.

Before prepping food I went out and picked purple sprouting and a few asparagus spears that were long enough, John did the morning feeding and letting out before creosoting some rails. I am not too happy about creosoting these days but the preservative they use these days is awful and the wood does not last more than a couple of years. When you pay a lot of money for the fencing you really want it to last as long as possible. Some of our boundary fences are original and they would have been put up in the seventies, ore soaked in old oil, bad I know but that’s what they did then and they do last a very, very long time because of it.

This years bank holiday is definitely going to be a ‘spring’ for everyone, last year we were locked down, this year we have a lot more freedom and I am sure people will be taking full advantage of it 🥰 I just heard that next year we will have a four day spring holiday to celebrate 70 years since the ascension to the throne of our Queen, big parties will be planned all over the country I think.

Well what a fabulous day we have had today, Luke came over and got some welding done and then moved onto cutting down the ash tree. Shelley, Josh and Flo popped in and helped to load the trailer and had a ride in it. They left then Sam arrived with the children, I was getting lunch ready when Charlie and Macca also popped in, together with my sister who was working on the caravan we all sat and had a lovely lunch in the garden. Sue went back to the caravan work, John and Luke carried on cutting the trunk up, Sam filled up a washing bowl with water for the kids to play in and I remembered we had a paddling pool from last year so we got that out, the kids stripped off and played the rest of the afternoon in there 🥰 Lovely day indeed, we are now knackered 😂

But it doesn’t end there for us lol, even if we are knackered there is still the afternoon jobs to get done, some tidying up left to do, a quick bite to eat and then out in fox patrol for the evening. Usually I do the watering in the greenhouse and tunnels, plus the newly planted veg. John wanders round checking on everything and then eventually we can get the birds into bed and relax. Tonight I have set up the wildlife camera to see if I can capture and footage of anything 👀 it will be interesting viewing in the morning hopefully.

Oh my feet hurt 🦶

Tuesday: Another lovely day, I was up with the early alarm even though we didn’t need to be as John is off today, still I find it’s easier to get on in the cooler mornings than later in the day. I started off indoors though as I wanted to get the boot room hoovered, the dust and debris on the floor was getting a bit much. Put some washing on and then outside, do the egg shed, water the plants in pots out there then onto some early morning weeding, hang the washing out at one point, prick out some foxglove seedlings etc etc. Once the heat gets up and the sun gets round I generally give up usually around lunchtime and besides I have work to do later in the day so I need some down time as well. Shelley came over with Josh and Flo at lunchtime, they bought lunch with them and then played in the garden for a few hours. We played a board game and then with the bubbles and then onto some drawing, they can’t use the garden at home at the minute as they are having building work done lol. All the while John was busy sorting out scrap ready to take to the scrapyard for weighing in. When he got back he came and sat in the garden with us all.

We had a rest in the cool in the afternoon before commencing with the afternoon jobs around 5, a quick bite to eat and some paperwork and then I went out to do some watering, the greenhouse, the tunnels, the newly planted squash, bean and sweetcorn plants. I then got some more straw and filled up the trial potato beds, I am not sure how this is going to work out, so far I’m not convinced but time will tell. One mistake I made was writing on the wooden surround the names of the potatoes, well that has all but washed off in the rain so it’s guess the variety time 😜 Last job of the day was to go and water the squash in the ménage, John did it last night for me but I think he missed a few 😂 not surprising really as he wouldn’t know what they look like anyway. One thing to note is that the plants I actually planted have faired a lot better than the ones I sank in pots so I may go and plant those properly tomorrow. Something has been digging near them again though none have been damaged so far.

It’s just gone 9pm, I have just come in to write this and John is still out of fox watch and putting to bed duties.

I have been trying to find an answer to a question I have about the hazel trees, at this time of year the leaves are sticky (if you walk, under a low branch it gets in your hair) I assume it is honeydew, everything I Google tells me it’s honeydew. Honeydew is caused by insect infestation of one sort or another and supposedly it’s not good for the tree, but and it’s quite a but, we have this every year and every year we still get a fantastic haul of Hazel’s and the trees are in great condition. Other observations over time include the amount bees that are attracted to the trees presumably because of the honey dew and birds that are attracted to them because of the insects. So my question was, is this a natural secretion? I can’t see any sign of infestations and the whole thing seems to be beneficial rather than detrimental. One year I actually thought there was a swarm there was such a hum but it was a lot of individual bees feeding 🙄 Is this natural, I mean, Google doesn’t know everything does it 😂 maybe it’s a long forgotten occurrence 🤷‍♀️ If you know then do tell me.

Wednesday: Oosh it’s warm today touching 26c, muggy with it and thunderstorms are forecast later. That will be good as I won’t have to do any watering. Apart from the basics we have both had the day off today, we got up early got jobs done and then went out before it got too warm. We had breakfast out and I bought a couple of plants, had a wander about before setting off back home. On the way back we called into a local village recreation ground where Shelley, Flo and Josh were having cake at the cafe. When we got home it was lovely and cool indoors, it’s like we have air conditioning 😂 nice when it’s so hot outside. Early afternoon we went off to another local park where Shelley, Sam and all the kids were meeting up for lunch and a play together, we played for a short while before leaving them to it and coming back home again.

The weather was really oppressive, enough to cause a headache or maybe it’s just me 🤪 We had the tiniest rain shower and then it stopped, I’m hoping we get a bit more overnight.

While I was out watering the plants that are out for sale I noticed the apple tree has powdery mildew 😖 there is always something 🙄 It is a combination of things that has caused it, firstly the mild winter hasn’t done any good because pests and disease haven’t died off. I know it was a long winter but it wasn’t that cold, secondly we had all that rain, again not the best conditions and thirdly we didn’t prune it back when we should have done which means the growth it a bit thick and the air can’t flow as it should, resulting in powdery mildew this time. I have pruned off the worst of it, the tree is huge and luckily most of it is near the bottom so I have done what I can for now. I need to spray it and I will either use milk which apparently works well or neem oil, I have both so a case of deciding which I think will be better 🤷‍♀️ I can’t spray the whole tree obviously but I can spray some of it and hope for the best.

John thinks we have lost a few more hens, seriously I am at the point where I wonder, what is the point.

Thursday: John is having a week off this week BUT it was Bank Holiday on the Monday, today he has gone to work for the whole day and tomorrow he is working the whole day and Tuesday he spent sorting out plumbing stuff, great week off!

He did the morning rounds before leaving and then it’s me on me tod so I sorted out washing to put on, the eggs to put out and then go some bread on the go.

While I was waiting for the bread to go through the two proves I did a bit of hoeing in the front beds and planted the two new plants I bought. One is a ground cover clematis which should look amazing once it gets going the other is a gorgeous low growing pink flowering shrub that the bees are already feeding on. Back indoors to decide on what will be for dinner this evening.

The bread is now baked and meanwhile I have been making a Moroccan rice salad to go with my lamb chop later, ordering a birthday present for John, his birthday is on Monday and organising a gathering for Sunday. Luckily we have plenty of room here for 30 plus other paddocks which could technically hold 30 more each 😜 We have a big family, if we all get together (which is rare) there are 60 of us 🤪 that is just Mum and Ken, their children (me included) their grandchildren and their great grandchildren, most of us live close by and so we see each other all the time especially birthdays 😂

I went out to the greenhouse mid morning, it’s overcast but warm today with the occasional peek of the sun. I potted on two tomato plants which I will grow on in the greenhouse, I have a bit of everything everywhere this year, I am hoping to find out which is the best place to grown certain things. Normally all the tomatoes go in the tunnels and one or two outside but leaving some in the greenhouse will give me an idea of if that is also any good for them or if it is too hot. The peppers and chilli love it in there, I think tomatoes might struggle a bit but we will see. I also planted out two more courgette plants and then some climbing French beans, nearly finished with the planting now. I do have two more small trays of runner beans though, no idea what I will do with them 🙄 I will keep them going just in case any that are planted out fail I think. I just have a few more squash to plant out once they have hardened off, crown Prince which are the lovely blue pumpkins and a couple of spaghetti squash and butternut squash, one table king and the musque de something or other 🤷‍♀️ that’s it for planting out then, but there will still be work to do. The purple sprouting is coming to an end, John and I had it the other night and the stems are getting a little bit too stringy for eating. The rest of the plant will feed the Guineas so no waste there, one I will leave to go to seed and collect that ready to sow some more for next year. It is such a useful crop to have when there is nothing else around even though it takes forever to mature. The ground it is on I will clear and leave to recover, I will probably put some home made compost on there and then cover it. I have been growing in that ground continuously for three years I think so it needs rest and rejuvenation. I dug up a mini kiwi that has tried twice to come into leaf in the garden but each time the frost has got it, I will pot it up and see if I can rescue it and then overwinter it in the tunnel before putting outside next spring well after the frosts have gone.

I picked some asparagus spears in the afternoon, I had spotted them earlier when I was planting courgettes and thought, I need to pick those. They grow at a great rate of knots and if you miss them they become a fern, we also have asparagus beetle here and so picking the spears is a good way to knock back the numbers. The beetles lay little tiny eggs on the spear stems but they can easily be wiped off with your finger, no harm done, to the asparagus at any rate 🙄 I dug up a few leeks earlier, they have been in the ground all year and need to come out before they spoil. I often use leeks in place of onion, no point going to buy onions when I have leeks to use up. On the side in the kitchen I now have leeks, asparagus, rhubarb, lettuce and the acquired butternut squash, I need to figure out what I am going to do with it all. I think the asparagus will be a side dish for dinner later, I may cook it and stir it into my rice dish while John can have it with his chop and potatoes. The lettuce can go into salad which I will have with the rice and a chop, I can also use some more of the peppers I also acquired, that leaves the rhubarb the leeks and the squash to sort out.

I thought I would take a quick look in the small tunnel to see if any peas were ready, yes they were 😁 so John will have asparagus and peas with his dinner tonight. Peas need picking regularly, they will then produce more peas, if you don’t pick them they think their job is done 🙄 The pea pod is the seed for next years plants after all and once they have successfully produced some pods they don’t need to do anymore, as a grower (and avid pea eater) we trick the plant into making more by taking the ones they have already produced, damn and blast it they think, I will have to produce more flowers now and ultimately more pea pods 😂 This applies to a lot of veg, take away this years seed and it will do its upmost to produce more, good eh, well for us anyway.

A bit of a sit down after dinner and then I went out to potter around in the garden and do a bit of watering in the tunnels. I also watered the fruit cage, well the fruit in pots anyway. It keeps trying to rain but never really amounts to much. I took a few lavender cuttings while I was out there, I will take a few every now and again and see if they amount to anything. The setting sun was glorious tonight, it bathed the next field in a golden glow, it bathed everything it touched in a warm golden glow it was a sight to behold. How lucky are we to see that on a regular basis 🥰

Friday: Not a bad day again, overcast but warm most of the day. I started off doing the usual bits in doors, loading the egg shed for the day, watering the squash plants, making sure the horses had plenty of water and potting up some more lemon grass seedlings. I also watered a few of the things that have been recently planted just to keep them going, not rain forecast for a while yet. Then I had a quick half hour catch up with a friend over from the US before Shelley came to pick me up to go out for lunch. We went to Bourton on the Water, it was packed, Shelley said on the way there, it will be nice to see the place without hundreds of tourists 🤣 I have never seen it so busy, it’s one of those places we take for granted, we have always visited there right from when I was a child as my Aunt and cousins lived there, I guess you forget it is a tourist destination. We had a lovely lunch and then a wander round and an ice cream before heading for home again. Luckily for me it was overcast, a nice change to walk round without shade searching for once. When I got back I had to reload the egg shed, it had been busy while I was away and almost empty.

Saturday: Another wall to wall blue sky day 😜 I wanted to get some food shopping done as early as possible this morning so by 8.30 we were off to the shops, I am going to do a cold buffet for any family that want to come over tomorrow afternoon. It will be one of a very few times we have had the opportunity to do this at all in a year, looking forward to it.

Although it didn’t take long to get the shopping I am always aware that the temperature is going up and the sun is getting higher giving me less time to get stuff done outside in the garden. So after putting the shopping away it was straight outside to get on, a bit of watering, some potting on, John cut the lawn and suddenly I’m out of shade and so I have to come inside 🙄 I could move the gazebo but it’s already to hot for me to be out there moving stuff around, sometimes it’s just the moving between shade areas that I can feel the sun prickling my skin, nightmare really, John said I need an indoor job but I like being outside 😂

We are all waiting to see what is going to happen on June 21st, it’s supposed to be the end of all restrictions but I don’t think that will be the case. For us it’s fine as it is at the minute, we feel that we have all the freedoms we need, we can go places, see people and do the things we like doing. I feel that at some point we have just got to learn to live with the virus being around, if when the majority of people have been vaccinated we still can’t have total freedom then what is the point of vaccinating 🤷‍♀️

I put some lemon grass plants out for sale, not sure if they will sell or not, it’s not something people commonly use unless they do a fair bit of Asian cooking. But it is a beautiful grass in its own right and has an amazing smell to boot so what’s not to like. Lemongrass is a powerful antioxidant and anti inflammatory, it would make a great lemon tea, it would also flavour vodka nicely I imagine, refreshing at any rate. I was surprised at how well it grew the first time I tried growing it but it does need to be brought in over the colder months.

It is so peaceful here today totally blissful. I think having spent last summer lockdown and not much interaction the rest of the year I have forgotten how noisy places can get. Yesterday was busy and consequently noisy, today in the shop it was noisy and here all I can really hear is nature, birds mostly. Starting to go out in the world again a bit makes me thankful that we live where we do, not sure why we would ever want to go anywhere else to be honest lol.

We lost more chickens today while we were putting the shopping away this morning I think, the birds were making a noise but I thought it was because we had let the dogs back out but then we found a pile of feathers a bit later on.

Sunday: Overcast today and the threat of rain later in the afternoon, bloody typical, when you want it, it’s nowhere to be seen, when you don’t want it, whoosh he it comes 😂 We got the morning jobs done and then I spent a couple of hours, picking, watering, weeding, hoeing and at the same time diving in and out of the kitchen cooking food for later on. Meanwhile John was burning, staining, tidying, and then came round to help me edge the lawn and tidy that up. Then indoors for a rest before I start sorting out food and drink for 3pm, I already got a head start by slow cooking the lamb overnight again, it was delicious last time so may as well do it again.

June is a fabulous month in both the flower garden and the veg garden, the flowers are beginning to bloom so we have nice splashes of colour everywhere this month. The veg will slowly start to come on a s by the end of the month we should be picking a selection of peas and beans plus the onions and garlic will be ready to harvest, dry and store. One of the best things in June is elderflower, the wonderful heady smell on a sunny day is a joy, taking those heads and making cordial is a delightful treat, the taste of summer is around the corner.

Friesland Farm

Herbs, Hazel Hedges & Hens

Posted on May 30, 2021 by

Monday 24th May 2021: Starting the week after being out last night and a beer sounds like a recipe for disaster luckily it was at The Harry Potter Studios and it was Butterbeer 😁 so I am ok this morning 😂 All I can say was it is epic! I didn’t really know what to expect and it exceeded expectations by a mile, just realising the amount of work and talent that went into producing these films is mind blowing, the detail and the scale is incredible. As for the physical side of the the road trip all I can say is 😳 The traffic was so heavy it took us and hour and a half to get to stokenchurch (which normally would be approx 40 mins) let alone the rest of the way to Watford. Coming back at 10 was even worse but not because of the traffic this time, it was the horrendous rain, seriously it was like driving in a monsoon!

This morning started off with the sun shinning in through the window but that soon disappeared, from the looks of the forecast this should be the last day of crap weather. I think the jet stream is on the shift finally, for two months now I have been thinking, along with everyone else I’m sure, it will be better next week, next week arrives and nope it is no better and sometimes worse lol.

John had his 2nd vaccine on Friday and has not had any side affects this time round which is good. In my opinion vaccines are the only way out of this and if you are a non vaccine person well that’s your choice as well, historically though vaccines are what safeguard the population, I doubt there would be many people walking round on this planet without modern medicine and I for one am very grateful.

I think it was last Monday that I was deciding between baking and housework, well I chose baking last time so I figured I’d better do housework this time. Hoovering, cleaning, polishing, in the hopes that as the week progresses the weather will get better and more time will be spent outside 🙄

One of my aims this year is to have much more dried produce, I want to rely less on the freezer to be able to keep the produce I grow throughout the year. Obviously jams, chutneys and fermenting are one way along with bottling (canning) but drying is also a method that is underused, by me at least. So today I picked some herbs to get started, I want create mixes as well as individual dried herbs, an Italian mix being the most useful to me alongside the traditional mix that you would use for stews and casseroles. I also am going to aim to create dried veg stock mixes, I think meat ones might be a bit too far but you never know. I began with the picking, actually I began last week with cleaning the dehydrator, and once the herbs were picked it it just a case of arranging them on the different shelves and turning it on. I will give you a quick overview of dos and dont’s just in case you want to have a go : Do pick your herbs before they start to flower, this is when they are at their best. Ideally dry the same herb on all the racks but if you don’t have enough to do that you can dry mixed batches. This has a couple of minor problems, the thickness of each herb is different so the drying times will be different. I generally put the thicker stalked of leaved herbs near the bottom and the finer ones at the top, that way they will hopefully all finish at the same time and you won’t have to waste electric on empty racks. The main thing to remember is that herbs all look similar when they are dry and green 🙄 so do try to remember what went in which rack (write a list to remind you) also as they dry they get very small, teeny tiny some of them, if they fall through the gaps they will fall onto the next layer of herbs. If you don’t mind then that’s fine but if you wanted a pure blend then it will matter. You don’t have to use a dehydrator of course, you can use a very low oven or you can hang to dry, the problem with hanging is dust, it gets everywhere and it will get on your drying herbs lol. I intend to pot them all up separately to begin with until I have enough of what I want and then I will blend them accordingly. By the way, what looks like a huge bunch when you pick it will probably only fill a tablespoon or two when it’s dry so if you want a lot then pick a lot! This morning I have picked, lovage, fennel, oregano, chive and parsley to get going with. I mentioned the Italian mix I want to make but also I think something like dill with dried lemon zest and black pepper will make an excellent mix for chicken, fish or pasta. The vegetable stock mix can be an assortment of whatever you have, just make sure that the pieces are all roughly the same size for drying. I am thinking, onion, celery, carrot, leek, garlic to start with and whatever is to hand maybe sweet potato, turnip, parsnip. Once they are dried they get whizzed in the processor and they will be ready to put in a jar and store, you can add salt and pepper or even chilli flakes if you want, just go for it and experiment. All of these things can also be dried separated of course, you would be surprised how handy a jar of celery or onion powder is and I will be making mushroom powder again this year as a flavour enhancer. The dried herb world is my oyster 😁

Drying herbs, a word of caution, make a note of what is on which tray, once dried they can all just look like dried green stuff 😜

Made some rhubarb and orange jam in the afternoon, the rain showers just keep appearing and it’s a tad cold out there, ridiculous for the end of May.

We lit the Rayburn again the other day when it rained all day long but I can’t ever remember having it going this late in the year before. We are at the stage when, if I light it the house gets way to hot but without it the house is a tad cold and feels damp in this weather. We do have the radiators in four rooms now but I don’t really want to be turning them on 😂 they are set low at around 16/17c so if it gets too cold they kick in but at this time of year, seriously 😐

It was my one of my brother in laws birthdays today so we went round saw a few other family members and had the best laughs, so good to be able to get back to some kind of normal and enjoy ourselves again.

Tuesday: I started prepping for this mornings main activity yesterday afternoon. Out of the freezer I got a lamb shank, two packs of chicken thighs, minced beef and a lump which I thought was stewing beef and luckily it was. Overnight I cooked the lamb shank in the slow cooker while everything else defrosted and so this morning I have been batch cooking. I fried off a large pan of onions, garlic and celery first and then got organised with various dinners a ready for the freezer. I am waiting for some to finish and one lot will be in the slow cooker again today but so far I have four shepherds pies, three lamb and sweet potato curries, three chicken casseroles and two chicken in lemon and garlic plus probably four or five portions of slow cooked beef stew as well as a lamb casserole for Johns dinner tonight. 18 meals all cooked and ready to freeze which will save me a lot of time over the summer months, I have used up bits from the freezer such as turnip, swede and spinach as well as pulled a few leeks from the garden and I have used some of my freshly dried herbs, I could have used fresh but I wanted to try them out. It will save cooking time and it will mean that I have something I like as well, normally I just cook and eat what John likes to save time. I realised while I was cooking that I am going to need a lidded casserole pan suitable for the hob, this will be useful because it means I don’t have to turn the whole oven on just to do Johns dinner, it can be done on the hob which is more energy efficient. I am aiming for efficiency, not because I have to but because I want to for the sake of the planet and our bank balance 😜 I use the foil dishes with the cardboard lids but I also have small plastic containers with lids, it’s a toss up really over which is better for the planet. The plastic ones can be used over and over again but they are plastic and they can get fragile in the freezer. The foil and cardboard ones are one use and so less cost effective but recyclable and in that respect better for the planet. I haven’t really come across a complete answer yet, obviously the best thing would be not use freeze anything and use everything fresh but that is a tall order in today’s busy life. Once I have used up the freezer contents in one freezer the plan is just to have a single freezer. Until now we have run two large chest freezers but we no longer have the need, we don’t rear our own meat much any more and I plan on being able to store anything I can in the store room that is yet to be built. Mostly for me this is an exercise in ‘let’s see what is possible’ let’s see how much I can preserve/store without the aid of electric and always in the back of my mind is the rest of that sentence ‘because one day we might need to’ 🤔 Never say it will never happen, this last year should have taught us that much at least.

Yesterday was the first day of the Hazel, trees have important roles in ‘lore’ of all kinds, country, Norse, Celtic, pagan, Druid to name a few. The Hazel is no exception, it is a sacred tree, divining rods are often made of hazel, it is a tree of protection from all manner of things, a tree that is a gateway to spring and the bounty it’s brings with it including birth, plenty of catkins, plenty of prams was a well known country saying until a few decades ago 😁

Popped over to see Charlie and Macca in the evening and when we got back at 9pm the first thing we heard when we got out of the car was a fox calling. John said he heard it last night as well so good job we came home well before dark and shut the hens in.

Wednesday: The sun made an early appearance this morning, 4.50 I woke up thinking it must be later and the daylight was already streaming in through the curtains. Although the sun continued to make itself seen there was a lot of cloud as well which lowered the temperature at times. After doing the eggs, dogs, cats, milk bottles, breakfast, shower, stretching exercises, I went straight out to get something done in the garden. To be honest it’s overwhelming, it’s like a jungle out there and I really had no idea where to start, but start I needed to so I picked watering the tunnels first. Then I went onto covering a large bit of weedy soil that is behind the big tunnel, I have used weed membrane and pegged it down. This will kill off the weeds and keep them controlled until I get round to planting it up. Then onto weeding the beetroot and swede rows, actually I ended up just pulling off the tops as there are so many, I am really trying to just slow them down until I have time to get on there for a good hour or more. Sam arrived with the twins mid morning, she has no electric today due to some work in the village and it’s not much fun without electric all day and two toddlers. Shelley came over with Florence after lunch and we all went for a walk along the local lane. George was fascinated by a spider he found on the ground and trying to jump in puddles, Lucy and Florence were happy running along picking flowers (dandelions) and looking at the horses and sheep. I know there is a whole gender neutral movement but the difference is something that is within some children quite naturally and that shouldn’t be neutralised for the sake of over thinking or over compensation which is what happens in some society circles today in my opinion 🙄 They can be whatever they want to be but let them be what they want not what society thinks they should want. I am quite glad I never grew up with all the pressures that the media (in all forms) force upon today’s parents, I am glad that rightly or wrongly, I knew my own mind and I wasn’t reduced to a gibbering wreck when trying to make parental decisions, even if I say so myself my girls turned out to be amazing adults so I must have done something right 🥰

I did a bit of weeding before dinner, the peas needed doing (as does everything else really) and then after dinner I walked over the lawn and decided it was dry enough to cut. No mow May was almost achieved but really the lawn has got way too long and besides we are only a few days off 😜 I cut half of it and John cut the other half, Sod’s law the sun came out full on and we were sweating buckets trying to mow foot tall grass! The weather as always is unreliably British, half the day I felt cold especially when the sun went behind the clouds, the second half I was boiling trying to work in the evening sun 🌞 Not complaining though it’s nice to see it and we are getting more as the week goes on, but then……..there is another cold front plunging in from Scandinavia according to the long range forecast, goodness knows what weather June is going to bring us and I still haven’t got some of the veg planted up yet.

Thursday: Oh what a lovely morning, wall to wall blue skies first thing and warm sunshine 🌞 John had a couple of hours work to do after he had done the birds and I went almost straight out into the garden. First off I have covered some more bare soil with weed membrane, I intend to plant the sweetcorn there but until I do I don’t want hundreds of weeds popping up all over the place. I watered the plants in the greenhouse hopefully they will get some warmth today and shoot up a bit more, it mostly peppers, chillies and aubergine left in there apart from some smaller squash plants that are just coming on. Then I opened a package that had arrived about four weeks ago and I hadn’t had chance to use it but oh my it’s a game changer for me. I don’t know why I didn’t buy one years ago, it’s a UV pop up gazebo and today I have spent 3 hours on my hands and knees weeding in the sunshine and get this bit, in a short sleeve t-shirt which is unheard of! I had the best three hours lol, the only problem with it is that I can’t easily move it to a new area by myself, today John was around but in future I will need to plan a lot better to maximise the use I can get out of it.

I spent the three hours weeding the asparagus bed which is also interplanted with strawberries, three rhubarb plants grown at the end of the bed and the herb area is at the top. The weeds are insane , the constant rain didn’t slow their growth at all so it was good to be able to get down and really clear them out. The strawberries that grow there probably won’t get harvested, I have other beds in the fruit cage that shouldn’t get eaten but these are out in the open and it won’t take the blackbirds long to figure out they are there. At least I can see where the asparagus is growing now I have thinned it all out a bit, it was like looking for needles in a haystack before.

At 2pm we had a delivery of POL hens, most of these are our own new stock but there are 20 that have been pre ordered by customers. John dealt with the unloading of those and the feed delivery and around 2.30 I came in to get some lunch. We have the twins today while Mia goes to her swimming lesson and I have a massage booked early evening so I needed to eat before chaos ensues 😂

The twins came, we played a little bit and then it was ‘unch unch’ after that we went outside to feed the torts and play in the sunshine. Sam dropped me off for my massage on their way back home.

Friday: Dull today, no sun, but the temperature is just fine 😁 I stripped the bed and put that onto wash, went out an freshened up the roadside egg board and then into the garden where I have spent the rest of the morning. Finally getting somewhere with the veg planting, I have sown all the sweetcorn, I kept a few back in case of losses. They have been sown in a block because they are wind pollinated and I have cut into the weed membrane to plant them as this bed is tricky, very heavy clay and very weedy. I am doing all I can to minimise the weeding and enable me to concentrate on the growing and harvesting when the time comes. I covered them in environmesh because animals and birds like to eat young corn greenery 🙄 After that I had a search to find something for a hack I had seen on you tube, this again is a game changer for me. The plastic weed membrane is awful, but I already have it so don’t want to waste it, when the wind gets under it shredding occurs, I have pegged it down with the raw ends tucked under so this doesn’t happen and then implemented my hack for planting. You use a weed wand or similar burner, find a metal circle though you can use a wooden template, I used a cylinder spanner, the diameter is about 6” then place it on the membrane and use the burner to burn a hole. This is hugely effective because the heat seals the edges of the circle so no shredding 😁 and a lovely little circle to dig and plant into, the membrane stays in place to keep the weeds down and again it’s hugely time saving. I have planted dwarf French beans the other end of the sweetcorn bed and butter nut squash and spaghetti squash behind the big tunnel. I also planted banana squash with the French beans as they can ramble on the ground through the beans and sweetcorn, also a couple planted near the runner beans, making full use of all the space available. I planted some courgettes near the rhubarb bed and I still have more of those to go in as well as more dwarf French beans but they are not big enough yet. So as it stands I have most things planted, I just need to get the hundreds of pumpkin and other squash plants in the ménage and the remaining courgettes in the garden once they are big enough to transplant. Feet hurt now so time for lunch.

John came home just as I was hoovering mid afternoon, at least I wasn’t sat down 😉 he was waiting for a floor to go down before going back to he job to put the toilet in, we had a cuppa and then Shelley and Flo came, they were going to help in the garden but it had started spitting with rain by then. John went back off to work, Shelley went to collect Josh from school and I went outside to water the small tunnel and then did a bit of weeding. I came in and re made the bed before going out to do the egg collecting as John will be late back. It has tried to rain on and off but not really amounted to much at all.

There is talk about June 21st and if the full reopen will go ahead or not 🙄 the Indian variant is transmitting at a rate of knots but the vaccine programme is also romping along its a race between the two at the minute. Mostly it feels as though everything is pretty much getting back to normal, it would be hard if we had to go back a step now, I have booked a couple of days out and a hair cut plus we have a holiday booked along with most of the rest of the country. We are looking forward to being able to see people on their birthdays and maybe a couple of bbqs, fingers crossed we keep going forward.

I went out and did the egg collecting and afternoon feeding rounds, then I went back and cleaned out the guinea pigs and the quail, I also cleaned out all the water buckets in the orchard pen. I need to get that lot all sorted out, we have a hen and a cockerel living with Ted, a cockerel and four hens living together then a single cockerel living out in the paddock with the flock. Two of the cockerels need to go so that I can let the others back out, at the minute they fight like billio if they get near one another 🙄 And Ted is not happy living with them, I had found him some ladies but the chap had a problem with his phone on the day we were due to meet him and collect and so far I haven’t heard anymore from him.

Saturday: Overcast this morning with spitting rain but nothing much. John did the animals and then got ready to go out for the morning with Macca to get suits for the wedding 😁 I told him not to fall over at the price 🤣 been a long time since he bought a suit! That leaves me here to potter about which is what I have been doing in the garden, I bit of tidying up rubbish and broken bits, putting the squash plants in the trolley to take to the ménage and moving over plants outside to the cold frame. It was not until I started moving the squash that I realised how many I have 😜 if they all grow there will be a squash mountain here, banana, spaghetti, butternut, pumpkin, crown Prince, de musque, and some cute little ones that I can’t remember the name of. I have hedged my bets when putting them in the ménage because I can see something has been digging. If it’s fox looking for worms then that’s not too bad but if it’s rabbits then that’s a different story, the larger plants I have just sunk the pots into the ground, I figure that way they don’t get a growth check, the roots will still continue to find there way out of the pot and into the ground and they may not get damaged. The smaller plants I have planted properly, we will see what the difference is when they start growing, they all had a good feed and water beforehand. I hope it works well, if it does I may think about using that space again to grow things, the weeds are still there in force and I thought that I could get a couple of Pygmy goats to put in there next year and they would do well at eating it all or pigs but they would do a lot more rootling around which may be detrimental, I will ponder on that one. The plants I have now been able to move outside are garden plants I have grown from seed, I have some lupin, rudbeckia and a yellow daisy that seeds everywhere, I did have it labelled at achellia but I realise it is not that even thought the leaves are very similar.

Yesterday on social media someone was giving away some padron peppers they had received in a veg box but didn’t want, I said if no one else wanted them I would love them, in return I offered a jar of rhubarb and orange jam which was gratefully accepted. When the lady turned up with the peppers today she also bought an aubergine and a butternut squash that she didn’t want either so I did well with that swap. I just need to decide what I am going to make with them now 😁

Growing your own gives you the best ingredients for your meals and they don’t have to be complicated affairs. This lunchtime I popped out to the tunnels and picked some baby spinach, some pea tops, lettuce, dill and coriander, chopped it all up and added chopped baby tomatoes, grapes and blueberries, and a thinly sliced baby bel cheese, no dressing needed (I am not keen on dressing anyway) because it was packed with flavour, fresh, flavoursome, healthy what could be better than that 😁

Popped round to Mums for a cuppa this afternoon and did the birds when we got back. On Saturday evenings we have fish and chips with my Sister and Brother in Law, today it was nice enough to sit outside. We had finished eating and were sat chatting when Shane looked across the paddock and said bloody heck (or words to that effect 😜) a fox has just grabbed a chicken. John got up and ran across with the dogs but he was long gone with his supper, we settled back down and then could hear the fox calling out the back. John got up and ran off in that direction and a large dark fox went running down the paddock and into the next field. When John was putting them to bed he noticed that about 4/5 hens have been had, feathers in the paddocks in various places. That all took place around 7pm, two hours before the hens go to bed and he kept coming back.

Sunday: Lovely sunshine first thing this morning then it disappeared behind thick cloud and hasn’t come back as yet and it’s 11am. We got sorted and then went to get a bit of food shopping first thing, Sam and Luke are coming over tomorrow, Luke is going to help John get a few things done and we will have a big picnic 😁

I was thinking of going out somewhere nice today but the foxes have scuppered that idea, we can’t go out for a few hours and leave the hens unsupervised, we wouldn’t have any left when we got back probably. That’s the problem with a free range flock and predators, we are kind of tied to the place daily. We may start to think about winding down the egg sales altogether over the next couple of years, things have definitely slowed right down here anyway. We may keep a lot less birds that can be penned to keep them safe if we want to go out for the day 🙄

A friend told me it’s national hedge week this week, hedges are hugely important to our insects, birds and wildlife, they provide much, much more than people realise. They are an ecosystem in their own right especially hedges of a decent age, they provide shelter, protection, food, soil stability, flood control, wildlife homes for pollinators, pest predators, pests themselves (valuable food sources) they keep livestock in or out and are of course a carbon sink. When humans want to rip out hedges they are only thinking of themselves and not what else shares this world with them. Most of it is because they don’t understand fully the detrimental effect it will have on the wildlife, usually the wildlife they have moved to the country to see, I find it ironic that people rip out hedges to get a better view of the surrounding countryside, um, that is part of the countryside 😂 The times people have said to us ‘you should take that hedge out so you have a better view’ of what? fields without hedges 🤷‍♀️ I would rather build a platform to get up higher. Replacing hedges with garden centre plants that are not even native does nothing at all to help, it’s like sticking a plaster over a hole in the side of a ship. Thank goodness there are folk out there who are rewilding though I doubt they can keep up with the ones that are destroying, it needs a whole mindset change, education is key, understand how your actions impact your environment. I talked about managed hedges as well, anything that is managed is purely for human benefit and control. Though managed hedges look good (to the human eye) are they really beneficial? A hedge if left will grow, get old, break down and regrow, it’s a cycle that we no longer allow, we feel that we are doing the best thing for the hedge keeping it tamed and in ‘good condition’ but there is more to the cycle. The deadwood is vital to ground dwelling insects, which in turn are vital to airborne insects and birds and guess what the hedge will regrow by itself if left. We have a classic example down on the far side of the bottom paddock, once there was a stone wall, I guess the hedge wasn’t there when it was erected by farm hands many many years ago. A hedge has grown up over the years (by itself mostly) and now it has got old and is dying, there is a lot of dead wood and the wall is falling down. Trying to get John, or any bloke (sorry for the sexist remark but this is my experience) for that matter, that stands and talks about it, to see beyond clearing it right out completely and starting again is like pushing a stubborn elephant uphill! Why, why would you want to clear out an established multifunctional wildlife habitat that is thriving, there are companies that charge a small fortune to replicate that 😂 I stand there and point out the obvious, the hedge is regrowing from the ground by itself why scrub all that out and start again, better to leave a tumbling down wall, dead wood and let the hedge sprout up naturally surely, it’s not rocket science is it 😜 But no, humans seems to need to ‘tidy’ everything back to a clean area and then fill it up again with something no where near as useful 😬 Put it this way if the human race disappeared tomorrow completely the wildlife would carry on and thrive without us ‘managing’ everything in fact it would probably be much much better off, sad but true.

How weird is this after I wrote about thinking along the lines of winding down the chickens John came home from getting fuel and said ‘I think we might start winding down the chickens and egg sales’ lol, seriously. Now we are other completely in tune with each other after so many years together or, which is more likely, we are both astute enough to see the situation as it is. At times over the years we have been so rushed off our feet with all that comes with egg sales that we haven’t had time to stop but lately it has completely slowed right down, I am pushing them but the response is not there. There are two reasons I think for this, one, we sold a lot of chickens during the lockdown last year, some of these were egg customers though not all that many, two, the farm shop next door has taken off really well and they are also selling eggs. If someone is going to call in to get bacon for their breakfast they might as well get eggs while they are there, they sell a lot of other things too and again you may as well pick up eggs while you are at it. This will be sad for our loyalist of customers and we do have some very loyal ones but we can’t keep going at something that is not making any money much as we might enjoy it. It will free up our time hugely, the time spent looking after the birds isn’t even in the ‘profit’ entry because I am here anyway but if it was we would have been running at a loss for years 😂 It was never our intention to sell eggs we just kind of fell into it, have enjoyed it but the time has come to start thinking about giving it up. We have just had a new lot of hens delivered and so will be running for at least another year yet, don’t panic, but gradually we will be winding down that side of things.

I am not sure yet where that will leave my blogging, it probably won’t affect it, I will still keep blurbing after all it’s more of a life diary than anything. It is a way of getting things out of my head when necessary (see hedges above 😂) It’s a written record of day to day life in rural Oxfordshire, not very exciting but it is a snapshot of real life.

Late afternoon early evening we were down in the big paddock taking out a fence, this is one of two cross fences being replaced, it also meant we were down where the foxes (there were two different ones) were seen last night. Once we had finished that we had to stay on patrol for the rest of the evening, taking it in turns to come inside and get something to eat before swapping back over, John is still out there now. No sign of anything today but they are known as cunning for a reason, they will be watching and the minute you are not that’s when they strike 🤪

Enjoy the bank holiday, hopefully the sun will shine, if it does you will find me eating my picnic in the shade 😂

Friesland Farm

Ash die back, plenty more rain (seriously that will do now thank you) & basically it’s all about the weather and how crap it is 🤣

Posted on May 18, 2021May 23, 2021 by frieslandfarm

I Monday 17th May 2021: New week, new mindset 😁 Starting today we can now eat inside cafes, restaurants and pubs etc, whoop, moreover we can go inside other people’s houses and we can hug. Yeah I will skip the last part if you don’t mind, apart from direct family I wasn’t a hugger before and I won’t be changing that outlook now just because we can 😂 The weather is good today, good for me at any rate, not raining, not windy, not too sunny and warm but not too warm, winning combination. I have therefore been busy outside all morning, I started off with the usual things like stocking the egg shed, feeding the Guineas and then I moved onto sorting out cardboard rubbish and burning that. I have pulled up stingers and blackberry saplings and cut down the grass outside the pol pen which we will be using for a permanent flock when they arrive in a couple of weeks time. After that it was into the greenhouse, put some plants out for sale, prick out some seedlings, pot on more peppers and water everything. Then onto the big tunnel where I have now planted the rest of the melons, still have some tomato plants but I may put those outside. Then I planted some spare broad bean plants in an area I have decided to just put anything that is t going somewhere else 😜 and finally onto sorting the ground where the runner beans are going. I have bindweed there, I have spent many years trying to painstaking eradicate it but I am now thinking, just live with it, sure makes life a lot easier that’s for sure. I will regularly pull it but you can’t stop the unstoppable! Then it was time for lunch and a cuppa, I am trying to get back on track I with tracking my food and I have put my Fitbit back on to encourage me to see how many steps a day I can achieve. Mind you scrabbling around on the ground digging and weeding is work as well but that doesn’t register as activity lol. Very typically as I take my break and sit down, well try too, the doorbell goes, a delivery arrives (and it’s not always for me) and the dogs start barking so I keep getting up to look out the window. As I went out to collect a delivery that was for me the thunder started so looks like we are in for a storm, shame I didn’t get the beans in beforehand as the ‘charge’ of a storm would have done them good. It looks like any work outside this afternoon is now off the cards so I will switch to an indoor job.

I did have to sort out a squabble this morning too, it’s not just siblings that fight 🙄 Ted has taken to picking on the cockerels and I let the light Sussex out this morning so they could mooch in the orchard area. Big mistake as Ted immediately started on the cockerel while I was feeding the Guineas. So much so that I had hold of Ted while Ted had firm hold of the cockerels comb in his beak and would not let go, no amount of persuasion and cajoling, I just had to wait until he decided to let go and then they continued fighting through the wire fence 🙄 We do have two surplus to requirement cockerels which we were going to dispatch but haven’t got round to it but this other one is my main man of the flock and I don’t want to have to get rid of him. I am going to have to have a good think about whether we keep Ted, he would be fine I think if we could find him a lady friend but they are rare as hens teeth if not rarer 😜

The chap came out to look at the ash trees and it’s not good news 😔 the one I thought had it does but so do the other three as well, I am gutted it’s fair to say. Just at a time when the world needs more trees I am going to have to take four big trees down, one will come down as soon as he can fit the job in and the other three can probably go another two years and then will have to come down. The only consolation I can find is that the trees are not functioning as they would normally do anyway because they are diseased. He said it is spreading rapidly through the ash trees and even some other species of tree, quite a worry, it is an airborne fungus so no chance of stopping it. Trees can either be taken down or they will eventually fall down, as the three at the back pose little risk to anything or anyone they get a short reprieve but I think we will eventually take them down so that there are no ‘freak accidents’. The other ‘Sod’s law’ coming into play is the wood lol, ash is the kings wood, the best burning wood you can get and we are taking out the Rayburn, you couldn’t make it up could you 😂 We will keep some of the wood for the fire pit and probably sell the rest on unless we get a small wood burner for heat only.

I pootled around indoors in the afternoon as the thunder rumbled and occasionally the rain showered, cleared out some bits from various drawers. John came home around three and then an old work colleague of his dropped round for a cuppa, which we could have indoors yay.

We had spoken to a local chap a couple of months back about doing some fencing in the paddocks for us and tonight he came round to have a look a chat about what we want doing. John will measure up and order the fencing and then Dan will come and put the fencing up when he has time. Once upon a time we definitely would have just done it ourselves but as we get older and because we don’t have the equipment also John is busy with other work we might as well give someone else the work and keep the economy ticking over. We have done it in the past but manually and the posts all end up falling over so it really needs a hydraulic rammer. We are changing the traditional slip rails to gates, slip rails work ok to a point but the rails are heavy to move and cumbersome when you have a horse in one hand already 😜

When I got back in a started on fixing some of my broken jewellery, well that was the plan anyway. I suspect plenty of people have broken chains and odd earrings lying around, well I got mine altogether and thought I would try repairing them. Turns out that was not as easy as I thought it would be and the upshot is I will sell the old and broken gold chains/earrings/rings and buy a new chain. There are a couple of rings that were Johns, they had to be cut off at various times, mostly due to him wearing them at work, which he no longer does as it is pretty dangerous and he has come close to losing a finger which is why they were cut off in the first place 🙄

Tuesday: Oooo the weather looks promising today, sunshine from the off 😁 I have put the towels in the washing machine so it better stay like that 😜 John has gone off to work after doing the feeding, I have put out eggs and fed the cats and dogs so far, now I just have to decide what jobs I am going to do today 😁 Hopefully I can get the runner beans planted up and then use the space they were in to put the squash plants out to harden off, then I need to take a look at where I am going to grow them all. I have around 20 plants (probably more) of various types, butternut, spaghetti, banana, crown Prince, pumpkin, mini pumpkin, gourmet squash and of course courgettes and I will grow them in the ménage as there is plenty of space in there. I will plant one or two in the veg garden just in case they get wrecked by something in there as I can’t cover them to protect them at all, trial and error, let’s hope it’s not error 🤪

I sat outside having a morning coffee in the sunshine and saw a kestrel hovering over the front paddock, kestrels used to be common place hanging round at the side of the roads but these days they are in decline and p on the amber list so it was a rare sighting indeed. By the time I nipped in to get my camera it had gone 😔

Once outside I watered the tunnels and then picked rhubarb ready to bundle and put out for sale. I got the runner beans planted which was a job I was determined to get done and the squash plants out into the cold frames, I rather underestimated how many I had lol, I said twenty it’s more like thirty 😜 Samantha arrived with the twins, we played a while outside and then inside, then it was lunch time and then we went for a walk in the village. We met Uncle Shane and cousin Joe and then we saw Grampy, haha how many people you know can you see in a tiny village, plenty it seems. We watched minnows swimming, floated a head of cow parsley and watched it go down the stream then we walked up the hill to the church yard where we could see ‘the whole world’ well that’s what it must look like to a toddler. By the time we got back it was peeing down with rain but they were asleep, Sam went out to get the horses in ready for the farrier and Charlie called in for a cuppa as well, seems like old times again now. They left and I waited for the fairies but he was running very late, I managed to get the dinner prepped just as he arrived. Horse pedicure complete I turned them back out by which time John had arrived home.

Dusk, John goes out to put the birds to bed, he comes back in and asks me to give him a hand as one of the geese has decided to sit on the eggs laid today, the only trouble is that they are in the open part of the stable block and so it’s not safe. My plan was to open one of the stables and see if we can get her to go in, nope she is not having any of it and even though I am trying to manoeuvre her with the aid of a handy rake she gets flighty and fighty! In the end she decides to leave the nest and go back up to the back paddock and the hut where all the others are. Tomorrow we will leave the stable door open and hopefully she will lay in there and then she can stay there because it is secure.

Wednesday: Although I was up and ready to get started on the day after going out to the dustbin I then spent far too long trying to identify a flock of birds. My conclusion is that they were a flock of juvenile starlings, they had gathered in the hedge then flown to the Apple tree making a racket because there was a Kite flying high above. At first I couldn’t work out what they were, I thought they were starling from a distance because of the number of them but then when I got close I couldn’t see the distinct flecks so then spent ages online trying to work out what they were. I think they are starlings but they are brown at the minute so that leads me to believe they are fledglings 😁

This mornings activities were mostly in the veg garden 😂 to be honest it was lovely, very relaxed, the sun was shining, the ground is damp but not too bad. I spent the first part in the greenhouse potting on and pricking out, I seem to have an army of dwarf rudbeckia seedlings 🙄 Then out onto the the garden where I spent the time on my knees hand weeding the onion bed. Onions don’t like weeds (I don’t know why 😜) so keeping the ground clear is better for them. They are doing really, really well I am very pleased, the garlic is strong too so that is looking good, the shallots are doing what shallots do. The red onion I planted a few weeks ago have now rooted and thrown up green shoots, all this rain is good for them at the minute though it could do with being a lot drier later for the onion family otherwise they get problems. I had a coffee break mid morning, I actually sat down with it rather than keep picking up while I was doing other things, and now I have come in for some lunch and a short rest. I weeded a little bit of the bed with the beetroot and swede in but decided it was a little too wet and I would achieve more once it was drier. I really enjoyed myself this morning which is rare as I am usually rushing about trying to get things done but today was definitely a slower pace and therefore more enjoyable.

After my rest I went outside to do a bit more but the wind had got up and the sky was looking black 🙄 Instead I went into the office and got out my card making stuff and made a few cards, the ones in the shed have nearly all sold 😁 I was tying to think how many I have made so far and I think it must be nearly 200! John came home a short while later and we sat outside and drank tea, then I thought as I was out there I might as well weed. I weeded two of the front beds and got a good start on the third until my back started aching and then I gave up. The ground is pretty wet, not in the raised beds, they are just damp but the one that is actually ground level, the worst one for weeds, is saturated and so I only weeded what I could reach from the hard standing as I don’t want to compact it too much. The cats were out there happily weaving in and out of my legs and arms while I was trying to work, and the birds that have nested in the boxes I propped in the buddliea bushes were sounding the alarm calls, in the end I moved so that the cats would move and the birds could relax a bit lol. We have blue tits and sparrow nesting in those boxes, sparrow nesting in the other boxes and in the gaps in the roof space. I have seen baby sparrow sat on the edge of the roof calling, you can tell they are babies because they have fluff poking out from between the feathers ☺️

Popped round to Mums for a cuppa after dinner.

John was telling me that a customer of his that also comes to get eggs here saw what she thought was a large cat the other evening, up by us 🙄 Bigger than a domestic cat, lynx size, ooo eeeer, I need to get the wildlife camera up and running see if I can catch anything on camera.

Thursday: The weather forecast for tomorrow is horrendous, 40/50mph winds, torrential downpours urgh. With this in mind I have made sure that I have done everything I need to do out there this morning, topped up feed for the Guineas and quail, horses, watered the greenhouse and poly tunnels and picked everything I need to pick today. If it turns out to be not to bad then I am ahead of the game and if it is that bad I will be sat inside making more cards 😂 With all that done this morning I am off to the local market with Shelley for a mooch round and hopefully a nice coffee. I have got tonight’s dinner out already and we had some duck breast in the freezer so I am using up that, John won’t have a clue what he is eating so as long as it’s not too way out there all should be well, I am planning on doing them in orange and honey with new potatoes and purple sprouting 🥰

The weather turned vile in the afternoon, the wind got up and the rain started, it feels quite a bit colder than it was yesterday, our weather is really seasonally off at the minute 🙃

We have the twins at teatime today again today while Mia goes for her swimming lesson, the minute Sam went out the door George was trying to get the kitchen chair out from under the table saying ‘unch, unch’ 😂 No not yet George you only just got here 😜

I spent a large part of the evening doing two things, liaising with a chap about a piece of farm equipment that John and Luke are going to look at later this afternoon and taking a look at domestic windmills 🙄 In light of the winds we get here John has decided (you note I said John, more about that later) that a windmill might be better to generate power than solar panels. Researching everything to do with them was my job, we figure a 2/3KW is about right and even if it doesn’t provide all our electric it will pay for some of it. I said John because I have never been keen on having one, the one over the back from us is huge and there is no way I want something like that here. Having looked into it a bit more, there are of course much smaller ones and I can see the logic but I am still not that keen to be honest. One point I insist on though are storage batteries, there is no point harnessing power if when there is a power cut you still have no electric 🙄

Friday: had to check the date today, the bins go out and I thought it can’t be the 21st May already but guess what 🤔 The weather is shocking for the time of year and it wouldn’t be so bad if we had already had some good weather but it hasn’t been great, so I reckon we have had nearly 7months of Winter weather this year, depressing stuff. Like many people I wake up each day hoping that it will be at least a pleasant day but we have only had a handful and the whole forecast for the weekend ahead is dire. Of course I know exactly what will happen, the minute it changes it will be so hot I will struggle to get any hours in outside 😂 but at least we will feel warmth and it will lift the spirits massively.

I am feeling surprisingly relaxed about things in the veg garden though despite everything, even the weeds, it’s too wet on the ground to get on and pull them and just hoeing is a waste of time in this weather as they just regrow quickly. I am resigned to doing it when the time is right and not worrying that I will have so much to do I won’t cope, this is a big change for me 😜 I am happy that so far I have got everything out that needs going out, that which is already in is doing well and I have not had to water any of it outside. The tunnels are mostly now planted up and because the sun is not appearing the plants are not drying out rapidly so they are getting a good chance to establish, these are all the silver linings from all the clouds we have had. No mow May is working out well as it’s been too wet to mow anyhow 😂 The grass is green and lush and so are the weeds but hey who cares anymore, not me 🙃

All the rhubarb and orange jam I made has sold so I need to make some more, apparently it’s a real winner though I haven’t actually tried it yet, I will hopefully get time to make some more this weekend.

Not really got an awful lot done today, I did do a bit of baking, some rock cakes and some lemon biscuits. Then I did make a few cards and did a bit of experimenting with various designs. John came home at lunchtime and had to take the entire contents out of his van including the racking in order to go and fetch something later this evening. Then he had to go and have his second jab mid afternoon, he had a good lunch beforehand, mainly because he has to go out this evening. We had a discussion and a look at where my store pantry will be going, that is going to be a good project if the rain carries on for a few more weeks 🤣 That will be dual purpose, it will store root veg, garlic, onions, chillies, squash, apples, pears etc over winter instead of freezing everything, it will also give me room for plenty of dried goods, jam, chutneys, any bottled juice and canned goods and anything else I can think of. It will also be a place I can hang flowers and herbs to dry 🥰 Researching what I want I found that I am probably a ‘kitchen witch’ fine by me 😁 my Mum is definitely a hedge witch and so I am following in good footsteps, hopefully I will pass the baton on.

This is the picture from Pinterest I will be creating my room ideas on 🥰

I bought an ‘echo’ which arrived today, we have Alexa in the main living room but I needed something for the bedroom. We used to have a clock radio which was great but for years now we have been using this small, frankly rubbish, little digital clock with a light that is barely visible 🙄 The alarm is set on Alexa for the morning but when it goes off that means the morning starts off with John hollering ‘Alexa off’ more than once if she doesn’t hear the first time, you can imagine that does not make for a gentle start to the day 😜 So I bought the echo, and I have now set the alarm with a gentle wake up that steadily gets louder, much better for the nerves I think. We can also then play sleep music at bedtime, John has difficulty getting to sleep as his mind is always whirring. The other night I played a sleep story just to see if it helped and it did so that is another reason to purchase. When I am not well I will be able to lie and listen to some relaxation music or I can listen to healing meditation whatever takes my fancy, or I could even just lay in bed and listen to the radio or and audio book, the world is my oyster. I could of course do all this with my phone but it often goes off with message notifications so this way it should all be undisturbed listening 😁

Saturday: A busy day today, first off, the usual stuff then John went off to the wood yard to order fencing for the paddocks. I put in fresh bedding for the geese as I had noticed that all of them were out grazing, good time to nip in and do the job. Fresh bedding for the ducks as well, all this rain is making the hut a right muddy mess 🙄 Then the wood delivery turned up, quick eh, yes we knew they were having a delivery today but didn’t expect them to deliver straightaway lol anyway that left John to help unload 70 rails and 50 posts 😜 meanwhile I tidied a few things up in the back area and then went out to the greenhouse and garden where I spent most of the rest of the day. Moving and potting on in the greenhouse, trying to find final positions for the peppers and aubergine, potting on more peppers and some melons, watering and a bit of tidying up. Then in the garden I planted about 36 leeks, the rest I have put at the end of the onion bed and planted them in clumps, I will pull them as baby leeks, waste not want not. I then planted some peas I have left over from the main planting, I have also watered both tunnels and picked purple sprouting at some point today. Inbetween all that there was washing up, loading the washing machine, getting the washing dry, making endless cups of tea, checking the torts, feeding the guinea pigs, stocking up the egg shed, sorting the eggs in the afternoon, looking for random goose eggs and discussing the store room, etc etc etc, pooped.

Sunday: The weather has been ok up to this very point, I had just come in, eaten my lunch and then the heavens opened 🙄 This morning we nipped to get a few bits from the the shop, it took less than 20mins from getting out the car to getting back in 😂 When we got back John started creosoting the new posts, the tannilised wood these days is rubbish right throughout the industry (it is widely acknowledged) and so when we are paying a fortune for it we want it to last more than a couple of years before it starts to rot. Meanwhile I have been in the greenhouse sowing some more courgettes as I only had three plants come up, then I planted some echinop plants in the front border and after that I spent my time weeding the front beds, four bucketfuls so far and still a bit more to do. There are some ‘weeds’ I leave such as any poppies that have self set and forget me nots but any deep rooted seedlings need to come out such as dock, nettles, grass etc. There is Bryony growing and I have to keep pulling that up as it’s a bit of a thug, I don’t mind once everything is growing but not while it is trying to get established.

I have managed to locate not one but two lady friends for Ted finally 😁 so I have been liaising with their owner as to when we can pick them up or get them delivered here.

This afternoon I am off to Harry Potter World with Shelley, Martin and the kiddies, out of the Shire for the first time in nearly a year 😜 I am leaving John in charge, he declined the invitation to come along lol.

Have a good week, hopefully we will see a bit more sunshine on the horizon, I am looking forward to an early morning cuppa out there without feeling cold 🥶

Friesland Farm

Jam, asparagus soup & May Day 🥰

Posted on April 27, 2021May 2, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 26th April 2021: Still on the chilly side for April and no sign of it warming for the next two weeks. Best to dress for the cold and take layers off I think 🤔 This week John has a full week of ‘proper’ work so I will mainly be here on my own bimbling away. This morning I set to making the dandelion honey from the flowers I picked yesterday, if you are going to try then pick them from a place you know has t been sprayed with anything and preferably where animals have not been 🙄 Mine have come from the garden where no animals are allowed and definitely no spraying, pick them in the sunshine so they are fully open and warmed by the sun. You can either take your time and pull off all the petals or you can keep them whole with the green bits attached (not the stalks) because you are going to strain it so it won’t make much difference in the end. Just give the flowers a good shake so any insects have time to escape before you boil them 😜 Simmer for 15 mins with a slice of lemon and then leave overnight to steep. Strain and squeeze out all the juice you can, measure the liquid, you want a pound of sugar for every pint of liquid. Then simmer (a good simmer not gentle) for 15 mins before putting into hot, sterilised jars. That’s it, liquid gold, sunshine in a pot, it is not as thick as honey more of a sauce but still very delicious and worth having a go just so you can say you have done it. Back in the day dandelions were a very important flower/crop and far from removing them from lawns they were actually planted up. They are a great source of nectar for bees and other insects, a great food source for many small mammals and you can even make a reasonable coffee from the dried roots (I have read this but never tried) Part of what is wrong with today’s thinking is we want perfect lawns and grass areas, what is perfect, that’s the question 🤷‍♀️ To me a perfect lawn is full of wild flowers, they are not weeds, they serve a purpose just not to humans, unless you make use of them that is.

It is mid morning and one of my plans today is to get my tomato plants in the polytunnel. I have looked at the long range forecast and even though the temps are below average it looks like the overnight temperature will remain above freezing for most of the time. I may have to put an extra fleece over the plants if I think it’s going to go below 0c but it’s looking hopeful.

I spent the rest of the morning in the small tunnel planting the tomato plants, 14 in total a mix of sweet million, tigerella and cherry indigo. I have to confess I don’t know which plant is which because though I labeled the rows when they were growing I muddled them up once they were potted up, I didn’t think carefully enough and whoops error made. Still have more plants, some will go into the big tunnel and I always try some outside to see how they do. I have staked them all and tied them in and the run string from the stake to the crop bar in the roof of the tunnel. These measures will hold them upright and hopefully take the weight when they are loaded with tomatoes. Because the temperatures are not up to seasonal average at the minute I have taken the precaution of fleecing the inside of the door ways to provide extra protection from the night temperatures, I have also cut extra fleece to put over them at night. It’s nice and warm in there at the minute, around 25c but you can feel the difference once you step outside so best to Molly coddle them as much as possible at the moment, I don’t want to lose them after spending so long getting them growing from seed.

I came indoors then for a bite to eat, I am not sure if it was the heat in the tunnel or what but I didn’t feel too well, a bit sick. I have had it before and wonder if it is my blood sugars dipping too low for some reason. Usually if I come in and have something to eat and a sit down it passes after a while 🤷‍♀️ I have regular blood test so if it was a permanent problem I think they would have seen it in the results before now. It tends to be when I am busy but it doesn’t happen often, I always have a good breakfast of oats and banana so it’s not that I have skipped breakfast or anything like that.

It is very quiet here today, not much noise outside at all and we have probably had one egg customer all day 😔 We worked out that we need to sell £7 worth of eggs a day just to cover the feed costs that doesn’t even include bedding or our time and the egg boxes we buy and it certainly doesn’t cover times when we have to worm the hens (which we only do if necessary). If business gets much slower I think we will have to have a serious discussion about wether to carry on with it or not 🙄 We might have to come up with a different idea altogether. I think it is because we are used to not being able to keep up with egg demand lol and it has certainly dropped for some reason. Not that I am too worried, the intention was always to be self sufficient and the egg thing just started as a sideline to move extra eggs but it’s nice to have people come and have a chat and put the world to rights sometimes.

Cup of tea and a sit down mid afternoon, I have just finished making some rhubarb and orange jam. Hoping it will set, there is not much mystery to jam making except the set lol and a lot depends on how much moisture is in the fruit you use. Really once you get it to a rolling boil and a temperature of 105c it theoretically should set but there is always the unknown. I never do the freezer test because quite frankly I can’t be arsed, our freezers are right out the back so by the time I got the plate in it would have warmed up a bit and so no good anyway. I prefer to get it to temp and hope🤞 generally it’s fine but sometimes if we have had a lot of rain and the fruit has taken up a lot of water it can be more tricky but nothing a re-boil couldn’t sort out. I went with orange in the end as that is what I fancied doing, the vanilla option can work out a tad expensive as you are supposed to put half a bean in and they cost a fair bit plus to me that’s a bit of a waste of a vanilla bean 😜

The dandelion honey is a little runny so more of a pouring sauce, it will still be great with ice cream or even pancakes/yoghurt etc but no so good to spread. The one I made last time was a better, thicker consistency and was so yummy that finger dipping was a must.

The jam was a good set, I can tell after only 10 mins because even though in the hot jars it’s still runny, in the bottom of the pan it’s nicely cooled and thick and sticky. I used to wash the pan straight away but it is good way of finding out how the set has gone so I leave it to cool and then wash it.

I sometimes think it would be good to do it for a living but I am a bit of a perfectionist, there is no way I would sell anything that wasn’t exactly right. I can imagine if it was yays to the left and nays to the right (or which ever way round it goes) that I would have a bigger reject pile than a sellable pile 😂 That goes for anything I do really. I think another reason I would like to do something is because I love to look for new recipes for things I grow but half of it John wouldn’t eat so there is not much point making it just for me, I would look like a roly poly pudding (even more than I do now) maybe I will just start making it and hope that he likes the look, but no, I don’t think that will work, we have such totally different tastes in food it’s ridiculous 😬

Oo John saw a shooting star last night, there is meteor activity at the minute, the eta aquariids, so that’s most likely what he saw.

Just in case you thought I was finished with the making today, nope, I made some asparagus soup. I had a bunch that I picked the day before yesterday and put in the shed but it hadn’t sold and so I got it back in. It had gone a bit limp so no point leaving it out there, I picked another fresh bunch and made soup. A simple soup that is big on flavour and of course would be delicious with a hunk of fresh bread and some Parmesan shavings. You could add cream to the soup but I like simple soups and beside it’s less fattening 😬 Just chop up and onion and a clove of garlic, sauté in a knob of butter and a drop of olive oil, the butter gives it a richer flavour but you can leave it out if you want. Add pepper and the chopped asparagus and then stock of your choice, either veg or chicken. Simmer until the asparagus is soft then either serve like that or whizz it with a blender stick. I don’t add extra salt because of the stock cube but add salt to taste if you like. Simple, nutritious, delicious and can be dressed up or down depending on the occasion. You can freeze this but not with the cream added, leave it out and add it later if you are freezing it.

Tuesday: I feel like I have been on the go fours and it’s only 9.30am. Mostly I have been doing household bits, the mundane stuff that has to be done also sort the egg shed, feed the dogs, put out the rubbish etc. Time for a quick coffee and contemplate what jobs I will do today, it’s still cold only about 5c at the minute, getting up to 14c at some point but at least the cold wind has dropped today which is a bonus. I haven’t checked the poly tunnel yet but I think the plants will have been ok, I have some out for sale in a little greenhouse and they are fine this morning so the Molly coddled ones should be cosy. The pepper plants and cucumbers are not big enough to transplant yet, they will go into the big tunnel, I had considered doing that today but they need to wait a while yet.

I decided as it was pretty cool outside I would sit and make some cards which is what I did for a couple of hours.

John came home as he had left his phone somewhere and had to phone around to find out where it was, eventually located it and will pick it up later.

I then went onto doing paperwork as I have got a bit behind and needed to catch up. Doing the household stuff and the farm receipts was the easy bit, doing Johns plumbing was painful. ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ springs to mind. I took a lunch break and went back to it but I honestly can’t make head nor tail of some of it. It appears we don’t have all the statements, some of the invoices and I can’t for the life of me match up payments for one supplier 🙄 It drives me to despair the amount of times I have tried to get John to organise supplier and payment records might as well bash my head against a brick wall. I am sure we will get there eventually as it’s usually all filed in Johns head but that’s not much use to me when he isn’t here. He tells me he has a book that he writes it down in now, I can’t wait to see that! Probably won’t be able to make head or tail of that either, it will be in special ‘John’ code 😜

Typical of me as I can’t leave a job alone until it’s done even when I know I can’t finish it so I have been going back and forth to the paperwork 😂 I have managed to chip away at little bits so I have less of it buzzing round in my head. This is all just to get it straight ready for getting in order for the accountant, that is yet to come 😩

I lit the Rayburn around 3pm, we haven’t had it lit for the last few days and relied on the electric blow heater in the living room but it’s just too cold overnight and so today I have decided to light it. Chances are we will be roasting by mid evening but we can always let it go out again.

I have been saddened to read online that the whole shop local frenzy of last year seems to have died. Plenty of egg sellers wondering where the customers have gone 🤔

I just need to have a small moan and get something off my chest here: I have just seen a social media post regarding garden waste and the fact that you have to pay to get your waste taken away. A garden tax, was someone’s description, excuse me 🙄 but it’s your garden and your garden waste and yet you think you shouldn’t have to pay to get it removed kerbside, here is an idea COMPOST IT YOURSELF THEN! Thanks for listening 😜

Seriously though there is a mind set that is pretty ugly when you look at it, everything is someone else’s fault or responsibility, the wider picture is never looked at or considered 🙄

It’s 8.45, John has gone out to put the birds to bed and if I had any nuts I would be sweating them off by now 😂 bloody roasting in here even though we didn’t put any more wood on the fire after 7pm as it was already getting a bit warm, all or nothing!

Wednesday: It started raining persistently last night with a few heavy bursts overnight and it’s still raining this morning. This is about one of the only times I will put a smiley face for rain 😁 we haven’t had any for weeks and the ground was really, really dry. The beds we planted up were holding up just about, I had been giving the plants a quick pick me up sprinkling with the hose but they really needed a soaking and now they have had one. Of course, not only will the plants put on some lush growth but so will the weeds 😂 ah well you can’t win them all and at least they might be easier to pull than they have been lately.

I have been delighted with the tulips this year, we don’t have many but they have been bright and cheery and really lift the spirits more so than the daffodils I think. So I had a mad idea lol and thought it would be nice to plant up pots of tulip bulbs and perhaps sell them, they would make great Easter and Mother’s Day presents ours birthday or general have a nice day gifts. Of course one thing led to another and my enthusiasm spread to, wouldn’t it be nice to have the bed in front of the window filled with tulips so I bought 500 bulbs, yep 500 lol, it’s the daffodil episode all over again. Obviously I have missed the boat this year but next year they are going to look fantastic and there will be enough bulbs to pot some up for sale. The 1000 daffodil bulbs I bought and planted along with Mum and Ken are doing well, they come up each year in a block of beautiful yellow but they always seem to be a bit late pr than most. They are up in the back paddock too which means they can’t really be seen, on hindsight I should have planted them in the driveway grass, never mind I can always start dividing them, this is the third year of flowering so I could start lifting some later in the year.

BOO! I just want to conduct a little experiment lol to see how many people read the blog all the way through. So if you could add Boo to the comments I would very much appreciate it 😁

Don’t forget to Boo 👻😜

Went out mid morning to do the horses and the guinea pigs, I watered the greenhouse and checked on the polytunnel. Where my hands got wet I could really feel the cold it’s not much warmer out there and there is not much I can be doing at the minute so I came back in to organise dinner tonight. I did get chased by the gander and at one point I thought I was cornered but found a hazel stick on the floor, a wave of that and he went off haughtily with his women, 😅

I have avintage flower press that I picked up at a boot sale years ago just because I loved it. I have never used it, until now, this morning I have picked some tiny flower heads and pressed them, no idea what I will do with the yet but it will be fun to think of something.

Saturday May 1st 2021: May Day, Beltane, a time to celebrate the arrival of summer 🙄 (thats a bit iffy here in the UK 😂) Still it is the time to enjoy nature at its finest, the blossom on the trees, the flowers, the hedgerows, the lush green grass. Birds, insects and animals everywhere are busy reproducing. These days we barely give May Day a second thought which is really sad, there was a time when a maypole was a permanent features in towns and villages and May Day was a day of celebration.

I had a very productive morning and part of the afternoon. I have been weeding, digging out deep rooted weeds, raking, having a bonfire and putting down membrane on the difficult for me to get too bed. It’s a good job I had been busy as you will notice nothing written for Thursday and Friday, that’s because apart from basic jobs I did bigger all really 😜

Sunday: Productive again, I know, two days in a row 😂 On the job list this morning apart from the usual was to get a spot of shopping, we were there at 9.30 and gone by 9.55 😜 Luckily the supermarket we use allows self service before 10, as we drove past another supermarket they were still queuing to get in. Back home unload and put away and then off to the DIY store for some fencing. We have an area just outside the back door that the old drive way cuts through, across the drive is the gate to the garden. I wanted to fence the drive off part way down, firstly this will mean that the area is secure for the toddlers and children to move between the house and the garden. Second but no less important it means the dogs can’t get into that area, they knock the kids over half the time and the other half of the time they dig holes. The holes then become ankle twisting areas that you don’t always see, usually because I am carrying something. The dogs can come in when we allow them but it means we can also shut them behind the fence if we don’t want them there. The other reason is the free range mobster geese, they have no manners, crap everywhere and nibble on everything plus they are pretty scary to children being much bigger than them. In fact they are pretty scary to me at the minute so the last thing I want is to open the back door to find them there 😜

Have a great week, hopefully the weather will warm up just a tad and everyone will be happy 😃

Friesland Farm

A pub lunch 😁 eggs galore & a Fox attack 😩

Posted on April 25, 2021 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.

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.

Friesland Farm

Ash before Oak 😏 a bit of creativity and it’s still cold outside 🥶

Posted on April 5, 2021April 13, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 5th April 2021: Bank Holiday Monday and you couldn’t have got a more different day than yesterday 😂 Yesterday we were basking in good temps with wall to wall sunshine and today there is a cold North wind and it actually snowed at one point! To be fair I am writing this at 4.30pm the sky is blue the sun is shining and it is not too bad but the chill in the wind is noticeable 🥶 We started off the day and the week with the usual morning rounds and jobs, I lit the Rayburn at around 8.30am as we didn’t light it yesterday and it was a bit chilly. John got the tractor out and was levelling the drive again although he tells me he is now happy with it, it had a few lumps and dips which he has now sorted out. Meanwhile I spent the morning doing a bit of pirate sewing 🏴‍☠️. I have sown pirate bunting, pirate cushion covers and a pirate table cloth. The sewing skills needed were not great, pinking shears eliminate the need turn over material, fairly basic but overall a good job done for the pirate ship and the grandchildren when they come to play. The rest of the day was spent doing not much at all really, we popped over some strawberry plants to my niece and had a cuppa with my brother and his wife. Then we went to the green with Shelley, Martin, Josh and Florence so that Josh could show us his bike riding skills 🚲 and then back home to do the egg rounds and water the greenhouse and poly tunnels. It is amazing how hot they are even though it’s cold outside, all it takes it the sun and they warm up massively, the greenhouse regularly reaches 30c on a sunny day.

Arrrrgh, all ready for pirate playtimes in the pirate ship.

Tuesday: Brrrr that cold wind is here still and it is positively Baltic out there we even had snow flurries again 🥶 John did the animals and then went off to do a mornings work, I found inside jobs to get on with as I didn’t fancy being out there today. I set about cleaning the kitchen and putting stuff away, throwing out of date stuff away, mostly stuff with 2016/17 dates on them 😂 Cleaning the tiled walls down as I went round, looks a whole lot brighter and less cluttered now. John came home late morning just as I was with a customer who was buying hens. He spent most of the afternoon doing something on the tractor though I am not sure exactly what 🤷‍♀️ I spent the afternoon making cards, the ones I had made and put in the shed all sold so I needed to restock and I might as well stay in the warm and do that. I lit the Rayburn at lunchtime as it was cold in here, no point freezing our nuts off just for the sake of it, I am here so I can keep feeding it every hour or so.

Late afternoon John came in and a delivery arrived, a gel topper for the mattress, John finds the memory foam too hot and I am inclined to agree so after talking to my sister about it we ordered this gel topper. She has one and says it is great, it’s supposed to disperse the heat more evenly, we will find out if it works 🙄

I discovered that John had been removing ivy from the hedge at the back, the trees and shrubs are being choked by it and a lot of them have died. It is a job that is on the to do list, it’s a big job though as there is a falling down stone wall, barbed wire, dead trees, lots of ivy and broken fencing, it is not a quick fix job but it is one that you can take up or leave whenever you want.

Apart from the afternoon rounds and egg collecting that is pretty much it for the day, not much going on outside in these temperatures 😜

Wednesday: Oooooo that was cold last night, we had thick snow flurries mid evening and the temps must have gone down to around -4 overnight. Everywhere was covered in a hard white frost this morning, John did the rounds and then went off to do a mornings work, I got sorted indoors and then out to feed the Guineas and check the torts. Billy was in the hut and Voldertort had dug himself into the ground 🙄 it should be milder from here on in but you never know. I came back in and got some household bits done and I lit the Rayburn, then I spent a good hour looking thorough seasonal recipes so I can make good use of the things I am growing.

To be honest I haven’t done much else today 🥴 I always feel a bit guilty at the end of the day if I haven’t done much but sometimes I think it’s a case of recharging batteries. I did watch the seaspiracy documentary that is a hot topic at the minute, shocking, is the word. We don’t eat a lot of fish but will be eating a lot less now if any at all, if you haven’t seen it then as a consumer you really should 🙄 I watched it with an open mind, I am aware that this kind of reporting is often driven by the vegan section of society but it is undeniably bad even if you only think it’s half true.

Mid evening and still light, looking out of the back door I can see the two cats (that are usually so lazy they don’t go far from the food bowl) down in the hedge line stalking rabbits 😂 They have just got into their hunting stride, last week John said “did you put a dead mouse in the cats bowl”, why he would even think that is something I would do I have no idea! They had caught a shrew and bought it in and put it in to the bowl themselves 🤣

Thursday: Slightly warmer today in a cold sort of way 😜 if the sun had come out it would have been lovely but there is still a chill in the air. John did the morning rounds while I did the indoor bits, he went off to do a quick job in the village while I then did a few outside bits. When he came back we went off to get a bit of shopping from the local market, back home to put stuff away and then over to see Sam and the children and give her a bit of a hand if necessary.

When we got back from the market the sheep from the next field and got past their fencing, through the hedge and were stood inbetween that and our new fence lol, it took the first one a minute or two to work out how to get back but the second one took decidedly longer to work it out 😋

Back from Sams, lit the Rayburn then an afternoon of sorting out Johns van insurance which should have taken two minutes online except it wouldn’t recognise the email address even though they had emailed to that exact address 🙄 unbelievable sometimes. That then took half an hour to do it over the phone 😂 John went off to do another small job this afternoon while I sorted out some online payments and ordered the third electric radiator, this one is for the kitchen. We are getting to the stage that the Rayburn only needs to be lit for a couple of hours, unless it’s really cold, so if we slowly install the electric rads we can begin to use them just to take the chill off the air. We do have to sort out the back door as you can see daylight through it and so that’s not cost effective but we will get that done soon as well.

The blossom is beginning to be noticeable all around the place and the leaves on the trees are also bursting into life. Unfortunately if the old saying is to be believed we have Ash before Oak here which means a wet summer ahead 🙄 Oak before Ash just a splash, Ash before Oak expect a soak, time will tell.

Friday 😀 After doing the morning rounds we spent the rest of the morning doing the pirate ship. I have swept it out and put fairy lights up high in there, I have put the cushions and bunting and table cloth in and hung up some paper parrots. John and I then found some Perspex and put that in the windows, this will stop the wind blowing in and the leaves, make it feel a bit more like a playhouse and hopefully the children will get to play in there this summer.

We came in at lunchtime to the sad news that Prince Phillip had died 😞 I know there were lots of varying opinions on him but he was someone’s husband, father, grandfather and great grand father and they will miss him dearly. He was the Queens Consort, not an easy job by any means, he devoted his life to supporting her and in turn everything she stood for, RIP

After a quick lunch John went off to look at a job and I planted the broad beans plants finally, as well as the Oca. I had to be very quick with the beans as the chickens could smell the Earth I dug for the holes and were there quick as a wink! I managed to get them in and cover them with hoops and netting though I had wanted to get some mulch round the bases but there was no way I would fend them off in time 😂 I can do that another day but at least they are now in. I had a few spare plants and where one or two garlic did not appear I have used the gaps up and put some in between and a couple of rows at the end of the garlic bed. Should be interesting to see if the garlic keeps the blackfly off of the bean plants.

Guess what, broadband and phone line issues again, this is ridiculous I think I will be going to ofcom this time 😡

Saturday: Still cold, not as cold as it has been but still no sign of the sun which we really need this time of year to get the veg plants going. After all the various morning stuff that needs to be done John went off to get feed and I went out into the veg garden. The planting and sowing really ramps up from here on in and this morning I have sown red onion sets. I will have a cracking haul of onions, shallots, garlic and leeks for winter storing hopefully. I then went into the greenhouse to do some pricking out, I have a mix of veg and flower seeds growing and this morning I have pricked out a couple of trays of achillea (summer berries) and I have also sown some celeriac and lemon grass seeds as well as some ginger roots but as I said we really need a bit of warmth soon for those to start growing. The lack of heat also means that the tomato and pepper plants that have come up are not able to move from the propagator to the bench yet, it’s just a tad too cold. I have cucumbers, melon and squash plants all coming on which also need to move out from under cover onto the benches, hopefully any day soon we will feel the temps rise. We also have a lack of rain at the moment 🙄 I can’t recall the last time it rained properly, at least a couple of weeks ago, it is the way things go sometimes and you can never know what kind of spring you are going to get so even the best laid plans get scuppered.

While I was in the greenhouse I was listening to the radio as always and the topic was the ship that blocked the canal holding up all the freight. It got round to the subject of self sufficiency of the country and if we ought to look into becoming more self sufficient 🤔 hmmm let me think, hell yes! I actually can’t believe that it is not on the ‘must do’ list, it is not rocket science is it 🤷‍♀️ if we produced as much as we could here that would give us food security and help the environment at the same time, why it is not happening as a matter of urgency I don’t know. I would have thought that the pandemic would have taught us big lessons in that department, it seems that we haven’t even felt the ripple effect that will be caused by the ship jam yet, I wonder what kind of panic buying that will result in, we will find out in a few weeks time 🙄

We have lived through history in the making over the last year and today we witness another at midday, a 41 death gun salute to HRH The Duke of Edinburgh, a very rare salute to witness especially as it was coordinated right across the UK and Gibraltar as well as HM ships at sea.

Just when I have stated the lack of rain situation we had a little shower, not much but enough to wet the ground which is all we need really 😀

Sunday: I hope we get a better second half to April than the first half, it’s been bloody cold today. At times the sun has made an appearance and it was nice, cool but still nice, but when it disappeared behind clouds the temperature plummeted and at one point it was trying to snow! After doing the morning jobs I went out into the greenhouse to get some bits done but after an hour I had to come back in as my feet were frozen and I haven’t been able to warm up all day. I did get a few things done in there, some rearranging, I sowed some more squash seeds and split and potted some pheasant grass I had growing. In the front I have resealed the bird bath hopefully with some success, it had a crack through it and before I try putting something in it I wanted to see if I could seal it.

I am struggling to function today because I am feeling the cold, I know that is a pathetic statement lol but it’s true. I think I am primed and ready for some warm spring days and they are not forthcoming and so I have gone into idle mode 🤣 I am currently huddled on the sofa, John meanwhile is busy outside tidying his van 🙄 I am literally shivering, hope I am not coming down with anything except ‘whereisspringitis’ 😜

Have a great week, a little more normality is creeping in, this week coming I am having a haircut and a massage whoop whoop, other shops will be open so we have a bit more choice when it comes to buying birthday presents 😜and the pub gardens will be open, not that I want to sit out in the freezing cold 🤣 one step closer to total freedom hopefully.

I think I will start a running list of what I have growing, what I am planting and what I am picking:

In the greenhouse:
Tomatoes
Peppers
Chilli
Butternut Sqaush
Banana sqaush
Courgette
Crown Prince
Pumpkins
Cucumber
Basil
Garlic chive
Melon
Runner beans
Dwarf French beans
Sweetcorn

In the cold frame
Peas
Mangetout
Swede
Turnip
Beetroot

Planted up outside
Broad beans
Onions
Garlic
Shallots
Oca
Carrots
Potatoes

In the tunnels
Lettuce
Baby spinach
Rocket
Spring onions
Radish
Flat leaf parsley (already growing from last year)

Already growing and harvesting
Purple sprouting broccoli
Leeks
Rhubarb
Asparagus (just starting to come through)

Not included on any of those lists are perennials such as herbs, sage, mint, lovage, thyme, oregano. Nor any of the fruit bushes, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, gooseberry, blackcurrant, blackberry, Logan berry, chokeberry, olive, fig. And then there are the top fruit trees, apple, pear, plum, apricot, peach, cherry.

I will keep adding to the lists as I remember as I am sure I have missed a fair few things out already. The lists will change as I move things around and plant up but they will give me an idea of what I have and what I need to be doing such as getting on with sowing the runner beans 😀

Friesland Farm

More freedom for us and the hens 😀 some lovely weather & some of the best days for a long time 🥰

Posted on April 1, 2021April 4, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 29th March 2021: Whoop whoop day 😂 today we are allowed a little more freedom, not much but enough to be going on with. I am not actually sure what are supposed to be doing now, meeting outdoors in groups of six I think or two households whatever that means 🤷‍♀️ it could be interpreted in different ways and does it includes children, who actually knows. The stay at home rule has ended, what does that mean, we have been able to go to the shops or on essential journeys, can we now go further to meet people, I am not entirely sure lol. The numbers seem to continue to come down which I assume means the vaccines are working in the limiting of the spread of the virus despite the children having been back at school for a few weeks. I find it nuts that I am even writing this let alone living through it.

It’s is overcast this morning but the wind has died down so it feels a lot warmer than the weekend, I think we have some sunshine coming his afternoon. Meanwhile the morning jobs all got done and then John went off to work, I went out and cleaned out the guinea pigs and checked on the lone cockerel before going into the greenhouse for the morning. In there I sowed some more beetroot, potted on sunflower seedlings and potted on some tomato and pepper plants. I watered everything that needed a bit extra moisture and all the while I am side stepping the torts. I was going to put them out at the weekend but it was too cold, they haven’t really got going yet either. They have food and water but at the moment are not interested, still warming up from the long winter sleep I suppose. I feel I must have done more in the greenhouse as I was in there a couple of hours but can’t think what else I did 😜 About 11.30 it was time for coffee but before I came i quickly nipped I to the tunnels to water the seedlings in each of those. I have spinach and rocket in one which have come up nicely and in the other various lettuce types and some spring onions which have also made an appearance. The strawberries in the tunnel are for an early crop, they are putting on good leaf growth and I have some escaped mint growing in there which is looks lovely and vibrant. The lemon and orange tree look a little worse for wear after winter but I have fed them and hopefully they will recover quickly with some warmer weather. The lemon verbena has tiny new leaves at the base of the plant, I was thinking I might dry some this year for a lemon tea which would be refreshing.

The signs of spring are everywhere, birds beginning to nest in the boxes, tiny buds on shrubs and trees waiting to burst, the daffodils bobbing a splash of colour all around us, dormant plants beginning to emerge from the ground, we are all just waiting for the sun to arrive 🌞

My expensive but necessary sun cream arrived this morning which is good, at least I know I don’t have a reaction to that one so I should be able to get on with life. The basic lotion isn’t all that expensive on its own but I ordered the lip balm and then a tinted one for the days when I have to go out in public and then a separate one for my face which is anti-ageing, every little helps eh 😂

We have loads of goose eggs, they sell slowly but we are getting six every other day, if you odds the seventh day that is about 27 goose eggs a week 🙄 I need to find another outlet for them I think lol.

The sun did come out in the afternoon and it was very welcome, I have to say it was truly delightful nipping out to the brassica cage to pick purple sprouting broccoli for our dinner this evening. Smoked haddock fillets, steamed sprouting and mashed potato mixed with the baby leeks which I chopped and sautéed in oil before mixing them in, wonderful. We have to make the most of the one nice day we are going to get tomorrow so dragging the paddocks is the first on the job list, fingers crossed we can start the tractor 😝

I bought some toastabags, biodegradable, compostable, steaming bags for the microwave, oh they are a game changer 😀 For smaller quantities of veg, i.e. enough for John and I, they are fabulous, the sprouting was perfectly done in less than three minutes and no extra saucepan to wash up bonus 🥰

It is 6pm and as yet I have not lit the Rayburn and I am wondering if I will, we will have to see how cold it gets once it starts to get dark but at the minute with the sun shining away there is no need.

Tuesday: It has just gone midday and I have come inside as the sun is blaring, lovely to see it but it’s all or nothing g at the minute. John is off today and so after getting all the morning jobs done as soon as possible it was time to drag the paddocks at last. I spent most of the morning on the tractor going up and down, round and round, it is one of my favourite jobs of the year 🥰 John spent his time cleaning out and power washing the chicken hits ready for their release on Thursday. It has been a long winter inside for them as well as us and they will be delighted to get back out on the grass. There is a part of the big paddock that needs going over again as we had bales of hay on in over winter, I have tried to get a lot of the trodden in stuff up but it got a bit hot for me, I do four wheelbarrows and the sun will dry off some of it then I can drag over it again. There are also some tiny hawthorn saplings that are growing and they need to be cut with the mower, hopefully it will be cool enough later to get back out there and finish the job off.

Once I couldn’t do anymore out in the open I went to get the torts and put them outside, big Billy was right behind the greenhouse door which took me a while to get him moved but they are both out in the sunshine and fresh air now. I checked the plants in the greenhouse and opened the vents and I turned off the propagators and took the lids off, it’s that warm in there, too much heat will do damage, as long as I remember to put it all back before the temps drop tonight they should be fine. The carrot seeds I sowed a couple of weeks back have finally started to show, carrots are pretty finicky here but hopefully they should continue on to a good crop. Once it’s not so hot I will sow another lot, you can’t have too many carrots 🥕

I do have my factor 50 on and a hat but spending too long in the sun is a no no for me, dipping in and out is not so bad at this time of year. Later on the trees will have leaves giving me more coverage and more time I can be out there without being in full sun. It is a pain really as I am sat in the shade thinking, I could be doing that job, hey Ho, we all have our trials and tribulations I guess.

It is ten to eight in the evening and it is still light outside 😀 I have had the best day, it’s been many months since I have had a day that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Tractor work in the morning, in the afternoon we went and had a cup of tea with Mum and Ken in the garden now we are allowed. My youngest sister also turned up with my niece both of whom I have not seen since last August. When we returned home we got the birds fed and collected eggs and then back out to the paddocks with the tractor. We dragged the part with hay on the ground again, at one point I got the tractor stuck as the ground was soft but after some shuffling back and forth I managed to get going again. We moved the two chicken huts with the tractor and then dragged the ground they had been stood on. After that we got the ride on mower out and cut back the hawthorn runners at the edge of the big paddock. Back inside to get the dinner cooked but in all honestly I would have been very happy to spend more time out in the paddocks on the tractor 🥰 It was a lovely evening and a great end to a fab days work. As a bonus the new suntan lotion seems to be brilliant, no sign of any sunburn or itchy spots, winner 😀

Wednesday: Another lovely day, not as hot as yesterday but that suits me fine 😀 Once the morning jobs were done, John is off again today, I got straight on with some weeding on the weedy bed in the front. The other two beds are fab but this one is going to be a pain I can see it now. After spending an hour doing that I went into the greenhouse to make sure everything is alright and also sowed some more tomato seeds. The ones in the first propagator have had a bit of an issue, there was a lot of water in the bottom of the tray, which I have now tipped out, and they have not liked it at all so that batch might end up in the compost heap 🙄 I am trying different things with them and at the moment they are not too bad but they just don’t look right. I sowed a couple more rows of carrots in one of he outside beds. Then Sam arrived with the twins so we sat in the garden for a couple of hours playing with them and had lunch. They went home and a customer arrived to buy hens and then we went off to the garden centre as there were a couple of things I wanted and of course ended up with more than that lol. Two of my lavender in the front bed died over winter and although I do have others I didn’t want to risk transplanting those and losing them too. I also wanted some flowers for the bed directly under the window as it is lacking in spring flowers at the minute. It is intended to be a summer flowering bed but it’s nice to have a splash of colour now as well. I bought some gladioli bulbs 😝 never in my life have I ever grown these before but there is a first time for everything and it is probably showing my age 🤭 I bought some more seed potatoes ready to plant on good Friday and a lovely primula that I couldn’t resist. After a cuppa when we got back I set about planting them all and a couple that my Mum had given me as well. I can’t wait for it all to start filling out and looking lovely.

After a short sit down it was time to crate up and move all the hens back to the outside huts, that was 56 to the front hut, 16 to the far side hut and 20 or so to the near side hut. Get fresh water and feed in there with them all and then John put up electric fencing while I collected eggs, put in clean bedding for the geese, clean water for everything else, box up the eggs and pick a bunch of daffodils for the kitchen. I forgot all about the daffs at the back and they are all out bobbing beautifully yellow in the sunshine 😀 That was a 6.30pm finish today and I’m knackered 😂 We have to make the most of it though as the forecast says the temps are going to plummet over the weekend and we could even have snow! Drat it, it was lovely while it lasted and hopefully it won’t be too long before the warm weather comes back again 🤞

I have got a lot of plants to sort out for selling, I have broad bean plants waiting to go in the ground, sweet peas waiting to go in somewhere, plants to pot on in the greenhouse but I am kind of waiting until this next cold patch passes, I always seem to be waiting for it to be the right time for something.

Thursday 1st April 2021: It is noticeably cooler today but the poultry don’t care because for the first time in four months they are allowed back out 🥰 Happy, happy birds, John said when he let them out they got their heads straight down pecking at the grass. They have been shut away due to avian flu and we were legally obliged to keep them away from wilds birds which for us meant they had to live in the stables, nice to see them back out in the fresh air again, not doubt they will be causing trouble before too long 😜

Stopped for a quick coffee at 11.30 but I have mostly been in the greenhouse. I have sown the first lot of squash seeds, I have standard pumpkins plus banana squash, spaghetti squash, crown Prince, butternut squash, and three other types of smaller edible squash that the names I can’t remember now lol. This is the first sowing of three seeds of each type and once they come through I will sow some more, I am planning on having lots of squash this winter 😀 I also potted on the toms and peppers that look a bit worse for wear, I can’t quite work it out but I think it’s too much moisture, anyway I have put them in bigger pots and got them under cover of some bubble wrap and we will see how they go, some of them I discarded but most look like they will recover ok.

Some of the hens have already escaped from their temporary compound and are wandering round the farm and garden 🙄 I think I am going to try to be more relaxed about that this year 😂 until they dig things up of course.

John came home at lunchtime and we popped round to see my Mum, it’s her birthday today so it was nice to be able to go and see her and have a cuppa and a slice of cake 😀 After that we popped to the shop to get some fruit and some hot cross buns, drop some eggs off at Shelley’s door and then back home.

A sight rarer than hens teeth could be seen today when John cut the lawn, I know he cut it earlier this month but seriously twice in one year is a record 😂. The small birds are still getting in the fruit cage but I think I have discovered an oversight, the wire all round is small but on the door the holes are about an inch, easy enough for them to get through I think so I will be stapling some mesh over the top to see if that is where the problem lies. We have looked all over and can’t see any other points of entry so that has to be it.

I lit the Rayburn about 4pm, the last two days we haven’t bothered but it is colder today, I will only run for a couple of hours though, just enough to take any chill off so that by bedtime it’s not freezing in here.

My new factor 50 clothing arrived, I have to say I love the neck cover, I may even order a second one. It is brilliant, it covers the top part of my chest where a top is usually scooped, that always gets caught by the sun, it covers my neck and I can use it to cover the lower half of my face to prevent the sun getting to it when I am working. The top is also lovely and again it is factor 50, expensive for working outside in but needs must 😜

Good Friday: Traditionally the day you put your potatoes in, that’s what Dad always told me, this year he is not here to ask if I have done it yet or not 😞 As I have said I am going to be trying out growing them in straw, never done it before so it’s a first for me, I will be keeping some back to grow more conventionally just in case it doesn’t work 😜

We had Mia for the day today as Sam and Luke had to go and collect something they bought from quite far away. We had a lovely day and took her over to see my Mum, they haven’t seen each other for nearly 15 months! We also went to get a smoothie as a treat and apart from that we didn’t do much outside apart from checking and topping up water for the animals.

Saturday: I finally managed to sort the potatoes today, as I have said I am trying out a totally new method and we will see how it goes. I have swift, Charlotte and Vivaldi as my first earlies and cara as my maincrop, I also have another bag of maincrop to plant a bit later on. Hopefully you can see from the pics how I have done it, I have raised beds that are not filled, placed the tubers on the soil and covered them with straw, that’s it. Once the foliage appears I will cover with straw again and again and hopefully we will still get a decent crop of spuds. I have also placed the environmesh on top of this is to stop any hens getting in there and scratching back the straw. I have also planted some cara a little more conventionally in a raised bed that has soil, that way I can see what the difference is and which way is better. I am hoping the straw method is good as it is easy and not much effort is required, always a bonus 😜

Lay chitted seed potatoes on the ground, cover with a layer of straw, as the shoots come up cover with more straw. The third picture is the more conventional soil grown method, again covered so that the hens and cats don’t scratch it up.

We cleaned, hoovered and washed the car today, worthy of a mention as that is not something that gets done very often 😂 There is never enough time (or perhaps inclination) to fit it in as a routine job and so it’s rare, however it was getting to the stage where it was desperate, it still had pine needles from the Christmas tree on the back seat 😜

The tomato plants in the greenhouse that looked a bit iffy have recovered really well with potting on and some feed, I am confident they will grow on to be good plants. I have onions garlic and shallots growing that I planted last autumn but I have also ordered some red onion sets today. I like red onions although John does not 🤷‍♀️ I actually don’t know what the difference is except that they look good in salad and coleslaw 😂. I am pretty sure that after this artic blast we are supposed to get on Monday, things will start to warm up and then veg growing will step up a pace. At the moment I am holding back on planting out anything including the broad beans, they are fine in pots at the moment and I don’t want them to have a massive set back from really cold air. I still feel like I am always waiting but I guess it will soon be time for all systems to go. Last year we had unseasonably hot weather for weeks and the year before that I think, so maybe this is a normal spring and I have just forgotten what that is really like 🤔

I went out and picked some of the purple sprouting, the more you pick the more it produces. It tastes lovely and is a welcome fresh vegetable at this time of year though it does take a long time to grow it is worth the effort I think.

Easter Sunday: The weather this weekend has been so much better than I thought it was going to be, according to the forecast last week it was not looking very nice at all but today has been glorious. We spent the morning and some of the afternoon outside working on the front, John on the tractor levelling the driveway and me planting some more things into the beds. I have gone through all the plants I have potted up and either planted them, discarded them or fed and labelled them for using later on. I have probably emptied around 50 plant pots including Johns Mums agapanthus which is now in the front triangle bed. I was thinking about how many of the plants have real meaning one way or another, some are cuttings given me by Martin’s Mum, some from my Mum, some plants were from Johns Mums garden and some from our old garden, those have been in pots for 11 years! Some of the plants I had bought from the house before that, I have been taking them round with me for years, other plants are what the children ah e bought me or friends for my birthdays, there are a lot of memories in the garden now 🥰

I used some hazel pruning to make some natural plant supports in one of the front beds, I think they look quite good and hopefully will do the job.

We finished at 1.30pm and then went to see Josh and Flo to give them their Easter eggs, on to see Mia, Lucie & George to give them their Easter eggs and then back home to feed the hens and collect eggs before going to Charlie and Macca to see them but I forgot to take their eggs 🤦‍♀️

Because we have been out and about we haven’t lit the Rayburn today and hopefully it won’t get too cold over night lol, we have only been lighting it for a couple of hours lately, for hot water and to take any chill off the air. I have a feeling we will be lighting it tomorrow as the temps are set to plunge, it was about 15/16c today if not more and tomorrow is forecast 5/6c bit of a difference isn’t it 😝

Have a fab week x x