goose eggs – Page 2 – frieslandfarm (flowers)

Eggs, bee swarm & a million and one jobs to do.

Posted on May 22, 2022May 22, 2022 by frieslandfarm

Monday 16th May 2022: Unlike a usual Sunday evening, I didn’t sit down, instead I made cakes 🙄 simple 2lb loaf cakes, four lemon and two chocolate. The chocolate ones were made with oil instead of butter because I ran out of that. I definitely managed to use up a few eggs though and as it stands I will have 9 cakes in the freezer for future use 😂 Always handy when we don’t have any eggs in the winter, if we still have loads of eggs when I get back from holiday I shall start among other things, not sure what yet but I will find some recipes I am sure, and I will also start freezing them, might as well. John was also busy out strimming until it started to rain, hopefully we will continue to get some showers over the next couple of days, we really need to replenish the water table.

Actual Monday 😁 I spent nearly all of the morning sorting out clothes ready for packing, all of mine anyway, still have Johns to do yet. He was supposed to be just popping out to replace a set of taps, by 1pm he had not returned, I phoned him and he had had multiple phone calls from customers for various small jobs so had decided to get them done. That’s all well and good but I was waiting to go into town and pick up a few last things for our holiday. Eventually he returned and off we went. Went we got back we had a quick rest before cracking on with some jobs in the evening, mine mostly involved cleaning the washing machine and hoovering the boot room😝 nothing very interesting today.

Tuesday: Started off well with getting some things done in the garden areas, putting up some trellis for a couple of climbers that will ramble over the dog kennels. They have dual purpose, cover the shape you looking kennel structure and provide some lovely foliage for flowers next year 😁 Meanwhile John was fixing wood to the bottom of the gates to stop the bloody geese getting through, they have been ducking under and coming into the front area and then round to the lawn if the gate is open. I then went on to do a bit of weeding and planting the squash plants that had been growing, I also planted up a couple of cucumbers outside and some tomato plants, might as well get them in if I have got them. The reason being that the Bank of England is predicting apocalyptic food prices by the end of the year and inflation at 10%, grow everything you can and make sure you use everything you grow. With doom and gloom on the horizon I thought I would try and experiment, freezing eggs in a muffin tin. You crack them open into the tin, pop the yolk with a cocktail stick, cover and freeze, then once frozen take them out of the tin and freeze in freezer bags. I think this will work fine for any eggs you want to use in baking once they are defrosted they should be like any other egg you have just cracked. Not sure about poached and fried but I can’t see why they would be much different and certainly will be fine for scrambled. Come autumn when the hens are all moulting the egg number reduced drastically and this way I should always have plenty.

Freezing eggs for the inevitable shortage in autumn

Sam came over with the twins late morning and then Shelley and Florence, we spent a pleasant enough hour in the garden although first George got stung by stinging nettles and then Lucie 🙄 They had both finished crying and we were chatting again when Sam looked across to the house with a look of concern and said ‘what’s that’ I stood up to look and immediately shouted to everyone to get in the house. I then shouted to John to get the dogs in now, every one did exactly as they were told which was great. The reason was a swarm, thousands of bees had decided that somewhere nearby they were going to settle, they were not high up either but low down at face level which is why I thought it was better to get in out of the way. They settled in the cider apple tree next to the house and I phoned around to get someone to come and collect them. Dave, one of the bee keepers who we sold honey for last year came over, he got his bee suit on and collected them up, much to the delight of the children, it was exciting for them. He waited a fair time to gather them all up but there were a lot he couldn’t get to go in the box and so he left with the ones he had which must have been thousands, it was a big swarm apparently. The rest were still flying around and clustered on the tree for a while but we went out to get some shopping and when we came back they had dispersed. Early evening I went out to water the poly tunnel and as I got near to the small one I could hear exactly where they had gone 😂 hundreds of them in my tunnel. Hopefully Dave is coming back late evening with some pheromone to gather them up.

The swarm settled pretty quickly fairly low down in a tree right next to the house.

Dave came back with a box that previously had a swarm in and some syrup in the hopes they would go in but they were quite docile but this point and reluctant to move, he gently brushed some of them in and is leaving the box overnight to see if more can be encouraged to go in. I need to water the tunnel 😂 so I am waiting until almost dark before going out to do it, don’t want to make them angry 🐝

Wednesday: I was up early this morning 5am, I needed to get quite a lot of flowers cut for orders today and I didn’t want to be disturbing those bees in the tunnel 😂 They were still mostly all sleeping 💤 I went about my business in relative safety 🙄 actually they are apparently not hostile when they are swarming as they have nothing to protect, no hive, no honey and no eggs, that’s reassuring but still when there are thousands of them it’s a bit scary. The ones that have been left behind number around 200 which is a tiny fraction of the amount of bees in a hive, still it’s a lot of bees in my poly tunnel 😂 I got all the cutting done ended up with wet feet and arms as the dew was pretty heavy after the rain yesterday. Then I went on to getting some weeding done in one of the front beds, I wanted to get them out before we go away or they would be triffids by the time I get back. I got stung on the arms and feet by long stinging nettles, I had changed my shoes for flip flops, what the heck was I even thinking 🧐 numpty. After doing that job it was round to the veg garden, which is rapidly becoming a flower garden 😝 to plant up, you guessed it, flowers. Grasses this time actually, specific types that are great for flower bouquets, they add movement and sparkle. Then I planted up some scented pelargoniums, not my usual thing but the foliage smells amazing and again good for flower posies.

Back indoors and I got the eggs from the freezer, they took a little bit of persuading to leave the tin, bang, bang, bang, but eventually I got them out and popped them into a bag and returned them to the freezer for use later in the year. Back outside to potter a little bit more and to observe the bees, I am quite fascinated by them to be honest, their behaviour patterns under the circumstances are interesting, they clump together quite a bit and appear dozy. Here is what I have learnt, if they don’t go to the box Dave bought, they will die, they need to feed and they are not getting any instruction from the rest of the hive so they don’t really know what to do without all the others 😢 As I said before they are a tiny fraction of the hive, a couple of hundred out of a swarm of 40/50,000 so are dispensable as far as the hive health goes. But they are bees and we need bees so trying to gather up stragglers is a good idea. Those that don’t go to the box will definitely die, this is ok though because they then become part of the food chain for other insects and small mammals such as beetles and mice, it’s just sad. Some of the younger ones could gather pollen and go to a different hive and because they are young and have the pollen they would probably be accepted, old bees or bees with no pollen will not 😏 Nature is both amazing and cruel at the same time isn’t it.

Indoors early afternoon to make up the flower orders and then a sit down before going out late afternoon to deliver flowers and eggs today 😁 Then I have a flower bouquet collection late afternoon.

It’s definitely swarm weather, the chap that collected our bees has collected another three swarms today! He came back to get any of the bees that had gone into the box by dusk, sadly the rest that are clustering in the polytunnel in various places will now die off and be part of the food chain. A queen bee can lay up to a thousand eggs a day apparently so they will soon replenish and he also said ‘our swarm’ is now in a hive and working really hard, yay go bees 🐝

More rain this evening, I for one am not complaining, we really needed the ground water levels to get back up to decent levels 🌧

Massive thunder storms with lightning and heavy bursts of rain.

Thursday: I spent the morning getting my hair done while John was busy at home sorting and tidying his van.

When we returned home we watched the lunchtime news and I can’t help but comment on a couple of things. First is the fact that potentially there will be food shortages due to goods not being able to be shipped from Ukraine. It is a fertile and abundant country but don’t you think it is a bit ridiculous to rely so heavily on one country to provide vast quantities for the rest of the world. Obviously Ukraine needs all the support we can give it in anyway we can but if it teaches us one thing it should be to look at worse case scenarios and see how resilient we are going forward.

Second is the rate of inflation and the rising cost of living, well I just can’t shut up sorry 😝 Back in the 80’s (yes I know I am going to sound like an old fossil) inflation went above 10% and mortgage interest rates climbed up and beyond 15%, 15%! Just let that sink in if you are in your 20/30’s and have a mortgage, I am not age bashing but seriously it was a tough period for our finances and guess what, there wasn’t any talk of help in any way from any direction at all. You got on with it by working more hours or taking a second job and dispensing with any little luxuries, you rode the storm basically and yes some people sank under the cost of it all, some people lost everything and had to start again. I can tell you countless stories of the types of jobs people took that wasn’t their usual line of work because it was a necessity to do so. But also back in the day hardly anyone was in debt up to the hilt, mostly we had a mortgage and that was it, we had a second hand car that was bought and paid for not on tick and our lifestyle was not as extravagant as they are today, that extravagance has become the norm 🙄 it seems to have become an entitlement. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, I know things have changed a lot and I know that there is genuine hardship out there but from observations there are also a lot out there who do not know how to cut their cloth either that or they couldn’t possibly give up what I would consider luxuries at a time like this 🤔

We had a busy few hours this evening, I wrote a list of jobs that need doing just in case John was not aware of all of them 😂 He started off by cutting the grass in the driveway then the paddock and finally the lawn. I potted up some chrysanthemums that arrived today, these will extend the flowers available right through to Christmas 😁 I did the watering in the tunnels, cleaned the horses water buckets out and filled them all up, did a bit of weeding, sorted all the eggs after John fed the birds and collected the eggs. In-between all that we had the twins and then I had a live online workshop to attend, my eyes are very tired 🥱 Up early tomorrow to cut flowers for a 100th birthday bouquet 🥰

Friday: Still rainy lol after all those dry months it hasn’t stopped raining on and off for a week now. Up early and I cracked on with cutting flowers for todays birthday bouquet 🥰 Then it was on to cleaning and then just before lunch ironing johns shirts. The only time I do ironing is for occasions and though I don’t mind doing it I was glad when it was finished 😂 Meanwhile John had to pop out to get a small job done and then once he was back there were jobs on the list for him to get his teeth into. Shelley said make sure I leave her some jobs to do, so I definitely will 😝

I made up the flowers at lunchtime and then delivered them and when I got back I thought I would have a go at a corsage. I quite liked doing one, it’s a different skill to try out.

Popped out early evening to pick up some plants that I had seen for sale, good sized plants that were too good to pass up lol. When I got back I put the dinner on then out to the paddock to get Biscuit in and confine her to a small pen. She hasn’t been bad it’s just that she will get bad if I leave her out on all that grass after the rain we have had so this is preventative.

A live meeting then gardeners world, lovely Friday night, almost, my jeans unexpectedly ripped across the front of the thigh area so I now have to quickly order new jeans for going away 😂

Saturday: A busy day today rammed with every type of job you could possibly think off both inside and out. John has been busy as well cleaning out the birds and mowing the grass in the front paddock by hand because the belt broke on the ride on mower 😝 Shelley came over in the afternoon and we walked through two lots of flower selection, conditioning and arranging, she did a great job and all will be well with that side of things I am certain. In the evening I printed of yet more paperwork for the holiday 😂 one more bit to do.

Sunday: Another busy, crammed day of things to do, mainly packing, I think I have packed way too much and then not enough at the same time 🤪 It’s all the little things to remember but hopefully I have remembered everything and what I haven’t, tough. John has been cutting everything g with the hand mower again, flipping typical that the ride on breaks just as you need to get everything up together. Then he had the front hens to clean out and power wash, that’s the last of the big clean outs, Shelley will then be able to just skip out and all should be fine. I have cleaned the spare room ready for the kids to sleep in, I still need to go and alter biscuits electric fencing to give her a bigger area for a week, then Sam is back from her holiday and will re jig the grazing again.

There is such a massive amount to organise on a Smallholding when you want to go on holiday, there are endless lists of daily, weekly routines for each and every animal, lists for the top priority jobs, lists for what, where, when, how and why, general lists for the household stuff, deliveries, customers and then there is all the work needed to get it all up together to make life easier for the person who is coming to take over. We are incredibly lucky to have the girls who always know how much we need a holiday and are willing to step in and help out massively, without them we simply couldn’t go away 🥰🥰🥰

Downloaded a few books to read and the Miriam Margolyes book in Audio form, that should be a bit of a hoot 😁

This afternoon I am having my nails, eyelashes and eyebrows, preened, tinted and polished and then a roast a Shelley’s 😁 Back home to get some watering done and water in some nematodes for the vine weevil, fill up the horses water, let a biscuit out for a day and a half before she gets confined for a week, and finally get a sit down. We will have plenty of last minute jobs and things to get sorted tomorrow but for the blog that’s it for almost three weeks. That just leaves me to say have a wonderful Jubilee celebration weekend, it’s not often a Platinum Jubilee is held, what an amazing lady our Queen is in every way, and providing we get a fit to travel result I will be back in a few weeks time. 🚢😁🥂🥳 🇬🇧

Friesland Farm

Flowers, singing for Beltane and and bit of rain 😁

Posted on April 28, 2022May 2, 2022 by frieslandfarm

Monday: 25th April 2022: A new week, tad chillier this week in the morning but it did warm up as the day went on. John had to phone the doctor this morning about his arm, who sent him to the MIU (who didn’t want to see him at the weekend) for an x-ray, when he got there they said he couldn’t have one without a referral from the doctor (who had just told him to go there 🙄) so he called the doctor who sent the referral over, got the x-ray done, no break which is good but they said they would send the info over to the doctor next week. Next week! He was kind of left in limbo then as he has to get his job finished but he is having real problems with the mobility and pain in the arm, next week pfft. We had the conversation that many people are having about what has happened to the NHS since covid. Don’t get me wrong I fully support them and I think overall they do an amazing job and during the pandemic the strain would have been unbearable but the service does not seem to have come out the other side yet. Multiple factors I am guessing like massive back logs and workloads but the basic functions of connecting departments seems to have fractured leaving people in limbo and I know I am not the only one saying this. Having said all that John must have said something to them because in the afternoon he had a call from the doctor who was surprised at how quickly she got his results back 😁 Anyway the upshot is that the elbow joint is worn out, I told John that is lifting too many cups of tea 😂 didn’t go down well 😝 in all honesty it will be the years of plastering, grouting and heavy lifting that has done it and he is basically getting old and falling to bits. The doctor was great though and has given him stronger painkillers, told him that if after his holiday and rest it is no better, to go back and they will look at more options, can’t ask for more than that it was just the getting there that was difficult.

Meanwhile back here I was busy getting on with the day, weeding, pottering, watering, checking things over, all the usual stuff and nothing more exciting than that really.

Tuesday: Still a chilly start to the morning almost cold enough for a touch of frost I think. Once the eggs were done and out, the washing was on, the household bits done, I went out to cut some flowers for a hand held posy someone has ordered and collecting g later today. Doing a smaller posy is lovely because you can use the smaller flowers that don’t have the stem length needed for a bouquet and there are some delightful flowers to use.

I have started to wash my tops with the UV wash which gives me just a little added protection from the sun in the coming weeks. Every little helps as they say and I have already started to get itchy raised bumps on my arms so I need to be more careful going forward. We often think the spring sunshine is not strong but the UV rays are still capable of doing damage to my skin and it would be good to get it under control as soon as I can, that is the best way to avoid a flare up.

I went out to look over the plants for sale out the front to find something has dug out some of the strawberry plants. Judging by the smell it’s fox looking for worms 🙄 yesterday it stole the butter left by the milk man and it has been leaving its smell and making a mess tipping out various rubbish here. We have know it has been hanging around for a while because every morning when I open the back door it stinks of fox, it has tried digging in the run where the front chickens are as well. All of this does not bode well because the mandatory housing restrictions for the poultry is being lifted on May 1st, we will need to get something sorted before they are allowed out.

Another fiasco we have had is that someone has hit Johns van while it was in the driveway 😡 hit it and then just driven off, it’s not the damage so much as the not saying anything that is infuriating. He has been like a little rabid dog trying to figure out exactly when and who it was. I get it, I really do but chuntering on and on and on about it will not solve anything at all. It’s done, the damage is done, we have an idea of who it was but no way of proving it so 🤷‍♀️ what can you say except that some peoples morals are not very high 😏

I said back in the middle of the pandemic that I thought we were in for a bumpy few years ahead, not sure why I just had a sense of foreboding 😏 The pandemic was bad enough, the invasion of Ukraine by someone who can only be described as an out of touch despot made it all worse and the knock on effect of both of these events are food shortages, a fuel crisis and big price rises. Now to add to the misery we could well be heading for a drought year, a dry Winter, lack of rain in Feb, March and April and the longer forecast showing not much sign of rain for most of May 🙄 John and I have been saying for weeks that it’s not looking good this year, the water tanks are almost empty and no rain ahead to fill them up again. I know we have mains water but that all adds to the bills so we try and use as much rainwater as we can collect for the animals and garden. The soil has a deficit of 23mm of water at the minute which doesn’t sound like a lot but it is Spring and 51% of the rivers are below normal levels already. Hopefully we will get some eventually, probably a deluge just when we don’t want it 😂

A small hand held posy made to order today for someone who has lost a family member, this one has one small sprig of symbolic Rosemary in it which represents remembrance ❤️

Wednesday: I was up before the alarm went off this morning, at first the sunrise looked promising but it soon clouded over and was a tad chilly for a while. I had breakfast, got the usual stuff sorted, washing, eggs, rubbish, recycling and then it was time to cut flowers 🥰 I don’t think this will ever get boring 🌸😁 I have two bigger bouquets to make up today, one for a birthday and one is a weekly order going forward. The tulip season is going to be over soon but there is so much more coming on, I watch the garden every day to see what is coming next, in the words of Penny (Patricia Hodge) from Miranda (one of my absolute favs) it is ‘such fun’. Once the flowers and foliage are cut they are ‘conditioned’ this means sitting in a bucket of water in a cool dark place for as many hours as possible before arranging into a bouquet. Sometimes there is a little bit of extra conditioning to do for some things, woody or hollow stems but in the whole they are all pretty much treated the same.

The rest of the day remained chilly 🥶

I did a bit of pricking out and some potting on in the greenhouse and some pottering around. I spent way too much time trying to get something up and running online 🙄 I cut a load of hazel and soaked it in the bath for something I want to try out for a flower arrangement I have to do. I made two prototypes of the thing I had in mind, one out of paper and one out of wire to see how it would all go together. Then finally I tried it with the soaked hazel sticks, half of it went well the other half not so much, not at all in fact 😝 I have good ideas but I am not very good at executing them, on that basis I have asked if anyone has anything similar I can borrow that is already made 😂

Then it was time to make up the two bouquets, one to be delivered the other to be collected, it is just delightful working with such beautiful flowers and foliage 🥰

Thursday: It’s still cold, what’s with the lack of sunshine, mind you with the total lack of rain as well it’s probably not a bad thing, everything would be keeling over by now otherwise. I did say to John I would go out and give anything struggling a bit of the wet stuff but once out there I felt it seemed too cold and they wouldn’t benefit from getting even colder, tricky one. So instead of that and after I had done the necessary jobs, I decided to play with flowers 😁 I had a colour combination in my head and wanted to see how it turned out, rather splendidly I think don’t you?

Dark purple and white tulips, an allium and some pale blue Jerusalem cowslips together with mock orange foliage and some sambucus nigra make a winning combo 🥰

Friday, still a bit chilly but I got a few things done outside including mowing the lawn. Last year I left it for no mow May but this year we have the new lawn piece and I have to keep it cut to stop anything growing in it such as comfrey. The ground that we cleared still had a few roots left in it I think and so in order to kill them off we are going to have to keep it mown. Just before lunch Sam came over with the twins, the farrier was coming late afternoon and so she came to get the horses in beforehand. She couldn’t stay because it was right over school pick up time but it meant all I had to do was get them out of the stable and tie them up on the hard standing area. Biscuit had been a bit pottery on her feet but luckily she has not developed laminitis, her feet had just grown a bit long and she was footsore. She is now all trimmed up and on a restricted patch of ground so she doesn’t end up poorly. Jack is fine so he gets turned back out on the grass.

Saturday: Up and got all my jobs done because I was off out for the day with a friend 🥰 We went to a Beltane singing group day, it was lovely, we sat in a circle, the entrance was a May bower with foliage and ribbons and we sang songs about May and Beltane and the Green Man. We went to the woods and sang among the Bluebells and really connected with nature, I feel very ‘earthed’ now 😁 Or at least I did until I got back 🤪

We have what I can only described as the most incompetent pharmacy ever or so it seems. Month after month they never have my prescription ready despite having put it in well in advance, it’s always the same, you will have to come back tomorrow, I leave it to the last possible day as it is. This time John came home with it and it was only a bit of it, come back for the rest tomorrow 🙄 he goes back today while I was out and when I got home it was only a bit more of it and by now the place had shut and I am without some of my meds until they open again. They just didn’t give him the whole lot, nobody checked to see what should have been there and realised that was not all of it. I would t complain but this is all the time, it’s fractious going to pick up a prescription from them and it’s not just the pandemic it’s been going on for years. I would change pharmacy but from what I have heard they won’t have another company in the town 🤷‍♀️ how is that possible and how is it that they can give such poor service without any consequences. It’s not just me saying this either, ask just about anyone in the town and they will tell you the same thing, bloody useless and that’s on a good day!

I had to help John retrieve the goose eggs this evening, one of them is sitting but the eggs are not fertile so no point her doing that. The plan I came up with was to get the other three out of the paddock that way you only have one to deal with not the other three coming to her defence 😝 I tried a stick first to see if I could get her to move off the nest that didn’t work, so I got a bucket, put it over her head and manoeuvred her towards the door and off she went while I collected the eggs 😁

Sunday May 1st, May Day, Beltane, blessings to you all on this very special day. A day celebrated throughout time in many different countries and religions, a day to welcome the ‘growth’ of all things. One of the best days of the year I think 🥰 Except that it was cold and rainy, the rain I am not complaining about as we really need it but the cold side of it can do one 😂 Not much gone done today really, John did some burning and some cleaning out, can’t remember what I did but later in the afternoon I went over to look after Mia and the twins while Sam and Luke went out for dinner.

I did make up a small bouquet for the flower shed just in case anyone wants one 😁

Friesland Farm

🦠 it got me 🙄 a bit of baking & everything else.

Posted on April 3, 2022April 3, 2022 by frieslandfarm

Monday 28th March 2022: I spent most of the day doing bits and pieces, pottering, call it what you will. I got a few plants in the ground in various places, watered some of the pots and watered the greenhouse but apart from that nothing major. There was plenty I could have got done but was a little tired by lunchtime, quick sit down and a rest then some more pottering, that’s my day, potty 🤪

Tuesday: I can’t even remember what I did for the first part of the morning 🤷‍♀️ but probably the usual jobs such as eggs, rubbish, washing up, social media posts lol. Mid morning I checked the post box and I had some plug plants delivered, some I had forgotten I ordered 🙄 One lesson I really have to learn is writing down the orders and keeping the book with me at all times so I can double check when I think ‘ooo look, I think I will order those’, doubling or tripling on flower orders is not a good thing 😂 These are chrysanthemums and I am aware I have others on order, they are perennial however and so I will have them year on year. I can propagate from them to increase stock and either use that stock or sell it on so it’s ok, that’s what I am telling myself anyhow 🤪 As soon as I unpacked them I made a coffee and went into the greenhouse to pot them up, they will stay in there until this cold snap moves on and then I will put them in the cold frames until the danger of frosts has passed when they will be planted out. These are early to mid season chrysanthemums, I also have some mid to late ones on order, most are spray chrysanthemums which will be fillers but some are single bloom and beautiful shapes and colours.

It is quite a bit colder today, the sun has gone and we have grey cloud and drizzle, by Thursday we will have minus temps overnight and even the threat of some snow 🙄 It’s the see saw season with swings of up 10 degrees in each direction at the moment.

Lunchtime some bare roots shrubs arrived so I soaked them in water for an hour before going outside to plant them up. There should have been five but in fact there were six 😁 I planted up four of them in various areas, one out in the front paddock where I have some other small shrubs trying to grow. Another on the edge of the orchard area, one near the pirate ship and one down in the difficult area of the bottom bed, should do ok there but veg don’t. The remaining two I potted up and put in the cold frame area where they will stay until they form some good roots and then will go out for sale. Then I decided to sow some runner beans and some dwarf French beans, these will be grown in the greenhouse for quite a while before they are ready to go out. After that a bit of pricking out, Ami Majus, which is a great filler flower a bit like cow parsley. I will direct sow some seeds for that as well but as always I like to hedge my bets and get some started under cover. I can definitely see me thinking about bigger under cover areas in the future, I am filling up every available space I have at the minute 😂

Wednesday: Very much colder today than last week, today I decided not to go outside and do any work, I stayed in the warm instead. I spent the best part of the morning baking cakes 🍰 two Madeira cakes, one chocolate and almond and one everyday fruit cake, I also made up some batches of Yorkshire pudding mix to freeze for the times when we don’t have many eggs. The reason I did that is because we have so many eggs that I really need to do some thing useful with them. I am trying as hard as I can to sell as many as I can but with all the pullets laying like crazy, we have a lot so might as well turn them into something for the freezer. Went outside early evening it is positively Baltic 🥶

Plenty of cakes for the freezer, got to use the glut of eggs we are getting.

Thursday: Today should have been the highlight of the year so far for me but it wasn’t, gutted does not come close. On Monday I tested positive for covid and today I was supposed to be going on the course day with Sarah Raven but am unable to go 😭🤬 Yeah, it sucks, worse there is no cancellation policy for covid, worse still they didn’t even acknowledge my email to say I couldn’t attend.

The day got worse as one of the Turkey ladies has died overnight so now Ted only has one lady friend. It is even colder today than yesterday and we have had quite a few snow flurries on and off through the day though none of it has settled so far. One good thing that happen though, the card reader arrived today so I can at least take card payments in the future plus get some QR codes up and running.

Going back to the covid, that is obviously why I felt quite tired last week, I also had a very sore throat (but didn’t know that was a symptom) I tested on Friday because of the way I felt but it was negative so I thought I just had a bug. Sunday evening I had a really bad headache that I still had on Monday morning so I thought I would test again. I checked the test after 10 mins, nothing, five minutes later it had a faint line 😳 Because I am on immune suppressants I have a specially issued PCR test that I then had to do and send off, that result came back positive as well on Tuesday morning 😩 However by Tuesday the illness seemed to have ‘broken’ and I had nothing but by this time the wheels had started in motion and so I was awaiting a phone call from the next stage of the chain. That was a call from a Dr from infection control 🤪 we had a discussion about when the illness started, what symptoms I had and how I was now feeling, the upshot was that he didn’t think I needed the anti viral medication that I could get to lessen the effect of the virus. I agreed with him, it seems that my immune system has done the job after all which is good news 😁 I need to watch out for the next couple of weeks apparently as breathing complications can appear well after the virus has gone 🤷‍♀️ Today I was amazed to find in the post box a replacement PCR test kit, I am impressed that the system they put in place works exactly as they say it will, good job, well done 👏

Friday: Still testing positive but all I have is a ‘fuzzy’ head and I often have that anyway 😂 I thought we might wake up to snow this morning, yesterday late afternoon and evening there were flurries of snow some of them pretty intense but they haven’t amounted to anything and the sun is shining beautifully this morning though it is still cold and frosty.

We had the final window fitted today so now they all match lol, before it was even in I was looking at decoration ideas. It is the spare room and was last done around 8 years ago, now a new smaller window has been fitted it will need some making good and so might as well be upgraded at the same time 😁 I love a project 🥰

I potted up some scented pelargonium that I had ordered. I am not a geranium type ordinarily but scented ones, yes please 😁 If you are ever planning a sensory garden then you have to include these, apple, lemon, mint, all the wonderful smells you can get with these little gems are amazing.

I have been watching Bridgerton 🥰 Shelley said to me ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen it’ so I thought I would see what it was all about. Well I love it, it is multifaceted, relatable on so many levels and comparable even to modern society, social media in particular. It is refreshingly easy to watch, witty and the characters are likeable, beautiful and downright handsome. Scandal, love, unrequited love, deception, plus the costumes and sets are perfectly gorgeous, what more could you want ❤️ I think writer was particularly clever, a large family of boys and girls spanning a good few years in ages will give you reams of storylines for future series and I for one cannot wait for the next series 😁

Saturday: John spent the day taking down old fencing, mowing the lawn and getting a bit of shopping. I spent the morning in the greenhouse, moving things around, moving plants over to the poly tunnel, putting some things out into the cold frame, I actually don’t know exactly what but we did do some things 🤪

Sunday: Finally having negative tests mean I can go out, I know you can anyway these days but I wouldn’t because I didn’t feel it was very responsible so I stayed put. I wanted to go to the diy shop to get some particular flowers that the website said they had, they didn’t 😏 so we went to the garden centre to see if they had them, they didn’t and worse we thought we would get breakfast but they were not cooking 😏 called in to see my brother on the way back for a coffee and he said go to this other shop they have loads of bargains, they had sold out 😏 not a terribly productive morning on the plant buying front 😂 Called in to see Mum and Ken to wish her a belated happy birthday and then back home. I did pick up some half price lily bulbs so I planted those when I got back, I also spent a good couple of hours in the greenhouse pricking out tomato seedlings (pretty big seedlings 🙄) and potting them up. I potted on some crazy daisies, Californian poppies and some China asters. Meanwhile John cleaned out the hens at the front and the back.

I took my very first card payment now we have a card machine 😁 hopefully that will be a useful addition, since covid people don’t carry much cash anymore. I need to set up the QR codes for another easy way to pay.

Friesland Farm

Sowing, Planting & 2nd place (I will take that 😁)

Posted on March 6, 2022 by frieslandfarm

Monday 28th February 2022: There was a beautiful pink glow in the sky this morning before it turned to drizzle.

To say I felt sick yesterday when Putin started talking about Nuclear alert was an understatement and I am sure that the vast majority of you felt the same. How is it in this day and age that someone with such power can (or even want to) play such stupid games 🤷‍♀️ A world where everyone lives in harmony is clearly not possible sadly, the events are unbelievable and the pathetic rhetoric he spouts is also unbelievable, he has lost touch with reality, if he really ever had a hold of it. Because of all that is going on my thoughts are dragged straight back to self sufficiency mode. Not just on a personal level but a National one, the reliance on other countries for vast amounts of supply be it energy, metals, wood or food etc is, in my humble opinion, a big mistake. We have seen how quickly things can change and if the last few years have taught us anything at all it should be that relying on others for our needs can at times see us limping along in survival mode rather than thriving 😏

I spent the morning in relative bliss in the greenhouse potting on plants that I started off at the end of last year. There are good signs of growth and so while we are in the calm before the storm period I decided to pot things on and feed anything that looked like it was in need. Most of these plants will go out for sale at the front but some of them will be used for the cut flower beds or to fill up any empty areas in my flower beds.

Rain stopped play outside in the afternoon.

Tuesday: Is it just me or has everyone got a morbid interest of turning the news on whenever possible? I like information and if I see something written or heard something I like to check it out from as many sources as I can. Nothing I have heard that has come from Russian propaganda has any merit whatsoever as far as I can tell. Things like the Nazi reference to Ukraine, does he have a point I think so off I go to check it out from the most reliable, independent source I can find, I have checked out many things and they have all been twisted to suit Putins purpose, so I conclude that the man is mad, I suspect most other people think so too and who knows where this will end. I am willing Ukraine to somehow beat off the might of the Russian army, their bravery is incredible.

I did a bit in the greenhouse, sowed a couple more seeds but that was about it really, I went to town in the afternoon with a Shelley for a mooch round the charity shops and a hot chocolate (weather is miserable). It was me doing the animals in the afternoon and while I was doing the rounds I realised that the fox had tried to get in the goose hut. One one of the roof rails is rotten and the ply underneath joins right at that point, I think the fox has got up there and tried to scrabble the rotten wood out of the way to gain access. What made me think this is that some things that were on the roof were down on the floor and they were not there yesterday evening. John had to go up and put an extra piece of ply on top of the roof as a temporary measure to make sure I don’t lose any of my lovely gooses 😁

Wednesday: More of the same weather wise though it is supposed to improve later in the week. For now it is grey, damp and drizzly so not much going on outside. I did sow some mangetout seeds (1st sowing) in the greenhouse, I think trying to sow direct would be a waste of time, there are the mice that pinch them or the weather that rots them so starting them off inside is a safer option.

I have been putting the final touches to my very first competition entry at the flower club tonight 😝 I really have no idea if I fulfilled the brief, in fact there wasn’t one really, look it up on the internet, well that produced thousands of different interpretations 😂 so I have done my best with what I had and what I wanted to achieve. I was surprised how nervous I am at submitting it later, but I am also excited to see what everyone else has done to get some ideas for another time and we have a demonstration which will be lovely. A pot et fleur is what was asked for and hopefully that’s what I have produced 🤷‍♀️ next time it’s a pave so I’d better get researching that next 😋

Thursday: I am bouncing around this morning with the biggest grin on my face because I only went and came in second in the ‘pot et fleur’ competition 😁 I was genuinely amazed and even more amazing is that the demonstrator who was booked was the independent judge and did the critique said that it was a difficult choice between the first and second place, whaaaaat 😁😁😁 seriously I can’t tell you how chuffed I am that I got it right. The demonstration itself was really inspiring it was titled ‘be kind to the earth’ and the arrangements were all made using compostable or recyclable holders so right up my street and she even made a heart similar to the ones I made with the weeping birch, obviously hers were amazing but it gives me something to work towards next year so watch this space lol.

My entry which I was totally amazed to find got second place 😁

Not much on the agenda this morning and I had a hospital appointment in the afternoon. The trip to and from the hospital took longer than the actual appointment 🙄 still it was nice to see a consultant face to face again, last time I saw anyone it was 2019 😮 All is well though so that is a good thing.

Friday: Not a bad day, a tad cold this morning but no rain and the sun made an appearance this afternoon. I did some baking this morning, just an oat and seed bar for me to snack on and a date and walnut cake for John to snack on lol. In the afternoon I went into the greenhouse and potted up some dahlias that had arrived, these were from Sarah Raven and are the William Morris collection 😁 there were supposed to be four tubers in there but I found five yay. I also sowed quite few annual seeds, amaranth (green giant) China Aster, phlox (crème brûlée) calendula (orange flash) some sunflowers, teddy bear, a multi stem and some large sunflowers, I also sowed some foxglove seeds, I think that was it but could have been a few more things 🤔 After that I made a cup of tea and sat out the front in the sunshine for a little while that was until,I spotted lots of sycamore seedlings sprouting so I did some weeding. Back inside to get the dinner sorted and then out to feed the poultry and collect the eggs. Back in to get the dinner in the oven and while it was cooking I had a live workshop to attend online. After we had eaten I had another live workshop to attend online and finally that was the end of the day and I could spend the rest of the evening relaxing (actually I was playing wordless unlimited 😝)

Saturday: I planted up plenty of gladioli bulbs today although not all of them, I will be successionally planting these so as to stagger the time that they come into bloom, I don’t want them all blooming at the same time. This will be the same for most of the annuals, the seeds will have a gap of at least two weeks between sowings so that I get a continuous flush of flowers rather than all at once (that’s the plan anyhow) I also potted on some tomato seedlings that I have been growing indoors, they are doing well and just needed to go into bigger pots to bring them on more. I sowed some more zinnia seeds and some sweet peas called ‘sublime scent’ 🥰 After doing that I went and helped John who had been giving the birds a good clean out, he did the ducks, the new point of lay at the front and the hens at the back. I went and did the birds in the stable block, we deep litter those so it was a case of raking it over, adding new sawdust and redoing the laying boxes and areas. I also added some sunflower hearts, seaweed and diatomaceous Earth to their food bowls. The new hens have begun to lay 😁 it won’t be long before we are getting lots of pullet eggs every day. Early evening I went over to Sam’s to babysit while he and Luke went out for the night.

Sunday: Not a bad day today although the sunshine was a bit deceiving, it looked a lot warmer than it actually was. We were up quite late for us as the babysitting was an early morning finish 🥱 but we soon got on with a few things. John did some tidying and burnt some rubbish meanwhile I prepped the dinner for later today and this time it was Sam, Luke and the kids coming for roast. I can’t think what else we did today but we were constantly on the go so must have got quite a bit done.

I need to wander across the paddock tomorrow sometime and see if the wild garlic is growing yet, I have seen other posts where people have handfuls, maybe mine will get to that stage one day 🙄

I hope you have a great week, the news on the world stage at the minute is not so good and every time I watch the news I feel heartbroken for Ukraine. All the more reason to really enjoy the little things in life, the Robin singing it’s heart out on the branch of a tree, that lonesome sunbeam that has found a chink in the clouds, the sound of normal everyday life going on around us, don’t take anything for granted, look, listen, love x x

Friesland Farm

Micro veg masterclass, pricking out & the first crop harvests of the year.

Posted on March 16, 2021March 21, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 15th March 2021: It’s Florence’s 3rd birthday today 😀 it is such a terrible shame that we have not been able to spend the time with all our grandchildren the way we would want to 😞 hopefully this coming summer we can make up for lost, precious time.

March 15th is synonymous with ‘beware the ides of March’ the warning given to Julius Caesar before he was assassinated on that very day but did you know there is an ides of every month. It is the full moon of the month and in other months falls between the 13th and the 15th, it was also the deadline for settling your monthly debts. So it was a dark and gloomy day for Caesar and anyone who owed anything but not so much these days, we can overlook any foreboding I think 🤔 🤞😂

The weather is not too bad this morning, we had heavy rain during the last evening but the sun is out this morning though the cold wind is still here, it has abated a little today mind you so that’s good. John did the animals and went to work, I did some housework bits and my plan is to go into the greenhouse and sow some flower seeds this morning. It should be nice in there, out of any wind and warmed a little from the sunshine. As with the vegetable seeds I seem to have amassed a lot of flower seeds too, I might as well sow them and either sell them or use them where I can. My favourite time of the gardening year is seed sowing I think, like Christmas Eve it’s the anticipation of wonderful things to come. Once everything has grown it gets a bit manic planting it all and then tending it all so seed sowing is the calm before the storm 😜

I did sew a few seeds, some more broad beans some of which will go out for sale when the plants are big enough and then some flower seeds. I need to sow flowers that don’t need the extra heat at the minute because I need the propagators for the tomatoes and peppers etc. But I did sow some orange poppies, cornflower, red flax and some sweet rocket. I have moved some of the plants that are growing nicely outside to the cold frames, lupins, some cuttings of hardier plants and some broad beans that are already a good size, these will all harden off, which basically means get used to the outside temperatures, before planting. There wasn’t as much to do as I thought I could because the timing is still not quite right for a lot of things. The tomato plants, although some of them have their true leaves, can do with a few more days before pricking them out and moving them to the bigger propagator, the same applies to the peppers and chilli plants. I have got some flower plants to pot on and after a coffee I may well do that job, first I had to replenish the egg shed. I rarely see customers arriving unless I am out there and then I go to the shed and it’s nearly empty 🙄 I forgot to get some garden canes at the garden centre so I have ordered some online, I have seen a good set up for growing peas that I want to try. Peas grow pretty straggly unless you are constantly moving the growth to where you want it to go. This neat little system also allows easy access, well easier than I ever make it anyway, in my mind it will work well, we shall see. The cardboard hack I am impressed with, that works a treat, definitely a keeper, if you are sowing rows straight into the ground you can use lengths of wood which work the same way. I do still have to work out where everything is going to go this year which is not something I have put very much thought into yet, I need to get my skates on with that one. The notebook that shelley bought me I am going to use to write down all the things I want to do with the produce this year, I often have ideas but then forget all about them and then think, oh I was going to do that. So far in the book is mint jelly and drying more herbs, I am sure I will think of plenty of other things along the way.

I did go back out to the greenhouse, I got the bigger propagator in place and then pricked out the tomato seedlings and the jalapeños, the pepper are a little too small at the minute. Once I had a bit of space in the smaller propagator I sowed some outdoor cucumber seeds. I also potted on a couple of the outdoor plants I have left over from planting the beds up and watered the seedling in the poly tunnels that I sowed last week, the spinach is already coming up. I am not sure if I just don’t have the energy today or if I feel the weather in not ideal for working out in the open but I have no inclination to do anything on the beds at the minute 🤷‍♀️

Remember the little red areas I said I have on my finger tips and around the nail bed, well a discussion with my Mum leads me to believe they may be chilblains. I never knew you could get them on your fingers as well but yes that is what they look like so I will look after my hands accordingly and see if they go.

Tuesday: The sun was out for a bit this morning, the wind has dropped and so it felt pleasant enough, when the sun disappears behind cloud it is obviously not so warm but still warmer than it has been in that cold wind.

John had a text from the local surgery offering a vaccine so he has taken that offer as it is for tomorrow and will cancel the one next week on he other side of Oxford, he was t really looking forward to driving back from there after he had it, this is five minutes from home rather than an hour round trip.

The micro veg on the windowsill didn’t go very well but I think I have learnt a bit from doing it. The lettuce seed was too sparsely sown and the peas kept drying out consequently I kept giving the peas water which was soaking up into the compost do the lettuce. The compost got too wet and in the end so did the pea seeds and although some of them grew, some went mouldy. Back to trying to get a balance, keeping different types of seeds in different trays is what I have learned I need to do. I have found a supplier of bigger quantities of seeds and have ordered some more and will keep trying until I can get somewhere near the desired result. You think it would be easy enough but I think there are things like ratio of compost to seeds and then watering techniques to take into account to get a good even growth rate.

I watched an hour long masterclass on micro greens and what I had thought I had done wrong was exactly what I had, plus I picked up a few other tips including this new (to me at any rate) idea of excluding light initially. So now I have set up another tray as per the video and I will monitor it to see how it goes. I had about five packets of half used sprouting broccoli so I have used those seeds for the trial. They are one of the most nutritious micro greens you can have and growing brassica to their full size takes up a lot of room and they have a lot of pest problems so if I can successfully grow them like this it’s a win, win situationist reckon. I have bought them in onto the kitchen window sill which is not necessary it it means I can monitor them more easily and a daily basis. Looking at the lists of micro greens most of them don’t need any extra heat which is a bonus, they are all crops that would normally grow without being under cover. There are so many types you can grow, turnip, beetroot, brassica, chives, nasturtiums, sunflower, peas and of course various lettuce, a whole lot more besides. One of the best things is the tiny amount of space you need to grow a good crop of nutritious greens, a small area of sideboard space and you are away. If you wanted to do it a little more seriously, a small shed so that you could keep them growing on rotation and a cheap led light would be all you needed I think.

I ordered some larger quantities of seed yesterday but looking at the array of micro greens you can grow is quite exciting really, it difficult not to get carried away, first steps first, let’s see how well this trial goes. It will be up to 10 days before I can harvest it but that is insane compared to how long you wait for your big veg to grow. I can see it is definitely the way forward to feeding ever increasing populations, plus as you will probably have seen, they can be grown in disused underground areas but for me there is nothing better than traditional veg gardening, outside in the fresh air, a bit of hard graft now and again and nature all around 🥰

I will just add to what I have learnt this morning, there are a couple of ways to grow micro veg, one way is without soil at all, actually three ways that I can think of. Hydroponically, that is with a pumped water system, they usually use fish in the water as well for cleaning and nutrients, the roots grow in water not soil, that tends to be a larger system than most people have room for. Then there is a soil based system like I am trying, which I prefer, and finally the sprouting type system. Probably twenty years ago or more it became trendy to sprout seeds of all types, a jar or special unit was used and the same principles are applied to the micro veg except that you allow the seedling to grow a lot bigger. Sprouting is exactly that it is the tiny shoot from the seed and you eat the whole lot. Two problems I found with this, one, that you have to remember every day to wash the seeds so that you don’t get a build up of pathogens in the water turning it sour and two which is relevant to me and my disease is that I can’t have Alfa Alfa which is one of the most popular sproutings, it increases inflamation. In a slight twist it’s one of the reasons that John mainly does the morning feeding, the chicken feed contains Alfa Alfa and does give off dust so the more I avoid it the better.

Rubbish micro veg beginner method, then after a masterclass a much better result. I will keep you posted on the process but as you can see after only a few days the seeds are sprouting.

I did go back into the greenhouse (because it’s such a nice day) and sowed some more flower seeds and a couple of small trays for micro greens, garlic chives as I already had them.

I had a few invoices to do for John and get those sent off and tidy up some old files on the laptop which I rarely use any more (the files and the laptop)

John came home just after lunch and we had a new batch of POL delivered at 2pm luckily no one is collecting any today so we went off to get a bit of food shopping. I have said it before but I am not sure how ‘we don’t need much’ transfers to a small trolley full 😂 I guess it’s mostly perishables and then things to stock up on plus we seem to buy a lot of cat milk 😜 Back home and I unpack everything while John goes and does the afternoon rounds, we had already lit the Rayburn before we went out. It is getting to that time of year when it can be warmer outside than in especially if the sun is out.

Wednesday: Not sunny, not raining, not windy and not cold, whoop lovely day for working outside which is exactly what I have been doing. John did the morning rounds and went off to work, I went out and put in clean bedding for the geese, ducks and the chickens in the stables plus topped up the grit and oyster shell. Then on to getting the Guineas some fresh greens, it’s a bit sparse at the minute but I found some sorrel, chard and dandelions plus some hazel twigs so they were happy. Someone came to pick up some point of lay hens. Then onto gardening which I spent the rest of the time doing. First off we have an area that is umm difficult shall we say, it is a triangle in the front but over the year everything had been put there, hard core, gravel, wood chip, if it got delivered that’s where it went and so digging plants in is difficult. Not to be deterred I got the shovel and moved stones and hardcore out and managed to plant the things I was hoping to plant. A forsythia, a buddliea, some ornamental grasses and a few other bits that look dead so I can’t actually remember what they are 🙄 This is not a formal bed and the intention is for it to look a bit wild. Then onto the other garden and I have lots of things that have self set so I have been digging them up and either transplanting them to the beds or potting them up for selling later in the spring. A couple of plants that have got big I have dug up and divided, they will also be put out for sale unless I need to fill a space. I took down the arch area that I put up last year, the metal arches have broken in so many places it’s not worth trying to cobble them back together. I was delighted to see that the mini kiwi is still alive though and have put an ornamental metal trellis there for it to grow up this year, hopefully we can get something else in place by the time it gets bigger. Plenty of weeding and hoeing got done and so I am happy with progress today 😀 A quick sit down mid afternoon

John will be home late afternoon as he has his vaccination today 😀 and I have two more lots of people coming for hens at some point.

I lit the Rayburn, John came home, he did the egg rounds and then went off to get his vaccine. He had the AstraZeneca, although there is controversy in some countries he said he places his faith in the science not the politicians lol, my brother noted that with the numbers vaccinated and the numbers affected by blood clots the chance is 0.0000005% chance of an issue, so the chance of getting covid is far, far greater 🙄 Just after he arrived home the next lot of people came for their new hens and then we just about managed to get a cup of tea before the next lot came for theirs. We still have 14 left to sell, this time last year they would have been sold just like that, I think we sold around 250 hens possibly more I haven’t done the books yet and so haven’t totted it up. Then it was time for some dinner and a restful evening, fingers crossed John doesn’t have any side affects.

Thursday: Up and about early this morning, John did the rounds while I did the inside jobs and then it was off for the first appointment of the day to get my bloods done. Grabbed a takeaway coffee on the way back and on with the rest of the day. Most of the day, until mid afternoon, I spent pottering in the polytunnel and greenhouse. I had some bits to tidy up and sort out in the tunnel, pots with things that had died in them and pull up the radicchio. I tasted it but I don’t like it, it’s too bitter for me and so I gave it to the Guineas, the space is now being used for a big water butt that I will fill from the tap to water any seedlings in there. In the greenhouse I have sown some basil seeds and utilised a rack unit to place over the top of the propagator so that any rising warmth will benefit the plants above it. I picked the first crop of the year, the forced rhubarb, a bunch I put out for sale and some I will stew down with some honey and have that with custard for my pudding later 💕

I know I keep banging on about it but I can’t tell how impressed I am with using this cardboard technique, seriously, the germination rate is nearly 100%, compare that to sporadic germination of around 70% of previous years and you can see why I am cock a hoop with it 😂

Seedlings grown under the cardboard, I took the cardboard off the beetroot on the left yesterday and the night scented stock this morning, tomorrow the stock will be upright and have colour now they are able to photosynthesise.

I was struggling to upload photos to the blog, for the last ten years I have been using the free site, in order to continue being able to have photographic content and not have to delete previous photos, I have had to start paying to use the WordPress site 😂 At the moment I have not engaged with any advertising or traffic payment but I may do that in the future to cover costs, I am loathe to as I personally find it really annoying to have pop up ads everywhere. I may try it and then undo it depending on the annoyance 😜 The blog will now appear under a new domain name of http://www.frieslandfarm.com instead of the WordPress appendage. I do have another website but I rarely use it and so I think I will close that one down and use this one instead.

Apologies if in previous blogs any pictures did not appear.

Friday: Fairly non weather again, to be honest I was expecting a plunge in temps but that seems to have changed which is great. I spent a large part of the morning doing some paperwork, it’s the time of year for renewals, cancellations, updates, mot, tax etc etc, all costly of course 😜 Towards midday I went into the greenhouse and spent an hour pricking out seedlings, dill and coriander. Dill is not something I have used much until last year when I discovered how tasty it is, I even dried some for use over winter.

I have two electric propagators on at the minute and I am thinking I need a third one 😜 I really want to get off to a flying start and quite a few things that could be started early need the heat. We don’t have constant temperatures indoors so another propagator seems the ideal solution. Any plants that get too much for the greenhouse can be transferred to the polytunnel to wait until planting time so I have the space to move them on, maybe I should just do it instead of thinking about it 😂

Tonight sees the long awaited return of Gardeners World and the soothing tones of Monty Don telling us what we should be doing at the weekend, always my favourite bit 😀 I have still been listening to podcasts on and off, mostly garden or environment related, I was astounded to find out that mowing the lawn with a petrol mower for an hour relates to driving 100 miles in carbon emissions, that is a shocking statistic 😱 If we had an electric point out there I would definitely change to an electric mower.

I couldn’t find the motivation to get stuck into anything much in the afternoon, consequently I felt the cold and so I lit the Rayburn early afternoon. I will probably have a busy weekend so I guess a gentle afternoon is allowed. Thought I didn’t do anything physical my mind is constantly whirring, all kinds of things rattling around, things I want to get done when the weather is slightly warmer, this to sow, plant, things I want to do with the harvests I hopefully get, yep plenty going on in my head 😂

At some point though the dates escape me, we will be allowed a little more freedom to see people which will be fabulous, as I say we have booked our spa stay and we have discussed a holiday which we can hopefully book first thing Monday morning. It is exciting to think we may leave the shire in the not too distant future, I can’t wait for some r & r or even just to sit down in a cafe for coffee would be nice.

Another exciting time on the distant horizon is 2022, from a genealogy point of view anyway, it’s the date the 1921 census information gets released. That will mean that I will be able to look up information on my grandparents and build a better picture of where they lived. Back to the now and we have the census this Sunday March 21st, do fill it in won’t you, it makes life so much easier for descendants who are researching you 😂

Saturday: Another non weather day, would have been nice to see the sun though. After the animals were done, John got the water taps sorted out, they get turned off over winter as they freeze and burst otherwise. We may have to watcher the forecast in case the temps dip below freezing but hopefully we should be fine now. After that I wanted him to sort out the runner bean frame, last year he put it up but not quite how I wanted it and consequently it didn’t work as well as it should have 🙄 now he has altered it to the way I wanted it in the first place. Meanwhile I laced back together any holes in the fruit cage netting and some other things though I can’t remember what now 😂 Mid morning someone bought us a shed that was going to be burnt but luckily they recognised it was too good for that. It is almost like new and so we will use it here for something no doubt, love a free shed 😀 John felt tired in the afternoon so he had a rest while I carried on pottering out side. This time of year it’s all about getting reading for the season ahead and so I have put in rows of canes and string for the peas and sat and had a look at the garden to see where everything is going to go. I remember what else I did earlier, I picked more rhubarb and some purple sprouting, the first picking of that.

And today I took the cover off of the micro veg and they now look like this:

Good germination over all, no damping off as yet, I will take photos every couple of days to compare the change but it seems like a successful trial, all I need to do now is sow some more so that I have a continuous supply.

Came in mid afternoon to light the Rayburn, John did the egg rounds, got some wood in, sorted out the rain tank tap and then had to shoot out to a call out.

I had a wander round the front paddock this morning, the hens will be allowed back out on April 1st so I thought I would just check it over. I was delighted to see the wild garlic leaves have made an appearance, I will wait until they get a little bigger and maybe pick a few for a salad one evening.

Sunday: Weather is the same, occasional peek from the sun but not much. Did the usual bits and pieces, went to get some food shopping. In the afternoon I did some weeding a bit of planting and sowed some leek seeds in the greenhouse but apart from that not a lot else really.

One more week finished and one more week nearer to some kind of freedom albeit small, at least the weather should keep improving. We aim to book a holiday tomorrow morning, that’s if the web site doesn’t go down with all the traffic 😂 fingers crossed because it would be nice to have a holiday to look forward too x

Have a good week 👋

Friesland Farm

Nice weather to begin with, then wind and rain and then just continuous wind 😝

Posted on March 14, 2021March 14, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 8th March 2021: Good morning and good morning to all those children who are finally returning to school today and big high five to the parents who have been home schooling ✋ Hopefully today marks the beginning of the road to some kind of normality later this year 🙏 When I think about the last year of our lives it all seems surreal, governments have ordered people to stay home and paid them to do so, made travel illegal, isolation and quarantine have become normal words in a conversation, furlough is a newly invented word for being paid to stay home, shortages of toilet roll and other vital supplies 🙄 No seeing your family, no hugs, no birthday celebrations, no weddings, funerals that couldn’t give people the send off they deserved, people dying by the millions all over the world, scientists working flat out to come up with a vaccine, NHS working round the clock in extreme circumstances, shops, bars, clubs, pubs, theatres, sports grounds all closed for the duration, and this time last year we had no idea what was coming!

John was up and did the animals before going off to work this morning. I swung the hoover round and did a bit of polishing, that will make me feel better when I go outside and spend most of my time in the garden 😀

Good grief is it still Monday 🙄 seems like a very long day today. Been busy in the garden first thing, raking up and burning garden debris, nothing quite like a garden bonfire in Spring. Then I was digging up more deep rooted weeds before they start to flower and set seed. Sam came and I looked after the twins for an hour while she went food shopping. Carried on in the garden after she left and John came home, we got the last bit of compost riddled and what didn’t fit in the new compost bins went on the garden. It will all end up on the garden I am just not ready for it yet. I cleaned the small poly tunnel cover with the algae remover, did a few more bits before sowing the first two rows of carrots for the year 😀 covered them with environmesh because the cats are getting round to playing in the garden and we have a storm coming Thursday apparently, so if they are covered nicely the seeds should not get to disturbed. Environmesh is an expensive outlay initially but it is very long lasting, I have had mine for years and it can be used for a multitude of coverings including brassicas. Checked the postbox and Johns call up for the vaccine had arrived, he was invited to go to the Kassam stadium but booking it online was a right ole rigmarole 🙄 by the time you had chosen a date and pressed next, the times had all been allocated and it was back to square one, in the end he phoned and spoke to a human and got it all booked 😀 Then it was time to get the eggs done and light the Rayburn, get the dinner sorted etc etc. I did pull up a few good beetroot today so I need to decide what to do with them, normally I would leave them in the ground to get bigger but I really wanted to clear the area for a fresh start.

In this area there is the apricot tree a cherry tree which is out of shot then rhubarb, a thornless blackberry some horseradish and asparagus but I have plenty of room to plant other crops, I am just not sure what that will be yet. To the right you can just see the runner bean frames so they also grow here. Last year I grew pumpkins in this space which just meandered around everything else which worked well.

It won’t be long until I can start picking some of this years produce, the rhubarb I have been forcing is looking brilliantly vibrant and there are enough stalks to pull, I really need to have custard with mine 😀 The purple sprouting broccoli has a few little heads appearing, I think by next week there will be enough for a picking. The leeks I planted last year have been slow but they are just about big enough to be useful if pulled from here on in, it’s all looking promising and I can’t wait for that fresh, home grown, full of flavour goodness. As a side note there are plenty of things growing that we could eat right now but they are from days long gone and are mostly considered weeds, plantain, dandelion, goose grass, chick weed, nettles, but always worth remembering just in case you ever need to know 😜

This forced rhubarb looks amazingly vibrant (no filter needed here) can’t wait to have some with custard 🥰

We are getting near to the end of the veg I froze last year but I still have loads of frozen fruit left mostly plums. The plums won’t be ripe until late August, early September so no rush to use them but I will probably make some more jam with half of them, there are also a few bags of mixed berries which again I will use to make jam as we have run out.

After five whole days of our broadband and phone being fixed it’s back to dropping out again so that more time wasted contacting BT, seriously they are shockingly shite! I would change provider but that doesn’t really solve the problem as Open Reach service the lines anyway not matter who the provider is so I can’t imagine it would be any better 🤷‍♀️

Tuesday: A sunny morning with a frost, it should burn off and be a pleasant day. I am trying to get as much done as possible during this dry period, we have wind and rain approaching in the second half of the week so making the most if it. Once the weather turns I can do a bit of baking, haven’t done any in a long while so John will be pleased. BT are coming out tomorrow to fix the problem, just like they did the last three times 🙄 not holding out much hope there 😜 We had another power cut the night before last, not for long but still, our services seem to be getting worse and worse with each passing year.

The big news today is the Megan and Harry interview, I am trying to avoid it but it crops up everywhere 😂 suffice to say my opinion, for what it matters, is that there are better ways of dealing with things than airing your dirty linen on a worldwide scale, they haven’t done themselves any favours. I had supported them in everything they decided to do until now.

It’s 1.30 and I have just come in and had some lunch after a very pleasant morning in the garden. I have been doing various bits but nothing too hard which is why it was so nice I think, pottering is the best term for it. I have sown some more seeds, firstly some flowers, sunflowers and echinops to be precise and then in the big tunnel I have also sown some little gem and winter gem lettuce, some spring onions and some white radish. I have cut back some of the hazel that overshadows the small tunnel, I think looking at them they need a really good cut back, I will have to sacrifice nuts this year. Then I thought I ought to sort out my seeds, they seem to be in complete disarray and I am forever going through all of them to find something. Now they are all in tubs for various types, root veg, squash, salad, you get the idea. The one thing I haven’t got is courgettes, none at all so I will have to get some and some more broad beans while I am at it. I have made sure that any flyawayables are secure for this wind we have coming, shame the weather is going to break but we have had a good run over the last week. It doesn’t sound like I have done much but I have done other bits as well such as retrieve the goose eggs and fill up their water bucket, sort out the eggs and the returned egg boxes, not much but it has filled my morning with only a quick coffee break when John came home to get something he needed. Yep a very pleasant morning indeed.

My guilty pleasure on such a lovely day 😜

I spent another hour in the greenhouse, I didn’t intend to, I went in to give the next size up propagator a clean ready for moving seedlings on but I got listening to a story on radio 4 and so I couldn’t leave until it was finished 😂 I found plenty of little things to do while I was listening 😀

Wednesday: It’s not as cold this morning but we have drizzle and a slight wind, worse to come later according to the weather forecast 😕 John was up and down the animals before going off to work, the builders merchant lorry arrived with the remaining top soil for the last bed, it has taken 15 of the big builder bags, I am not sure how much they weigh but that’s a lot of top soil. John arrived back home as he saw the lorry passing him and came back to help unload which was great as I was not looking forward to that. They hold the bags up on a grab over the bed and then cut underneath to let the soil fall but even so I struggle to cut the bag with my rusty old Stanley knife 😂 They all left and I came in to finish the washing up and then out to take the soil as flat as I could, we have a small mound left in the middle and I will let John decide wether to rake it over or take it off (heavy work lol) I seem to have lost a lot of strength over the last year, I keep trying to build it back up but then everything hurts, at the minute I have shooting pains now and again up the middle of my lower palm and into the wrists. I need to book some more blood tests for next week to see how the white cells are doing, hopefully they have not gone too low, that could be causing the problems I am having which are only minor but still inconvenient. I am also waiting for BT to arrive again today, we will see what they can find this time 🙄

As the weather is not favourable I had decided I will probably do some baking today, it will keep the kitchen nice and warm and keep me busy. It also means I will have things in the freezer that I can just grab to defrost once the gardening season is well under way and I have less time indoors to do stuff like cooking 😜

I have baked scones, biscuits, two fruit cakes and a mincemeat slice pudding for dinner tonight to go with out delicious looking shoulder of lamb 😀

I will freeze a fair bit of this for another day 😀

It was nice and warm in the kitchen while I was cooking and moving around but a short while after I had finished I could feel the cold so it was time to light the Rayburn. Another valid reason that I will be glad when I no longer have to do that is this scenario: It is pretty windy today, the wind is coming up from a south westerly direction and whipping past the back door, the Rayburn is next to the back door and when I empty the ash pan I go straight outside, you can put two and two together there can’t you 😝 And also a good reason for lighting it mid afternoon is to do with the wind, we already had one power cut this week and one the week before I think it was so the potential for another is high. The winds are forecast to reach up to 70 miles an hour on the coast, they will be less fierce by the time they come this far inland but still could reach 50 miles an hour and that will be more than enough to bring down a tree onto a power line. If I warm the house up now at least we won’t be freezing if it does happen later 🙄 Always pay to have a plan 😉

Thursday: Good grief what a night, I was going to sit and blog at 4.30 this morning but decided not to bother. Due to the winds I was awake at 1.30, 3, 4, 5 which is when I made a cuppa, went back to bed and the alarm went off at 6.30 but I went back to sleep as the winds had subsided a little by then. Seriously it was roaring all night, the metal roof occasional banged, the wooden building flexed, creaked and groaned, each time I nodded off there would be a loud creak or bang and I would be wide awake again. By 6am my eyes were stinging where I was tired. The local station recorded 47mph peak, their elevation is 88m ours is 101m with an open west aspect which is the direction the winds came from most of the night so I reckon we probably could have recorded 60mph or more at times here. Loud is an understatement, I was trying to compare it, I think it was mix of a big waterfall and a fast speed train 😂 It never let up all night long and this morning is lighter but still blowy, it changed in speed and direction around 6am. On a good note though it’s not raining this morning no yet anyway, I had expected a lot more rain than we have had 🤷‍♀️ By contrast, John slept through the lot 🙄 Amazes me because if he can hear the second hand of a clock he can’t sleep apparently but rip roaring winds not a problem, he was the same when the children were little, never heard the baby cry or the dog bark to go out but would complain that the clock on the oven downstairs made a noise!

John was up before me and do the animals, I got up and had a cuppa, then I made another one and thought, John will be in any minute from doing the rounds so I made him one, I drank mine and thought, where has he got to? I then realise that his phone and glasses were no on the table and so I looked out the window and his van was gone, he had left for work before I even got up 😂

I whizzed round and got a few things done, made an appointment for bloods next week, sorted out the eggs, the Guineas, cats and dogs, put the rubbish out, give the place a check over to make sure no trees had come down then had a coffee. After that I went to town to get some fruit from the market, takeaway coffee and a pastry from the local coffee shop musing over how lovely it will be to be able to go in and sit down for coffee eventually 🥰 A quick trip into the supermarket and the bakery, I haven’t managed to make bread so I bought some. Then over to see Sam and the twiglets in time to help feed lunch. Back home for 2pm and I could have lit the Rayburn but then I am tied to it for an hour so instead I spent an hour in the greenhouse checking things over. I also sowed some night scented stock seeds, these flowers are vital to things like moths and night flyers, they need nectar too. I got caught up listening to another afternoon story and couldn’t leave until it had finished 😂 The cardboard over the seedlings hack is looking promising, so much so that I have mow covered all seeds with it. I am not sure why I have never come across this before but if it works well it’s a keeper hack. I thought I then ought to light the Rayburn but first I had to get a few barrowfulls of wood into the back, saves going out in the dark and cold to get it later on. We will have two extra areas once the Rayburn is gone, one just out the back in the undercover area where we bring the wood into and then the big undercover area outside where we keep all the chopped wood, it’s big enough to fit a horse box or tractor in so quite a decent size, I am sure we will figure out what to do with them pretty quickly.

Friday: Friday again already 😜 John did the morning rounds and then went off to work. I had lots of little things to get sorted before the farrier arrived at 10am. All sorted indoors it was outside to get some hay in nets to hang for the horses on the hard standing and then into the paddock to get them in. As always Biscuit was a good good and came biddingly and Jack was an arse 😜 finally managed to get his head collar on and lead him in. I picked out their feet and waited for the farrier who was running late. Just as he turned up so did Sam with the twins, got that sorted and the twins had a little sit on the back of biscuit which they both seemed to like and then it was time for a sing song before lunch. A while after lunch I went with Sam in the car to sit with them while she got some shopping, it was around their afternoon nap time so that worked in well. By the time I got back John was home and he had even got the Rayburn lit. The wind is rather cold today but at least not as fierce, we have had a good bit of rain which has refilled some of the water tanks so that’s good, it’s amazing how quickly it gets used during a dry period. We have not got much else done this afternoon but we have a busy weekend ahead of us weather permitting so it’s fine to have a little rest now and again.

Early evening and it’s raining, it think we have rain for most of the night.

Saturday: Pretty windy again this morning, we got the morning jobs done including moving the light Sussex back out to their outdoor enclosure so that we could move the hens from the point of lay pen back into the stable ready for the batch of POL coming in this week. I also completely cleaned out the Guineas pig run and observed them for a while, I don’t think it’s mites that the guinea has got I think it’s being bullied by the other one. The reason I came to this conclusion is that the other one shows no signs of mite and he is constantly chasing the other one off, need to monitor that and do something about it soon. We also have one cockerel bullying another, it was fine while the other one was young but now it’s grown and on someone else’s territory it’s not so good, also need to do something about that 🙄 It’s always the male of the species that are a problem 😂 the females live together in relative harmony 🤔 We then went to the garden centre so that I could buy some plants for the final bed, I have a lot that I have previously grown ready or already had but I wanted a few more smaller plants for infilling, this bed is (hopefully) a nod to a cottage garden style, roses, Hardy geranium, delphiniums, dahlias, stocks, saxifrage etc, each bed should have a different look eventually.

While I was out there planting things I had a look at something I planted in the other bed, it hadn’t made it through the winter which was strange as it’s a huechera which are fairy Hardy. I dug it up thinking I might be able to recuse it and was horrified to see lots of little grubs in the soil. My first thought was cut worm and if it is in the topsoil then we are buggered as it will undone all the work we have done already, chewing through the roots of everything and killing it all off. I lifted the plant, and all the surrounding soil making sure I found every little grub that I could, this all went in the skip, there was another plant that was similar so I dug that up and yep one or two grubs in there to 🤦‍♀️ My next thought was that if it’s in the compost I am also buggered as I have used that for everything! A quick scan round and everything else is fine so I think it is localised luckily, I googled it and it’s not cut worm but vine weevil grubs which will be easier to deal with, they like pots of things so I imagine an adult has crawled in when I had stuff in pots and laid it’s eggs. Not so bad because it means it’s not in everything and I can get nematodes to water in and deal with them, panic over 😅

Besides that I had a lovely time planting everything in between hail storms and rain that is and of course the never ending wind. In the end I got fed up of being buffeted and went into the greenhouse for some respite from it lol.

Once I had finished that it was indoors to do a quick bit of hoovering all round and get the Rayburn ready for lighting. John had been out the back giving the POL pen a power wash so it’s all ready for next week and then came in and made a cuppa.

We booked our first post covid overnight stay away 🥰 when I say we, I don’t mean John and I 😂 Ever since our eldest turned 30, the three girls and I have a new tradition of having a spa break at a 5* boutique hotel in the Cotswolds. Last April we were booked to go for Charlie’s 30th but it got cancelled due to the pandemic and so after a whole year of waiting we were able to book it again for the end of July 👏 So looking forward to finally being able to go so fingers crossed the rest of the year goes as planned 🙏 I will have to look for somewhere for John and I to go, it’s only fair 😂

Sunday: Still windy, getting tedious now lol, it’s more tiring working against the wind all the time 🙄 Still, not to be deterred we got up, I have to say I had the most amazing breakfast by strength_chef delivered from Charlie and Macca, then got the animals done and then out the front to get some more bits tidied up. Sam arrived with Mia to do the horses and bought some beautiful primula to plant in my new flower bed along with some seeds for the butterflies and bees. Mia went home with a goose egg for her breakfast 😜 Shelley popped over to drop off a present and that was a lovely little recycled notebook that is impregnated with seeds that you can plant when you have finished using it and some amazing blondies from Indulge by Amy, find her on Facebook, fab cakes 🥰 Feeling the love today from my amazing girls, love them all to the moon and back 💕 💕 💕

We did a bit more outside after I lit the Rayburn, it’s pretty chilly today, John laid a few slabs and sorted out some of the driveway, it needs raking off and levelling, I collected empty flower pots that had blown around and we moved the fig tree and the olive tree to the fruit cage. The birds pinch all the emerging buds on both so I never get anything, hopefully in the cage I will stand more of a chanice of a harvest.

Eventually in the early afternoon we had both had enough outside and so a well earned Sunday afternoon sit down was in order.

Not long until the spring equinox 👏 👏 👏 happy days ahead 🥰 Have a fabulous week whatever you are doing x x

Friesland Farm

Sunshine ☀️ a vaccine & finally some gardening.

Posted on February 28, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 22nd February 2021: Just like that in a blink of an eye it’s Monday again. Another drizzly, grey morning, still quite mild for the time of year though. I do wish the weather would turn a little drier though, and if the sun could make an appearance that would be great. It seems like I am always wishing for different weather and generally I am, my ideal would be a dry sunny day of around 18c with rain overnight just in case anyone is listening and can do that for me 😜

John is working again this week and he did the rounds before he left. I sorted out the eggs, the hens are laying like crazy and we have plenty of them to try and shift. I did a few routine household bits and also phoned the septic tank company to get ours emptied, it did not get done last year due to covid so I really need it done this year to prevent any problems.

After chatting with our youngest daughter, Charlotte, I might have more of a go at growing micro greens. She is having a go at doing them for herself and she asked me what kind of seeds she needed to do it, I have plenty of spare seeds so I gave her a selection to get her going. It started me thinking that this would be a fairly easy way to grow a crop of tasty nutritious food, I just need to see if I can find a bulk seed company, buying the small packets is fine if you are doing it for yourself but on a bigger scale I need bigger quantities of seed to make it worthwhile. I have got pea shoots and garlic chives on the go for myself as mini salad leaves but the choice is huge really and so I think I am missing a trick here.

I take back what I said about it being mild, I went out to the greenhouse to do a couple of bits and to check on plants and it is colder than yesterday I think. I did organise a punnet of micro salad greens which are now on the kitchen window sill along with some peas that are just sat in the punnet, no compost, I have wetted the both of them and we will see how they get on. The peas I did in the greenhouse (which were in compost) have already started to rot, it’s just too cold for them at the minute, if at first you don’t succeed try something else 😆 The broad beans are coming up though and funnily enough the peas in the root trainers are too just not the ones in a seed tray 🤷‍♀️ too much moisture and too cold I think.

John came home just after lunch, I never know if I am coming or going theses days, I thought he was out for the day so was just hoovering the floors ready to give them a wash but that scuppered my plans. The reason becomes obvious when he is eating and drops some of it on the floor, why bother 😜

Boris set out the journey we are to take to come out of this long lockdown, it’s not quick but by 21st June we should be totally restriction free providing all goes well. On the downside it means that Charlotte and Maccas wedding will not go ahead on May 7th and restrictions will still be in place 😞 We will see if they are able to move it to later in the the year.

Tuesday: Not a bad day, slight frost to begin with but it soon warmed up a bit, grey and overcast mostly and windy but no rain 😀 John did the animals then went off to do a job, I got on with a bit of weeding and then moving some pots to clear the area where the next bed is going out the front. John came back and we carried on clearing the area, there were bags of compost, empty pots, pots with plants in, bit of debris etc etc and a pile of slabs. We cleared everything but the slabs and then set about giving the hazel trees a good prune, we didn’t do them last year and they have got a bit big and unruly. Now they are all cut nice and neatly, the branches all shredded and put back under the trees to put goodness back into the ground and give the mini beasts some cover. That pretty much took us well into the afternoon, the some lunch, a sit down, light the Rayburn, do the afternoon rounds and that’s another day over.

It will be March next week and that’s when many more seeds can be sown, I need to start in earnest making sure the beds are ready. I still have some flowers growing in some of them, once I can work out exactly what they are I will start transplanting them. We start the final bed out in the front area tomorrow, a smaller bed in a triangle shape, I am thinking this will be roses and romantic flowers like bleeding hearts, creeping phlox and agapanthus but I need to plan it properly first.

Wednesday: Blowy, grey, overcast, but not raining and fairly mild. John did the animals then went off to do a job and also pick up some sleepers for this last bed in the front area. It will be nice to get that done and I may have to have a trip to the garden centre to find some nice things to put in there.

This morning I have been preoccupied with a chance discovery, the pieces of the jigsaw fell into place as it were. I can’t prove a thing but it all makes sense to me, I am talking about the theft of the honesty box and money before Christmas. This is what I think, we had a delivery two weeks or so previous to the theft, the delivery driver and his appearance and van rang alarm bells (your intuition is high when you live rurally on a farm, you recognise certain traits 🙄) When I went to the gate and realised it was a delivery I felt a little better, however I thought I recognised the driver from way, way back, I had said to John at the time, I reckon that was ….. but I couldn’t be sure. The person in question didn’t always lead a static life shall we say, except when incarcerated at her majesty’s pleasure. Two weeks later when we were out for about three hours we returned home to find the honesty box and contents ripped from the shed, there was also a delivery in the shed. At the time John said I reckon it was the delivery person but we had no cctv evidence and no way to prove anything. Then this morning a post on Facebook which made me look at the profile more closely and there is the delivery driver that came here! It was who I thought it was, as I say I can’t prove a thing but it’s all a bit coincidental in my eyes.

It’s mid afternoon and we have spent till now working out on the front area, I did a lot of weeding in the first bed and I have a couch grass problem there that I need to bring under control. John and I have moved slabs, positioned sleepers and started building the bed. Shelley came to get her food from the freezer now hers has been fixed and Sam came with the kids so they all played in the front paddock to run off some steam and get some fresh air. Indoors at 2 for lunch and to light the Rayburn, we’d to be on target this afternoon with jobs and dinner as I have my vaccination early evening 😀

The first bed is looking good, I mean it’s still a bit dead due to the time of year but I can see things beginning to bud and grow, the bulbs I planted have all come up, crocus, snowdrops and tête-à-tête, only a few this year but year on year they will multiply and it will look amazing. I need to wait and see how well the areas are filled with what I have already planted, the temptation is to cram a lot in but I really want space for plants/shrubs to look their very best. Each bed will have a different character and the first one is full of flowering shrubs and bulbs, fragrant, berries and plenty of nectar for the bees.

Thursday: Well it’s 2pm and so far I have had no side effects from my vaccine last night, hopefully it will stay that way. John did the animals this morning and then went to do a little job but was back by 10am. We got started out the front again, I added an extra job to Johns list of beds 😜 About two years ago or whenever it was he put up the new front fence, I made a temporary bed in front of the fence. By temporary I mean pots of flowers all stood behind a piece of wood 😂 This morning I asked nicely if we could perhaps make it into a permanent one, it didn’t actually take long, we had the materials, plants and top soil to do the job. Around an hour or so later it was ready for me to take the plants out of the pots and plant them in the bed, hopefully it will look lovely in a few weeks time. The beds will save me a lot of time watering, when things are in pots they dry out very quickly, with the beds a good soaking once a week should be adequate.

Oh and the weather was beautiful 🤩 sunny, mild, dry practically perfect.

It is so nice to have flowers I have waited a long time to have proper flower beds again and the reward today was watching the bees feeding on the crocus 🐝 and he cat trying to catch the bees in mid air 😂

We have moved down from alert level 5 to alert level 4 today, a good sign that things are going in the right direction and the pressure on the NHS has eased somewhat, it hasn’t gone but it’s good news.

Friday: Gorgeous morning, frosty start then lovely sunshine ☀️ I had planned to get out on the veg garden but I woke up with a rash this morning, arms and chest, not sure if this is the vaccine or being in the sun yesterday so I figured I better avoid it today. That leaves housework, oh joy 😜 Gave the bedroom a good clean, pull out the bed and dust everything within an inch of its life, then wash the floors in the living room and kitchen. I did think about doing more than that but the momentum left me 😆

Watching the birds at the seed feeder this morning I spotted one I haven’t seen before, a coal tit, it’s quick and I barely managed to get a pic of it but I am chuffed we have another new type of garden bird around 😀

John was back and forth between jobs today and I mainly pottered around not achieving very much, bit tired today and I have learned that when tired don’t do too much, I have the luxury of being able to do that I know but I still think it’s sound advice I give myself 😜

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Friesland Farm

Valentine’s 💘 goose eggs & seed sowing begins.

Posted on February 21, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 15th February 2021: I am feeling more optimistic this morning about the weeks ahead, I think the weather really does have an effect on my moods and outlook. Today it is much milder, yes we have had rain and yes that is a pain going straight from a frozen solid week to a soggy one but everything feels a little lighter today. John has a full week at work this week so I will mostly be here by myself for the best part of the daytime but he did do the animals before he went this morning which means I can get on and get some things done indoors. I started off by changing the bedsheets and some washing, everybody loves clean sheets day don’t they lol.

Valentine’s Day is the day traditionally that geese start to lay and lo and behold we had the first goose egg of the season yesterday 🥰 it is a short season and by mid May they will have stopped or they will be sitting one or the other. We never have much luck with them sitting and hatching naturally, they always end up kicking eggs out of the nest. This year I think I am going to house them in a stable and let them free range, this will be after the hens are allowed back out of course. The stable will have much more room, one of the problems is that there are usually three geese trying to nest in a small space which is problematic, hopefully more space will help that situation but we will see. I would be nice to have goslings wandering around the place. It is one of those weird things in life that mean most of the domestic geese around the country begin to lay on the same day, I can’t explain it, I doubt if anyone else can either but they are pretty accurate in their timing 🤷‍♀️

Yesterday evening I started doing a bit on my online beekeeping course, I have chosen to look firstly at modern beekeeping methods which is what most people practice. However the more I learn the less I like it, it is basically farming whereas I would prefer the bees to live a natural life and so I will also be looking at natural beekeeping methods. The difference is that the bees are allowed to live as naturally as possible and you only harvest honey if there is enough for the bees to live on during the winter, if here isn’t you don’t have honey. As it takes a lifetime for a bee to produce a tiny drop of honey I think this is only fair really, there are a few other things that I am not keen on, wing clipping and generally suppressing the hive so that it doesn’t swarm. You know me by now and I prefer all things to have as natural life as possible I mean nature knows best doesn’t it and I would rather keep bees for pollination and survival purposes rather than harvesting lots of honey although a smidge of it would be nice now and again. Bees are fascinating creatures, even if you are not thinking of keeping them I would urge you to read up about them and their life it is amazing stuff. I will keep you posted on the topic and let you know what I decided, I am hoping that my tree bees will have survived the winter, I haven’t seen any sign of them yet but I will keep an eye out for them. It will be a major win if they have, proving that they can manage rather than be managed.

I went out and did a bit outside, planted the silver birch, I will get a picture in the spring as it’s basically a dead stick at the minute 🙄 John came home because the materials for the job were wrong so he concreted in some of the posts for the fence and then got called out to take a radiator off. The sun came out and it was really warm, the temperatures are forecast to be around 15c next weekend lol talk about a swing. I had a walk round and made some good observations on what needs doing but I felt it was t quite the right time just yet. You get a feel for when is a good time to start things and when it’s too early, either that or I am being lazy 😜 no seriously though I found a couple of big pots of bulbs growing but the soil is still frozen beneath the surface layer so it will have to wait for a few days more I think. I would have got and weeded that front bed but with the rain straight after the frost I don’t think that’s a good idea, looks like I will have a lot to do next weekend instead. One thing I have realised is that I don’t like working when I am encumbered with a winter coat on, the less layers I have to wear the better I work, I think he winter coat is heavy and it makes me a bit sluggish so roll on some nicer weather when I only need thin layers. I checked the greenhouse out, everything needed a bit of water but on the whole most things have survived well even that last week of extreme cold. The orange and lemon tree look a little worse for wear, they need some water but I will wait for warmer temps before I do that, I don’t want to water them and then if it gets cold again the soil freezes, better for the roots to just be dry than frozen. I had a good look round to see where these pallet collars will go and I think some major reorganisation needs to happen but again I can’t do that while the ground is still a bit frozen. I am looking forward to getting going once conditions are right though, bring on the growing season 😀

I did go out and do a bit more in the greenhouse as it’s such a lovely day I didn’t want to waste it. I did a bit of tidying and brushing off, pulled off dead leaves that sort of thing. There has been a mouse in there so I have put some grain down to see if it’s still there or not, if it is I need to get it gone before I start seed sowing in earnest. I did try and pull some weeds in the garden but the ground is still frozen underneath, I should have listened to my inner self really. I decided to come in and light the Rayburn and get a loaf of bread on the go before having some lunch and a quick sit down.

As I had some bread on the go I decided to make some cheese as well, not a snap decision, I had bought some milk when I went shopping the other day specifically to have a go. If you have some milk that you need to use up it worth thinking about making cheese, not a complicated process and in fact ‘farmers cheese’ is a simple thing to do with ingredients you probably have in the cupboard. Gently heat the milk in a thick bottomed pan, when it begins to froth and bubble (but not boil) take it off the heat and add white vinegar, this splits the milk into curds and whey. All you do is drain the curds, I use muslin (you can buy the organic baby ones which work great) then add salt and any flavour you want, chives, thyme, minced garlic, the options are endless. Squeeze all the liquid out and then shape it on a plate and weight it down with another plate. Thats it, simple enough and a great skill to have up your sleeve. The whey can be used in bread making or other recipes and the cheese will keep for a week in the fridge or can be frozen for use in recipes later. I think a slice of fresh bread and some freshly made soft cheese will make a delicious supper. I actually added salt and pepper to mine, I have a thing for pepper at the minute, no idea why but I tend to listen to my body, if it wants pepper, it gets pepper 😜

Tuesday: At last a day when I can get outside and get busy, and that’s exactly what I did. John did the animals first thing and then started on some more of the drive way area. When I had done indoor stuff I came out and planted the seven cherry plum trees, this is easier than it sounds as they are small whips and so pushing a spade in the ground and making a slit is all that is required for these. Then I spent the morning planting things in the new raised bed, this included digging some stuff up from elsewhere (those that I could recognise at the minute) After that I started on the fruit cage and cut back all the autumn fruiting raspberry canes and some weeding in the fruit cage. After that I went on to the very back bed to sort that out, this is quite a big job, it has a dual pear tree, a cherry tree, an apple, a mulberry and then four gooseberry bushes and three blackcurrant. Over time the gooseberries and blackcurrants have got a bit out of hand so I started by cutting them right back, this will mean no fruit this year from them but that’s fine we have plenty in the freezer from last year still. One of the currant bushes has a horse chestnut tree sapling growing through it so that will need to be dug up and detangled before replanting the bush. There is also a golden hop that has also got a bit out of hand and is spreading everywhere, I wouldn’t mind if it grew along the fence but it keeps choking the fruit trees so I have been trying to dig it out but it’s quite hard work. I haven’t quite decided wether I should completely dig the gooseberries out or not yet, they make it difficult to pick the top fruit as some of the thorns are wicked. I am glad I have a plan now though, that bed is the one that gets all the sun from early morning until evening which means it is a bed I have trouble getting to in the summer months, it is also a bed that will need no attention once I have cleared and cleaned it up so a good place to start I think. It is also the very back bed so I can work methodically towards the front end which will help when I am deciding what job to tackle, otherwise I tend to wander aimlessly from job to job and that never looks like I have achieved much.

I have some really tasty yellow raspberries ‘Autumn Gold’ if you get the chance to try some then do they are sweeter than red ones, I am hoping to divide my plants this year so I have even more of them to harvest later in the year. At the moment they are in pots but I am thinking of making a bed just for these in the fruit cage.

A bonus today is that I don’t have to cook dinner, the bad part of the story is that Shelley’s freezer has broken and so she is having to cook off some of her food including some pork, so tonight we will be picking up a takeaway roast from Shelley’s 😀 She has been able to put some of it in our freezer until hers gets fixed so it’s not too bad, she also made some crumbles and a curries and she has kindly given some to us 🥰

I did think that I would go back outside after stopping for a cuppa at 2.30pm but I think I should take it slowly, after a winter of not doing much I don’t want to over do it and burn myself out. The weather is looking fair for most of the week and positively tropic at the weekend so there will be plenty of time to get stuff done.

There is a rodent of some sort in the greenhouse as all the grain I put down yesterday is gone, I think it is living in with the hibernating torts 🙄 I have set a trap to try and catch it otherwise I won’t be able to sow any pea or bean seeds as they will get eaten. Thinking about the torts, the weekend temperatures that are forecast will probably wake them up so I had a quick look over their outdoor pen and I need to get their out door house ready, some of the hens have been using it over winter in the pol pen. While I was weeding I decided to leave any dandelions where they are for now as I can dig them up for feeding to the torts once they are awake.

John went out to do the afternoon rounds and the heavens opened, he was not happy 😆 but I am as it means anything I have planted today will get a good watering in 😀

Of course it is pancake day today and when the girls were at home I always made pancakes for tea. John doesn’t like pancakes though 🙄 so I didn’t bother today but maybe I will make some for my dessert tomorrow.

Wednesday: John has gone to do a full days work today but he did the animals first. I was not far behind him out on the smallholding, putting in fresh bedding for the ducks, geese and Ted, feeding the Guineas etc. Then I went into the greenhouse for about an hour and a half to get some early seeds sown. The peas and beans that were sown a couple of weeks back are starting to show some shoots and I sowed another couple of batches of peas, we are talking about eight at a time as I don’t want to suddenly have so many that I can’t deal with them. That is one of the restraints you have to place on yourself, not sowing too much at once. This morning I have set up the propagator and have sown, peppers, jalapeño and tomatoes, these all need a long growing period. If you are thinking of getting yours in make sure you will be able to accommodate them with extra heat as they get bigger, the temptation to sow lots of seeds quickly turns into a disaster when the plants are much bigger and you have nowhere warm to bring them on. I have three varieties of tomato in at the minute, indigo cherry which are like the indigo rose only smaller, then some tigerello which are stripy tomatoes and then some yellow cherry tomatoes. I have also sown some garlic chives, dill and coriander, the garlic chives are for adding to pea shoots for salads.

You may notice the shiny stuff behind the propagator, this is to reflect as much light as possible back towards it because the light levels are low at this time of year. I do need to get on and clean the windows of the greenhouse which will help immensely 😜

After a cup of coffee at 10.30, the time is relevant because I find each day without even looking at a clock, I come in for coffee and it’s always around 10.30 🤷‍♀️ Anyway after the coffee I went back outside until 1pm and did a good mornings work I think. First I started with following my plan of yesterday but the soil was claggy, I got as much as I could done before giving up, I had thick layers of mud in my boots, the fork handle and my gloves, on to plan B. I did find a little gooseberry bush growing (self set) so dug that, put it in a big pot and will grow it in the fruit cage where I can prune it more easily. Plan B was to work at the opposite end of the garden to what I had decided yesterday and weed the herb bed, that’s what I spent the rest of the morning doing. The feverfew although it is a herb, is a pain and spreads everywhere so I pulled it all up from there, there are nettles that are growing so they got pulled up as well, it’s very satisfying pulling out a long root of nettle I think, there were plenty of dandelions that thought they were going to make it, nope, out they came and I ended up with a wheelbarrow full of weeds and debris. I did find a couple of ladybirds hibernating so I relocated them to the greenhouse and the beginning of my ladybird empire 😂 1pm and it’s lunchtime and time for an hours sit down before lighting the Rayburn, sorting out dinner for this evening and today it’s my job to do the afternoon feeding and egg collecting. I am pretty pleased with what I have got done out there today, the weather makes such a difference as it was very pleasant, a small amount of rain at one point but nothing major, hopefully there will be plenty more days ahead to get working after a long winter.

Good call coming in and staying in as it is now raining quite well 😜 might do a bit of research or reading for an hour.

So my afternoon panned out rather differently than expected, my good old friends BT and I spent two hours chatting and figuring out why my internet keeps dropping out, apparently an engineer is coming tomorrow 🙄

And I got the call up for my vaccine yaaaaaaaay, next week I will have my first vaccination, it’s amazing actually how emotional it was to get the text, I think it signals the beginning of the end, we have a long way to go still but hopefully at some point this year things will be as near normal as we can get.

Thursday: Oooo an altogether different morning, wet, grey and breezy, not very nice, I am glad I got out on the garden when I could this week. It is still mild though, last night it was around 11c at 9pm 🙄 Looks like today I will mostly be doing indoors stuff 😜

Did some hoovering and polishing, the sun came out in the afternoon but it is a chilly breeze. By that time I was waiting for a cake to cook and getting the Rayburn lit. Take two black bananas, and two overripe pears, mix with some flour, sugar, oil, eggs and chocolate chips and voila something lovely from something not so appetising 😀

BT turned up as they said they would so that’s a bonus, tested everything this end, no faults with equipment so it must be a fault somewhere on the line in the lane 🙄 Internet is still dropping in and out constantly, I reported the same fault last month and they supposedly came out and fixed it, not so well or they wouldn’t be back again would they. Hopefully this time they will do a proper job and sort it once and for all, we had the gigaclear installed through the village a couple of years ago, I might see how much that is or I even considered satellite internet at one point, rural broadband is not the best I can tell you.

After the broadband appeared to be fixed properly, no more drop outs, the rest of the afternoon and early evening went along as usual. We settled down to watch some tv and boom the power went, after establishing it was not anything here that had tripped I called the power company. They had a main cable down and it would be two hours before they could get it back on, darn it, luckily I had charged everything I needed and also the mini hub that BT gave me is a unit you charge so I still had internet and I still had a device 😀 Just as well because I wanted to watch the robot landing on Mars. The power did not come back on after two hours so we went to bed, it came on at 1am 😜 We have on average around four power cuts a year nearly always in the winter months, so we have got used to being prepared, keeping essentials like phone and torches charged and if push came to shove we could always light a campfire to cook dinner and boil a kettle on. I am just glad the power cut was not last week as we would have been freezing 🥶

Friday 😀 Happy Friday everyone, the electric is back on this morning which means we can have cwaffee 🥰 that is good, a morning without coffee is a miserable morning.

It is what is known as a filthy day today, rain on and off all day, wind, grey, altogether ‘orrible 😜 So for the main part I have been making cards, I had some that had been ordered and then I made a few birthday cards as well. Sitting in my little workspace with the radiator on was lovely but I forgot about the rest of the house and when I came out it was cold so I got the Rayburn lit just after lunch. I did the feeding and egg collecting this afternoon, first I had to get a few wheelbarrows of wood from the outside store to the inside area, then on to do the rounds. I noticed the gate to the goose paddock was open, this meant one of two things, either John had forgotten to let them out or he had not shut the gate properly this morning. As I walked up there the tell tale signs of goose footprints told me they were out somewhere, that was ok though as it meant I could get into the nest and retrieve the eggs without having to watch my back! Fed the horses, fed everything else, collected the eggs, got the wood in, got the post in and checked the egg shed ☑️ time for a cuppa ☕️

Saturday: A much better day today, grey and overcast cast but mild and dry. The last couple of weeks of February and the whole of March are the long hard slog towards Spring, it’s almost like you have done a very, very long walk and the last bit is up a steep hill that is wet and muddy, you have to keep going, it’s the end of a difficult journey 😜

We spent the morning cleaning out huts and tidying up paddocks ready for Spring. I cleaned out the ducks, the quail hut, the pol pen, new bedding in the goose hut, cleaned out teds pen, some empty houses etc and John tidied things away from the front paddock, netting that we had taken down and then power washed the front hen hut ready for when they are allowed back out again. We had planned more but decided did we needed to get a bit of shopping in so went off to do that, the jobs will wait until tomorrow.

Today is my youngest sisters 40th birthday 🥳 I was sixteen when she was born, it’s crazy that I had lived a whole childhood before she even came along 😂

Sunday: Oh what a morning we have had, weather is ok, still grey but mild and not raining, well spitting now and again but nothing much. Last night we couldn’t find one of the cats so we left the cat flap undone hoping he would be there this morning, nope. He was there last night at around 7/8 but by 10 he wasn’t, we looked all around, in sheds and outbuildings, I opened Johns van, we called him, nothing. We got on with the morning jobs and then went out the the side paddock, taking down chicken netting, stakes etc and then opened it up for the horses to come into. They have been hanging near the fence for a couple of days, they can see and smell the grass growing and it wouldn’t be long before they bashed the fence down to get in so easier to get it sorted before they take matters into their own hands. After that we came in for a coffee and then John had to go and give his van a bit of a tidy out while I cleaned out the Rayburn ready to light it. John opened the door of the van and guess who jumped out, the cat, why it didn’t come this morning when I looked in there and called it I don’t know but I am glad he is found and safe. I was convinced that as it had just vanished that the fox had taken him but all’s weep that ends well.

I saw a little Jenny wren gathering feathers for nesting this morning, wrens are the most common breeding bird in the UK but they are very quick and tend to keep low to the ground when they are about.

I caught another mouse in the trap in the greenhouse, that’s three so far 🙄 must be a whole colony living in there!

Tomorrow we get an update on how the country will begin to come out of the lockdown, I think it will be a lot slower than people are hoping 🙄

Friesland Farm

Glorious days, another rabbit & work, work, work.

Posted on March 29, 2020February 8, 2023 by frieslandfarm

Monday 23rd March 2020: I have had the best day of the year so far lol, the sun has shone beautifully, it was warm and I have spent a day as happy as the pig in the proverbial 😀 After getting the morning rounds done we set about sorting out the tractor and chains to drag the back paddock, so I spent the morning driving the tractor up and down until it was done. We did get stuck in a particularly poached area but got out of it pretty quickly. After that we took down the fence between the little paddock and the back paddock so that we could get the hen hut through and into the back paddock and the front chickens will move to here once it is ready, we put the fence back up and went in for some lunch. After lunch we got the ride on mower out and I spent the afternoon riding around on the mower cutting the grass in the front paddock. Later still in the afternoon John did the feed rounds and I went into the greenhouse to do the watering and then indoors to make some dinner. I love driving the tractor and would happily spend hours pooltling around on it providing the weather is just right. I say we of course because John is at home and we are self isolating, just as well as I had a call from the doctor to take me off my meds as my white cells have dropped again which means I am very susceptible to infection so we are taking this social distancing very seriously. We can of course chat over the gate providing we stand well clear and have had a few chats with egg customers as they arrive at 4 to get eggs.

Right now I’m wishing we had hundreds of chickens to sell as the calls and messages I have had to see if we have any is unprecedented, every one thinks they have had an original thought, they haven’t, everyone is after them 😜

Tuesday: Another lovely day and a day spent doing plenty of jobs around the place. With the morning rounds done John went up the back to put up electric fencing ready to move the hens up there tonight, give it a clean out, put in clean bedding and get the water on, meanwhile I got the outdoor quail house ready to move them outside again tomorrow. I did a bit of muck shovelling in the muck pile and then into the garden. I have planted out some of the seedlings that were growing in the greenhouse, normally they would have been sown straight into the ground but it was so wet I didn’t bother, I now have a couple of rows of swede and turnips planted up and covered so the hens don’t eat them, I also got some of the dwarf broad beans planted out. As I said I will aim to grow as much as possible this year and while I was looking around I realise I have lots of space to be able to do this so I need to crack on 😜 Tomorrow I will sow carrot seeds, I did a batch in the tunnel and they grew but then something ate them 😏 The other seeds are beginning to sprout, radish and lettuce, sow, sow, sow is the mantra for this year.

In the afternoon I gave the front paddock a second, lower cut, the plan is to wait until the grass clippings die off and then move the geese back there to keep it short. John power washed the POL pen (his favourite job for some reason 🙄) and then it was time to get the eggs collected and ready for sales at 4pm. This has become a less frantic affair but still brisk with a constant coming and going of cars. We have put precautions in place, the honesty box has a bag inside so we don’t need to touch the money just take the bag out, the eggs are put out and then we step away from the gate but monitor it so that people only take a dozen lol who knew it would come to this.

Then it was time to turn on the tv for updates and get the dinner, then at dusk out to load up 46 hens and move them to their new des res in the back paddock.

A pheasant and a partridge wandered up into the farmyard while we were sat out there earlier.

Shelley drove over to get some eggs and some hay for their rabbit, of course the children couldn’t get out of the car and so I spoke to them from a distance through the open window, when it was time for them to go Josh started crying, it’s heartbreaking not to be able to hug your grandchildren, I know it’s temporary and I want to still be here next year so for now it just has to be, but it’s hard 😢

Wednesday: It’s lunchtime and we are beginning to forget what day it is as they all seem like ground hog days 🤣 not complaining though as we have more than enough to keep us busy. I did some washing and a bit of cleaning this morning while John did the morning rounds, then I went onto getting some paperwork sorted and some bills paid, I think John was cutting more wood 😂 then it was time to get the tractor out again for a bit more dragging. I love sitting on there with the sun shinning and the smell of the Diesel engine 😜 with that finished I then went to water the greenhouse and plants I put in yesterday and hang out the washing while John took apart a fence that is all but knackered. We discussed putting it back up but have no nails to do the job and the local hardware yard is closed 😏 The greenhouse is taking a bit of managing at the minute as the temps are going right up into the 30s but at night they plummet and at the weekend we are forecast much colder weather, it’s a balancing act that takes a bit of experience but I hope I’m winning.

Oh man, it’s 7.30pm and we have just come in after an afternoon and evening of some hard graft. We moved the second hen house and all the electric fencing, plenty of jobs in between, putting the torts away, I am getting them outside in the morning and putting them away overnight while it’s still cold, get the washing in, wash the dogs, collect the eggs, feed the birds, light the Rayburn and then at dusk try rounding up chickens that are not quite sure where they are going. The chickens that we put up the back, although we left them in for longer today, decided that they wanted to go back home, well about 10 of them anyway. Overnight they are in their old hut but in the morning we will put them in a stable for a ‘reset’ these are the delinquents that always get out and into my garden, they will go back up to the back after about a week and we hope they stay there. The ones in the side paddock got out when we moved the electric netting and we left them to have a good wander but then it was time to start rounding them up 🙄 Cue John and two border collies that have never been taught to round up, although they have a bit of a natural instinct they are more hinder than help. In the end John resorted to rugby tackles 😂 diving on them and eventually we got them all in. At some point today we also moved the geese back to the front paddock as they were harassing the escaped hens. If we have walked around the paddock once we have walked around 20/30 times so I won’t be joining in the Joe Wicks PE lessons online. My back aches 😜 We also had a delivery of another rabbit, now I know it’s necessary trips only but I had promised the chap I would have it when it was old enough and, it’s a long story but his rabbits have been doing what rabbits do (the male is now neutered) but I didn’t want him left with offspring that potentially could start the process again so now we have a little boy rabbit, who is living separately from the girls I hasten to add. I will have a proper look at him tomorrow and FaceTime the grandchildren to get a name for him.

Thursday: Another fabulous day weather wise and I have had probably the peak of best days this week, I was driving the tractor to drag one of the paddocks (my fave job anyway) and I saw a herd of around 20 deer in the next field. They stayed there for ages and in the end I went and got my camera to take a few shots, as we are in a bit of a valley I could only see them while sat on the tractor 😂 so I was trying to multitask lol. If I can get the pics from my camera onto my iPad (long story) they should appear below. As for the rest of the day it was pretty much business as usual, do the rounds multiple times a day, sow some carrot seeds, a bit of watering for newly planted stuff. I uncovered a raised bed and found loads of self set potatoes trying to grow, that’s a bonus so I will leave them in situ. John cut a bit more wood, we have never had the wood stash so big at this time of year. We had to fix the door on the quail hut but once we had done that we moved them outside to enjoy the sunshine. I can’t remember what else we have done today but it was a day full of things getting done which is great.

We went outside at 8pm to show our gratitude to the NHS not really expecting to hear anything or to be heard as we are quite far away from anyone BUT I could hear cheering and clapping from the village which was amazing 😀😀😀🇬🇧🇬🇧 we salute you NHS workers and all the workers that are busy keeping our country going during difficult times.

What day is it lol, oh yes Friday: Again a beautiful day and we made the most of it. We did the morning rounds and then I did some watering in the greenhouse, moved the torts outside and then onto dragging the last of the paddocks that need doing. We just have a few poached areas that need going over once they have fully dried out but apart from those it’s all done.

Charlie called in first thing she had picked up my prescription from the chemist and some antibacterial wipes as I could only get a little handbag pack when the rush started. We need them to wipe down handles on the egg shed and then the gates as we come back in.

I was now free to get on in the garden so I have sown two more small raised beds of carrots, you can never have enough carrots 🥕 I watered all the things I have recently sown, and I potted on 36 geranium plug plants, I don’t even remember ordering them but I probably got them to sell on. Most things are going well but we are due a cold snap this weekend, after that I’m hoping the temps climb back up so that things progress with a bit of speed. I also picked a large picking of purple sprouting broccoli which we will eat tonight with a piece of beef I got out, last night I made a pear and blackberry (fruit I froze last year) sponge pudding and we ate half, the other half will be eaten tonight. Meanwhile John has been cleaning his van 🙄 this does not get done often and so has taken a good few hours.

Around 2pm we had an amazing family FaceTime appointment with our niece Evie so that we could sing happy birthday to her, a cacophony is what I would call it but all good fun 😀🎂 This is how birthdays will be for a while.

The rest of the afternoon was spent getting the Rayburn ready to light and getting the dinner prepped for later, doing the egg collecting and feeding rounds, I think we are going to have a bit of a shock with the temps tomorrow so we have enjoyed cups of tea sat in the sun today. Luckily at this time of year I can tolerate a bit of sunshine though I still try not to over do it.

Benny the cat has decided that this spot is the best place to soak up the warmth, it a bit tricky trying to get out of the door and not stepping on him mind you 😜

Saturday: A cold wind today but the sun was still shinning this morning though those lovely few days we have had will quickly become a memory. We did the morning rounds and then I came indoors to hoover through, polish, clean the bathroom etc and then make a lemon drizzle cake. John spent a good couple of hours washing and jet washing his van which was filthy. He is now jet washing the hard standing, everything will be jet washed by the time this is over 🤣

How are you all getting on spending rather more hours a day with your loved ones than you normally would 🙄 It hasn’t been tooooo bad here although John questions everything I do which is rather annoying considering I do these things all day every day by myself normally. We have had to have words, I say we, of course I mean I 😜 It has become apparent that the dogs bark at everything John does from jet washing to chain sawing to even just putting on his wellies and coat in the mornings, and not just one bark but a constant bloody annoying stream of them! I don’t know why this is as they don’t do it with me, he seems oblivious to it but it’s getting on my nerves. This morning was the final straw, John was jet washing the van the dogs are constantly barking so eventually I went and got them in, only find that they are filthy as they have been playing in the water. Remember I only washed the dogs the other day as the weather had dried up and they should stay fairly clean……😏 not only that but I then had to shut them in the boot room wet and dirty and I had cleaned all that the other day to for the same reasons 🤬 So an explanation was given as to why I was a tiny bit peed off, I don’t understand why he can’t think these things through for himself. The other thing that is annoying is him asking me to do stuff, stuff that I would normally just have to get on with by myself as a general rule, I don’t shout and ask someone to open the gate for me if I am going through with things in my hand because there is only me here normally but John seems to think that it’s ok for me to stop what I am doing and go open the gate for him, no, no it’s not, do it yourself 😝 I’m sure by the end of this we will have ironed out all the little irritable things, either that or we won’t be speaking to each other much if at all 😂 On a good note he has learnt to use the washing machine, it was just to wash his work towels and dust sheets but it’s a start, it does seem however that no one ever taught him what a peg was for 😂 once his towels ended up on the floor instead of the line he worked it out 🤔 Back to the bugbears and one is food, how much food do you actually want to eat for goodness sake 🤣 I’m having to ration some bits! We are not living in normal times and eating whatever you want because you can get more is not an option at the moment, rant over 🤐

What is everyone missing during this lockdown? Obviously I miss seeing my children and especially my grandchildren 😢 I hope we get to spend some time together in the summer months. Other than that there is not much I miss except being able to spontaneously go out for breakfast or coffee and cake, it will seem like a luxury when life gets back to normal. In a weird way I have got the life I wanted, almost, I mean John is at home a lot and so we are able to get jobs done, not just packing them in at the weekend depending on the weather and on top of that there is no sport for him to sit and watch 🤣 happy days. At the moment all my family are fit and well, let’s hope that doesn’t change 😏 Of course we are luckier than a lot of people as we have a few acres to wander round and plenty of outdoor jobs to do, no need for specific online exercise classes here, I really feel for those that are in flats or apartment blocks as that must be very long days. I wonder if we will really learn to appreciate the freedom that we normally have in the end, I hope so. John, I imagine, is missing people, people to talk to lol, he is much more sociable than I am, he is that bloke who will strike up a conversation with you while you are stood in a queue, make a passing comment while out shopping in the hopes that someone wants to chat, he probably spends most of his ‘normal’ days talking to anyone and everyone so I imagine it’s more difficult for him than me. I am the type who, when stood in a queue would look the other way if I thought someone wanted to chat 🤣 I’m not rude, I would never ignore someone if I got caught off guard and they starting talking anyway it’s just how I am. We definitely are the ‘chalk and cheese’ in so many ways it’s hilarious really.

Sunday: Cor blimy guvnor that is a cold wind today especially after last weeks lovely warm temps 😜 we did the usual morning stuff and then guess what job John opted for? Yep, jet washing 🙄 this time it’s the front hit that we just moved the hens out of, I told you he is obsessed with jet washing everything 😂 I did a bit of pricking out in the greenhouse and some water I g but to be honest it was pretty cold so I only did an hour. We went and dropped some eggs off at Charlie’s door, did a knock and run lol, then went down to Mums to check her greenhouse and water the things in there. I’m not sure how much longer we will be able to move about, the police now have powers to stop and question people but we were going from a to c via b and didn’t have any contact with anyone. It perhaps was not a necessity as far as world health is concerned to water mums plants but I’m sure it is to her as she had not planned on getting stuck in Spain during a worldwide lockdown 😏

There was a post on Facebook about food security and the fact that imports are being held up or stopped and where that will leave us as a country. My thoughts are and always have been that we need to be more self reliant as a country, this is why I am always banging on about growing your own or if that is not possible buying seasonal/local/British. Watching a programme on tv about food in Istanbul, I mentioned to John about how bad our diet is here, it really is atrocious when you look at other countries especially the Mediterranean ones, our supermarkets are overloaded with junk and people think it’s normal to dish up this rubbish for dinner 🙄 I know it’s difficult to get people to change habits, I have tried so many times with John, but we really ought to take this opportunity to eat what is grown here. These days we can grow a much bigger variety of produce than we could 50 years ago so it doesn’t have to be boring you just need to jump track and inject some imagination.

I’m pretty tired and sluggish today, I think it’s the cold lol, my average body temperature at the moment is 35.5 so only half a degree off hypothermic 🙄 the low white cells added into the mix probably isn’t helping either so I haven’t really done much else in the way of work.

Stay safe everyone x

Friesland Farm

Muddling on, madness & Mothers Day

Posted on March 22, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday March 16th 2020: A cold start to the day but it yielded a glorious day which I took full advantage of. I started off indoors hoovering and polishing so that I could dedicate more time to outside 😋 Once the animal rounds were done I took the dahlia tubers from the back toilet and potted them up in order to begin waking them up, they are now in the large tunnel. The dahlias are a bit of a faff but I am enjoying growing them so until I get fed up of digging them up and storing them I will continue. I also potted up some of the freesia bulbs, I experimented by digging half up and leaving half in the ground, the ones in the ground have done well and not rotted so that’s a win. I’m hoping the temps keep climbing as sharing the floor in the greenhouse with Big Billy is proving difficult lol, and he keeps lying behind the door so it’s hard to get in, also I remembered that Voldertort likes to go for feet, luckily he hasn’t come out yet but when he does they will have to go outside I think. I did a bit of weeding and planted a couple of plants and some more garlic bulbs which have started to sprout. It was lovely working out in the warm, the kind of weather I have been waiting for 😀

The afternoon was a much more frantic affair, we had a delivery of 40 pullets and a large delivery of feed which will keep us going for a couple of months. To be fair if we ran out of feed the birds would just have to manage on forage, they would lay less eggs but they wouldn’t starve. At about this point, which was 3pm ish we ran out of chicken eggs, this is because within two customers this morning most of the eggs were gone! I’m hoping it was a fluke and that people are not panic buying them, the hens lay every day and so the same number are always available, no need to stash them. So while I am trying to get water and feed for the new hens (which will hopefully start to lay pretty quickly) a customer was shouting over the gate because we had run out of eggs. I hate being put under pressure and we have had a good run of being able to keep the egg shed stocked but I then had to think about doing the egg collecting sharpish.

The first of our daily updates from the government indicates that life is about to get difficult, we are advised to avoid social contact, unnecessary contact and travel, work from home if possible ✅ to isolate the whole house for 14 days if one person has symptoms, and that vulnerable people should be shielded for up to 12 weeks, that’s anyone who it’s recommended has a flu jab, that’s me 😏 I don’t mind telling you, it’s a real worry, I worry about Mum and Ken so far away from any of us, I worry about Charlie who is an NHS dental nurse, I worry about Shelley and Sam and the kiddies, strange times indeed. We are all trying as hard as we can to isolate ourselves, John is on a job for two weeks but when that’s done, if not before, he will not go to work anymore for the time being.

Tuesday: A duller morning but not too bad at the minute, dry but rain coming later. I did the rounds and put out what few eggs I picked up but they are getting snapped up quickly, even the duck eggs are flying off the shelf which is unheard of 🤔

I spent the morning in the greenhouse, watering and sowing a few seeds, wallflowers, ranunculus corms and some leek seeds I had saved from last year. I also sowed a row of little gem lettuce and some wild rocket inbetween the rows of garlic in the poly tunnel. I shall keep sowing as much as I can, it keeps me busy and hopefully will keep us fed.

The situation in this country and others is changing fast every day sometimes minute to minute. Many people I know are practising significant social distancing already and I imagine it’s going to get a lot tougher in the next couple of weeks.

Wednesday: I was determined to get outside and away from any media this morning, I’m finding that I end up with a headache at the end of the day probably due to heightened anxiety and some outdoor work is the cure 😀 This morning after doing the rounds I did end up with umpteen messages pinging back and forth but after that I went out and did some hand weeding. It’s therapeutic at the best of times and a welcome interlude today, I weeded and tided the asparagus bed as these will be the next veg to start making an appearance although I did notice a small artichoke forming so that’s good news as well.

I try and run my day so that I do outside work in the morning when I have plenty of energy and then come in for lunch and do household stuff in the afternoon before having to go back out to do the afternoon feeding and egg collecting, it seems to work well enough.

I’ve had to put a notice on the egg shed as we are selling out of chicken eggs quickly each time I put them out, I have noticed a few ‘new’ customers I hope they keep coming even after the crisis is over 🤔

I get a lot of time to think about things and one thing I hope people take on board is having a buffer for future events, it strikes me that so many people spend everything they have on ‘stuff’ bigger houses, newer cars, more holidays, all the gear, that they are totally reliant on that pay check coming in to keep them going. I guess it will be a lesson well learnt to figure out that there are there are things that can put that all into jeopardy and in a short space of time to. I guess what I am trying to say is people need to be more self reliant across the board if you get my meaning.

Had a stressful couple of hours this afternoon, I had an egg customer sat waiting for eggs after I put out a notice due to the shortages at times, so was under pressure to get the eggs out in the shelf, meanwhile the carbon monoxide alarm was going off 😮 so open all doors and windows, I think a seal has gone on the flue. In between that I was trying to arrange a payment for something in Spain and probably because I was rushing I kept getting locked out of online banking 🤷‍♀️ All sorted in the end, I hate it when everything happens at once, I want my orderly days back lol.

Thursday: It’s raining this morning which is a bummer because I went to bed thinking about the jobs I would do in the morning and now they are scuppered as they were mostly on the garden 😏

At the moment although I am social distancing, John is still working, he is working at one house and limiting contact with anyone else, though I think by the weekend we will be more restricted. He did go out to the shop last night, I asked for oranges and bananas and some cucumber for the torts, there was 1 orange left, no bananas and two halves of marked down cucumber, he did manage to get two Easter eggs 😂 some bread rolls and some cheese. Although we are face timing, I miss seeing the children and grandchildren in the flesh lol, the kids kind of understand that we have to do this until the virus is gone but it’s hard going and we are only at the beginning. Mum and Ken have decided to sit tight in Spain, they might as well as driving through Spain and France at the minute would be extremely difficult and they would be going from one bad situation into another as it stands now they will be through this before us and at least they will have some nice weather 😀

It’s rumoured that the army are on standby to be deployed here, doing what is yet to be seen, the schools and colleges are closing from Friday only key worker and vulnerable children will attend, its all closing down slowly. I fully agree with the way the government are listening to scientists and doing what needs to be done at the right time, their strategy seems logical to me.

Not only have the chicken and duck eggs sales gone barmy now we have people looking for chickens to keep 🙄 Obviously I will not be selling hens to anyone that hasn’t kept them before, the hens welfare is always top priority but more so in times like these.

I’m going to have to change a few things around here as we have hit barmyville today 😝 First off as mentioned a sharp increase in enquiries of hens for sale, going to have to protect the ones we have I think 🤔 I had someone come to buy 4 I made them wait at the gate while I got them, standing six feet away while I left the wheelbarrow with the crate of hens then got them to put the money in the barrow, then I had an older customer who has been coming for years came and the only eggs I had were ones not yet put out so I hid them in an amazon box and took them out to her so anyone arriving would not see I had given them to her. Finally despite a note in the shed saying if we are sold out do not ring the bell, I had a customer come marching across the drive to the door, I went out the back and pretended I didn’t hear the knock, it seems no matter what you tell people they don’t listen, I say finally but after putting eggs out I was making a cuppa, I could see people who obviously had never been before, they had three boxes of eggs and when I checked the money later after sales it was short 😤 Could have been anyone but it’s bad form people. So I think tomorrow I will shut the very front gate with a closed until 4pm sign, take the roadside board in so we are not getting people who have not been before and then limit customers to a dozen eggs, not really what we should have to do, seeing the best and the worst of people at the minute.

History in the making is what we are witnessing in these fraught times, the interest rates here have been cut again to the lowest EVER 0.1% We see countries in lockdown all over the world, the armies are out on the streets in some of them, you can’t find a toilet roll for love nor money, crazy times people.

Unbelievable, I thought my day of fucktardness had finished but no, I asked John to shut the very front gate as we had sold out of eggs, a while later a car pulls up to the gate someone gets out realises the gate is shut and they can’t open it and then proceeds to climb over the fence and walk up the driveway!

Friday: Still cold but dry this morning. After yesterday’s shenanigans we made the decision to close the front gate with a notice saying ‘closed, eggs will be available at 4pm’ this gives me peace of mind that I am not going to be hunted down and that I am not constantly worrying about people arriving to no eggs. The fact that I have seen reports on poultry groups that people are having their hens stolen is another worry, honestly what the hell is wrong with people 😏 John is finishing today, he is in the middle of doing a bathroom but if he leaves it now it is still fully functional just not finished, if he carries on next week and the suppliers shut down he will be scuppered so makes sense to stop at a good point.

This morning I did the usual rounds then a few bits of tidying up on the yard and in the stable block, and took the horses some hay putting up at the far end of the paddocks so that they actually have to move from the front, right to the back to get it lol, since they discovered the side paddock was open they haven’t left it at all🙄

I’m sat here in the afternoon hiding again, a planned one this time as Sam has come over to get the horses in because the farrier is coming first thing in the morning. I am hiding because she has Mia with her and if she knows I am in she will want to come in and see me, she won’t understand why that can’t happen, it’s so sad that we have to do this but we are protecting not just myself but others in the family with health issues. I hate that this virus has deprived me of precious time with the grandchildren we still FaceTime but it’s not like real hugs and kisses

So the gate was opened at 4pm and it was mental, by 4.15 we had sold all the duck and chicken eggs, it was car after car coming in, add to that the amount of enquiries about point of lay chickens and people coming to get them, just bonkers today 🙄

Saturday: A cold start but dry and with the promise of some sunshine. We did the morning rounds, the farrier was here bright and early at 7.30am then onto the jobs of the day. John went off to get some fire cement for the flue and then replaced the broken fire cement and the fire rope of the flue. He then went to get some compost so I can carry on potting on and seed growing, after that he spent most of the day cutting up wood. I topped up bedding in the duck and goose house then cleaned out the quail, after that I was free to potter in the greenhouse, watering and potting on. I also had a look round at what I had, a few leeks that didn’t get planted last year, same with a tray of garlic and some welsh onions that I separated at the end of last year. All of these I have now planted, not wasting anything this year so spaces were found to pop them in. I also have some strawberry plants that I had put out for sale but I got them back in and potted them up, I will need as much as I can grow especially soft fruit for the grandchildren so might as well use them myself. I have raspberry/blackcurrant and gooseberry bushes that I potted up last year that I can also use to increase yields. We got ready for the 4pm onslaught again today but it was much less frantic more of a steady stream.

People are starting to understand that we need to stay home more and more but there are plenty out there who are not getting it (usually in a supermarket queue).

I am hugely proud, and also terrified at the same time, to tell you that our youngest daughter Charlotte, who is an NHS dental nurse, has put herself forward and will be working with a dedicated team in a dedicated surgery to provide emergency dental care for patients with confirmed covid-19. As soon as I heard there was a possibility that her practice had been designated I knew she would volunteer to be on the team, that’s my girl 🥰 and there are thousands of NHS workers doing the exact same thing so please don’t go out unnecessarily, flatten the curve and give them a fighting chance to deal with this crisis.

Sunday: A cold start again but that soon blossomed into a beautiful day, the wind was still cold at times but the heat of the sun could be felt which is the main thing. It is of course Mother’s Day and the 2020 version is very different to previous years, a quote I like is ‘who would have thought that the best thing you can give your Mother today is distance’ sad but true. Despite the distancing we have managed, I managed to find somewhere in Spain to get a pot plant to my Mum, my girls have managed to get an afternoon tea delivery to me (and some for John of course 😜) Charlie and Macca walked over and we stood in the driveway having a conversation with distance between us, we exchanged goodies by placing them on the floor then stepping back lol, the likes of these things only ever seen in movies before now.

Other than that John is still cutting wood, he said he ‘liked being forced not to have to go to work’ I think it’s different to taking a week off and feeling under pressure about the workload he would have to go back to. I know it will be stressful for a lot of people but for a few it will relieve the stress. Meanwhile I have been baking some bread and doing some bits of gardening, getting the beds ready for planting into when the time comes to plant out. We are keeping a very close eye on the weather so that we can drag the fields as soon as possible, the ground is slowly drying out which will make living conditions for the birds a lot easier than it has been all winter.

I wish you all well this week coming and never have I written that before with more sincerity than now.