Tag: greenhouse

Posted in Friesland Farm

Darker nights, Halloween and another lockdown.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 26th October 2020: Having been somewhat absent from the outside last week I thought I had better do a few bits today. But first there was a cake to cook and jelly to make for the VIPs, chocolate cake today as requested by Josh and strawberry jelly this week. I got some dusting and hoovering done while I was waiting for the cake to cook, put some washing in and got a beef stew on the go for our dinner tonight. I was intending them to go out but first I had to do a couple of invoices and I have reverted to the laptop for those as other methods seem to be failing 🙄 Finally it was time to get out and do those things that had been on my mind, filling the bird feeders for the garden birds was the first job. I stop feeding them in late spring but I want them to stay around and so begin to feed them again now that food is more scarce. This year I have positioned them so that I can get good photographs of them feeding, they were behind the oak tree before and I could never get a good angle without going out and frightening them off. It started raining just as I went out and I figured someone must have been watching and said ‘she is out turn the tap on’ 😜 but it soon passed. Then I had a look and picked and what produce is still left growing, a lonely courgette, a few indigo rose tomatoes, some raspberries, the brassica cage has enormous plants in there and I think they are sprouting broccoli so they won’t be ready until next year, one plant is about six foot tall! There are still lettuce and salad greens growing as well as radicchio, the oranges are almost ready to pick I think and the (one) loofah is still going strong. I fed the blueberry plants some sulphate of iron and replenished the top of the pots with fresh ericaceous compost, that will hopefully make them good and strong next year and produce plenty of blueberries. Then it was onto seed collecting and I gathered, cornflower, marigold, red flax, poppies, geum, bronze amaranth, love in a mist, nepeta, chick peas, achillea and sunflower seeds, bagged them and labeled them because I will have no idea what they are by next spring if I just leave them 😂 There are plenty of other jobs I want to get done but I don’t have time today, now the clocks have change it will be a short afternoon. Time to come in for some lunch and wash up the baking things before the little guests arrive.

Tuesday: Raining 🙄 That means only one thing, paperwork 😂 and I’m pleased to say I have finished and it’s all up together and ready to go to the accountants 😃 I worked on it until 12.45, I had literally just finished and packed everything away when Shelley messaged saying she was taking the kids to the garden centre for cake and would I like to go, yes indeed, I think I’ve have earned it. By the time we got there the kids had fallen asleep in the car and it was hammering down so we sat there for ten minutes before deciding to wake them and make a dash for it.

Back home in time to quickly light the Rayburn and then go and feed the hens and collect the eggs before putting them out into the shed. John came home in time to shut the birds away which is now about 5pm. We had dinner, went to get a bit of shopping and popped in to see Mum and Ken for a cuppa. And that’s another day done, but a good one because I can now think clearly about anything else I have to do rather than having the paperwork at the back of my mind all the time 😌

Wednesday: Time goes by so slowly….🎶 that’s what I have been thinking ever since the clocks went back, time seems to be slower. It’s 9.15am and I have already done all the morning jobs, got a batch of leek and potato soup well on the way and done some of this years accounts. I swear I look at the clock, go and do what seems like a hundred things and then look again and only five minutes have passed 😂 John was up before the alarm went off this morning, had his breakfast and then did the animals, he got caught in the biggest downpour 😣 I have Josh and Flo this morning while Shelley has to work so just having a quick coffee before they arrive, she will be back at lunchtime and then we will go for a walk I think providing it’s not pouring down again.

Walk cancelled, biggest downpour/hailstorm and thunderstorm ever 😂 stay in the warm and watch a film seemed like a much better option. Luckily I managed to dodge the rain showers when I was feeding the hens and collecting the eggs. Not got much done in the way of outside work today, but I had a couple of deliveries of more bird seed and fat balls and seem to have way over ordered, I might put them out for sale in the shed.

Thursday: Finally got my backside into gear to get a bit done. This morning after the usual chores a shower and some meditation I went outside, I cleaned out the guineas and both light Sussex houses. I picked all the remaining green tomatoes and bought in the pumpkin for carving. I carved the pumpkin first and I know I should have made something with the inside but I’m not a pumpkin lover and the flesh is hard to get out when you want it left whole. Faced carved, not scary cos it will frighten the babies, we have some extraordinary pumpkin carvers in the family but I’m not one of them so it’s basic 😜 Next job was the green tomato chutney, I have used the indigo rose toms, it produce loads of fruit but it was late and about 2/3rds of them haven’t ripened and it’s too late now. Out came the cauldron 😀 and in went the ingredients, green tomatoes obviously, cooking apples, red onions, malt vinegar, dark brown sugar and a spice bag with ginger, peppercorns, and chilli in. You can put whatever spices you fancy, cardamom, coriander, all spice, star anise (which I often use) but this time I chose cumin, for a warming taste, to go along with the other flavours, fingers crossed it will be good. You can’t really go wrong with a chutney it just depends on what you put in if it turns out to be a good one or a great one. Chutney has its origins in India but the British love a good chutney, its basically a mix of fruit, spices, sugar and vinegar in whatever blend you like, it’s great for using up gluts and stores well and of course goes brilliantly with cheese and is nearly always ready in time for Christmas. I have a chief taster for the chutney in Macca, he loves it, it is a paradox though (I think I can safely use that word here) because he doesn’t like cheese 🤷‍♀️

Chutney making process

You may have noticed that I have already used the C word 🎄 and it’s only October, normally I won’t even entertain it until December BUT we have had a tough year this year and although I won’t be going as far as to put up my decorations this early I concede that we need something to keep us cheery at the moment and so I have relented and I’m going with the flow. That reminds me I must get the cake out and give it a drink of brandy 😜

Halloween is not going to be quite the same this year but we can still make it an occasion at home, get a pic n mix bowl and watch a scary movie 👻 The grandchildren are coming over in the day time and we will be dressing up, apple bobbing and eating doughnuts from a string and of course there will be sweet treats 🎃

Oxford has just moved up a tier 😏 as an outlying shire we are still on tier one but with the cases rising rapidly I don’t think it will be long before we are joining them in further restrictions. The second wave, as widely predicted, is bigger than the initial outbreak but I’m guessing they have more knowledge of how to treat it successfully in most cases now, I hope so anyway. France and Germany have gone into lockdown measures and both countries admit it is out of control, as I keep saying luckily it’s not airborne or that could have been the end of life as we know it, I think the world is finally realising how fragile our existence on this planet really is 🙄

I hate Thursday evenings, I don’t hate it until I have done the dinner, fed the cats and the dogs, got the logs in for the fire and sat down to enjoy the evening, then I hate it because I have usually forgotten to put the bins out 😣 just like this Thursday evening which means having to go out in the dark and the cold to do it. It’s not just a quick nip down a very short path to the kerbside here, it’s not a trek in the Antarctic either but still it’s a chore and a bore if I have forgotten, I’ll see if I can persuade John to do it 😝 (He did bless him)

Had a bit of a Covid scare when the elderly lady next door to Mum went into hospital and tested positive for Covid, Mum had been round there in the week as she had a fall and help was needed to get her up. As soon as she heard she booked a test because, being half term, she had seen quite a few of the family, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and she did have a bit of a cold, luckily the test came back negative 😀

Friday: Not a bad day, a bit spitty and overcast but feels very mild. I did the usual morning tasks and then had blood tests followed by a cheeky visit to costa with Shelley, Josh and Flo. Back home to get some bits done though I haven’t decided what yet 😀

We used to have Sunday roasts with all the girls and partners but since the grandchildren numbers have expanded its difficult to get them all in at the same time so I have decided to do them separately, (and we now have the rule of six of course) it’s a shame as there is nothing better than a full family dinner but there just isn’t room. That’s one of my biggest regrets about moving and not building something big enough but we never gave the expansion of the family a thought really. Hopefully we can get a few in before a lockdown which I think is inevitable 🙄

I spent a bit of time in the greenhouse potting up some allium bulbs that I had been given a couple of months ago. I have not decided where to put them so pot them up until spring and then decide, mind you there are lots of pots so I may sell some of them. I bought the saffron crocus in from outside, I always miss them flowering as they flower late autumn and in my head it should be spring 🙄 I have never managed to harvest saffron from them yet, maybe this year I will get some (if I remember to look 😝) they go over pretty quickly as far as I can tell. The lonely loofah is still doing ok, I’m not sure when to harvest it but I don’t think it’s ready yet, the trouble is that we are getting to the time of the year when things can develop mould when they are under cover so I need to keep a close eye on it over the next few weeks. At the moment there is not much in the greenhouse, I’m mostly overwintering seedlings and cuttings I took back in the summer, drying out seeds ready to bag up and of course the torts are sleeping in a hut in there. The door is open so they can get out if they choose to, Voldy came out one day last week but didn’t eat or drink and I haven’t seen Billy since he went in lol.

Saffron crocus, might get a few strands this year maybe 🤷‍♀️

Now is a good time to take hardwood cuttings and although I am not too good at it I wanted to give a couple of things a go to see if I could increase my plants. Blueberry, cos you can never have too many blueberry bushes, mulberry and olive, it might be a bit late for the olive but nothing ventured nothing gained eh. By now the rain is a bit heavier and it’s not much fun getting a soaking if you don’t need to, there are plenty of times when I have to go out in the rain but choosing to do it is just silly 😜

Hardwood cuttings of blueberry, mulberry and olive

Saturday: It’s 9.45 and it’s turned filthy out there, first thing it wasn’t too bad a bit of fine drizzle but now the rain is heavier and it’s blowy. John did half the rounds this morning and I did the other half, this meant he could then get on with finalising the pathway ready to concrete and even though it’s ready we won’t be doing it in this 🙄 we will wait until it passes over which should be this afternoon. It will be all hands to the deck on the mixer and the wheelbarrow then. Meanwhile I have been doing the usual things, putting washing on, feeding the cats and dogs, washing up, putting the rubbish out , then outside to do the other half of the feed rounds and move the chicken fencing so the horses can eat off the grass that has grown, I also gave them a bit of hay to keep them warm today. They have a shelter, two actually but rarely use them, they are pretty hardy, they don’t come in very often, only in the very worst of the weather. There won’t be many fireworks this year but even then we don’t bring them in, my thinking is that they are better out there where they can see what’s going on than inside where they can only hear frightening noises and have no idea what’s going on, they are fine and they don’t panic because they are used to it.

I did start to bring in the plants that will not survive a harsh winter, dahlias mostly but also some creeping thyme which will do better inside and I think I will bring the olive in (the one in a pot, the other is in the ground) just to see if it brings it on any better than leaving it outside. I say started too but the rain got heavy so the rest can wait until next week when we are supposed to get drier weather 🤞

If we do go into a lockdown, which is looking very likely and as soon as next week, I have plenty to be getting on with but it will be a bit more depressing this time round with the colder days and darker nights 😏 and bang will go my family Sunday roasts though I am doing one tomorrow for Charlie, Macca, Mum and Ken so we will make sure we enjoy it 😀

John went back out to do the concreting and I lit the fire and made bread, I did volunteer but he wanted bread and some warm when he came back in. I got those done and then went out to give him a hand anyway, I did manage to load the cement mixer with around 5 lots before I had to come back in and sort the bread for baking, 56 and I can still shovel into a mixer, I’ll take that 😜 worth my weight in gold as I told John 😉 Josh, Flo and Mia came over for a bit of Halloween fun, doughnut eating, apple bobbing and sweetie hunting then a child friendly, Halloween film.

I am just sat waiting for the Prime Minister to make an announcement any time soon, we are definitely going into a lock down, for a month by the looks of it but how much of a lockdown, that’s the question. Josh was visibly unhappy when we told him that we might not be able to see each other ‘what about Mondays’ he said, meaning teatime at Nanas, I will have send it to them instead 😏

Well that’s it a month of restricted movement from Thursday 🙄 it will be different this time though as John will still be working and I will be here not seeing anyone, not too keen on this but we gotta do what we gotta do, no good moaning about anything just get on with it and hope it slows the infection rate. The good thing is the grandchildren will get one more tea at Nanas in before we can’t see each other for a month.

Sunday: We are having the first and the last (for a month at least) of the Sunday roast evenings tonight so we will make it a good one 😀 Firstly though after we have done all the morning jobs I have an eye test appointment in Witney, not sure if I will be able to pick up my glasses when they are ready though lol. Then I need to pick up a few bits of shopping for dinner later, if there is anything left, reports of panic buying are all over social media, did people not learn anything last time 🤷‍♀️ and then it will be round to Sam and Luke’s for a quick visit as it’s Luke birthday today.

I doubt we will get much done outside here today as it’s raining again but at least the path is down and has cured overnight although the cat has walked all the way along it much to Johns utter disgust 🤣

I went for my eye test, got there gave them my name and they said your appointment is the 5th not the 1st, nope it’s definitely the 1st, here is the email to prove it, a discussion out in the back commenced and finally they said they were fully booked and couldn’t fit me in today 😏 They were apologetic and it will be reported that the online booking system somehow cocked up, I wasn’t too bothered as I have plenty to be getting on with 😀 A bit of shopping though I didn’t really see any signs of panic buying in Waitrose 🤣 and then onto wish Luke a happy birthday and drop some beers to him. Well drop is exactly what happened, as John got them out of the car he appeared to throw them in the air and then not catch them, crash, smash they landed on the floor, luckily only one bottle broke but still a bit of a disaster morning 😜

John spent an hour loading logs into the back area, feeding the birds, collecting the eggs while I prepped and cooked a roast with all the trimmings, a rice pudding and an apple and blackberry crumble for our guests this evening.

And that’s another week done, next week we will be moving towards the partial lockdown in the hope that the disease can be slowed, I do hope so for the sake of the NHS staff 😏 Stay safe everyone and have a good week x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Lavender oil, a lovely walk and plenty of walnuts.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 28th September 2020: Would you look at that, we are back round to Monday again 🙄 Some tasks just happen without any planning of them and that’s what I have been doing this morning, an unplanned task, still one that needed doing just wasn’t on my radar. The cleaning out of the greenhouse, two reasons for doing it, one, the season is coming to its end and lots have gone over and need adding to the compost heap, second reason is that the tortoises will need to begin hibernation soon. They hibernate in the greenhouse in a hutch over winter but they need to wind down first, they are already beginning to ‘dig in’ in the outside run, a good sign that they are ready for the long winter sleep. They will probably spend the next three weeks awake and I will slowly withdraw food from them although they are pretty good at regulating themselves. They can’t go into hibernation with food in their stomach as it will either ferment or freeze, neither has a good outcome 😏 On a warm day in the greenhouse they will still be active but as the temps drop they will become less so until they are fully hibernating and then we wrap them up until I can hear them shuffling around next spring.

I spent a few hours in the greenhouse moving things, sweeping down, cleaning and throwing stuff away, discovering many spiders but luckily no mice 😀 There are still a few things hanging on in there, chillies, although I picked most of them this morning, a couple of peppers still growing and again I picked the bigger ones already this morning, I have a few plants that are overwintering in there ready for next spring and there are walnuts, hazelnuts, lavender and tomatoes all either drying or ripening off. I also have some thermal foil ordered to put on the North side to help reflect the heat/light back towards what is still growing. At this time of year it’s easy to lose plants to the cold in the greenhouse so I am doing everything I can to keep them going including standing them on celeotex to stop cold drafts at the base of the plants. I may even make a thermal shelter out of the foil and a cardboard box to protect anything really vulnerable. I did think about heating it but in all honestly it’s a waste of money until the growing season begins again in Spring.

After a spot of lunch I went into the big tunnel to finish tidying up after pulling the tomato plants. Plenty of weeding in there, despite the fact that I put black plastic all round the edges the weeds crept through. I almost got one side finished and decided it was time for a sit down, I spent so much time on my knees each time I stood up I felt dizzy 🥴 that’s not good is it. I also found a clutch of eggs while I was tipping stuff onto the compost, we found a clutch in the straw in the stables but the minute you find them the hens move quarters and it’s hide and seek until you locate them. I can bet my bottom dollar that once I pick them up later they won’t lay there again and it will be back to hunting for them. I said to John we were loads of egg down in the daily count 😂

John came home and set about shifting all the wood we had taken off the front of the building and there was a lot of it. That left me to do the egg/feed rounds, pick some runner beans, pick some raspberries and get the dinner sorted. By 6pm my back was aching and with the washing up done it was time for a sit down thank goodness 😅

The animals we picked up on Saturday in case you hadn’t already guessed were two little black and white kittens. Yes I know I said I was done with cats for a while but we really need them to keep the mouse and potentially rat population under control. So we collected Jack and Jill (original I know 😜) and they have been settling in well. Today for the first time one of them came to meet me when I went through to the boot room which is where they are, sometimes locked in a cage because the dogs also have free range of the room and sometimes the dogs are locked out and the kittens get to stretch. It didn’t take them long to start climbing and finding hidey holes.

Tuesday: I started off the day by burning a bit of rubbish, paper feed sacks and cardboard boxes etc, then I had half an hour to kill so I thought that would be a good time to infuse the lavender I have been drying. I have used almond oil as a base, stuffed the jar three quarters full with lavender heads and covered it with the oil. That will sit on the window sill for about three weeks with the occasional shake and then be ready to bottle, a lovely soothing relaxing oil for all kinds of uses. I finished that and my cup of coffee and went out to the paddocks to bring in the horses ready for the farriers visit. Sam arrived with the twiglets, after the horses were sorted and back out we had some lunch and then went on a walk along the local downs. Again the scenery was beautiful, there was plenty to admire, spindleberry and flax, plus a bonus snack as we saw some great looking apples growing on a tree in the hedge, they were the best apples we had tasted for years 🍎

Spindleberry and flax two of my favourites to see while out walking.

When John came home we took down a chain link fence to the side of the building as we have someone coming to take the trees down tomorrow hopefully, as the weather is supposed to be terrible 🙄 It will be great once they are down as we can finally move the access to the yard, at the minute you drive past the front of the house and round in a big C shape which can be tricky when towing a trailer, this one will go straight up the side and the turning/reversing point will be much easier than it is now. Then it will be a case of a new fence and gate, the jobs are piling up lol.

Wednesday: Today is the day the remaining trees come down at last, I was a bit worried as I hadn’t heard from the people doing it and I hadn’t contacted them but they turned up as planned so that’s brilliant.

The weather is supposed to be awful later this week, high winds and rain urgh I think summer is done 😏 It’s going to be a long Winter what with all the restrictions as well as the long dark nights but I’m sure we will get through it. Funny how spring and summer seem to go faster than the autumn and winter 🙄 I do love autumn mind you, I love Halloween and bonfire night though I don’t think there will be much going on this year, we will have to make it the best we can in the circumstances, maybe a hot chocolate and a scary film (not too scary 😂) with the fire going will help.

I stayed indoors out of the way of machinery and trees being felled 🙄 mostly I did a fair bit of sorting out, things to go to the charity shop, things to throw away, old paperwork to burn. Mid afternoon I lit the Rayburn, it started raining around lunchtime and I think it is supposed to get worse later, might as well have a warm cosy house especially as I will be doing the feeds rounds later and likely to get a soaking 😜

The trees are down and we now have a huge pile of woodchip and tree trunks, it was surprising how oppressive the trees were even just the four that were left.

Now you see them, now you don’t 😀
All this from just four trees, though they were huge 😜

Nice and toasty indoors with the Rayburn going, we will only have it lit for a few hours and then let it out or we will be sweating buckets tonight 😂

We are into the second wave of the virus now, they said it would come, we hoped it wouldn’t but here it is spreading rapidly I expect more restrictions will be added over the next few weeks.

Thursday: After the torrential downpours last night we woke to a beautiful morning, sunny, warm, delightful 😀 I seem to have my clearing out head on at the moment and so went out into the back area and started tidying up and clearing any rubbish, putting things away properly, that sort of thing. Then I got distracted, the daughter of someone I know has started a business transferring old vhs to digital. We have a few that I would like to get done so I went searching for them, our wedding video is the main one and then there are Christmas and holiday videos. Plenty of them have nothing written on them so I needed a player to have a look, I found one in the caravan which must have been dads as it has been here since we first bought the place. No plug on it 😂 this is typical as, like John, Dad probably robbed the plug for something else, however John also takes the plugs off defunct electricals and keeps them so I found one in a drawer. I am of the era that were taught how to wire a plug, I have no idea if they still teach that or not but it was one of the more useful things I ever learnt 😜 and so I put on a new plug and voila it works, I say works, it lights up and turns on anyway, the next phase is to hook up to a tv and see if it actually plays. Oh the fun I am going to have watching all these memories 🥰

After doing that I had to sort out the POL pen as we are expecting a delivery of hens this afternoon, it just needed sweeping out and some weeds pulling, that took me up to lunchtime and time for a half hour sit down I reckon.

I decided to rig up the video recorder and see what was on some of the tapes, the quality is not too good now, well they have been sat there for nearly thirty years (some of them anyway) but they are watchable, I just need to go through all of them and see what is what. It’s a long time since I hooked up a video player to the tv and had to google it 😂

John came home just in time for the arrival of 50 hens and the feed delivery so he sorted all that out

Josh wanted to come over after school and be left here on his own with us so Mummy and Flo had to push off 😂 not quite like that but you get the gist. He helped Grampy with the egg collecting and then he helped me gather some walnuts, I thought the squirrel would have most of them but there were loads on the floor so we picked them all up. Then things got hectic for a couple of hours as we had people arriving to collect hens and some people arriving to collect wood, what with that and answering messages about the wood it was all hands on deck, Josh even helped me load some wood in a wheelbarrow for someone. Eventually everything was done and sorted, Josh went back home, John put the birds to bed and that’s the end of another day 😀

Friday: It couldn’t be a more different day compared to yesterday’s sunshine, it’s been raining through the night and this morning it’s grey, dull, breezy and constant rain, yuk. Luckily I don’t have to be out and about in it at the moment, John did the rounds this morning before going to work, I stayed inside with a cup of tea 😂

I whizzed round and got a few household jobs done and then it was time to go and have my blood tests done, and get my flue jab, after that I went for coffee and cake with Shelley and Flo and then onto have a routine mammogram 😏 Just my luck that the software wasn’t playing ball and had to have one side done three times! If you have never had one before they compress your boob in various positions and it’s pretty uncomfortable so to have to have it done three times is not very nice at all but very necessary 🙄 Back home and light the Rayburn as it’s cold and rainy, if I can get it lit and settled before I have to go out and do the feed rounds I don’t have to nip in halfway round to check on it. Apart from that we have someone coming to pick up hens at 4pm and a cosy night in the warm is in order I think.

Saturday: Wet and rainy overnight, still drizzling this morning, a rather dank, dull day 🙄 John did the animals and then went off to pick up the tractor part that needed repairing, hopefully he will get that fitted today. I pottered around indoors sorting washing, drying, various other tasks, I am thinking of all the jobs to get done outside so that I am not wandering around wondering what needs doing. When it’s raining it’s best to have a clear itinerary that way I don’t end up either coming in and out of the house or standing round outside getting wet and cold.

Yesterday the world was informed that Donald Trump had covid, this morning we were told he has been hospitalised. From his actions and sentiments I don’t think he really believed it was a threat, I hope for his sake that he can overcome it 🙄

Nuts! I haven’t gone nuts but I do have a good haul of them, hazels and walnuts. The hazels are easy as you pick them and put them in a basket, they just keep like that all year. The walnuts though are a different kettle of fish, they need washing and drying successfully, if you just leave them they grow a mould in the outside which permeates inside and that’s not good. I have tried various methods over time but this year I have washed them off and because the Rayburn is lit I have put them in pans on the warming shelf to dry gently. I tried selling some last year but to be honest because you don’t what’s inside them until you crack them open it’s not really fair on customers especially if they get a few with nothing inside. I guess the industry xrays them or something like they do with eggs for cracks or anomalies. I try just picking up what I will use but seeing them on the ground the urge to gather is too strong so now I have quite a lot 😜 I was. Reading that you can freeze them though or even keep them in the fridge so I might have a ‘cracking evening’ soon and then they will be on hand to use quickly in cakes or for snacking. I have no idea how they don’t go rancid in the packing they are sold in 🤷‍♀️ if anyone has a clue let me know.

Lots of walnuts 😀

I decided to have a go at doing something with the nuts so I made some snacking nuts, a Keto recipe to be precise, whatever that is, it uses granulated sweetener instead of sugar. I cup of hazels, 1 cup of walnuts and 1 cup of cashews that I had in the cupboard. 1/4 cup of water, 1 cup of truvia, 1tsp cinnamon, 1tsp sea salt, 1tsp vanilla extract. Put everything except the nuts in a saucepan on medium heat, heat until dissolved then add nuts, keep stirring until the mixture crystallises, cool, eat, but I portioned it at around 15 portions which works out at 165 calories 😂 not for an everyday snack but as a treat it will be well worth it I reckon. It will store for a couple of months in an airtight jar or freeze, can be chopped into smaller pieces to top yoghurt or an apple crumble as always you are only limited by your imagination 😀

A word or two of advice (warnings 😜) don’t leave it in the pan to cool tip it out onto a tray, it’s difficult to get out of the pan once it’s set 🥴 if you like nice flat pastry when you roll, don’t use your rolling pin to bash the bottom of the pan it ends up with dents 🤣 and it’s very moorish so put it away in the cupboard or that will 500 calories gone before you know it 😝

The wood is nearly gone, we have had a couple of people come and cut it up and take it away, actually one bloke has been back three times already 😀

Sunday: Oh my days we have had nearly 48hrs of constant rain some of it pretty heavy at times. I woke about five times in the night and each time I could hear it pouring down, consequently this morning we have our usual river and lake in the fields. My aim was to get the horses in so I got the stables ready, John went off to pick up some hay bales as we haven’t got any in yet and I also bought the quail inside as they were looking rather glum. Biscuit was happy to be coming in, Jack however was a total prat and was adamant he wasn’t going to play ball until I got him a bowl of chaff feed that is then he decided it might be a good idea after all 🙄 we were a bit soggy after the morning out in it all. We came in and lit the fire and then popped round to see Mum and Ken and drop some videos off that are going to be converted to digital. When we got back, Shelley, Martin and the kiddies had dropped round for a cuppa and a chat. Then it was time to do the feed rounds and egg collection, the day has whizzed past today despite the depressing weather.

That’s another week done and dusted, I feel like it was a bit of a bitty week and nothing really consolidated, I don’t know why, it just feels like that. Hopefully next week I will feel a bit more in control, who knows what the week will bring though 😂 Have a good one whatever you are doing 🥰

Posted in Friesland Farm

A pick ‘n’ mix of a week 😜

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 13th July 2020: It was a sunny start though the sun seems to have disappeared behind clouds now which is great for me. I did a bit of picking first thing this morning, rhubarb, dwarf beans, courgettes, a marrow, beetroot, salad turnips, French breakfast radish and white globe radish plus a few blueberries and raspberries. The little birds are still getting into the fruit cage though I can’t see where they are managing to get in, i did think that the raspberries were not producing very much, they are being eaten before I even get out of bed!

It’s ‘Bees need’ week this week and there are five simple things you can do to help the plight of our most important creatures. Grow more flowers (the open type, not multiple petals as they can’t reach the nectar) Leave some wild areas, weeds are not favoured by humans but the bees love them and we need the bees to survive otherwise we won’t 🙄 Don’t cut the grass so often, I know it looks a bit unsightly but we managed without hairdressers and barbers for a while and it didn’t hurt did it 😜 Don’t disturb nests and hibernation places, if you find a bees nest just leave it, they won’t bother you if you don’t bother them, of course I am not talking about a swarm, that does need sorting but on the whole solitary bees will move on once the young have hatched. Don’t use pesticides, this in my opinion is the biggest problem for insects, nurture nature to get a good balance in your garden instead of resorting to pesticide. Those are the main five things but there are other things you can do to help when it’s really hot, leave a dish of topped up water for insects to find and quench their thirst. When it’s turning cold provide areas for them to overwinter, bug houses are all the rage but areas that have not been tidied are just as good, resist the temptation to tidy and leave it until spring 😀

This morning I have been doing a bit of this and a bit of that in the garden. I planted up the pak Choi and the chicory into the polytunnel for the colder months and I sowed a new bed of mixed lettuce leaves which will be quick growing. The bed I pulled all the carrots from has now got a layer of mushroom compost on it to condition the soil and I have sown some lambs lettuce and winter purslane (I think) in the bed that the radish were in. The bulb fennel seeds I sowed in there failed to materialise 🙄 After that it was onto re potting some plants I bought at the weekend, ornamental grasses. The area in the front that I cast lots of wildflower seeds onto has not really done much, I have some things in pots but I think the seeds and small plants I put there have been eaten by earwigs or woodlouse as it has a layer of wood chip covering, ideal for pests to live in 😜 So I bought some grasses and will put them in pots over there the idea being that they set seed and do the job for me, I can’t dig into the ground as it was an area used to put types of aggregate and now is a solid bed of stones.

Update: something is eating the pak Choi and something has dug up a couple of the chicory plants, why do I bother lol

I was looking forward to lunchtime because today is the day I get to eat the first couple of ripe tomatoes in a cheese sandwich, that is always a day to look forward to 😀 as I always say grow/find yourself some home grown toms they taste a hundred times better than shop bought ones especially if they are freshly picked after being warmed by the sun ☀️

I’m not sure what’s on the agenda for the afternoon yet, I seem to run out of steam after lunch, definitely not got the ooomph I had when I was on the steroids 😏

I got this evenings dinner on the go, I like to do it either first thing or at least by lunchtime otherwise I feel disinclined to sort anything at the actual time. I don’t know how people come in from work and decide what to have, we would end up with something on toast every night 😜 Tonight’s dinner is lamb shank (just one is enough for the two of us) cooked in the slow cooker with veg from the garden, broad beans, dwarf beans, turnips, potatoes, peas, garlic I grew and is now stored and rosemary from the garden, along with some lamb stock from the freezer. The lamb is from a local smallholder so it’s entirely a smallholder meal 😀 For pudding (or dessert if you are posh) we have mixed fruit crumble, blueberries, raspberries, gooseberries, blackcurrants and rhubarb, all from the garden, as I have said before, we eat like kings here 👑

John has gone to work today which enables me to get on a bit I think, I am certainly more organised when he is not here, I think it’s the fact that I can’t entirely get on with what I want to do as there is usually something to be discussed or looked at and he is inclined to come in for lunch and turn the tv on to watch the news so I sit down and watch it too, something I don’t do when I am here by myself (except in the winter months)

John has been in the wars at work today, a piece of tile he was chopping off the wall flew and caught his middle finger between the knuckle and the hand. He came home with a couple of bloody plasters on it. He went off to do the egg collecting and came back in swearing, he saw a rat in the duck pen, picked up an iron bar to whack it, missed and blood starting pouring out of his finger again, he says pouring I say dribbling. He is quite dramatic in his descriptions ‘ I had a bad accident at work today’ seriously, you cut your finger, ‘it’s really deep’ can’t be that deep or your finger would be hanging off! You can see I’m not the sympathetic type 😜 so when I had to clean it up and re dress it and he is hanging onto the sink saying ‘I feel sick and dizzy’ my answer is ‘strap a pair on will you’ 🤪 I don’t really understand those who feel sick and dizzy at the slightest cut, I am of a mind to think it’s all in the head but maybe it isn’t, maybe it’s a real thing that I have just never experienced being made of sterner stuff 😀

Tuesday: Today is a long awaited day, I get a hair cut 😂 not that I am one who regularly has a hair cut just when it gets on my nerves which it is doing at the minute. Two reasons, one it has got a bit long and is annoying when it’s wrapping itself round my neck when I’m sleeping 🙄 and two it is falling out, probably due to the new meds but I think a good cut will help a bit, I’m hoping anyway 🤞

John is working again today, this will probably be the norm now, mostly working with the odd day off here and there, even though he wants to spend more time at home, the phone keeps ringing, well his mobile anyway as the house phone you know about already! I have slung the Hoover round and done a bit of wiping over and topped and tailed the gooseberries I picked the other day ready for the freezer. Topping and tailing is pretty time consuming luckily it’s only gooseberries that need it, blackcurrants don’t really as the ‘bit’ is the remainder of the flower and so perfectly fine to eat, saves a lot of time. I feel tired today and lethargic, I am wondering what to do next and then wondering if I can be bothered 😕

A new law comes into effect next week and we will have to wear face masks in shops, some people already do but I never have, the choice is wear a mask or don’t go shopping 😜 hmmm I think I prefer the latter.

Shelley and the children came over and we dug some potatoes for their dinner later, picked some peas and ate them from the pod 😀 I love to teach the children about where food actually comes from. Josh and I had an interesting conversation about flies eyes and how they have 360o vision, I managed to get him off the subject of superheroes for a minute or two 😜

Wednesday: An overcast but pleasant enough day, some very slight drizzle first thing that soon went. First thing I did was water the greenhouse and feed the torts, then move the grasses I re potted to their position out in the front area. I decided to give the whole area a bit of a tidy up, weeding, sweeping, dead heading cutting back and mowing the grass in the driveway, it’s looking a lot better now. At times I feel overwhelmed by the weeds and amount of tidying it will take to get it looking immaculate, then I remind myself that it’s good for the wildlife and I shouldn’t be too tidy 🙄 It’s been a difficult transition that has taken years to let go, in our old place I opened the garden once a year so everything was immaculate all the time but that is exhausting as well as time consuming. Part of me likes a tidy well turned out garden but another part of me loves the overgrown look, if I could achieve a combination of the two that would be a great result, I will keep working on it 😜 A Gardeners’ work is always a life time road I think, it changes direction sometimes but it is a constant motion when it’s in the blood I reckon 🙂

I have just discovered the medicine wheel, literally just discovered it last night when I joined a balanced life group. I am curious to see how this can help with life and felt drawn to it for some reason so am following. I have talked before about how I see life, in circles, the minute, the hour, the day, the year, after some discussion and thought, the month is not seen the same but as part of a circle that forms the year. Apparently lots of people see these in linear form, so stretching ahead of you, have you ever thought about it? And if you have after reading this, which one are you? If you are a circle person you are much more in touch with your life balance than you think but you can have blockages which is where the medicine wheel comes in, I am looking forward to the discovery of any blockage I have and as a bonus it’s always good to learn something new 😀

In the afternoon the girls came over with the kiddies and we went for a walk up the local lane. I like to keep an eye on a couple of apple trees and a plum tree along there, we have had some very tasty fruit from those trees and they are loaded again this year I am glad to see. We had a few incidents, Josh turned the hose on and got Flo all wet, then on the walk Florence walked into a blackberry runner so had scratches all over her face, when we got back Mia turned the hose on and got Josh wet (that’s Karma we all explained to him 🤪) the only difference was that whereas Josh readily apologised to Flo, Mia has enormous difficulty saying sorry. It ends up with her having a total meltdown, by this time the twins are crying as well, poor Sam, Mia still won’t apologise no matter how much you try and coax her or tell her and then she melts down further because Shelley, Josh and Flo are going to feed the chickens but she is not allowed because she won’t say sorry. The horse pesters Shelley (she doesn’t like horses) so she feeds the hens but abandons the egg collection, Mia goes with Josh, Flo and Shelley to do the front hens, Sam goes to pick the eggs up where shelley couldn’t and the geese arrive and harass Samantha, eventually all situations are resolved but it’s pure carnage when it’s going on 😂 When they have all gone it’s time for a quiet cuppa before I start again.

We all commented on how cold it was for the time of year, it really is very noticeable especially if there is a breeze, it’s going to jump up 6 degrees tomorrow that is quite a difference from one day to the next.

We went to the supermarket this evening and although we have not worn masks before we thought now would be a good time to get used to doing it. I can tell you my future trips will be as little as possible, my glasses kept steaming up so I couldn’t see anything, resulted in keep moving them from my face to my head and that involves touching 🙄 I felt more at ease when I wasn’t wearing one, I may see if there are any delivery slots available yet 😏

Thursday: I did a bit of picking this morning, the usual culprits lol but it does look like I may have found where the little birds get in the fruit cage because I blocked up a hole and this morning I have quite a few raspberries 😀 After doing the picking I cut the lawn but I confess I am a bit tired today, I need to remember that though I have come out the other side of a flare and I am on meds, I still have lupus and I still get tired. So today I a, winky going to rest and hopefully build up some reserve energy for tomorrow. I bought a gardening magazine yesterday so I will read it at my leisure I think 😀

Remember the cuttings I took back in May, well I can report that most of them didn’t take 🤪 but some did 😀 I think I had eight pots of four cuttings and I have ended up with six plants 🙄 still, six free plants is better than none, a couple of them I am really chuffed about, a clematis and a climbing rose 😀 the others are a sage, a japonica, elderflower (nigra). The dahlias I took cuttings from took really easily and I now have four in a pot out the front so hopefully they will flower and I would definitely do those again but some of the other stuff I think is easier to grow from seed/root/dividing, still it was good to give it a go and I had some measure of success.

Friday: A beautiful summer morning, just how summer should be, a fresh but sunny start with the promise of more warmth as the day progresses but not so hot that you can’t function properly 🤣 I started with watering the pots out the front then onto the poly tunnels so that they can cope with any heat, the greenhouse and the pots on the decking and in the cold frames, in fact anything that is in a pot got a watering. I picked a few raspberries and blueberries and there are still a few strawberries to be had, a handful of tomatoes were ready as well. I did pick a coup,e of cucumbers a while back and the rest are still too small to pick but there are plenty of them. I had a good look round and although everything seems slow it is producing, just not in vast quantities, I’m not sure why but others have said the same this year, in contrast I see others who have said it’s a bumper year, I guess it just depends on where you are. I sat with a coffee and watched all the wildlife, goldfinches, blackbirds (pinching the choke berries) a wren that had got herself into the greenhouse and then couldn’t find the bloody great doorway to get back out 😂 I have noticed an increase in butterflies and I aim to get some photos at some point, I still think the smaller insects are a bit thin on the ground which is a worry, normally I would see hoverflies, dragonflies, lacewings etc but they seem to be absent, maybe now the sun is here they will come out to play.

I am feeling less tired today thankfully, I’m not sure what it was, could be anything from air pressure to the Lupus, who knows but today I feel as though I can get on which is great.

Saturday: I spent most of the morning picking, watering and cutting back. I picked all the peas/mangetout I could find and then gave the plants a good cut back. You can still sow seeds at this time of year so I thought as the plants are already growing I might as well just cut the existing ones back and see what’s happens. I have done it with the broad beans and they are flowering again already, hopefully I will get a second crop. I don’t sell peas in the shed, the reason being we use a lot of them, they are labour intensive mind you and you end up with much more empty pod than peas but worth the bother I think. You can make pea pod wine apparently but I have never tried. I picked about 1/2 kg of dwarf French beans, some out for sale and some in the freezer, the more you pick beans and peas the more the plant will produce, once you stop picking they will stop producing so it’s best to keep taking them off. I also,picked courgettes, tomatoes, radish, cucumber, peppers, quite a haul this morning. A bit of watering to keep everything going and then into the kitchen to process it all.

More pod than peas 😜

Sunday: A rainy start so I needn’t have done any watering yesterday 😂 We got the usual jobs done and then went out for breakfast, on the way back we popped in to see Mum and Ken and when we got home Charlie and Macca were here so we sat and had coffee with them. We sat down for a while and then my mobile rang and it was BT complaints dept about the complaint I made last Sunday after getting nowhere. I then spent two and a half hours more on the phone going form dept to dept, the upshot is we have been ‘slammed’ I think that is their term for massive cock up. Basically they disconnected the wrong line and now we are having to spend hours trying to get it reinstated, I reordered it once but that order has been cancelled because they have the line under the wrong address and the other person cancelled the order. I have been from the complaints dept to the faults dept to the ‘I have no idea’ dept and finally to the order dept explaining I have been through all this already and won’t it just happen again, they assured me it won’t, I somehow don’t believe them 🙄 Watch this space………

Consequently we have not done much else today except that John spent half an hour digging up ragwort from the paddocks before it goes to seed. He did start some chainsaw work this morning but the chain snapped, luckily it stayed on the blade otherwise it could have been a day spent at the hospital instead!

Have a good week and as always, stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Curveball INCOMING……………🙄

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 22nd June 2020: And here we are back round at Monday again, still in the throes of a pandemic but hopefully coming out the other side slowly. We have had a constant day today, plenty of jobs and constantly busy. We started off with a bit of tractor work which John did, dragging the paddocks and then he decided to roll them, I told him it was too dry but he didn’t listen. When he came back in he said ‘the paddocks are too dry’ 🙄 I did a fair bit of picking, mostly veg for dinner tonight but also fruit. Most of our meal is home grown everyday at the minute and what isn’t home grown is from other smallholders 😀 Seasonal eating means strawberries and raspberries for pudding every day 😜 I’m not complaining. I picked cherries again this morning and the morello cherries are ripe, and the birds haven’t eaten them so far, so I picked the ones that were ready and started the process of glacé cherries. It’s a ten day process but well worth doing if you fancy a go. Picking and processing begins in earnest now for winter stores and any future pandemic 🤪

After a spot of lunch and a cuppa the next batch of chickens arrived, John sorted them out while I messaged everyone who had them on order. Then time to feed the chickens and collect the eggs ready to put them out and as soon as that was done customers began to arrive to collect their chickens. We squeezed dinner in between arrivals and then Samantha arrived to give Mia the dog a haircut. She has such a thick coat and with the temps set to climb over 30 this week it seemed like a good time to get it off for her, she is now scalped and bathed and I have ordered her a new bed as patch keeps pinching her nice plush one.

A little bit of work in the garden once it had cooled right down, in for a hot chocolate before we ago off to bed, the alarm is set for 5am so I can get some work done before it gets too hot tomorrow.

Tuesday: Up at the crack of sparrows 😜 actually the sparrows have been up for at least an hour already lol. Straight out in the garden to get some picking and weeding done. I managed to get another lot of morello cherries, last year the crows stripped the tree bare but this year they have left them alone and I only have a single blackbird helping himself so I don’t mind that. I also picked mangetout, rhubarb and artichoke, I sorted out a few plants to put out for sale, did the hoovering indoors and then we nipped out to do a few bits in town. Now it’s very hot out there and I can feel the uv rays causing itching on my arms already so it’s 12noon and I am done outside as there’s no more shade for me to furtively move about in 🤪

Generally any indoor time I spend looking up recipes or doing a bit of research on various subjects, or cooking etc.

A few more chicken customers this evening, dinner then pop to the shop to buy bread and come out with two bagfuls of shopping 🙄 pop round to Shelley and Martin for a quick cuppa and then home.

Wednesday: Up very early today as it is going to be hot and I want to get a bit done before I have to come indoors. Plenty of hoeing and weeding, some pricking out (spring cabbage ready for winter planting) some picking, more mange tout and cherries. Then indoors to stone the cherries and freeze them the mange tout went out for sale, do what needs to be done to the glacé cherries and make some blackcurrant sauce for ice cream. Tidy up and put a few bits away, put some washing out, Hoover the boot room and clean the dog beds, lunch. I saw a rat while I was putting food out for the torts so John got his air gun out and I sat with him for a while to see where they are coming from and going to, I have left him out there waiting ………..I doubt very much he will get any, he is far too impatient and keeps moving about, not quietly either 🙄

Thought I would take a photo of my arm and show you what just getting caught in the sun for a few minutes at a time does to me. You can see small raised bumps, that continues up my arms and is really itchy especially when I get hot. This occurs even when I am trying to spend as much time out of the sun as possible because even doing that I have to nip out to get the washing in or go to the gate and get a delivery, even in the car to appointments is exposure. The more I am exposed the worse it gets. At the moment I have the butterfly rash on my face as well, luckily that does not itch its just annoying as it looks like I’ve had one too many 😜 The itchy bumps come even if I have myself covered so the uv rays penetrate clothing easily and if I sat out in it my legs, back, neck and chest would all be affected, great isn’t it, that is why I avoid the sun as much as possible, even factor 50 can’t protect me enough. My medication is supposed to bring my immune system down to a ‘normal’ level in line with everyone else but it never seems to work like that with sun exposure. In a nutshell, I don’t do sunshine 🤪

Thursday: It’s bloody hot lol. It’s our 37th Wedding Anniversary today not that we can do a lot of celebrating 🥳 Up early got the outside work done and then it was blood tests for me, I had to wear a face mask this time which is something new and FYI your glasses steam up every few seconds 🙄 Then we got a takeaway coffee from a local cafe that has re opened, they do particularly good coffee and we sat out on the pavement (not actually on the pavement) and watched the town for about 15 minutes. It’s Market day and although it was busier than it has been of late, it’s not anywhere near as busy as it used to be before the pandemic. We popped in to see Mum and Ken where we had more coffee and then back home to spend the rest of the day inside in the cool. John nipped out late afternoon to do a sink for someone but that’s pretty much it, just waiting now for the weather to break a bit, it will probably hammer down and I still won’t be doing much outside, I should give up really, everything seems against me getting any outside work done lately.

Friday: Getting pretty peed off with the weather now, it was supposed to break and rain today but again we have wall to wall sunshine, John has been off this week but it’s been too hot to do much and I wanted to get a quick trip to a local nursery or the garden centre in but that has also not been possible. Most of the areas are obviously outside and by the time they are open it’s too hot for me to be walking about in it, so I’m sulking instead 😏 We got the morning jobs done in the cool of the day and cleaned all the furniture on the decking. We put the decking under a wild cherry tree, big mistake, at this time of year not only are the cherries falling but the birds sit up there eating them and do what birds do when something goes in one end 🙄 The cherries are nearly all gone now and tonight we are having champagne and nibbles with my brother and his wife and my sister and her husband, we were all supposed to be going on the cruise together and so I thought it would be nice to at least get together and lament 🤪

The new egg customers that were so desperate to have eggs during the lockdown appear to have abandoned us 🙄 that’s fine because it means that for our long standing loyal customers there should always be eggs for them but it does make you think about how fickle people are. John and I discussed the idea that if a second lockdown came we would only allow regular customers to have eggs we just need to work out how we would do it.

Saturday: Life has a habit of throwing you a curveball every now and then and that is exactly what happened last night. John started having chronic stomach pains and eventually was taken to A & E where he was kept overnight and today has been admitted to a ward. About 20 years ago he had the same problem over a period of four years and they didn’t know what it was until eventually it was so bad one day that they just opened him up to have a look. What they found was a condition called interception which is where the bowel folds in on itself causing a narrowing of the bowel, they think this was triggered buy the fact that he cannot digest mushrooms and they were lodged firmly in the narrowing. He hasn’t had mushrooms though so at this point I have no idea what has caused it this time 🙄 Obviously it’s not great timing with the whole pandemic, the system is much different to what we are used to, for a start you deliver them to the door of A & E and that’s it, you can’t go in, you can’t visit and so consequently most of the time you have no idea of what is happening 🙄 We managed to get through and find out what was going on at lunchtime today that’s a long time to wait with no news. As you can imagine, today I have done the morning rounds and that is it, I am waiting near the phone in case I get an update, I will do the afternoon rounds later but not much else will get done today. The covid distancing rules went out the window as my sister and brother in law took John to hospital and later Charlie and Macca came here to stay the night with me 🙄

Sunday: John is still in hospital though having spoken to the nurse on several occasions I can report that he is no longer in pain and is declining pain relief so that’s progress. He has had several investigations and at the moment they are waiting to see what happens when he eats, all being well they are thinking of discharging him tomorrow, we wait and see.

Charlie stayed over again last night and helped out with things this morning, there are still jobs to be done, feeding, watering, picking etc. Once everything was completed I sorted out the veg and shelley arrived so I gave her the cherries to process 😀 meanwhile I made something I saw on a Facebook feed and it intrigued me, a recipe that was hundreds of years old, very simple and a delicious healthy snack which is why I wanted to give it a go. Dried dates, soaked in boiling water for half an hour, pistachios ground up to make a powder and a tiny amount of butter, that’s it. Add half the pistachio powder to the soaked dates (discard the water first) add the melted butter and fork them together then roll small amounts in the remaining powder, voila, easy, nutritious and healthy snacks 😀 You thought power packed healthy food was a modern thing didn’t you, turns out our ancestors knew about them all along lol.

Mersu

That’s about it from me this week although I am all fired up after watching a film that I think everyone should watch if they eat, and that’s most of us isnt it. https://grow.foodrevolution.org/ watch this space I will be writing more about this once life has got back to some sort of normality.

Have a great week, stay safe x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Ladybird larvae, picking begins & pyramid orchids.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 15th June 2020: A few bits of catch up news that I have forgotten to update on: I am easily making 10,000 steps a day on my Fitbit 😀 so at least I know I’m not lazy lol. The chive flower vinegar is at last in the bottle, now just need some chips to try it out on 😂 I’d forgotten that I had taken a photo of the muck pile gates as they were and so I can show you a before and after picture.

Last night I ordered some ladybird larvae lol and now I have to make the brassica cage a des res for them hoping they will stick around. I am hoping to get a bug hotel that I can put up for them to hibernate in come winter. A bit of research tells me it’s better to get the larvae than the ladybirds themselves as the larvae will at least stick around long enough to eat a few thousand aphids before flying off 😂

An early start and a busy morning, picking mange tout, broad beans, asparagus and rhubarb, at last we are starting to get a decent return from the plants. Though I have heard people talking about their raspberries and courgettes, mine have not started producing yet, some small fruits but nothing more. I seem to have been constantly on the go but I can’t remember what else I have been doing, some weeding and planted a couple of small plants, feeding the rabbits/guineas all the weed pickings, a bit of watering, then indoors to do a bit of cleaning, all sparkly and fresh and time for a sit down I reckon.

I have ordered some things that hang in trees to keep the birds away from my fruit this year, I am also hoping it frightens off the crows. We have about 30 of them each morning squawking and cackling all morning long, they come for the crane fly larvae in the paddocks but roost in the trees making a right old racket.

Thinking about the easing of lockdown measures and not much has really changed for me, I’m not bothered by the shops opening, I don’t spend my time shopping for clothes and goods etc, the only joy will be to go out for something to eat preferably at a good garden centre 😜

The strawberries are coming thick and fast, not enough to make jam yet and besides we are eating them just as fast. I was going to make a French strawberry cake for pudding later but then I thought we might as well eat them as they are, almost 😀 they are sprinkled with truvia not sugar and I have taken a liking to having mine with marscapone 🥰 try it, delicious, fresh, home grown, seasonal, doesn’t get much better than that as far as I am concerned 😀

Just had the biggest rumble of thunder, I love a good thunderstorm and a bit of lightening too 😀 An hour or so later and we haven’t had any more thunder but we have had a good dose of rain 🌧 😀 no watering for me tonight except that I had already done the front lot about 2 hours ago 😂 Ah well it won’t hurt for them to have extra and the rate it’s coming down it will definitely fill the water tanks.

Tuesday: A misty morning after the rainfall last night and the weather is going to be humid 😜 with outbreaks of sunshine and possible rain showers, perfect for the garden not so much for us lol. The ladybird larvae arrived, that was pretty quick, I opened them up and there were lots of teeny weeny larvae in there, supposed to be 100 but I don’t know if quality control had to count them 😂 anyway they come on shredded paper and you tip them into a little bag that is provided and place the bag near where you want the larvae to eventually move to. So at the moment they are in the bag underneath a big cabbage leaf in the brassica cage. When I came back I and looked at the box they came in there were one or two still in there so I took them to the greenhouse and let them go in the pepper plants, I have had to keep wiping greenfly off these plants each morning. That’s what I spent the first half hour doing this morning, that and moving the aubergine plants outside. I keep trying aubergine each year but this year I think will be the last time, I have tried everything I can, various growing mediums and conditions and this year I bought grafted plants (they are not cheap) but although they flower, the flower just drops off, I even hand pollinated them with a paintbrush to no avail. They also seem to attract multiple pests, greenfly and whitefly particularly, so they have been put outside to either fail completely or by some miracle produce at least one fruit we will see which. I picked some mangetout, with the rain and sun there will be plenty of pickings every day, I also picked a few broad beans, I haven’t checked anything else yet but as the sun is now out and on the garden it will have to wait until later on or some cloud cover lol. I did check on the cherries this morning and so far so good the birds have not been at them, I am hoping he sun today will turn enough of them for me to pick a bowl full. Everything comes at once which is why you need methods of preserving the produce, I noticed there are a few raspberries to be picked and plenty of strawberries again today.

We have had a bad run with the rabbits we got back at the beginning of the year, all three came from the same place but all three have died, the last one died yesterday, he has not been anywhere near the other two so it’s not infectious and he looked completely healthy just like the others did and yet died so I’m thinking it’s got to be genetic. I know the chap we got them from and the same problem with all of his but he didn’t have this until after we had got them for him so he wasn’t to know.

The compost delivery came so that enabled me to get on with some potting on, I have a fair bit to do, shrubs and flowers I had put into pots and now need bigger pots, trees I have been growing need bigger pots before I decide what to do with them, seedlings that need pricking out and then there is the mushroom compost for soil conditioning.

I got a bug house from a friend who’s husband is making them and then they sell them for the Air Ambulance charity 😀 I am hoping the ladybirds will move in a hibernate over winter and then be around for next years growing season 🙄

A couple of things to report, firstly, I am impressed with the biodegradable membrane/mulch it really does keep the moisture in, I only wish I had got it early enough to plant into rather than having to cut round but will def get this at the beginning of the season next year. Secondly, the orchids are back 😀 and this time there are more 😀😀 I deliberately left some long grass around the edges of the front paddock as I knew that’s where they grow and success they are back. Another thing to report is that if you wear your Fitbit on the mower and the ground is rough it counts the bumps as steps 😂😂😂 Another thing I want to share is the pinching out of side shoots on tomatoes, I do this, I guess most tomato growers do it to. What I usually do is discard the bits but you can plant them up and they will grow, so this time I thought I would have a go and just pushed them into soil with the basil I have growing. I think they are taking 😀 that means that if you buy tomato plants normally, you really only have to buy one plant, wait patiently for the side shoots and pinch them out, there are always plenty of them. I have also done it with the indigo rose tomato as that is the only one I have bought the others have all been raised from seed, watch this space, Im hoping that one takes as well, more bang for your bucks as they say plus it means I could buy a few different varieties and not have hundreds of seedlings just a few plants instead, worth remembering for next year.

Pyramid Orchid

I went outside after tea to collect some Huechera seed, sow some into a pot and save some for sowing next year if the pot ones don’t come up. John decided that we should top the front paddock, taking off the heads of any plantain etc that’s when I noticed the orchids, we then did the small back paddock again leaving a large patch in the middle long, there were plenty of insects flying around so I thought it best to leave them something to feed on. Apparently we are due two inches of rain tomorrow so getting it cut beforehand is a good idea, at least the rain we get will be used by the grass and not the weeds.

I picked strawberries, blackcurrants and a couple of cherries, the rest are not ripe enough yet. The Blackcurrants are not as prolific as they were last year, I had to cut it back quite hard last year as the greenfly decimated the new growth, this year they don’t have greenfly, you never know what is going to happen from year to year. I don’t mind there not being that many as I think there are still some in the freezer I can use if I need to. I froze 500g of the strawberries as there were not enough in one picking to make some jam and they will spoil if I leave them too long. I picked a few raspberries that were ready too, I have sun gold raspberries as well as the regular red ones. I had three of these canes but I think I have lost one over winter so come autumn I will be propagating these as they are very reliable and more importantly taste lovely. I think it will be a real novelty to make jam with them don’t you? But I need enough to be able to do that so I need to increase what I have already.

Wednesday: Ooo I’ve had a lovely morning so far, I have been concentrating on bulbs, that is pots of bulbs that I planted up and now need thinning out. I ordered the bulbs a couple of years ago and just shoved them into big tubs, they grew well but not what I had intended to do with them, I just ran out of time or enthusiasm or something. Now I have the compost and lots of big pots thanks to my brother, I spent the morning sorting them all out. I now have smaller decorative pots with a few bulbs in and lots of little pots with bulbs in ready for selling on next year, I have had to use an old cold frame that has environmesh on it to keep them in as I’m not sure if the squirrels will eat them otherwise. There are ranunculus, tulips and English bluebells and probably some others but I will have to wait until they come up next spring to see exactly what they are. One more tub has yet to flower so I will leave that until they have and then sort them out too. I picked a few mange tout but nothing else this morning, there will be a good picking every day from them for a while, keep picking is the key, the more you pick the more they will produce.

You may read my blog and think, she spends a lot of time in the garden, well yes I do 😀 it’s what I love doing, it’s the lifestyle choice we made that enables me to be able to do exactly that. we made sacrifices along the way and we have had our struggles just like everyone else but eventually we got there. During the lockdown John was beginning to see why I enjoy it so much, it’s a more relaxed pace of life and certainly much less stressful than out in the workplace which I never really fitted into, I love being my own boss, making my own choices and mistakes with only me to account too. I love having my time to do what I want to be able to do (on the whole) if I want to do something I will, if not I won’t, having said that there are things that have to be done of course especially when you have animals, they come first and foremost. I don’t make a lot of money at it, it’s not about the money for me, never has been, it’s about quality of life, we only get one shot at it might as well spend it as close to how you would like it as you can 😀

Sam, Shelley and the children came round in the afternoon for garden time, the kids spent a bit of time running of some energy in the front paddock, it’s great that we have the space for them to run around especially in times like these. 4pm and still no rain yet though just as I am typing the thunder starts lol.

Thursday: Rain and plenty of it, I woke at 4.30am and could hear torrential rain and then when I woke again at 6.30 it’s was still going, 11.45 and it still raining though a steady rate rather than heavy and it’s supposed to move slowly on during the course of the afternoon. It is a very welcome decent load and will do the garden good, the veg will come on a treat now 😀

As working out side is not an option I decided to tackle the office 🙄 Paperwork which should have been sorted, has been dumped on the desk for the last 12 weeks, the room itself has had stuff just dumped in it with the idea of sorting it at some point and today is that point. So I spent the morning going through some of the bits, stuff for the bin, stuff for the charity shop, stuff to sell on and then there is stuff I have no idea what to do with so it goes back to where it came from 😜 I call it the office because it’s where I go to do paperwork and it has a desk but it also has the Hoover in there, some coats, a cupboard full of bits and pieces, photographs, Christmas stuff, children’s toys and books, I should re name it the multi room really 😂

Friday: It was still drizzling first thing but gradually the day improved. I did some picking, the rain has ramped up the growth so I will probably spend many hours picking from here on here. Mangetout, raspberries and strawberries this morning and cherries this afternoon. I cooked the cherries with sugar and cornflour to make a pie filling that I will freeze and use at a later date. We have plenty of fresh fruit for puddings at the minute so need need for pies and crumbles much to Johns disgust lol. Once it had dried up a bit more I did some hoeing, the weeds will also ramp up after the deluge especially if the sun comes out as well. I was showing someone round the garden this afternoon when they said ‘oh is that a lizard I just saw, or a baby snake’ 🤪 I guess breeding has been successful for my grass snake and now there are babies, not sure what I think about that 😂 as long as I don’t find any while weeding by hand I will be fine 🙄

John came home at lunchtime today and has a new plan for the hens at the back, he is moving them to the side paddock next to the others. First he had to go and get a battery for the tractor from the scrapyard and he also refelted the duck house roof (the wind ripped off the last lot) and then cleaned the ducks out as the rain lashed in there making a right old mess. It makes sense to move them to the side as I am out there more often than not during the day and in the evening we can nip out and check at intervals hopefully frightening the fox away.

Saturday & Sunday: I forgot to make any notes yesterday so I will have to try and remember what we did lol. John moved the chicken hut that was up the back, down to the side so that we can put the hens back out and keep an eye on them 👀 He burnt a bit of rubbish which now we have had some rain was safe to do. I can’t remember what I did lol but I was busy 😂

Solstice blessings to you all,. Today has also been a busy day, mostly with Father’s Day visits, I do a couple of hours in the garden this morning hen we went to get a coffee, pop in to see Ken, back here to see Samantha, then off to see Charlie and back here again to see Shelley, a full day of fatherly love 💕 This evening we had someone taking care of our disappearing chicken problem 😉 which I can report was mission accomplished so now at least John doesn’t have to spend all evening guarding them. Now we just have a couple of rats and a few dozen crows to deal with, the crows will hopefully move on soon, they are after the crane flies in the ground, once the hatch into daddy long legs they will move on to another food source and as long as it’s not my fruit trees I don’t mind. The rats, and I saw one this morning in the light Sussex pen, have been given a hearty meal 😜 I don’t like poison on the whole but they are being a bit of a nuisance and I don’t really want hoards of them. My elderly rabbit died sometime over night and by the time I got to her this morning the rats had eaten her eyes out, urgh horrible creatures. I thought the run was rat proof but obviously not so we will need to look that over and see what else we can do, though rats can chew through concrete so I’m not sure there is anything that will some them except poison or shooting them.

John has another week off this week coming, we were due to go on holiday on Tuesday and obviously that’s not happening now so he might as well make himself useful at home 😀 Have a great week and as always, stay safe.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Lemon curd, routine jobs and another fox problem 😏

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday June 8th 2020: Its just gone midday and I have sat down for a sandwich and a breather, I have had a bits and pieces morning doing whatever needed doing. So far I have weeded the brassica, sweetcorn and squash beds, picked asparagus, mange tout, broad beans and rhubarb, poo picked biscuits paddock and done their water buckets, gone on the hunt for randomly laid eggs, given the boot room a quick clean over, repotted some Solomans seal, and sowed some little gem lettuce in the big tunnel, not a bad mornings work. Time for a quick rest before starting again this afternoon.

Lemon curd, remember I said I can’t make it, well someone in the family can 😀 Samantha made a pavlova for Johns afternoon tea party and used the yolks to make lemon curd, first time she had ever tried it and success, it taste amazing, I had it on toast for breakfast this morning, I am very impressed 😀😀 and a little jealous lol.

Samantha’s amazing lemon curd 🥰

Just as soon as I sit down, as always, someone wants me lol, and they always arrive in multiples, must be a radar system somewhere that lets people know I have a spare minute 😜

It’s the season of pests 😜 they are upon us in their millions and I have several infestations. The one I am most concerned about is in the brassica cage, the small plants are covered in whitefly, luckily I had ordered some neem oil (I still couldn’t find the other bottle) I made up a solution and sprayed everything. Neem is a great organic pesticide, it interrupts the hormone system of the fly and they ‘forget’ to eat and breed 🙄 Buy a good cold pressed oil, mix it with some mild liquid soap, add water and spray away, it definitely works 😀 N.B don’t use neem if you are pregnant or trying to get pregnant as it can interfere with your hormones!

Tuesday: It’s 4.30pm and I thought I would come in and write a bit up, typically it’s been pretty cloudy today which is great 😀 so at about 3.30 I decided to turn on one of the soaker hoses and lo and behold the sun has been out ever since, can’t win 😜 Other than pottering again I have made bread and I made a batch of biscuits, choc chip, lemon curd and plain as Mum and Ken came up for a coffee and a sit in the garden mid morning which was lovely. It’s nice to be able to sit and take the time to enjoy the garden and surroundings rather than continuously working in it lol. 3pm and it’s down to me today to do the egg collecting and feeding, it didn’t take long for Johns work day to go from 9-3 to 7.30-5.30 did it 🤔

The ground is still incredibly dry, the rain we had was great for filling up the tanks and giving the ground a good soaking but a couple of days later and it’s as dry as a bone again already. We had a good conversation about compost, especially the stuff you get from the garden centres, over the last few years it has got worse rather than better I think, you find all kinds of bits in it including plastic 😔 We have a big compost heap and make quite a bit of our own that and the horse the horse muck will cover the veg beds in winter but it still leaves me short for seed growing and potting on so I think I will invest in a tonne of mushroom compost, I have tried the tonne bags of multipurpose but again it’s not that good. I was reading an article the other day and people have reported weedkiller damage to their crops from organic compost, the upshot is that compost can be called organic because it comes from organic material and not from an organic source that hasn’t been treated with weedkiller, seriously, you have to know the ins and outs of advertising to understand exactly what you are getting 🙄 like everything else it’s a minefield.

We spent most of the evening outside, John replaced the pump that sends the rain water over to the garden, the old one kept randomly coming on even when the tap wasn’t turned on and then wouldn’t turn off. Sometimes it wouldn’t come on at all until you weren’t ready for it then it suddenly spat out at you 🤪 meanwhile I did some watering and then went round and cleaned out and filled up all the water buckets for every pen and the horses. We let the geese out thinking they might be hungry as the grass is looking a bit brown in places but they just decided to ‘trev’ around the farm causing chaos, not that hungry then 🙄

Wednesday: We started off the day by me asking ‘what day was it’ and John replying it don’t know’ bodes wells doesn’t it lol. John did the animals while I collected all the burnable rubbish up and burnt that before doing anything else. After that I moved onto sorting out the light Sussex, three hens had gone broody and we had three chicks hatch although there were about twenty eggs. I would have left them except this morning the eggs had been scattered and one of the chicks was dead. In order to sort the situation I have separated one hen and the two chicks, they are now in a hut in the front paddock, the other two were determined to sit back on an empty nest (the remaining eggs I removed as they had gone cold) so I have shut the hit up and they can’t get back in. Hopefully they will begin to lay eggs again as we could do with them. Out of the egg I removed only three had anything in them the rest were all empty, sadly the embryos were all dead as they had been left to get cold. I hope I have put the hen who sat the longest with the chicks, I studied the comb to see which one of them had stopped laying the longest, she definitely hasn’t laid for a while, the other two, who have only jumped on the bad wagon in the last week, still had a tinge of red on their combs, not scientific but it’s all I have to go on. Any of the hens would look after the chicks and the chicks will go to any of the hens for warmth so it doesn’t matter in that respect, they don’t recognise mumma only warmth, food and water.

After that was sorted I did a bit of picking, some mangetout and the asparagus has livened up since the heavy rain so I can just about get a picking or two out of it before the season ends. It was coming through spindly so I had thought I would leave it now for the year but suddenly some nice fat spears came up, not going to waste those 😀 Then it was onto watering the raspberries (in pots) and giving them a feed, I also tied in the stems that are long enough, it’s surprising how heavy the branches get when they are fully loaded with berries, they can drag right down on the ground if not secured upright, which spoils them. Then onto pruning the apricot tree back a bit, the strong wind we had blew nearly all the young fruit off and so I figured I might as well prune. I am not going to get any fruit this year and I needed to raise the canopy a little and take out any branches that were not needed. The tree is diseased, it has canker but as it’s the only fruit tree there it shouldn’t pass it on to any others around the place as long as I am careful. By that I mean clearing the ground of cuttings and debris and not composting them but burning them and making sure I thoroughly clean my pruners with alcohol after using them. The tree can still produce fruit for the time being and it provides some shade and a place for the birds so until it gets too bad to keep it can stay. All the while when working in the garden I am acutely aware that there is a three foot snake somewhere 😜 at one point I give myself a right fright, thinking I had just stepped on it I looked down and realised it was just the soaker hose 😅 I finished that it started to rain, just a spit to begin with then a steady drizzle, at that point which was nearly lunchtime I decided to come in and whizz the hoover round before having a bite to eat.

Thursday: John is off today and tomorrow and so we started off doing the morning rounds and then he went into the paddocks as his job for the next few days is pulling all the docks/stingers etc, (I give him all the best jobs 😂) Meanwhile I did some hoeing and weeding in the veg garden and I sowed some rows of edible flowers, borage, nasturtiums and viola, it will be different using those in salads, they are packed with vitamins and minerals, good for you as well as pretty 😀

In the afternoon we went to a local nursery (needed a plant fix 🤪) I went with a specific area in mind but as usual what happens is I get sidetracked by what I see lol. The area is in the front compound and it is where we used to keep a trailer, it is also where hardcore would be delivered and then wood chip, the hardcore is pretty compacted over years of being there and so it’s difficult to dig into. We covered it with a layer of wood chip back at the beginning of the lockdown and I have planted some bits into it but they have to be small as I can’t get a trowel in deep enough. I want the area to be for bees and pollinating insects so I have planted some shasta daisies, some yellow daisies, toadflax and campanula, I did plant some cosmos but that got eaten by woodlouse I think. I planted some dog roses near the fence at the back and at the end of last year I put a holly in but it’s still fairy small. The plants I got from the nursery were coreopsis, scabious, nepeta and sedum, I have planted these into pots and tubs because they are quite big plants and I will never get them into the ground there, hopefully some of them will self seed. I also scattered poppy/love in a mist seeds but I’m not sure they will come up or if they will get eaten as well. What I got sidetracked by was a lovely little huechera that I hadn’t seen before, ballon flower which I have never grown before and another plant that at the moment I can’t recall the name of. All the plants are good big plants with plenty of roots so most of them I divided into four, that means I paid £6 each for them but once established I end up with £24 worth 😀, that’s a win, win as far as I am concerned. From the sedum I took bits that had already formed roots and potted up those as well, once established I can put them out for sale and cover my costs.

Friday: I have joined the Fitbit society and bought one for myself, I want to see just how many steps I do in a normal day plus it monitors my heart rate which is a bit jumpy at times, I think this is due to the meds but I can keep track and mention it to the consultant if needs be, I can track my sleep to see exactly what sort of a night I am getting as at the moment I feel like I am waking up all the time, plus it will spur me on to drink more water and up my steps if I need to, don’t want to get lazy 😂 It’s nearly 2pm and I have done nearly 8,000 steps apparently 🙄

The rest of the morning was pretty much a repeat of yesterday, John is off again and on paddock weed duty, I have done some watering and a little bit of picking as well as doing some of the feed rounds this morning and walking into the village to post a letter first thing. Shelley and the children came for a cuppa in the garden.

When they left we had some lunch and then I planted a couple of courgettes that I picked up yesterday (I only had yellow ones to grow from seed and so bought a coup,e of green ones as well) Then walking past a little raised bed approx 2 x 3ft which had self set potatoes in it, I realised that they were not doing very well, they got frosted early on and never really seemed to recover, now they have blight so the best thing to do is pull them up and use the bed for something else. It was not a bad haul of potatoes considering, there is enough to feed us for a few days at any rate and the bed can now be used for something else, I will need to have a think about what to put in there.

Self set potatoes, not bad for no effort at all 😀

Saturday: Eat, sleep, work repeat lol, seems like a lot of what we do is the same over and over 😜 Today was no exception, more weed pulling duty for John, more weeding and picking for me, a quick trip to a local landscapers to order a big bag of compost and another of mushroom compost. I need to use so much of it to repot everything it was costing a fortune buying the smaller bags, I should have done it in the beginning but with everything shut down it was impossible.

The ‘June drop’ is happening, that’s where some of the fruit on the trees drops off, don’t be alarmed it’s perfectly normal and good for the tree (as long as you don’t just have one apple or plum on there 😜) the next job will be to remove some more of the fruits if they are clustered together, this will help the remaining fruit get bigger and better, there will be less chance of disease with a good air flow between fruits.

John went out to put the birds to bed and I went to shut the poly tunnel and greenhouse door, I could hear a fox in the field next to us. John said it took two hens, he couldn’t get to them in time and it was as big as our dogs 🙄 Bloody pain in the arse, having free range hens is great but it always comes at a price. On the up side we also saw a barn owl swooping over our paddocks presumably hunting, shame they don’t hunt foxes 😜 And the bats were flying well tonight, I have no idea where they live, we have never found any sign of them here but I watched a programme and they will travel miles each nigh apparently so I assume they live in a stone barn somewhere around here.

Sunday: Pretty much a similar day to yesterday work wise, I was up early and gardening in my PJs 🤪 in the early morning sun. I did a bit of weeding, and put some of this new membrane round the melons and cucumbers in the tunnel to see how it does. I have had to cut it round the plants which is not ideal but better than nothing, I want to see how it performs and what the advantages are, if any. I emptied out the bags I have been growing potatoes in, there are quite a few and we will have some for tea tonight. We went round to have coffee in the garden with Mum and Ken mid morning and naturally I bought some bits back with me, a couple of miniature roses and a huechera that she had dug up and didn’t want, happy me, any plant fix is a good fix 😜

I spent the afternoon going in and out depending on cloud cover lol, that was mostly to hand hoe various beds. After tea I spent a bit of time wiping greenfly off the brassica plants, luckily the leaves are small and not too many at the minute but trying to keep the numbers down seems relentless. The netting keeps out the butterflies bit it also keeps out the ladybirds so I might have to buy some in to release in there as a control. I am just waiting for the heat to go out of the sun before I pick strawberries and water some of the beds. John has been getting a stable ready for the hens, we will have to move them back in until the fox problem is sorted again, it has picked a couple off in the daytime so it’s a problem. We had a good long run with no foxes and now all of a sudden we seem inundated with them. We have a wasp nest right by the kitchen window in the lap board so that will be another lovely job for tonight 🙄 best to leave it as late as possible, last time John had to go up a ladder to do it and they stung him, he said I can do this one 😏

Have a good week and stay safe x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Runner beans 😀 a snake and finally some rain 🌧

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday June 1st 2020: There is still a worldwide pandemic going on but life is trying to get back to normal albeit baby steps. John has returned to the bathroom he started 10 weeks ago to finish it off this week, it is still a little difficult getting building supplies but it can be done it just needs planning ahead. He is doing the morning rounds before he goes so that I can get straight on in the veg garden, this is because if I did the animals, by the time I have finished the Sun has moved right round and I am running out of time to get anything sorted 🙄 He will be home in time to do the afternoon rounds, again because it is so hot I would suffer badly having to go out in it every day. It does occur to me that we need to radically change how things are set up but we never seem to work out how is best to do it, you can’t really get instant shade unless you pay a fortune for it, we would need a forest really lol.

I spent the early morning watering the plants that needed doing, poly tunnels, newly sown seeds and pots, then I had time to go round and sort out all the odds and sods I have in pots around he place. Some of them are pot bound, mostly bits I potted up last year and then left to get on with it, I had lovage in a pot and I have now divided into four pieces and potted those up, I had straggly bits of plants here and there, all are for putting out for sale eventually but they need a bit of tlc first. A couple of dog roses I had in pots have now been planted next to a boundary fence that had gaps and I dug up bits that had self set in various places, free plants 😀

Next job was indoors to do a bit of hoovering and polishing, it’s easier when there is only me around plus it stays clean and tidy for a while which is nice. I have so many things to sort out indoors, the spare room now seems to have become a dumping ground as well as the office 😏 I need to have a good clear out I think as there are things I am never going to use just waiting there, just in case 😂

Guess what I just found! My jar of runner beans seeds, I bloody knew I had a jar somewhere 😂 I keep the seeds in the spare room over winter as it’s dry and cool, when I took the rest out I must have left them behind, then I had lots of spare cushions from the old sofa which I had put down the side of the bed and there under them was a jar of runner bean seeds 😜 The first lot I ordered still never turned up and now (unless I have catastrophic failure) I don’t need them 🙄

Sorry for the blur, I was so chuffed to have found them that I didn’t look at the pic I had taken 😂

Foxes are the bane of a chicken keepers life but I had a phone call this morning and heard an awful story of bees killing chickens. A hive was being relocated but apparently they didn’t get all the bees when they moved it, the ones left behind, realising their hive had gone, got angry, swarmed and attacked the hens next door killing three of them, poor hens 🙄

Tuesday: It’s 10am and I have sat down for a coffee, I drink a few cups of coffee in the mornings but usually on the go lol. I woke at 4am did consider getting up, I opened the curtains and the windows then thought it’s perhaps a tad too early and so laid back down and must have fallen asleep waking again at 5, this time I was up and about. First job after breakfasting was to go out and turn on one of the soaker hoses, I decided after poking my finger into various beds that the peas and bean bed would benefit most. While that was watering I picked veg for tonight’s dinner, carrots, the first of the new potatoes, mange-tout and asparagus we are having that with some lamb steaks. I also picked a few stalks of rhubarb and some strawberries, rhubarb and strawberry crumble for dessert 😀 I have chopped the mange-tout up smaller so John doesn’t notice, I also chopped the asparagus and carrots so we are having a ‘medley’ of veg. The rhubarb and strawberry crumble has been tweaked as well with a tiny pinch of vanilla power and some oats in the crumble mixture, I shall await the complaint from John but have decided that if I’m cooking, I’m doing it how I would like it sometimes 😜 I know he will still eat it anyway, he just likes to utter his objections 😂 I had a couple of over ripe bananas (that’s a novelty after weeks of not being able to get any) and so I also made a banana bread loaf with a twist. I substituted an ounce of butter with an ounce of peanut butter and added a few chocolate chips, again John doesn’t like peanut butter but his compulsion to eat cake will be greater 😂 The struggle with fussy eaters is real people, but I’m slowly managing to get him to comply. I am going to marinate my lamb in mint, oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper, I will do Johns plain, he would have a hissy fit at that and definitely wouldn’t eat it no matter how hungry he was lol.

After the picking and before the prepping and cooking I cleaned out the two rabbit/guinea cages and the quail hut, sorted the horses water and hay and put out some plants for sale at the front. John has gone to work again today but as always did the animals beforehand, after so many weeks off he is more than a little reluctant to go back, and if you know John in the workplace you will also know he is a worker, always loved going to work. He has enjoyed being home much more than he ever thought he would and hasn’t missed work one bit, well maybe a little bit as he does like to chatter, drink tea and get fed cake, with customers 😋

My blood tests all came back normal, yay, that’s the first time in about three months, I am slowly coming down off the steroids and increasing the new medication, next week it will be at full strength. So far it has been ok, I keep getting the sweats but the same thing happened with the methotrexate and eventually it subsided so I’m hoping the same happens with these tablets. At my time of life you would be forgiven for thinking it was menopausal but, and this is a stroke of luck, I was late to the meno, and have had hardly any of the problems that other women suffer with, I’m grateful, I mean there is only so much shit one person can handle and I think I have my fair share already 🙄

After coffee it was time to feed the torts, in weather like this they eat a lot lol, they can easily eat 4 big tomatoes a pepper, half a cucumber and two large handfuls of weeds a day if not more. Normally it would be hotter later in the year and I would have plenty growing to feed them with but this early in the season I have to buy toms, peppers and cues for them. They only really get those as seconds as the first thing they are offered are weeds and leafy greens but not lettuce (well a tiny bit) Their favourites in order of preference go like this, Tomato, peppers, cucumber, dandelion, thistle, garden weeds, aloe vera, ice plant, cabbage. They adore banana and strawberries although both are given in very limited quantities only occasionally as a treat, not so different from humans wanting the goodies all the time 😂 They have pretty much exhausted their forage now coupled with the lack of rain it’s a bit sparse although there is plenty of clover they don’t seem to be that interested in it.

Big Billy
Voldertort

They haven’t had their annual bath yet as the grandchildren normally do it so I’m waiting for the day they can start working again 😜

In the evening we went to Shelleys to have a cuppa in the garden with them but before we left I wanted to get the runner beans watered so I connected up the soaker hose ready to leave running while we were out. I moved a piece of black weed membrane that had blown across where it shouldn’t be and got a right surprise as something slithered across in front of me and dived back under it where I had moved it to. I carefully lifted it up and found a rather large grass snake looking at me 😀 I am quite delighted to see it as it means my little eco system is alive and well although they do eat frogs 😏 and eggs apparently 🙄 I also just read that the females are larger than the males and as this was around 3ft long I’m guessing it was female, and may have eggs in the compost heap 🤪

Did you know?

When threatened by one of its many predators, the grass snake often ‘plays dead’, perhaps making itself less appealing to eat. Predators include badgers, red foxes, domestic cats, hedgehogs and a number of birds; when caught, grass snakes hiss and release a foul-smelling substance from their anal gland. Although they may also strike with the head, they do not bite and are harmless to humans. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/reptiles/grass-snake

Wednesday: Oooo I have had the best of mornings 😀 firstly, it’s about 8/10 degrees cooler today and overcast 😀 secondly, we have had some rain, just a wetting so far nothing much but coupled with the cooler day it will do a little bit of good and I didn’t have to water early this morning. That left me to get on with other things, the bed that I can’t normally get to in sunny weather, I have moved the rhubarb that was there, it was really struggling so I dug it up and out it where we keep the muck ready to go on the garden. Instead I have planted another pumpkin nearby, I had to soak the ground beforehand as it’s rock solid, I put in plenty of well rotted manure, pumpkins are hungry plants, and hopefully it will grow nicely and give plenty of ground cover until I can decide what to do there come autumn. I planted some plum tomatoes in the big tunnel, still a few more to plant but they are still a bit small just yet. I have pottered and hoed and pottered some more 😀

Early this morning I spotted something unusual and thought it was a bee, I took photos and asked online and discovered it was an emerging cinnabar moth, I know what these look like but have never seen one that was just about to unfold itself before. It was a real treat to keep popping back and watching the process 😀

Emerging cinnabar moth
This is when I can see the hard work starting to pay off 😀 #selfsufficiency

Well it’s been kind of raining on and off all day so far, not enough to even start filling the water tanks but enough of a wetting to perk up the veg garden, not enough though to give them a proper soaking so far, I’m hoping that somewhere they are getting a good downpour as it will at least increase the available ground water levels 🙄

Although we are in full swing with the growing season it’s now the time to think about Winter veg sowings, this year I am going to try pak Choi as a winter crop, I thought about peas and broad beans but actually they only arrive a few weeks earlier than a spring sowing so I am undecided on that at the moment. I feel the garlic does much better over winter than spring sowings so will definitely do that again, I haven’t done onions this year and may not bother, leeks are just as useful and I have the perennial onions which I need to increase. I am also going to try forcing some rhubarb next spring for early, sweeter stalks, not all the plants but maybe two of them, never done it before it will be new and exciting to me 😀 Now is also the time to start preparing any beds, where the crops will soon be lifted, for next year, plenty of rotted manure on them and plenty of cover, though I have not decided what to use for that yet as the weed membrane gets ripped to bits but the wind. I did consider sewing the edges so it doesn’t happen 🙄

Thursday: Altogether a much cooler day ahead and I for one am grateful. We didn’t get anywhere near enough rain for anything but to perk up what is already growing, we still have some on the horizon for tomorrow but I think this years growing is going to be more difficult as we haven’t even got to the summer months fully yet 🙄 With the knowledge that we are only in June and it’s already a challenge I set about looking for an eco friendly weed suppressant, I found bio degradable mulch film, this will suppress weeds but also trap moisture in the ground for the plants to make use of, it can then be dug in at the end of the season. I have to weigh up the fors and against in costs, watering and the time spent watering and weeding versus the cost of the material. I will see how it goes and how cost effective it is.

As I said yesterday I am already planning for autumn/winter growing and this morning I have sown purple sprouting broccoli, one of the best hungry gap fillers you can get. I have also sown radishio (chicory) which will give a crop well into late autumn under cover and I have sown more dwarf beans and peas to extend the season, if the weather is favourable I should get a second crop. There is still plenty you can sow at the moment although space is obviously an issue as existing crops are still taking up space. One of the experiments I am pleased with is a tub of brassica leaves. I had a lot of seeds for cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower and I don’t have space in the garden for rows and rows of individual plants so I sprinkled them in compost in an old recycling box and will pick the leaves as needed, you don’t need to wait for them to get to their usual form they are edible as they are, tasty young leaves.

In the afternoon I had a look over the three rows of swede, turnip and beetroot I sowed a few weeks back, the beetroot are doing ok, the swede have a long way to go yet and hopefully with some rain they will swell eventually but the turnips are like bullets 🙄 so I will cut my losses pull them up, give the tops to the rabbits and re sow with something else I think.

When I took some of the the tops to the rabbits I could hear cheeping from the light Sussex pen, we have chicks, well at least one anyway, I went and got some chick crumb and a small drinker to put in and hopefully in a few days time they will all be running around in there. I took a photo and you can just about see a tiny beak if you zoom in close enough.

I made some garlic bread before going out to do the turnips, I hadn’t intended on doing them but just started weeding and pottering away, completely forgetting that the bread was in the oven 😜 luckily I remembered in time and I didn’t burn it 😅

The garlic that had been drying needed dealing with, it won’t store and if I leave it too long it will start trying to grow again and when you get a green shoot in garlic it makes it bitter. I peeled about 6 heads and have stored them in oil, I get two things, ready available garlic cloves and of course garlic infused olive oil to use 😀

Friday: Again, once John has done the morning rounds, it’s me on me tod here, I was enjoying lockdown with him home and hopefully he won’t book too much work in 😜 The weather, yes it’s always about the weather, is colder and pretty windy to boot 🙄 honestly couldn’t we just have a little something in-between blazing hot days and cold windy days not even any wet days to compensate. It is a least cold enough to let the plants make use of any watering I do, in the heat it was as much as they could manage to just keep going I think so with this cooler spell they should put on good growth, that’s if the wind doesn’t knock them back too much. I spent a pleasant hour or so sorting out my plant labels, the little white stick type, I have tried wooden ones but the writing runs or they rot very quickly so the next best thing is to keep re using what I have already. As the year goes on I tend to toss them into a tub and have to spend ages searching through for what I need, now they are all bagged up in their various cultivars so I should be able to access what I want quickly. I watered the big tunnel and went round securing anything that had the potential to fly in this wind, I don’t want plants to start getting broken by flying buckets etc. The three rows of carrot and one of beetroot I sowed last week have started to emerge, I am happy about that as carrot seems to be hit and miss over the last couple of years I don’t know why. With that in mind I looked up the Moon phase to see what is best sown now, we have a full moon tonight and the next phase is suited to sowing root crops and doing cuttings and division as the sap is pulled down, it’s all about the ebb and the flow just like the oceans. I will try and get some more root crops sown and I have just taken cuttings of one of my dahlias to see how that goes.

It’s early Saturday afternoon and we at last have rain 🌧 a decent enough amount so far to penetrate the soil 😀 happy me, happy vegetable garden.

This mornings work consisted of cutting back a few bits that had gone to seed such as the winter spinach and sorrel in fact I pulled up the spinach stumps and have sown some salad turnips and spring onions in there instead and late yesterday I sowed some bulb fennel in the bed next to it that had garlic in it. I also did a bit of picking, there was quite a bit really considering it’s early in the year and we have not had much rain. I pulled all the early carrots that were in the polytunnel, we have been eating them when needed but I decided to get them all up, some are now chopped and in the freezer, some in a pan along with peas and asparagus for dinner later. I picked mange-tout and pod peas, some baby beetroot, Swiss chard, and some self set potatoes, not a bad little haul for the day.

I have done a little bit of dividing up of a couple of plants, one lot were the primroses from the beginning of the year, I now have three new pots of them as well as the original three and a plant I picked up at the garden centre for half price has now been divided into four, a Tiarella, hardy perennial, spring flowering. I will put them aside to get going and I will have plenty of new plants to either sell on or fill my flower beds with 😀 As I’m typing, it is still raining 😀 I’m hoping it will at least half fill the water tanks, that would be a bonus, oh it’s raining harder also most hammering down 😀 I know I should be careful what I wish for but 🤪

Whoo hoo lovely jubbly, early evening and we have had some pretty heavy downpours, this will not only fill the water tanks , water the garden but also swell the ground water which is the most useful of all for the bigger trees 😀

It’s Johns birthday tomorrow and I have made a batch of blueberry muffins, we are hoping to have a socially distanced afternoon tea with the children and grandchildren, I have scones and sandwiches to make tomorrow, Charlie is making birthday cake, Shelley is bringing crisps and dips and Samantha is making pavlova so I think with some beers or Prosecco we have things covered 😀 just hope its dry 🤣🤣

Tonight’s job was to move the hens from the pen back to the paddock at the back and hope that the fox has found other quarry. The sunset tonight was magnificent, you will have to take my word for it as I didn’t have my phone so couldn’t get a pic but the sun was fiery orange and the billowy clouds were all different hues of stormy grey, the sun rays were streaming through the clouds, lol I wish I had got a picture now.

The hen with the pecked bum has now fully recovered and she has a fluffy bottom again and so she has gone back out with the batch we moved. Q

Sunday: Johns birthday 🍰 even when it’s your birthday there are still jobs to be done, I had set Alexa to play Happy Birthday at 6.25 and then forgot all about it until she starting up this morning, in a sleep daze I thought ‘ what the heck is going on’ 😂 We got up had breakfast and then out to do the feeding, watering, letting out and collect the duck eggs. I then went into the garden to get a few things done, the good thing about the rain is that it means I don’t have to water and so can do other things for a change instead. My brother had given me lots of big pots he no longer wanted and I spent some time potting bigger plants on. I have a Nandina (heavenly bamboo) that has been struggling for a couple of years, when I got it out of the pot the drainage holes were blocked and so I made some more, took away some of the old compost from around the roots and repotted it with some fresh compost, hopefully it will begin to pick right up now. I have two box balls that I grew from tiny plants that also needed repotting and freshening up as they have been struggling, those are now done and had a trim. A tamarisk tree in a pot that other things have self seeded alongside (foxgloves and verbena) has also had a clear out and some new compost, the foxgloves and verbena have been potted up to go out for sale once they establish. A strawberry tree that was in a broken pot (didn’t hold water very well🙄) is now in a new pot and should perk up quickly.

My sister and brother in law called in mid morning and we had coffee in the garden which was lovely, the weather has improved massively today and so it was very pleasant. When they went I made a batch of scones ready for afternoon tea later, as long as the rain holds off I think we will have a socially distanced afternoon tea picnic in the front paddock 😀

That’s where I will leave for this week, I can then enjoy the rest of the afternoon and evening helping the birthday boy to celebrate. Have a great week and as always stay safe x x

Posted in Friesland Farm

Wall to wall sunshine, endless watering means early mornings 😜

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

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

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No filter needed for this beauty 😀

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm
Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a great week and continue to stay safe x x