grow your own – Page 12 – frieslandfarm (flowers)

Spring Bank Holiday 😁 glorious sunsets & the first peas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my feet hurt 🦶

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

Herbs, Hazel Hedges & Hens

Posted on May 30, 2021 by

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popped round to Mums for a cuppa after dinner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

More rain 🌧 some planting up & my 2nd vaccine 😁

Posted on May 11, 2021May 16, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 10th May 2021: OMFG! I have just typed up today’s page and accidentally discarded it 🤬 so I have to start again, I was initially distraught then I realised it was only Monday so I hadn’t lost that much 😂

The weather looked promising this morning, not cold, not too warm, not too sunny and not raining, breezy which rose to pretty windy during the afternoon but all in all an ok day.

I started off this morning cleaning the boot room surfaces, sorting out the dehumidifier, putting out eggs, putting on washing etc etc, then as per my plan I went into the greenhouse.

Sorting out plants was my main objective, moving them to the tunnels, moving them to the cold frames, discarding anything that hadn’t made it and resowing anything that had gaps (mostly dwarf beans) I rang John who was working in Oxford and asked him to get some compost on his way back as I have plenty that need potting on. The rest of the time I have spent in the big tunnel planting cucumbers and tomatoes. They have had plenty of tlc as I don’t want to plant them up half hearted and not get a good return, so each plant has some spent mushroom compost at the base, some pelleted chicken manure, more mushroom compost on top and then I have covered the soil with black fabric weed membrane which will not only keep any weeds under control but keep the roots warm and some moisture in as well. If I don’t get a good haul from that lot then there is no hope. The tomatoes have had the same treatment, firstly I had to put in some pallet collars as raised beds because when I dug down the clay was just under the surface. When we sited the tunnel years ago we didn’t do a test dig (big mistake) and soon realised it was on a wide clay seam 🙄 I have tried for a few years to improve the soil but to no avail, so enter pallet collars and raised beds. The collars are great, these are 1200 x 1000 and just the right height to grow in, we also use them stacked to put sieved home made compost in as well, they can then be taken down as we use the compost and they fold so stack neatly away.

I have got some tomato plants left so I will squeeze them in where I can, you can never have too many tomatoes 🍅 I have rather lost the plot when sowing tomato seeds though as I have another tray coming on in the greenhouse, I will have to put them out for sale as I really don’t need any more 😂

There is always a sense of satisfaction when you turn garden trimmings, duck bedding and old plants into useable compost 😁

I have now put the runner beans and sweetcorn plants out in the cold frame they should be fine, the only plants not out there yet are the squash plants because they are quite fleshy and any frosty nights will not be good for them, they can wait a while longer. That will just leave the pepper, chilli and aubergine plants in the greenhouse which is where they will stay to grow on and produce fruit, they like the incredible heat that the greenhouse gets in the summer months.

Planted up the other box with tomatoes in the afternoon, John came home around 3.30 so I stopped for a cup of tea and a sit down, then someone came to get some plants I had put by, then it was time to get dinner sorted. I have had dinner and am toying with the idea of doing another stint this evening, as yet undecided, I may get too comfy sat here 😜

May 10th is World Lupus Day, I have Lupus, it does not have me, it is the wolf within, rears it’s ugly head sometimes but with fabulous Doctors and Consultants we manage to get it under control. Before I was diagnosed I had never heard of it 🤷‍♀️ if you haven’t, look it up 😁 🦋

Tuesday: John has gone to work again today but did the feeding and letting out of the birds before he went. Meanwhile I sorted a hotchpotch dinner for later, not really that much of a mash up but various bags of half used veg and a previously cooked chicken leg have now gone into the slow cooker with some frozen chicken stock. Then it was onto getting washing sorted, rubbish out, eggs out, feed cats and dogs, go out and feed the horses and Guineas before starting on watering the tunnels. After that I finally got into the greenhouse and potted on the peppers, some cucumbers that have gone out for sale along with some tiny tomato plants. I sowed some more squash, runner beans and French beans, might as well have too many than not enough. Then onto the front beds and plant up some quick filler plants I bought, snapdragons, pinks and verbena. I also planted some flowers I grew from seed in a different bed, Californian poppies, cornflower and sweet rocket which have all gone in the flowering shrub bed. That bed will look as near to ‘woodland/wild’ as I can get it to look and it is full of nectar rich plants for the insects. Then it began to rain, up to then it had been a nice day, some sunshine, not windy and not cold, at least the rain will water everything in but I was hoping to get some weeding done, that will now have to wait. I will have a quick lunch break and then probably plant up the melons in the big tunnel.

It’s 2pm, to be honest I thought it was later than that, I didn’t do the weeding, instead I have spent two hours filling up the last raised bed which is by the new fence and gate at the back. We still have the drive to finish but John built the bed a while back, today I put down weed membrane and then filled it with soil. The soil came from various places, leftover mushroom compost, leftover topsoil, pots that had bulbs in them and left over soil (ones I didn’t plant in the other beds) and then a couple of barrowfuls from the compost heap. Then it was onto planting, there is an elderflower and a sumac that grows there and I wanted to leave those in, everything else was just plants I had lying around waiting for something to happen to them. I am going to call this the Bertie Basset bed as it has all sorts in it 😜 There is no plan to this bed it is just what I have lying around, stocks, achillea, crocosmia, viola, Hardy geranium, a couple of things I have no idea what they are yet, some pots of cornflower and poached egg seeds, dill, coriander, a tamarisk, and another shrub that I think is an ornamental currant but time will tell, there are also some sweet peas for good measure. All plants I had potted up to use at some point, I also dug up some forget me not which will readily self seed over time. I then netted it over for a day or two because the cats will think that ‘the lady that feeds’ them has built a new deluxe toilet area for them 😂 It will be interesting to see how this bed develops, some things are thuggish but they can be dug up or dug out in the autumn if they take over too much. The seeds I have put in pots and then sunk the pots, this is because there will be weeds growing in this soil and so if I know where the seedlings are they won’t get massacred in the weeding process. Job done it is time for a sit down, my feet are hurting, always a good cue for time out.

I did go back out with a cup of tea and did some hand hoeing on the broad bean and onion bed just before John came home.

Did you know that Oxfordshire is probably the most historically rich county in England, no nor did I until I was reading up about a few things. My brother has made an exciting and potentially important discovery near to where he lives, he was tidying a hedge and trying to get water to run away when he made a find, most people would have thought it was just rubble. The potential is great so much so that geophysics were done and now some trenches are being dug and explored, can’t say much more than that at the minute but the experts are excited and if it turns out to be what they think then my brother will get some of thecredit for the find, how fab is that 🥰 I got interested when geophysics were mentioned lol, I love the thought of what is under our feet from hundreds if not thousands of years ago, we bumble along with absolutely no idea of what has gone before which I find fascinating. I remember the point I became intrigued when I discovered that although the Romans built extensive settlements here and had all kinds of statues and monuments, by the time the Vikings arrived, a difference of around 3/400 years, nobody really knew who these artefacts belonged to, mind blowing, you’d think the knowledge would have been passed on but we seemed to go into regression, again I find that fascinating. I guess it goes hand in hand with my interest in the apocalyptic because of course that is exactly what would happen if civilisation was brought to its knees, we would have to start again and that would take hundreds of years to rebuild current systems by which time a lot of knowledge is lost 🙄

Wednesday: Whoop whoop 2nd vaccination day 😁 I felt quite emotional getting that done which took me a bit by surprise must have had some tension even though I didn’t realise it. We were up early as I had it booked for 8.40, it was busy when we got there but the efficiency was incredible and I went straight in, waited my 15 minutes and then left, job done.

Back home I decided not to do anything strenuous, I had two big glasses of water and some paracetamol just in case 🙄. I have spent the last two days in the garden so today I can take a more relaxed approach to jobs. Yesterday I got some frozen plums and some elderberries out of the freezer so this morning I made some elderberry syrup for Charlie and three small plum crumbles, one for Johns dessert later and two for the freezer and then an extra batch of crumble mix to freeze for later use. I know I am trying to get the freezers emptied but converting produce into easy grab items will work the same way. I intend to harvest a lot of elderberries this season, they are so good for you and can be added to crumbles, smoothies, or made into syrup for a good winter vitamin c shot everyday, very beneficial.

I went out and watered the greenhouse and the tunnels then apart from cooking the dinner I haven’t done anything else really. My arm is a little sore from the injection but so far so good 😊

I ordered another radiator, for our bedroom this time.

Thursday: Up and about fairly early, John did the animals and then went off to work, I got on with the usual bits indoors and then out to feed the quail and Guineas, top up the egg shed and pick asparagus, rhubarb and lettuce to put out for sale this morning. I have saved some asparagus to have for lunch with a couple of hard boiled eggs and I will pick more lettuce to go with it, a self sufficient lunch 🥰 I have to pop out this morning to do someone a favour for an hour but as it’s raining already I won’t be missing out on outside jobs , it feels as though the rain is set in for the day. Everywhere is looking very lush and green, the hedges, the trees, the shrubs are all bursting into life and it looks wonderful.

John or rather Patch discovered a hedgehog nest the other night, very happy that they are still around, each year you never know if they have made it through or not and each year it is delightful to discover that they have 😁 The dogs can’t get at it as they have made it under pallets in the hay barn but they know they are there and John has seen them too. We are still doing no mow May though everything is looking a bit untidy I will persevere for as long as I can. The only problem will be that the grass will be long come June which will make it more difficult to cut, might even be hay by then 😜

I still have no side affects from the vaccine yesterday morning apart from a heavy feeling at the site of the vaccine, fingers crossed it stays that way 🙄

Plenty of rain today 🤪 I lit the Rayburn mid day just to take the chill off and keep the damp at bay.

Some torrential downpours 🌧

I had the twins at teatime while Sam took Mia for a swimming lesson, great for them to be able to do something a bit normal again, Shelley took Florence swimming the other day and Josh has started martial arts 😁

Friday: Heavy rain overnight and into the morning again, I thought I might wake up to find we had floated away 🙄 The overall temperature is slowly rising though, it’s no where near as cold as it was a week or so ago. Everything is looking very lush due to the rain but it would be nice to see a bit of sunshine to really show of the colours, I am not holding my breath, thundery showers are on the forecast again today.

Am feeling a little sluggish this morning, I think that’s the vaccine but it is difficult to tell as it is pretty much the same as an off day with the Lupus.

Apart from checking the tunnels and greenhouse for watering (with no sun appearance they won’t have dried out at all 😂) I doubt I will do much outside today, no point cleaning anything out in this weather, it just makes things worse, can’t really do much on the soil as again it would make things worse, so it looks like it might be cleaning the house, oh joy 🤪

I keep looking at the clock and thinking, has it stopped 🙄, I have had breakfast, put dinner in the slow cooker, topped up the egg shed, washed up, washed the duck eggs, fed the dogs and cats, put the bin out, whizzed round with the hoover and polish and wiped the bathroom round and it’s still only 9.30, I honestly thought the clock was wrong 😂 Better find some other jobs to do 😜

I cleaned out the fridge, always a great job to do lol and then as I had stuff to use up I did some baking. Two loaves of bread are now on the first prove and I have mixed up a date and pecan nut loaf ready to cook at the same time as the bread. I also had a chicken thigh in the fridge to use up and that is now in a mini roasting tin along with some asparagus, spinach, garlic, lemon, veg stock a knob of butter and some black pepper. Makes sense to make full use of the the oven heat once it’s switched on, I had better get used to doing this I think, with the Rayburn it didn’t matter as the wood was all free and some the heat was free but once that goes I need to be more energy efficient.

Omg the chicken smelt so delicious that I ate it for lunch and it was amazing, I don’t say that about many things, I cut a slice of freshly baked bread to mop up and I reckon it was a gourmet dish 👌 No pictures because I gobbled it up before thinking about it 😂

Saturday: Still damp with threats of rain and it’s not going to change much over the next few days it seems. This morning John has gone off to get feed while I sort out the usual bits and pieces.

Yesterday while I was getting the dustbin in I noticed how wonderful the lilacs were looking. We have three different colours here, a white (which is not so spectacular) a light lilac and a deep lilac which is my favourite, most of those blooms are double headed. I picked a few of each to bring some colour indoors.

The current rain and warmer temps are making the natural world look fabulous I think, it is like you have put a vivid filter on everything 😂

Looking out of the kitchen window at the minute is a pleasure 🥰 No filter needed on this!

John came back mid morning and we got the radiator on the wall and I sorted out ‘stuff’ more stuff that I have no idea why I keep it, half empty tubes of hand cream, body lotion, hair grips that have seen better days 😂 things I have had for years but also not used for years either 🙄 I need to be a bit more ruthless about moving stuff along, either to the charity shop or selling on. Then we popped out to get a bit of shopping and round to Mums to see Ken as it is his birthday today.

The rain was off and on, on more than it was off 🤪

Spent the afternoon trying to get my head around some online media pages 🤪 I am not a technophobe by any means, I come from the generation that started out on a manual typewriter, moved to a word processor and then onto dial up internet. I learnt to programme in the early days though it is way beyond me now, I wonder how many people reading this would even know what a punched card was, we used to have them in IT lessons, not that I could ever work out what we were doing with them mind you 🤣 Despite all this and trying to ‘keep up’, some of the more recent social media sites leave me a little bit fluffed 😬 The connectivity of some of them don’t seem to flow well, or maybe it’s just me 😜

Still no significant side affects from the vaccination.

The news around the world makes for depressing viewing at the minute, we’ll always but especially at the minute, I despair of the human race, I really do, peace and harmony is what I would like to see.

Sunday: A drier start to the day but still damp underfoot and still the threat of showers.

John did the morning rounds and then unloaded the feed he got yesterday and also cleaned out the ducks. Meanwhile I sorted out indoor stuff before going out and picking purple sprouting and asparagus for dinner this evening. After that I went into the greenhouse and pricked out some dwarf rudbeckia and watered the plants, gave them a check over to make sure all is well. The risk of frost should end mid May (which is now upon us) and looking at the forecast for the next week I think I will put the squash plants out to start hardening off. If I give them just over a week they should be fine but I will need to watch the weather forecast carefully just in case.

Talking about all being well and watching out for things, we have four ash trees here, I don’t know if you have heard but there is a big problem with ash die back in the south of the country. Potentially it will wipe out the ash tree population very much like Elm tree disease did with those trees, it is sad that there are generations of people who will not be able to recognise an Elm 😔 One of my ash trees is looking as though it may have succumbed but I am not entirely sure, I have been in touch with someone who will be able to tell me if it is dieback or natural splitting, my suspicions are it’s the first one of the two but I am no expert. This will mean the tree will have to come down which is tragic, I will however plant at least three or four more trees to try and make up for it 🙄

Have pottered about checking over the tomato plants and taking the side shoots off, watering, feeding them. Then planted up an aubergine in the big tunnel along with three sweet pepper plants, might as well spread things around a bit and see which gives the best results. I am surprised to see the tomato plants flowering already, that’s early in my experience usually is ma waiting ages for them to flower. The peas I planted in the small tunnel with the toms are romping along, already flowering and producing pea pods, I imagine these will peak quickly due to the heat but it’s an experiment and that’s what experiments are for, to see what happens. Going back to the aubergine, if you are growing them they do a little better if you hand pollinate them with a paintbrush, unless there are plenty of bees going in with them, doing it manually is a sure fire way to make sure they are pollinated. 🐝

Friesland Farm

A cold week, plenty of rhubarb & delicious mushrooms.

Posted on May 4, 2021May 9, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 3rd May 2021: Bank Holiday Monday, in a normal year there would be plenty of days out to choose from but this year 🤔 add to that the weather forecast and well let’s just say we might as well stay at home 😂 Which is of course exactly what we are doing, I have stopped for a coffee break and John is out on the tractor trying to finish off the side driveway, I wonder how long it is before he gets rained off. Meanwhile I have been in the greenhouse, sorting out plants, tidying up, throwing stuff away, recycling spent compost, moving plants outside to harden off. I really need to move some of the plants on and so have taken the risk even though the temps are still down, they can’t stay down forever surely 🤷‍♀️ It is still only mid morning so I am going to have to find other projects to get my teeth into but planting up is not going to be one of them. I have got some potting on to do maybe that is the direction I will go in today.

I did go back into the greenhouse, might as well as it’s not bad in there, I put some of the basil seedlings into a big pot ready to move to the tunnel. I have grown red and green basil this year for a lovely contrast, I also moved the garlic chive seedlings all into one big pot and was just about to do the dill when Shelley arrived with Josh and Flo so we stopped for a cuppa.

Midday and I have lit the Rayburn, it is not very nice out there and it’s only going to get worse. It seems like we have had a very long winter and we are not out of it yet, I am starting to feel slightly suffocated by it all. where are the warm mornings and lovely spring days, not on the horizon yet sadly.

One thing I have done indoors is take photos of the Rayburn ready for when we sell it, we had thought we would be finished with it by now but that is not the case. We will move to warmer weather eventually though and that’s when it will go up for sale, part of me will be sorry, the other part will be glad, and we move on to different things, hopefully some solar panels soon as well.

Tuesday: It is still very windy this morning but at least the rain has stopped. The day after a bank holiday is always a funny one I feel, you have relaxed a little too much to really get going like you would on a Monday morning. John has gone off to do some work so I am on my own today, I have two jobs in mind but as yet have not decided which to concentrate on. First is housework, needs a Hoover and a polish all through but I am also contemplating getting the big tunnel sorted and possibly planted up. A look at the weather forecast shows that it is not going to improve that much over the next week and we are now into May, time to stop dallying I think. I have half heartedly got the housework on the list as I am really leaning towards the tunnel just procrastinating 😜

The cucumbers will go into the tunnel along with some more tomato plants but I will also hedge my bets with peppers though most of those will stay in the greenhouse which gets the best heat over summer. The pots of basil and coriander will also go in there and the lemon grass once that is big enough to transplant, I already have some early strawberries growing and a few rows of little gem lettuce. The orange and lemon tree are looking terrible, I have fed them but I think the prolonged cold is reeking havoc and although I have tried to stabilise them I am not sure if they are going to make it to be honest. I may have to get them out of the pots to make sure there is no other reason for their demise such as vine weevil.

Melons will also be going into the tunnel and again I might have to cover the doors with extra fleece to keep out any draught. This year has certainly thrown up totally different weather patterns and trying to level the growing conditions is a challenge 🙄 Everything growing outside is fine on the whole it’s just the tender plants that struggle. The squash plants definitely won’t be going out for quite a while yet, maybe even next month before that happens

Yesterday I bought some mushrooms from my sister, I openly admit to having failed at home grown mushrooms but her partner has worked hard for the last couple of years perfecting the art of growing them. Look at these beautiful clusters, they smell amazing, the colours are beautiful and I am about to have some for breakfast so I will let you know how they taste.

They were delish, I had mine cooked in a little butter and black pepper on some wholemeal toast with a coffee, nice and simple but absolutely delicious 😋

I went out after breakfast and gave biscuit some hay and stored out their water buckets, generally speaking, these days John does most of the poultry and I do the others, the others are cats, dogs, horses, guinea pigs, torts, quail any other waifs and strays we happen to have at the time. I used to do all of them every day twice a day but on top of housework, cooking, paperwork, gardening, veg growing and prepping it got too much and stressed me out a little so with John easing back on his plumbing he began to take on some of the jobs, and still does them even when he has a days work to do 🥰

Jeez that is hard work out there, the winds are so strong, it 10.30am and I am done being buffeted, I look like I have been dragged through a hedge backwards! I did get a bit done, I decided that the cucumber plants are still way too small to go in the ground, we need the sun to come through, it wouldn’t matter about the wind and the rain if we had some warmth to go with it. In the tunnel I did get things ready for planting later in a couple of weeks time I think. I also had a good look at the orange and lemon tree, nothing in the roots that looks ominous but they are damp, considering I only watered them well once in the last couple of weeks this is not a good thing. They like a good long water just once a week but it is not warm enough for the excess to get soaked up and so they are sitting in damp soil, no wonder they don’t look well. To remedy this I have provided them with a duvet experience lol. They look ropey even to an untrained eye but on closer inspection there are lots of tiny new leaves just starting to appear so I am not too worried.

I have trimmed them up and wrapped them in bubble wrap and a fleece hat 😜 hopefully they will appreciate the tlc.

Sam popped in for an hour or so with the twins and when she left I figured I would get some cleaning done after all, then I will sort out dinner for later and get the Rayburn ready to light….again🙄

After Sam had left I got on with some hoovering, polishing and cleaning the bathroom, not a full clean but a whip round so that I feel it is clean enough for the next few days at least and I sorted out dinner for this evening. I pondered while I was hoovering, as you do, mulling over the last year or so and what if anything it has taught me. There is plenty I was already aware of more so than others I think, I was always aware that life could so easily go wrong on a big scale, a pandemic, a natural catastrophe, some sort of apocalyptic happening and so when covid hit it was no surprise to me, more than that, my previous musings on the subject were no longer a laughing matter for John 😂 It was a reality and all the while I have thought, as bad as it has been, it could have been a whole lot worse 🤔 That is something for future generations to remember, I hope they do but the chances are that it will be so far back in their history they won’t put in to place the lessons we have learned (and I’m not talking about stocking up on toilet paper) maybe they will, who knows. The one thing we have all learnt is that things don’t always go the way we think they will just because that has been the norm all our lives, things change, events occur and we have to adapt. Life in the here and now is important is what I have learnt, and the simpler the life the easier it is to adapt to change. I need to stop hoovering 🤣

As I have mentioned before, the past six/seven months have been the windiest I have ever known it to be, such a curious year weather wise and no chance of planning anything. At the moment we have a draught blowing through the back door, the whole building moves over time and as a consequence the doors end up either not opening or closing properly or a gap appears suddenly which is what has happened lately. I am trying to find the best kind of product to use for now as we are planning on getting a new door at some point.

I went out the the greenhouse with the intention of potting on, when I went in it was 36c the sun came out and within two minutes it had climbed to 40c, too hot to stay in there lol, can’t win at the minute. It did make me think though because I came back indoors and it’s cold, we should be using more passive solar on the house somehow, difficult when I can’t tolerate UV rays though 🤔

A friend messaged in the early evening to say there was a street food wagon parked up at a local caravan park, normally that is not something that we would go and get but I hadn’t put the dinner in yet and I thought, why the heck not, let’s go 😁 It was Sri Lankan and it was lovely and even John tried one or two things, ooosh it’s spicy he said 🤣 but he did eat it, there is hope yet.

Wednesday: It’s a promising start to the day, the sun is shining the wind has dropped to a breeze and I can feel that it is not as cold as it has been of late, though still below average. Whoop, the world is my oyster today and the weather is favourable now I just need to decide exactly what to do, or I may just glide through the day picking and choosing as I go.

I went out and began by doing some picking, 5 bundles of rhubarb that went out for sale, a good haul of purple sprouting some of which went out for sale and some I have kept back for dinner tonight along with a bundle of asparagus. The asparagus is slow this year I think I need to give it a good feed and mulch at the end of the season. I then had a job in mind but got waylaid talking to a customer and by the time I got back in the garden I had forgotten all about it and went on to something else 😂 That something else was pottering in the greenhouse again 🥰 moving things around, potting some things on, watering and feeding the hungry plants with an organic feed. There is still a bit of a chill in the air even though the sun is out but it is pleasant enough and warm enough for me to work which is the main thing.

Thursday: Late afternoon and I have just sat down after a busy day of bit and pieces. I started off by sorting out my jam jar stash ready for jam season. Sorting out what lids fit and what jars I have got, the upshot was that I needed to order more jars so that is in hand and they are arriving tomorrow. Then onto picking some rhubarb and some purple sprouting, the rhubarb I picked today were the thin stalks that I can’t really put out for sale but they are ideal for jam. On then to jam making, rhubarb and orange again as that has gone down well with people and especially Josh who said it was delicious. Mum came over to grab some material and then Shelley came over to get the purple sprouting, both of them went away with a bag full of stuff from my freezers, mainly fruit but also some pasta sauces I froze last year and a few other bits and pieces that I won’t get round to using for various reasons. Most years I can run one freezer down, give it a clean out and then turn it on again when the season gets underway. Last year however I could not feed the family for Sunday lunches etc and so the stock pile stayed piled up. We have used most of the veg but there was a lot of fruit and going through the freezer I can see I need to have a big cook up and use some of the contents up. Once that was done I made a quick rhubarb crumble for pudding later, sat down and John came home. What is funny about that is that when he comes in and I am sat down he says ‘just sat down then’ to which I always reply yes I have actually, this time I had literally just written the first line of this paragraph when he appeared 😜

I sweetened the rhubarb with honey instead of sugar, although there was still sugar in the crumble topping, it was lovely just the right balance, not sweet but not tart either, winner 😁

One of our hens is laying a whopper egg every day, 100g + 🙄 we had them for dinner tonight and of course they were double yolkers. For comparison a medium size egg would weigh between 57 & 67g anything over 66g goes in a large box and on avaerage they are around 72g so you can see what a huge difference the 100g ones are, xxl I think.

Friday 7th May 2021: I make a special note of the date today because it should have been Charlie and Macca’s wedding day, I should have been the Mother of the the Bride and we should have been celebrating. Covid has taken a lot of lives around the world which is tragic in itself but it has also taken lots of hopes and dreams which I know can all be postponed for another time but it still impacts on those that had their plans and dreams in place. The wedding will still go ahead it will just be towards the later end of the year and we keep our fingers crossed that things continue to move in a forward direction.

The sun has made an appearance this morning and it is warm enough to wander outside with my morning cuppa and have a look over the front flower beds which I duly did. Today is one of only two or three mornings where it has been nice enough to do that and this is a short interlude. Tomorrow’s forecast is horrendous, high winds and heavy rain, you gotta laugh or you would just cry. I am glad it is nice today as we are going out for a family lunch with Charlie and Macca as a way of marking the day, we couldn’t really ignore it like it was never booked.

I whipped out and gave the guinea pigs a quick clean out, fed them, gave them hay and fresh water, picked up the quail eggs on the way back through. Went to the hay barn to get hay for biscuit and found a goose egg under the hay, John said one had started laying there, first it was in the stable black now the hay barn but I have shut that off so she will have to go back to the stable. Three other geese are now sitting tight, one other is laying the other two, well if they are laying I have no idea where 🙄

A chap came to collect something I had up for sale and was saying what a lovely place and that he and his girlfriend would like to do something similar. As I always say to people, go for it, you get one life so do what makes you happy. Then I thought about our journey over the years, it’s never straight forward, you learn at lot, your emotions get battered at times but it’s hugely rewarding and it’s a great lifestyle choice, well I think so anyway. The only thing is you have to learn to move the goalposts if necessary, that does not come easily for me especially once I get into ‘ideology’ mode. Self sufficient to me was exactly that, nothing that you can’t produce yourself or swap/barter, self reliance is also a major factor, making sure you can do everything you need to. These ideals are of course ridiculous especially if it’s just one person doing it (which until the last year it has been, just me for 80% of the time) Still I busted a gut trying to do it until eventually you can’t and you take a step back and think ‘ah what the hell’ and suddenly life becomes more enjoyable. You stop busying yourself for 18hrs a day making sure you, plant, grow, harvest, process, make, bake, store, dry, as much as you possibly can and you do what you can when you can, it is a lot more harmonious and that’s how it should be otherwise you are still on that hamster wheel of life just one with different objectives. These days life is a lot more relaxed, I settle for self sufficientish and I think the pandemic and the lockdowns have had a lot to do with our attitude shift, what doesn’t get done today, will wait until tomorrow (obviously that does not include feeding animals 😂) I suppose what I am saying is, if you are starting out on this journey, here speaks the voice of experience, at times be prepared to take a different road to the one you had mapped out. If this last year has taught us anything at all it is that things don’t always go the way you think they will 🥰

Saturday: Urgh what a truly horrid day today, I heard the rain all through the night, it’s just gone midday and it hasn’t really eased up for longer than half an hour. At the minute rain is driving from south to north so at least it’s not as cold as it would be the other way round 🙄 At the moment we don’t have the strong winds I thought we were getting I may have been wrong about those or they may come later. We made a decision not to bother doing too much today, can’t really do a lot outside, except John has cut some more wood. We went and got some food shopping first thing, not much just mostly stuff that John eats. I want to start using up a lot of the freezer contents so I have warned him there may be some strange meals coming his way 😂 and probably plenty of soup which is ideal at the minute.

I lit the Rayburn at lunchtime to keep the damp at bay and just take any chill off, probably won’t have it going all day as it will get too warm. I need to order the next electric radiator and John is going to convert the ladder rails int the bathroom by filling them with oil and then they will be connected to the electric. The ladder rails will be so much better on electric because we can’t dry the towels over summer normally so it will be a great improvement on that score.

Sunday: Not too bad a day today, it was a little windy overnight but that has settled to a stiff breeze 😜 and no rain, mostly cloudy which is fine by me, feels a lot warmer than previous days. We or rather I, had already decided we were going out today to do something different, I am fed up of not doing anything away from here. So we went to an antiques centre for a shuffty round, had an ice cream from the van in the car park and then John sat in the car while I mooched a little round the garden centre. I found a craft area and bought a couple of bits for doing something with but I did resist any plants today, go me 😁

Back home and time to get the leg of lamb prepped, pick some fresh greens from the garden, purple sprouting, asparagus and some mangetout from the tunnel. Really they are undeveloped pea pods but they will taste great and there were only about five of them, I pinched out the tops of the pea plants to get more shoots from the bottom and waste not want not they will go in with the greens as well. By eck, people pay a fortune for straight to the table from the garden dinning and here we are doing it on a daily basis 🥰 With a flourless chocolate cake made for dessert we are living the dream here 😜

Have a great week, I am hoping the weather will be a little more seasonal than it has been of late but I don’t want it to go straight into wall to wall sunshine as I won’t get on very well in that either 😂

Friesland Farm

Jam, asparagus soup & May Day 🥰

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget to Boo 👻😜

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

A pub lunch 😁 eggs galore & a Fox attack 😩

Posted on April 25, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 19th April 2021: Monday again yay 😜 Today it is Mia’s 5th birthday so we will be popping over to see her later 🎂 John went to work this morning after doing the rounds and I have mostly been pottering out and about in the garden. I have had to do some watering as even the plants that like it dry are beginning to struggle a little. Most of the plants that are in the beds or in the ground are fine, anything I had recently planted needed water and plants in pots need some water. I don’t have many pots now as most of them have gone into the new beds but there are still a few that I haven’t put anywhere yet or that will stay in pots elsewhere. I watered the veg plants I put in last week and also the raspberries and blueberries that are all in pots. Everything else will still be able to get some overnight moisture or deep ground moisture hopefully. There is no rain on the radar at all 🥴 certainly no sign of any April showers 🙄

I dug up the few plants I wanted to move, the water I gave them last night has done well and the rootball was still damp this morning. Some I have planted straight in the ground and some have gone into pots to bring on either to sell or plant where I have a bare patch. I have tried to get a broad a range of flowering plants and shrubs as possible, this includes different heights, strength of fragrances, some with evening fragrance, different colours and sizes of flowers but nearly all are single open flowers which are what the insects need, I do have a few flowers that are double but not many. In other areas I have included grasses for the wildlife that prefer those and I have the small (tiny) pond which has water plants. I keep contemplating a bigger pond, the one I have is literally a large tub but it works well enough as a wildlife pond. As long as I have water areas around I suppose they don’t need to look like a pond just do the same job.

I had my lunch sat outside which was glorious, all I could hear were the birds and myself crunching on an apple 😀 beautiful day. John came home mid afternoon so we went over to Sams early so that she could go and pick Mia up from school while we looked after the twins, and then saw Mia and gave her some birthday presents.

Back home and I cut the grass in the front driveway, I have left some squares so that the grass gets long, the insects will appreciate that. John then cut the lawn before we had something to eat, we had a delivery of an old cupboard I have bought to put where the Rayburn is once that goes and then we popped round to see Mum and Ken for a cuppa as it was such a nice evening.

The amount of eggs the hens and ducks are laying is verging on ridiculous 🙄 we have about six trays to try and shift. At one time I could advertise on Facebook but the algorithms have put paid to that as soon as you mention any animal species, I even heard of someone having a horse manure post declined. I think I will have to make lemon curd, lime curd and orange curd and give it to people, then a batch of cakes for the freezer maybe some pickled eggs, John is already eating eggs for breakfast every day 😂

Tuesday: Beautiful morning 🥰 Last night driving back from Mums the sun was a fireball and early this morning it was the same.

By 7.30 I had breakfasted, dressed, got the first load of washing on and cleaned the windows. With the sun finally shining the dusty windows were getting a bit annoying, I am not fanatical about my windows but they have not been done all winter, we don’t have many and they are not very big so any light I can get inside is welcome. I don’t spend too long faffing just a soapy cloth over and then the squeegee any marks left behind can stay, they will soon get dirty again and I can think of better things to do than meticulously getting them to be perfect, besides, I don’t stay inside on a sunny day looking out of the window 😜

I spent the next two hours outside sorting out a few plants, re potting some shrubs that I have now placed in an area that is looking pretty bare. Under the Oak tree is fenced off because there was a hawthorn there, which has mow died off after years of cutting back and also a dog rose which I cut back hard each year, both of these have viscious thorns and I don’t want the children getting tangled in them. It means I have a fenced area with not much in it, over the years I have filled it with pots of things but now most of that has been planted in the beds. I did have mock orange, a dogwood, a euonymus and a white buddliea which I have grown from very small plants, these are now bigger, potted up and sitting nicely in that bare space. The white buddliea was quite big, about three feet but it was really struggling where it was and so I dug it up the other day, put it in a bucket of water with some feed ready to move elsewhere. It was only when I was looking around for things to fill the space that I decided it could go in a big pot and hopefully it will like it in its new place. I also scattered a few packets of flower seeds to see how they do, it should look nice and full by mid summer.

John came home mid morning, I hung the washing out and then we decided not to waste the day so we went out for lunch! Oh how fabulous was that to sit outside by the river having a pub lunch and a cold drink, very fabulous I can tell you 🥰 People were happy to be getting out and about and doing something normal, we went for a short walk along the river before returning back to town to get some shopping.

Wednesday: It’s mid afternoon and I have come in for a sit down after a very productive morning doing various jobs in the garden. I have to pace myself otherwise I won’t have the energy to haul myself around later this afternoon and get the dinner etc. I know when it’s time to stop as my feet hurt and my legs won’t carry me much more, definitely sit down time. So what have I been doing? Well I started off planting four rows of root veg, two rows of turnips and two more rows of beetroot, that’s four lots of beetroot at the moment and we don’t even eat that much but it does sell well and it makes a great chutney. After that I watered it all in and watered a few other bits and then planted more potatoes, that’s all of them in now so it’s just a case of waiting. I checked the carrots and as always they are spasmodic so I topped up the rows with more carrot seed, I am determined to have a lot of carrots this year. I have done some hoeing (a lot actually 🙄) I have fixed down weed membrane in unused areas like the compost area so that I don’t have to worry about weeds growing everywhere and I have tried to dig out the comfrey root on one of the beds that has not been planted yet. If you get comfrey, and it is a great plant, make sure you get the bocking 14 which does not readily seed everywhere and cause a big problem later on like the one I have 😂 I have dug up a trug full of dandelions to feed to the torts and Guineas and I have picked purple sprouting and asparagus for dinner later. There are probably lots of other little things I have done but can’t recall now that the time has passed. I feel like I have definitely made some headway and no longer feel that I am lacking behind. I have had a good look at the areas that are still to plant up and decided what will go where, I just need to wait for the tender plants to get bigger and the weather to stop plunging back into artic mode 😜

Everything in the greenhouse is doing well, although we are getting a lot of frosts the temperature over night in there must be staying reasonably above freezing which is great. I was tempted to plant the tomatoes in the tunnels but as they would be directly into the ground that might not be such a good idea so I will hold my horses. Talking about horses, I observed that biscuit was lying in the paddock this morning when I started gardening, a couple of times I spoke to her as she was just the other side of the fence, she didn’t seem overly unhappy, but after she had been there at least two hours I went into the paddock to give her a thorough check over. I gave her a nudge to see if she would get up, nope, I gave her a shove to see if she would get up, nope, so I walked a way to go and get a head collar to put on her and see if I could force her to get up that way. By this time I was slightly concerned that she couldn’t get up of her own accord, I turned and walked away and up she jumped 😂 little sod was just having a lovely sunbathe and resented my intrusion I think lol.

Oh my days we have so many eggs at the minute I am seriously going to have to do something with them. Not sure where all our egg customers have gone 🤷‍♀️ two regulars that always had a lot of eggs each we have moved recently so that makes a difference and I guess so does the fact that we sold so many chickens last year 😂 Right I am off to find out what recipes use an enormous amount of eggs up, I guess I could make pasta but we don’t eat that much of it so it will have to be cake for the freezer!

Thursday: Lovely sunny morning again, a tad cold first thing but soon warmed up. It’s 9.30 and as yet I have not done anything else except have my breakfast and make stuff. I have a batch of lemon curd on the go in the slow cooker, yep in the slow cooker, I could have stood and made it but I figured this way I could get on with other things. In the oven at the moment I have the fail safe Mary Berry orange and sultana cake and a lemon drizzle cake, 16 eggs used in total so far 😜 I know what will happen, I will use all these eggs and then the hens will go on strike and we won’t have enough eggs 😂 can’t win, it’s never a dead cert either way so I am just rolling with it. At the moment I have not pickled any eggs, I need to check I have enough vinegar to do a large jar full, not quite sure what I will do with them then as John doesn’t eat them and it’s not something I would think about having very often but luckily the boys in the family do like them so they will probably go to them 😀 Great with a pint and a packet of crisps I am told though never tried lol. I also made some little cakes for the children, light lemon flavoured ones. I know lemons are not grown here so technically not sustainable but I need to use up eggs somehow and so lemons it is 😜 On the subject of lemons, it is possible to grow them here so I’m not sure why it’s not done on a bigger scale to be honest, plenty of people have them in the conservatory and they produce half decent lemons, maybe it would cost too much on a commercial scale 🤷‍♀️

John has gone off to work again today, that’s two in a row lol he will be tired out by the end of the week. The semi retired thing is working well so far but I wonder how long it will be until he is booked up again.

The wind is a bit chilly and if you are in the shade or not moving around very fast it can feel colder than the impression the sunny bright blue sky is giving. In the greenhouse though the temp has hit 40c which is amazing, it feels lovely in there as long as you don’t spend too long inside 😜 You can definitely feel the difference when you come out again.

Sam came over with George and Lucie for a couple of hours over lunchtime, we went for a wander round the farm introducing them to all the animals, George spends his time saying cock-a-doodle do and Lucie gets busy exploring everything she can.

The cakes and the lemon curd are resting nicely on the side, I am hoping the curd does set, home made lemon curd is totally amazing, zingy, tasty and not over sweet like the shop bought stuff so if you ever get a hankering to make it then go for it you won’t regret it.

I spent more time, much more time, than I would want to, trying to sort out a printing problem, basically I eventually found out that my iPad would not talk to my printer for some reason, kids 🙄 A few updates and resets later (and you all know how long they take) and I was back in business. The object of the printing was to print pictures of the plants I had out for sale, it’s all very well putting greenery out there but if someone has no idea what it will look like eventually then they probably won’t bother, well now they know 😊

Friday: Another lovely day of wall to wall sunshine (if you can tolerate that sort of thing) I never have a plan of what I am going to do, I may have a vague idea of things I want to get done but these days I don’t stress over it. I wanted to strip the bed and get the covers washed first thing and on the line, one bit of cleaning leads to another and before you know it the morning has largely passed. That is a bit of a school boy error for me because ideally I should get outside while it’s still cool. Anyhow I didn’t and so mid morning I decided to then get out on the garden. The birds, bees and beer bed has done well for around five years with hardly any work needed. Lately it has got a little wayward, stingers have taken hold and are big strong plants, I have a tree growing through a blackcurrant bush, the golden hop has gone berserk and twined round everything, the gooseberries are suffering due to not enough air circulating. It is time to address the problems, we began back at the beginning of the year by digging out one of the gooseberry bushes and trying to get the roots of the hop out but it was so wet and claggy it was near on impossible so I have left it. Today I started to tackle it again but it is incredibly dry 😂 and digging is almost impossible. The sun was getting hotter and hotter and there is no shade there, it is one of the beds that is most difficult for me to tend because it gets all day sun right from the off. There are four trees which are now pretty big, a cherry, an apple, a mulberry and a dual pear, plus three blackcurrant bushes and three gooseberry bushes, there are wild strawberries growing on the ground in one area but the rest has weed membrane down because I can’t get to do it easily. There is rhubarb and the hop as well, it is a very productive area and mostly I leave it for the birds and bees, the hop part was for the beer but that has never happened yet 🙄 Over time the trunks have got large and round and the membrane has come away allowing the stingers, docks, keck and dandelions to take hold. The idea was to get all those out and then adjust the membrane to cover the soil again, but I can’t dig a lot of it out as it is entwined in the fruit bushes, the dilemma is, do I forsake the bushes and start again or leave it for the time being and tackle it at the end of the year when the ground will be softer. I would have to make a proper plan as I will need Johns strength to help get those plants out, the roots will be deep. I was enjoying doing what I could but I could feel the sun and the heat beginning to affect my skin, (a kind of prickling feeling) there is nothing more I would enjoy than being in a vest top digging away and to be honest it pisses me off that I can’t but I also don’t want to induce a flare so I am limited in what I can do. For today I have now left it, I have been able to adjust some of the membrane and cover gaps but that’s about it, still, every little helps I suppose.

John was home mid afternoon, with flowers 💐 at this point I can here you asking ‘what has he done wrong’ because that’s exactly what I would think normally except that we had had one of those conversations the night before. You know the ones, long time married discussions, he says to me that I am a pessimist and so I explain that once upon a time I was an optimist but was regularly disappointed and eventually because a realist 😜 One of the points I made was that he prided himself on the fact that he bought me flowers ‘once every twenty five years’, each birthday, Valentine’s Day, anniversary I would hope to get flowers and they never came so eventually you stop hoping and face reality. I’m not sure if that shocked him to hear that but the result was a lovely bunch of flowers today so I’ll take that 😁

I picked a few bunches of rhubarb in the afternoon and a bunch of asparagus all of which went out for sale as I won’t be using it today. I noticed quite a few spindly stalks of rhubarb so I will probably pick those and make rhubarb jam either with vanilla, orange or ginger haven’t quite decided which one yet. Ginger might be too wintery and I don’t have an orange thinking about it so it will most likely be vanilla lol.

Saturday: Ooosh busy morning this morning doing various garden jobs, lots of potting on, putting plants out for sale, various other bits up for sale, trying to move on some of the ‘stuff’ we have lying around 😂 We had a tragic start to the day mind you as sometime overnight the fox has got into one of the huts in the paddock and slaughtered 17 hens 🙄 At first we couldn’t work out how it got in but further investigation shows that he has some how managed to lift a very heavy side panel and get through some tight bars to get access. That’s the end of that lot and I won’t show you the graphic photo of the aftermath I will leave that to your imagination 💭 They were our oldest lot of hens but they were still laying well and that’s about 12 eggs a day we have now lost 😠 Typically I literally just sold the 13 point of lay hens we had left otherwise we would have just kept those, the old law of the sod and all that.

John has been on the tractor moving heavy stuff around to tidy up and also cleaning out some of the other birds as well as the morning jobs of feeding, watering and egg collecting.

It is sunny with blue skies today but there is quite a breeze and it’s a tad cold. April is normally a month you can enjoy with warming temperatures and showers but this one has been cold all the way through, I do hope May has better things in store for us. There is no sign of rain for at least a couple more weeks and the wind direction is predicted to be either from the north or the east so it will stay chilly. Not until the first week of May does the wind start coming from the west 🙄

Blimey trying to get the washing off the line in this wind was a mission 😂

Sunday: We started off well this morning, no frost but still windy and it’s coming from the East but with the sun out as well it’s not bad. John did the feeding, no more Fox attacks, and then he got on with cleaning out the point of lay pen. This pen we built around five years ago at a cost of around £1000 and when the batches come in for sale that’s where they go. We have now decided because it is fox proof we will house one of the two permanent flocks in there and let them out in the daytime and use a stable for the point of lay when they come in. Makes much more sense to not loose our flocks overnight, the huts are great, they are over 100 years old though and they were used back in the day when foxes were controlled as that is no longer the case we have to move with the situation.

While John was doing that I started a bonfire to burn some paper rubbish, dirty shavings and some bits of wood. While I was doing that I noticed that biscuit was lying down again, this time I decided to get her in as that is not normal daily behaviour for her. She is a bit pottery on her feet, the ground is rock hard due to the lack of rain and her feet need looking after as it is so I got her into the stable. I didn’t want to leave her there because she is better off outside but I needed to put up the electric stakes and tape. This would have been a ten minute job if John had not just gathered it all up and dumped it in a heap when we dragged the fields. Anyone who has ever had to untangle electric horse tape will know this is a pig of a job 😂 I got that sorted and moved the water bucket, got John to fix a piece of the fence that was broken and got biscuit back outside with some hay. All the time she was in Jack was wellying up and down the paddocks making a racket, if you regularly see two or more horses in a field and then one on it’s own going a bit mental, the reason is because they have been separated from their friend 🙄 Once they were both settled again we shot off to get a little bit of shopping.

When we got back I went out to sort out the guinea pigs etc in the orchard. As I was in there I looked up to see a chap walking up the drive, he spotted me and then turned and walk back out and off down the lane. I said to John something doesn’t feel right and John went across the paddock to the wall by the lane to see where he went, he had carried on and then went off to the left down scrubs lane which is basically a dirt track that goes to a few properties and eventually out across the fields. No problem I thought, it’s just a walker and maybe my intuition was not right. However, 10 minutes later we were stood in the drive talking to Sam and Luke who had pulled up in the car and he walked back past the bottom of the driveway. This then does become odd as if he was out walking I wouldn’t expect him to be back 10 minutes later, it means he didn’t go far before turning round and coming back rather than continuing his walk. He was almost dressed like a Walker but not quite, dark clothes a flat cap and a small backpack, let’s just say he looked like he was trying to blend in with Walker but definitely didn’t. He may have been totally innocent but my instincts were telling me differently and you get a feel for things like that over time. I flagged it up on the rural watch page I am on just in case there are any other reports.

I then spent another hour weeding the front beds, I figured if he came back a third time I couldn’t really be seen until the last minute and might catch him coming up the drive again.

We nipped down to the local pub for a drink in the garden with Sam and Luke who had been to the wildlife park. I did pick some dandelion flowers beforehand and they are now sleeping overnight ready for dandelion honey tomorrow.

Friesland Farm

Snow! A hair cut & Mint jelly 🥰

Posted on April 13, 2021April 18, 2021 by frieslandfarm

Monday 12th April 2021: WTAF!

Woke up to snow, not just a few flakes but more than we have had in the wintertime 😂 As if this past year hasn’t been crazy enough 😜

John was up, fed and let out the birds and gone to work by 8am this morning, he should be back by lunchtime. I had the Rayburn lit by 8.30, not because it’s particularly cold, I always think it feels warmer with snow on the ground, but more because it will be soggy which means we will get soggy. Soggy gloves, hats, coats, and so it is useful to have somewhere to dry everything and warm up hands and feet when we get back inside.

I have so far only done the indoor bits and pieces but I need to get outside and bring the torts back in. They must wonder the heck is going on, they have already been digging themselves into the ground at night but of course the day time (especially if the sun comes out) they are wandering around. I left them because I kept thinking, it will warm up today, ha, so I give up and will put them back indoors.

Today we also get more freedoms in the form of non essential shops opening including hairdressers, barbers, salons and outside eating and pub gardens😂 What a day for it to snow, I feel sorry for those businesses that have waited all this time to wake up to a blanket of snow this morning, it was bad enough that it is colder than average and certainly much, much colder than this time last year! We should be having warm spring sunshine and be able to comfortably sit outside having some refreshments 🤷‍♀️

Just sat down for a quick break after cleaning the spare room, I have come to the conclusion (again 😂) that I have too much stuff. We make extra storage to store stuff we hardly, if ever, use, what is that all about. I hate to get rid of it though, you never know when you will need it 😜 In all seriousness I do need to find new homes for a lot of it, now the charity shops are open again at least I can take stuff there, someone else might be able to make use of some of it. Whatever ‘it’ is ai need to go through it all and thin it all out.

The next electric radiator has just arrived eeeek, I am looking forward to this one because it’s for the kitchen which means that on chilly mornings it should be warmer in there than it is when I haven’t lit the Rayburn 🥰

Time seems to be passing slowly today I don’t know why, maybe because I have been cleaning and they say time passes quickly when you are having fun so the opposite must be true too 😜

Tuesday: Totally different day today, cold start but the sun is shining and it’s quite warm 🥰 John has gone to work again today but did the animals before leaving. I spent the first couple of hours indoors sorting out some of the ‘stuff’ and also taking up a pair of curtains to hang in the spare room. Then outside to get on with the jobs of the day, first off the water buckets, it was frozen this morning when John went to do them. Another reason for getting the indoor stuff done first, by the time I go out pipes have thawed and it’s warmed up a bit. I water the plants growing in the tunnels, cut a couple of bunches of rhubarb but most of the time I spent in the greenhouse sowing seeds. This morning it was runner beans, dwarf French beans and sweetcorn as well as pricking out some echinops for the flower beds. I feel like I am really behind, I say that every year but I still have work to do on some of the beds as they are not ready for planting yet although it won’t take long I am still aware that they are on the todo list. A bit of weeding in the front flower beds and then inside to get the washing up done and a quick sit down before I get a haircut yay 😁

Hair cut done ✅ after a spot of lunch it was back outside to try to gain some ground, which I feel I have done. I have planted the peas and the mangetout, I just have a few pea left to find a space for, I also planted and covered two rows of beetroot (chigoya, stripey) and two rows of swede. The root veg I have sown in multi crop blocks which basically means more than one seed in each sowing, they like it apparently and you thin out later once they are swelling up. Each sowing was watered in with some organic plant food and hopefully they will get going pretty quickly. Most of the peas were sown outside, four rows, but two rows I have sown in the poly tunnel. I am hoping I will get an earlier drop from these, if I don’t and it fails at least the compost they are in will get some goodness from the nitrogen nodules. I figured that the tomatoes won’t be going in for a while and even then will take a while to get big enough to out grow the peas so we will see what happens. I also had some more broad beans left over so I have planted them next to the swede, might as well mix it up a little and see what results we get.

Wednesday: Not such a cold start this morning g and the sun was already out first thing. I whizzed round and did the indoors stuff before going outside around 9.30. Watering the veg I planted yesterday and then some pricking out of dill and coriander. Onto hoeing the onion bed and one of the asparagus beds. John came home at lunch time and we popped to the shops to get a few bits, it was manic, I had forgotten what it was like when everybody in the whole world was out shopping 😩 busy, manic, everyone fighting for a car parking space, queues, bring back lockdown 😂

Thursday: Still cold for the time of year and so I am holding off a few jobs, besides the fact it’s chilly to work outside unless you have a job that keeps you warm, the ground is too cold to plant much. Likewise I can’t move things on in the greenhouse because what would normally now move to the bench is still on a heat mat 🙄

We haven’t done much today, John has done a bit of tidying up, the wood store is now empty and John has cleared the ground ready to put the tractor in there, that will free up a bay in the hay barn, for what I don’t know yet. I have pottered about doing not much really, Charlie came over and bought lunch with her, it’s her birthday today so we had lunch outside but it was a tad cold when the sun went behind the clouds. Sam and the kids came over in the afternoon and the kids played with bubbles, a piece of board on the ground (jumping up and down) and the wheelbarrow, who needs expensive toys 😂

Friday: Temps are about a degree warmer than yesterday and for an hour at least this morning the sun was glorious, unfortunately it disappeared and as yet has not reappeared but the chilly wind has dropped and so it feels much better today. John went to work and I spent my time in the garden after going round and doing the water buckets which were frozen when John tired to do them first thing. In the greenhouse I am still waiting to be able to move things along but the constant cold nights mean I won’t chance it yet. I pot on some of the cucumber plants and the courgettes so at least something is happening. I have also sown some more flower seeds, rudbeckia and lupin, they will go out for sale once they are big enough. On the garden itself I have done some weeding, well that’s mostly all I did, weeding lol. I put out a couple more plants for sale but as yet it’s too cold to put some of the others out so they will have to wait a while longer.

Before coming in for a sit down at 3pm I picked some purple sprouting for dinner later and had a quick look at the asparagus which is just starting to appear above ground but not big enough to cut yet.

I have seen the forecast for next week the temps are going to climb nicely and then plummet with an artic blast again! I think I am just going to have to go ahead as best I can with planting up and moving on then try to protect the plants as best as possible and see what happens. I can always start sowing some more just in case the first lot get affected and if they don’t then I can sell the second lot of sowings when they get bigger. If I keep waiting will be at the end of the season before we know it lol, a difficult year but then every year seems to have its challenges nowadays.

Saturday: The weather looks promising today, despite a frosty start there is wall to wall blue sky. Today was one of those days when you have a plan and probably shouldn’t have bothered 🙄 A job that should have been first thing and 10 mins didn’t get completed until midday for various reasons. Last night I cooked up bramley apples and mint along with some cider vinegar to make mint jelly, that all went well and I left it overnight to strain hoping to get it boiled and jarred up first thing. I had just got the sugar in and dissolved when BT arrived and almost at the same time Martin, Josh and Flo called in to see us. As I always say, everything stops for grandchildren and so I set the pan aside to return to it later once they had gone. We had coffee outside and played with the kids, all the while the BT man is checking equipment. He goes off at some point believing he has detected this elusive fault. Martin and the children leave so I go back inside and get the pan back on the boil only it has developed a skin which I skimmed off first (I think it was from the vinegar) The engineer returns as I am carefully watching the mixture boil and get up to temperature, I barely look at him when he is telling me, he thinks that is now sorted and I shouldn’t have any more problems, yep I have heard that one before 😂 He leaves and I carry on until I am happy I will get a set and then put it into jars than have not been in the oven sterilising for over two hours 😜 Job done I go outside to get started out there as I haven’t had a chance to do that as yet. I go into the orchard to started getting water for the Guineas, quail, Turkey and light Sussex, only to find the water is not coming out of the tap, that means a leak somewhere. I go back into the garden and can hear it pouring out of the main tap, it has been going a while as the paddock has a slick of water across it 🥴 Luckily just as I discovered it, John, who had popped to the shop for some milk, returned, there were three joints in total that had popped off from the freeze thaw process 🙄 Once we got those sorted and I may say it wasn’t without incident as John lost one of the washers down a hole in the ground (yeah I know, you couldn’t make this stuff up) I finished getting the water buckets etc sorted and then it was onto watering some of the veg plants I have planted recently. It is not as bad as it was this time last year when we had record high temps and no rain for weeks but this year it’s cold and no rain for weeks 🤷‍♀️ always a situation to overcome, hopefully it will all be fine in the end and we will get veg!

Mint jelly, not quite as clear as I would have liked and I forgot to turn it when it was part set so the mint bits are all at the top but it will still be delicious 😋 The jelly you buy in the shop will have green food colouring added to it to make it more appealing 🙄 this is the colour it actually should be 😀

I checked the greenhouse and opened the vents, all seems well in there so there was nothing to be getting on with. I came in for a cuppa around 1.30 and did a bit of researching of various plants, we will watch Prince Phillips funeral later this afternoon though John is annoyed as the snooker is starting as well but I have already bagged the tv 😋

Sunday: Lovely day, sunshine, warm fabulous. Today is the first anniversary of the passing of Dad and so tinged with a little sadness, but not too much as there are so many things I remember that make me smile or laugh. I often wondered when people said they think of them every day, how that was possible but it really is, in the littlest things you catch yourself thinking about a chuckle or a ‘wise word’ or just the appreciation he would have had for something like a good home cooked dinner. We went to the grave and gave him a toast with his favourite tipple, had a little sing song and a jig, he would have loved that 😂

For the best part of the day I have not done much other than clean out the Guineas and a trip to the garden centre and a visit to my brother for a cuppa on the way over. I attempted to do something about one part of the veg bed that I had turned over to wildlife, it needs sorting but apart from pulling out nettles I abandoned the job, I will get back to it at some point but not today. John meanwhile has been doing the usual jobs, feeding, watering, egg collecting. He did start the very last raised bed at the side in the driveway, until I pulled him away to go to the garden centre that is but he didn’t offer up much objection to abandon tools 😜

Early evening I went out and checked the greenhouse to make sure everything was alright and then I watered the herb bed. It is so dry that nothing is really bursting into life like it should be at this time of year. There are a couple of plants I want to lfit and so giving them a soaking will help immensely when I go out in the morning to dig them up and move them.

I can’t quite believe that right at the very beginning of this week we had a covering of snow and now the days are bright, sunny and warm lol. I think we have a few more days of warm weather before it gets cold again 🙄 not sure how long that will last but these things are sent to try us and they certainly do!

Friesland Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the cold frame
Peas
Mangetout
Swede
Turnip
Beetroot

Planted up outside
Broad beans
Onions
Garlic
Shallots
Oca
Carrots
Potatoes

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a fab week x x