grow your own – Page 15 – frieslandfarm (flowers)

Harvesting, soup making and a trip out of the shire 😀

Posted on September 26, 2020September 27, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 21st Sept 2020: You may remember, but probably not lol, that I bought a tea bush (sapling actually) Camellia Sinensis, well it’s been steadily growing and although it’s still not very big it does have quite a few leaves on it. Hopefully it will get big enough to make both green tea and black tea, wouldn’t that be an achievement ‘grow your own tea’ I can’t wait to try, maybe next year 😀

Another sunny day ahead and I had been doing a bit of cleaning on Mondays but the weather is set to break quite hard around midweek and so I wanted to get some outside housekeeping done. Firstly though start the bread making process, while the first prove was happening I watered everything out the front and everything in pots in the main garden. Then during the second prove I cleaned out the guineas and quail. While the bread was baking I put together a new feeder we have bought, I did get it for the chickens but am trying it out in the duck pen. After the bread came out of the oven I put clean bedding in the goose hut and cleaned the water bucket refilling it with fresh water, I cleaned out the duck hut and put in new bedding and I cleaned the floor in the chicken hut out the front.

I came in and tried to catch up with the briefing on the virus, it’s not good news as we kind of knew it wouldn’t be 😏 Cases are rising and the government is keen to get control of it, it’s not looking good. But what is annoying me is that we have been really good, doing all the right things during lockdown and the easing measures. We have only socialised with family, we haven’t been out and about at all really except food shopping and the garden centre 🙄 and yet it is going to be the likes of us that are penalised I think and by that I mean families. You can go to work, school, pub, restaurant, swimming, sport activities, even get on a bloody plane and go abroad but you probably won’t be able to have family over for dinner, I am guessing here but if that ends up being the case it’s really going to piss me off 😏 We wait with baited breath for the next update!

It’s quite a depressing outlook what with Winter literally on the doorstep and the possibility of further measures. I am usually the one that says ‘it could be worse’ and of course there are much, much worse situations to be in but still the thought is a gloomy one. I see a few pod cast and box set catch ups coming 😜

Early evening Charlie came round to help paint the cladding, we are getting nearer to the rain coming and it would be good to get it all done before then. I did some bits of clearing up and making the cups of tea, one of my jobs is to tun the magnet over the ground and pick up and old nails or new screws and nails that have been dropped (plenty of those as John is not the tidiest of workers 😜) I ordered some sparrow flats which have arrived, I could have used the bird boxes I made but some nice new ones will look better. Sparrows like to nest and roost in colonies and these are three boxes all in one unit, I bought two of them and am just hoping they are delighted with them. The old boxes will still be used somewhere else, they did use them and so hopefully they will again 😀

Tuesday: Autumn equinox, equal amount of day and night, a time for celebrating the harvests 🌾 and the turning of the wheel, The feast of Avalon, Mabon, blessed be 🥰 It is a lovely sunny morning and so first thing I picked raspberries and then went up the back to pick blackberries. I love the fact that I can pick blackberries from our own hedges, I know they have not had anything sprayed on or near them and they are as good as you can get, full of vitamins and minerals, potassium, magnesium and calcium as well as vit A, C, E & B vitamins and of course they are great antioxidants 😀

I spent a good couple of hours in the garden. Firstly in the big poly tunnel, the tomatoes in there have succumbed to blight so it’s a case of save what I can and pull up the rest. They are now ripening (hopefully) in the greenhouse, any green ones I will probably make chutney from. Then it was onto picking anything that will get hit by frost, we have had some fabulous weather but any day now it will turn. The first frosts will affect anything that has a high water content such as courgettes so I might as well pick them now. I also harvested the pumpkins, again I don’t want the rain to affect them and I don’t want the birds to start eating them once they get ripe enough, they are now stored in the small tunnel. I only got four butternut squash and they were tiny 😜 bit of a disaster as far as they go but hey ho there is always next year 🙄 There were a few cucumbers to pick, they are much smaller now and the skins get tougher but they will still taste good. I picked runner beans and pulled some beetroot and the last of the corn cobs. I then came in and got straight onto sorting it all for the freezer, mostly soup mixes today, I’ll look forward to cooking and eating those in the colder months.

There are a couple of other things to harvest but not until the frosts come, they are Oca and Yacon. I had a little look at the yacon, I found one tiny tuber under one plant 😏 however, I did taste it and it’s lovely, sweeter than I thought it would be so definitely something to try and bring on again next year I think. The Oca get left until after the frost kills off the top growth, I am not expecting great harvests from them though as it has been so dry. I could leave them in the ground and they will be fine and grow again next year with maybe a better harvest.

I need to tidy up the poly tunnel now that I have cleared the tomatoes but I thought it would be better left as a rainy day job. I have basil that needs cutting and drying, some of it I am going to leave to go to seed and hopefully collect that, the more seed you can collect from things the cheaper and more sustainable growing your own becomes 😀 I will give it a good tidy and take out things I don’t want in there, like the cape gooseberry, and then see what I could sow for winter use.

Wednesday: It rained overnight, not much but the weather has definitely broken this morning. Last night we went out (out, out lol) that is the first time since the beginning of lockdown way back in March. We went with Charlie and Macca, Maccas Mum nad her friend Jackie, it was a tasting evening at the venue Charlie and Macca have booked for their wedding next year. The healthy eating went out the window 😜 as canapés were followed by starters, main course and pudding, all the choices on the menu and a taste of all the wines to go with them. The food was amazing, the wine was a treat to try, so many including Prosecco and champagne, the venue is delightful and we had a great time. I only hope that all those that have booked weddings next year will get to have their day 🙄 That will probably be the end of our nights out until next year 😂 The world felt normal (well apart from the one way system) for a few hours 😀

This morning even though it was very fine drizzle, I decided to get a bit of clearing done on the veg garden. First I tided up the compost area so that I could get in there to put more stuff in and then I set about the area with the sweetcorn. Although I had a few cobs, I didn’t have as many as I usually get and I also think that the baby corn would be a more versatile option next year. I found another butternut squash which takes the total to five 🙄 I pulled up plenty of weeds and got stung by stinging nettles and dug up some self set potatoes. We planted some red (Duke of York I think) about four years ago and every year any small tuber left in the ground produces about half a large bucket of spuds, no work needed, brilliant 😀 I have cleared it and piled the compost heap high, I just need to go back and pull any weeds that are left but it started raining a bit more heavily so I decided that was enough.

On the sunny days when there is no cloud cover at all, John has been coming home early to feed the hens and collect the eggs but yesterday and today I have done it as it’s overcast and I can easily move around outside. Yesterday I found a hen with her legs chewed off from underneath the hut which must have happened overnight. Today I suspect we have lost some more, we had four broody hens that get turfed off the eggs each day as they are not viable eggs, today there is no sign of them and the eggs were a mess. It takes ages to break brooding and so I can’t imagine that all four have suddenly decided to stop 🙄 That means a daytime fox which is always bad news.

Thursday: It rained heavily last night for a short while and then again this morning but the sun is out, it’s a cold breeze though. John did the morning rounds and I have spent the early part of the morning prepping lunch and dinner. Tomato soup for lunch, tastes amazing and shepherds pie for dinner this evening.

Fresh tomato soup: 1 onion chopped, 3 carrots chopped, 1stick of celery chopped, 5 good sized tomatoes chopped, I tsp olive oil, black pepper to taste, 1/3 of a chicken stock cube. Sweat down the onions in the olive oil, add the other ingredients and cook on low until soft, then blend. At this point you can sieve out the seeds and any bits of tomato skin if you want but I leave them in. I have been precise with the measurements because if you are calorie counting this is for two people and 1 portion is 111 calories 😀

Fresh tomato soup, easy, nutritious, low in calories 😀

I added a teaspoon of low fat black pepper cream cheese 😀

Home made soups are the easiest thing in the world, they taste much better than tinned soups, you can put almost anything in them but the best three ingredients to start of any soup are, onion, carrot and celery call them your base ingredients, if you can’t have onion (I know peeps with IBS struggle) use leek or spring onions instead, then add whatever you have, a great way to use up stuff in the fridge even half tins of beans/hummus etc. Normally it will be veg I use but bacon is a lovely addition, cook it crispy and sprinkle on and of course chicken bones often have very tasty bits of meant firmly stuck to them, just simmer the bones to release the meat. The soup season is nearly here so get experimenting, it’s a great way to get some or all of your five a day 😀

We have new measures in place to limit the spread of the virus, the rule of six indoors and outside also extends to restaurants and bars with table service only and they have to close by 10pm. Apart from that I think it’s much the same, again people have been asked to work from home if they can and hand washing, the social distancing and face masks are all still being encouraged. A new app was launched today for track and trace, how many people will download it is yet to be seen, there are plenty of conspiracy theorists about warning people not to do it 🙄 I wonder about their theories especially the whole ‘the virus isn’t real’ one, I mean what government in their right mind would pay everyone to stay at home and governments all over the world are doing the same, doesn’t really sound like something they would do unless they had to does it? I would also ask any of them ‘what is the ultimate aim if what you say is true’ because I can’t see what they would gain from it personally.

Urgh it’s that time of year where you put the washing out and suddenly a downpour arrives, which is exactly what happened today 😏 I toyed with the idea of putting it in the tumble dryer but decided on the line would be better, wrong 😝

This years failures are next years compost, I was listening to a pod cast when I heard this, it’s fabulous and I love it, so true and a reminder that nothing is wasted except maybe some of your time 🥰

Friday: You can feel the temperature drop even though the sun is out, it’s a cold wind today. Some days I know what I am going to be doing and some days I have to think about what to do, today was a ‘What shall I do day’. I don’t want to waste the day but I don’t feel like getting outside to do any gardening (even though I really should 😜) I went for a walk, good for the mind, good for my health especially as we live at the top of a pretty steep hill 😂 I took a few photos on the way round, it’s a typical Cotswold village full of creamy stone cottages, very pretty even on a day like today, very quiet though I didn’t see a single soul in the thirty five minutes it took me 🙄

When I got back I set about making some bread and cake, two loaves of whole meal bread, one for now and one for the freezer and two wholemeal flour sultana cakes again for for eating this weekend and one for the freezer. I have switched to using wholemeal as it’s better for you, organic, even better and if you can find organic stoneground flour that’s the cherry on the cake so to speak 😀 luckily for us we have a local mill that does.

Saturday: We went out, not just out but out of the shire out 😮 We were supposed to go to Wales for the weekend but that had to be cancelled so we decided to go on a road trip. We went to Stonehenge, haven’t been there for well over twenty odd years and it’s all different now, not the stones obviously they are still the same but the visitor centre has moved. When we last went you could park right next to them now you have to walk a mile to see them, you can get a shuttle bus but it was a dry day so I made John walk 😂 We did get the bus back though as it was incredibly windy and although the sun was out it was cold. Then we were going to go to the coast but we went to Marlborough for lunch instead and had a walk round, after that it was time to go to Goring on Thames where we had a couple of animals to pick up, more about that in a couple of weeks time 😀 Not quite the weekend we had planned but it was nice to get out and about and see some different countryside. We see a lot of country side because if I am navigating I avoid the bigger roads, John likes to go from A to B in as little time as possible, me I like the scenic route 😜

It’s getting much colder now, almost October so we will have to think about lighting the Rayburn soon, it’s tricky to get it right, we don’t run it all year like some people do as it would be way too hot in here so it will be a case of lighting it mid afternoon for a few hours to build heat then let it out. This is not ideal for this kind of boiler but needs must, eventually it will be on all the time.

Sunday: We went out for breakfast, I know, we only went out yesterday you are thinking lol, but we were supposed to be away for the weekend so I thought a good cooked breakfast this morning would keep John going as we have plenty to do today. When we got back John started on the last leg of the cladding and I got on with cleaning Rosie the Rayburn. She has sat patiently all spring and summer getting covered in dust, had baskets of veg and fruit dumped on her and now it was her turn to shine. Shine she does, she looks as good now as when she was installed all those years ago, mind you it has taken me a good few hours, the flue had to be swept, all the grate taken out and cleaned a general hoover out, check all the fire ropes, replace the ones that were no good, replace the rock wall where it’s needed and finally give the outside a good clean.

I took some photos of the road we go along to get to breakfast this morning, how amazingly lucky are we to live somewhere so beautiful 😍

In the afternoon we were busy tidying up the front area now John has finished the cladding although we have more to do, we need to find some metal flashing for the top and then put in a row of slabs along the front of the building to make it easier to clean the windows etc. After that another flower bed has to be built and planted up, I bought some new sparrow flats as they like to live in colonies hopefully they will begin to investigate them soon, the satellite dish had to go back up and the security light as well. We have a mountain of wood to move which we will hopefully get done tonight and then on Wednesday we have someone coming to take down the rest of the big conifer trees. We can then start on the side of the building and the new driveway that will go along the side, as well as a new fence and gate, so much to do 😜

Friesland Farm

Autumn pickings, a smack in the eye and a house of horrors (bit dramatic Dawn) 😝

Posted on September 12, 2020September 13, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 7th September: We’ll here we are again back round at Monday, the children have either gone back or are going back this week. Seems like life is returning to normal except the daily reports of the virus numbers which in some countries are scarily huge 🙄 Cases are rising here, well they are going to with everyone moving around more freely but the deaths are not as staggering as they once were, though that’s not much consolation if it happens to be your family member 😢 Life hasn’t really altered much at all for me in particular, never been one to go shopping or to the pub or do much socialising at all really 😂 life is pretty much as it always was except that now I can see the children, grandchildren and wider family members which is fine by me. I must admit that I was wondering when we could go to a live music event or theatre again but in all honesty I doubt we will be going anywhere before next summer. We have got to make the most of what we do have, it’s the only way to get through this whole episode 🤷‍♀️

This morning I have been doing a bit of hoovering and polishing and listening to tunes while I do it. My teenage years were the second half of the seventies and I have some music on the iPod from the ‘Jackie’ album so I was listening to some of that. They were good times, the youth club discos would consist of ABBA, Showaddywaddy, The Jackson Five, Paul Nicholas, The Rubettes, Hot Chocolate, Barry White, Status Quo, T. rex, Slade, Suzi Quattro, Lief Garret, Mud, The Osmonds, Bryan Ferry to name a few, a real eclectic mix totally representative of the seventies 😀 We wore platform shoes and Oxford bag trousers, layered skirts and cheesecloth tie up blouses, we used the phone box down the road to call friends or we went round and knocked on the door. We spent weekends staying at mates houses, going home on their school bus instead of our own and we listened to the Top 40 run down on a Sunday night on radio Luxembourg I think it was. Yep they were great times to grow up for sure 😀

I picked some Autumn raspberries, this is the first time I have been able to pick a decent amount and now they will produce this everyday so I shall be freezing some of them. I cut down on the amount of bushes I had by about 2/3 because I couldn’t keep up with picking lol maybe I should have just done a third 🙄 I stewed some cooking apples and made a batch lot of apple and raspberry crumbles for John, for me I froze some batches of stewed apple unsweetened which I can add other fruit to or cinnamon and maybe a sprinkle of truvia until I get used to no sugar at all lol. John has cut out his one sugar in tea and is now a no sugar tea drinker but I can’t quite let go.

Tuesday: Not a bad weather day, overcast but warm enough for only one layer 😀 Apart from the usual bits and pieces I have been chopping and cooking down tomatoes ready to purée. This will then go into the freezer as a base for soups, slightly different to the passata as it’s just tomatoes. I have begun to stress my tomato plants, I do this every year and all it means is less watering, much less, this then tricks the plant into thinking the season is over and will hopefully ripen what fruit is still on there. You still end up with some green tomatoes but not as many.

Went for a walk with Sam, Shelley, and the grandchildren this afternoon, we walked round the village which was lovely. Plenty of nice looking apples on some of the trees, might have to go and raid some, the ones on the roadside of course, my scrumping days are long gone 😂 In a village I lived in when I was about 10 there was an orchard over the road from where we lived (now a housing estate 😏) but we would often go over the wall for an apple or two. I am not sure who the land belonged too but they didn’t pick the apples so we helped ourselves lol. It’s funny is t it that people go blackberry picking but you don’t see people picking apples or nuts 🙄

Wednesday: Well it’s happened and the country is back on restrictions, gatherings of people are down from 30 to 6 and no more than two households indoors or outdoors, I think 🤔 Anyone who is surprised by it must have had their head in the sand, the groups that have been gathering in bars, certainly local ones, have been ridiculous and there seems to have been no policing of the rules either by the bar staff or the authorities. Most of the pubs and restaurants I know of have been sticking to the guidelines but the micro pubs and bars have had large gatherings outside on the pavement which is indeed difficult to police, hopefully these new restrictions will stop all that and still allow the pubs and restaurants to continue providing the excellent service that they have been.

Meanwhile I have been doing a few bits this morning, picking some apples I missed on the last look, some courgettes and a couple of pears. Watering the poly tunnels and picking the tomatoes, I have had a good haul of toms this year and there are still plenty on there, I just hope we get the weather to keep them going and ripen them, especially the indigo ones which are always slow to ripen I find. I watered all the plants in the new bed out the front and the ones in pots and tided up the front a bit as we are expecting the wood delivery today for the cladding.

I picked a few blackberries this afternoon from the hedgerow lining the back paddocks, there are more but I’m pretty sure the horses will start mugging me for them if I go into their paddock. Then wood delivery arrived and I called John to let him know as he was coming home early to do some of the work. That’s when we found out that our phone number (new one) comes up on the receiving phone under the old owner which was a business in Carterton under the name of fitfigures! Great so when I phone out if someone has caller ID they may not answer it, bloody unbelievable that this saga continues. On the funny side John quickly quipped ‘I’ll know it’s you darling’ 😂

I had a small accident, John was on the house phone in the kitchen calling the wood yard as the delivery was short, I was in the kitchen and going into the boot room. You make a very fleeting assessment of the path you are going to take without even realising it and that’s what I did, the pathway was clear and I walked toward the boot room door, at the same time John got up from the chair with the phone still in his hand up by his ear, finished the call, turned round, went to put his hand down and bang it caught me on the corner of my left eye, worse I had my glasses on which seemed to clout the corner of my eyebrow. It all happened in a split second. How the glasses hit the eyebrow I don’t know as I have tried to manoeuvre the glasses to see but they are rigid so it must have been a heck of a clout, I ended up on the floor as the stop was so abrupt and I reckon I will have a black eye tomorrow 👀

Oh a had a wander and looked at the bees in the tree, loads of bees going in and out so they are definitely thriving, no sign of honey oozing out yet though 😂

I made dinner, John worked on the front of the building, after dinner he carried on doing some more. Meanwhile I fed the dogs, why is this relevant I hear you ask, well John has been doing it but I kept telling him he was over feeding them. Every time I looked at their bowl it was FULL of biscuits, we feed them a decent dog feed which I researched thoroughly and they only need a third of what he was putting in there. Naturally being dogs they were eating it all but I could see that Mia in particular was putting on weight. Despite being asked (told) he still kept over feeding and so now I am in charge of doing it 😜

My eye hurts, I have a small, hurts to touch, lump on the eyebrow 🙄

Diesel still hasn’t appeared that’s a week now, not having much luck with cats at the moment. He has been here ten years mind you and been more and more absent lately so either found himself somewhere better or met his demise 😏

Thursday: A lovely morning, warm but mainly overcast, I had already decided as I was falling asleep last night that I would get out and tidy up the fruit cage. One of the support wires had snapped and there were quite a few weeds that needed pulling. So that’s exactly what I did, a very pleasant couple of hours of weeding here and there as well as the fruit cage. Then I watered some things because the ground is very dry again, luckily there is plenty of rain water in the storage tanks at the minute. I picked a few ears of corn, might have to have one for lunch 😀 I am going to try the microwave method, you leave the corn in the husk (un shucked is the term) and microwave it and apparently the husk is then easier to remove, we will see 🙄

The corn was delicious and very easy to do in the microwave, I was impressed with the ease in which the husk came off and the tenderness of the corn, winner 😀

Lunch, freshly picked corn on the cob, hard boiled egg with mayo and home grown salad 🥰 life is good 😀

My eye didn’t blacken thank goodness and it is less tender today but still a lump there and a little bit sore.

I did a walk around the perimeter of the paddocks just for a bit of exercise and picked up some walnuts. I can tell the squirrel is fearing on them already this year because there are peelings and bits of shell all under the tree, occasionally he must drop one that he has peeled and that’s a bonus for me as it means I don’t have to do that one 😂 Hulling walnuts is my least favourite job, there is no easy way to do it and I have tried multiple methods over the years. The main thing is to wear gloves otherwise you have brown fingers for weeks afterwards. As with the hazels this year, I am not planning on gathering all of them, just enough to keep me going, we have them growing so might as well use them in cakes etc.

Shelley and the children called late afternoon and we went up to the back paddock and picked a good haul of blackberries 😀

Friday 11th Sept: I put the date in today because of course it’s a day that we can never forget. Long before we bought the smallholding a terrible day unfolded in the USA and the whole world watched the events as they happened, not something I will forget in a hurry, I remember exactly where I was sat and how the room looked as I watched the news reports of the Twin Towers being attacked and the horror as I watched live when the towers began to fall 😢 RIP

I started the morning with that Friday feeling 🥰 and got on with some picking, cucumbers, sweetcorn, runner beans, beetroot, hazel nuts and walnuts today. You can tell what time of year it is without a calendar by the shift in what you are gathering in, early Autumn is a time I love.

I have a couple of marrow and I decided to make a marrow cake, they are the same as a courgette just bigger. I sort of followed a recipe, this is a healthier version of what I found, it’s still in the oven so hopefully will taste just as good as a version with fat and sugar in it.

Marrow cake: 300g Marrow, grated 2 eggs 150g whole wheat flour, 150g SR flour 100g coconut oil (melted if you are in a colder climate 😂) 1tsp baking powder, 1tsp cinnamon 1tsp vanilla extract 3tbls Maple syrup (or to taste) put it all in a bowl and mix thoroughly, bake at around 160c for approx 40mins or until you get a clean knife. I figured it would be about 12 slices from a loaf tin and so each slice is around 200 calories a slice which is not bad when you ‘NEED CAKE’ 😜 You could add nuts or chocolate chips or even add cocoa powder if you want a chocolate version but obviously that increases the calories. I think I will mix up a little icing sugar and lemon or lime juice to drizzle on top as an extra treat.

Saturday: Busy day today, we started off with the usual rounds and I did a few bits while John started on the second half of the front of the building. He pulled off the cladding and horror, the main timbers at the bottom were rotten through and through, I mean crumbling rotten and some of the timber that goes going under the building 😏 He kept saying ‘oh dear this doesn’t look good’ no shit Sherlock, I was starting to panic a little and to be honest felt like crying. I came indoors and had a word with myself then went back out, ‘right then, instead of being negative how about we look at it properly and see exactly what is what and then decide what we will do about it’. So John went underneath the building as there was space (just about) for him to get under and assess the situation fully. Turns out that only the first couple of foot of the timbers were gone and the rest was fine which meant we had something solid to attach new timbers to 😅 thank goodness for that. Martin arrived to help and as Shelley was working I looked after Florence and Josh while they got on with some work. Me and the kiddies went and picked raspberries, had a good look at the pumpkin patch, I think they were impressed with my efforts, which is good because that’s who I grow them for 🙄 we fed the guineas and the torts, went for a walk in the paddock to look at the bees nest, picked some walnuts, had some snacks and some chit chat and then it was time for them to go home. Martin came back in the afternoon and carried on helping John and now we have half the building sorted and the first layer of ply has gone on. John and I couldn’t decide (agree) on the colour to stain the cladding when it’s finished I wanted a brown shade, John wanted grey which I wasn’t keen on. He bought home a tin of the grey anyway (to my disgust 😂) but actually now he has done a sample I quite like it and think it will look great. There is a first time for everything and John was right, which is a first 😝

You can just see Johns foot as he scrabbles about underneath to assess the extent of the rotten timbers 😱

Sunday: Lovely sunny day, John did the animals and then got on with the front of the house. Luckily the rest of the timbers are not as bad as that lot yesterday and so he was able to get on well. I did some watering in the greenhouse and tunnels and then decided to clear one side of the small tunnel. There were a couple of tomato plants that have all but gone over a sorry looking parsley and a large cape gooseberry in the bed. I had decided previously to take out the gooseberry as it’s got too being, I don’t get many from it and it casts a lot of shade. Once cleared I had to top up the beds with some fresh compost and then I sowed some forcing carrots, I have no idea if I will get any but it doesn’t cost much to give it a go so I have nothing to lose. They are Amsterdam forcing carrots, quick maturing and so I might be lucky enough to get some for Christmas.

One filled the other waiting to be filled then sown with carrots for a Christmas crop hopefully. There is parsley growing right in the middle too lol.

It’s twilight and I went out to collect a delivery that just arrived, I can hear an owl in the hedgerow between us and the next field, twit twoo 🦉🥰

Friesland Farm

Rain, homegrown passata and a broken tractor 😕

Posted on August 31, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 24th August: Rattling through the weeks, I think like most people I will be glad to see the back of 2020, while not wanting to wish my life away it’s been a tough year by anyone’s standards 😜

It’s just gone 2pm and I am all plummed out I reckon, I spent the first part of the morning doing some cleaning whilst listening to some tunes, haven’t done that for ages so it was good to have the music blasting out 😜 After that it was plums again 🙄 I have just processed another 4kgs, 2 of them as more jam and the other two for the freezer, there are plenty more on the trees but seriously I think I have enough in reserve 😂 come this time next year if there are no plums I may regret that decision but it’s one I will have to live with. What is left on the trees will keep the birds going hopefully, that’s if the wasps haven’t had them all by then.

The weather is changeable, I went out to hang the washing, the minute I walked away it started to spit then got a bit worse, I got it all back in again and it stopped, it was like a bloody comedy sketch! The sun is out now and I’m tempted to try again but we are running out of good drying time and you never know at the minute if it will stay dry long enough. Update: it didn’t and now it’s in the tumble dryer which I try not to use very often but needs must.

John is working today but then has the next three day’s off, I would be chuffed but the forecast is dreadful so I can’t see us getting much done on that front border which was the plan.

I managed to get a photo of the hens and their chicks this morning, it’s not a great one but it is cheery 🥰

Popped round to see Mum and Ken for a cuppa before dinner then afterwards we did a little bit on the front border. It’s quite hard going because it was mostly shingle and hardcore lol, taking a while to get it up together before planting up.

The nights are drawing in, it’s getting dark at 8.30pm 😏 Winters coming lol.

Tuesday: It rained pretty heavily during the night and was still raining this morning, not a good start to Johns days off to do the border 😏 We got the animals done and a few other random jobs and then John went out to do a bit out front. Luckily by this time it’s only fine mist rain so he was able to get on a little, not sure how long for as the forecast is terrible today, rain and high winds again, I definitely think Autumn is upon us already 😕 Meanwhile indoors 😜 I made some fresh bread and got some vegetable soup on the go, all from the garden so it’s good and wholesome, free of any nasties. Veg soup is a great way of getting plenty of goodness, in this pan there is potato, onion, garlic, chard stalks, courgette, turnips, lovage and sage, you cant really go wrong putting whatever you have in the pan as long as there is a selection 😀

The weather didn’t get any better, it ranged from awful to worse, storm Francis you can do one it’s supposed to be late summer 🙄 As the weather was not favourable I spent some of the day sorting through Dads stuff and seeing who wants what. Bits and pieces he had collected or been given, nothing of great value but all things typical of him, harmonicas, brass ornaments, penknives, he always had a penknife and they had been sharpened away over the years but that’s what’s makes them special. I kept a couple of pruning knives that he used and in the garden 😀

I hope the weather is nicer tomorrow 🙄 We have BT coming to supposedly reconnecting us, I won’t hold my breath 😂 and I have a bloods appointment in the morning.

Wednesday: So today was the day for the big BT cock up correction, I am pleased to report we now have a landline again albeit a new number for the time being, we also have full internet access once more instead of a ‘here you are this will keep you off our backs’ mini hub which incidentally doesn’t do anything ‘wired’ only wireless 🙄 go figure. Anyhooo as I said we are now able to function fully though it did take the engineer from 8am through to 3pm to get it sorted, again, go figure, I don’t understand how it can be that hard but then again I’m not qualified in that industry 😜

Meanwhile John and I have been getting on with the front border, I ordered a good few tonnes of topsoil and we are almost ready to put it down. I was pleased that we have been able to progress without using weedkiller which was a task in itself and it’s basically compacted earth and shingle. We have raked and weeded the perennial weeds and have now put down a layer of cardboard which will block out the light from remaining weeds, that with a deep layer on top should do the job. I can’t wait to start planting it up, I think I have decided on just the flowering shrubs and then cast seed from things like love in a mist, verbena, red flax and whatever else I fancy. My biggest worry is keeping the hens off it.

Thursday: It’s 1pm and started raining about 20 minutes ago, up to then it had been dry and overcast and we had been busy. After the morning rounds John got on with the front border, we have a few tonnes of topsoil coming but he has been using the tractor to put manure in the bottom of the bed and moving a lot of stones as the ground dips away quite a bit at one end so it needs making up. Meanwhile this morning I got Biscuit the Shetland in from the main paddocks and into a smaller one. She has done really well all summer and not had any laminitis but with all this rain the grass is flushing and that won’t do her any good so for the time being she is confined. I took a walk around the paddock edges and ate a few blackberries as I went, I will endeavour to get out there and pick some as soon as I have time. I picked a few things this morning, runner beans and lots of tomatoes. The runner beans have not done so well this year I think the weather has been all wrong for them. There are beans but they were late and instead of young, long beans there are shorter fatter beans which are normally what you would get at the end of the season. They will still get used though, I chopped some of them along with a few cauliflower heads I picked (these are quite small too this year) and some carrots, these will be open froze ready to bag up. The cauliflower stalks don’t get wasted as I chopped them up along with patty pan, turnip, runner beans and carrots for a soup bag mix. I also picked a punnet of soft fruit, raspberries, the last few blueberries and plenty of hybrid blackberries. At the moment I have bread on the go and have just taken some roasted, tomatoes, garlic, onion, basil and oregano out of the oven, I will wait for it to cool and then put it through the mouli for passata, it smells amazing 😀

The passata tastes seriously good I’m really pleased with it, its the river cottage method but tweek it however you want with whatever you have 😀

Rain stopped play for the rest of the afternoon really, the downpours were heavy and thundery and more of the same tomorrow I think 😕

Friday: A soggy morning and more rain forecast for today 🙄 John did the animals and went off to work for the day and I did some bits and pieces around the place. I got the milk in and then realised that I hadn’t put the dustbin out and the cart was going past 😏 I put it out anyway in the hopes that they would stop on the way back, they did 😀 Some people complain about their binmen but I always find ours accommodating, I went back down the drive to thank them. Then I burnt some paper rubbish, when I eventually found something to light it with that is, a one time I always had a handy lighter but not these days, I need one of those everlasting matches I think. I checked on the horses, they were fine and then over to the orchard pen to check things there. I found a dead chick, it had got stuck behind the hut and died 😢 but the other five are fine, there are always ways animals find to get themselves killed no matter how careful you are. You wouldn’t believe some of the predicaments we have found animals in over the years even in a seemingly innocuous paddock. Sheep are the worst as they move forward, a dog or cat will move backwards to try and untangle itself but sheep go forward often making the situation worse. We had one once wedged under the Cambridge roller, it has a triangle of iron angle bars to hitch it up with. The front end lays on the ground when not in use and why the sheep decided to get under it I don’t know, how it managed to get under it I don’t know either but luckily you can just pick it up and release the sheep which is what we did. That was an easy one, we have had one firmly stuck underneath the hen coop and one that had got its head stuck in the stock fencing (which is fairly common) they were much harder to release when you are doing your best not to hurt them in any way. We had a horse that managed to roll and find the only piece of old barbed wire in the field (not our field) and slash open his face, cats stuck down gaps we didn’t even know were there and hens wedged behind drainpipe, animals get themselves into all kinds of scrapes from time to time.

I hoovered the boot room and the kitchen and did a bit of putting away and then went into the garden to see what could be done out there, it’s very soggy so I decided not much! We are still waiting for the delivery of topsoil so I can’t do that either, I will have to find something to do indoors I think, coffee break first though 😜

I have been thinking a lot about the weather patterns, hard not too when they are all over the place. A news item this week was about the shortage of wheat due to the conditions and so the knock on effect on bread and cakes etc and how farmers are going to have to look at their growing practices. The same can be said for veg growers, I have been saying for a few years now about how the seasons seem to be shifting, very warm spring, wet summer, early autumn, that has certainly been the case for the last two years. I need to work out how to change the way I garden to fit in with the weather changes. I am thinking that making more of under cover growing helps to stabilise the conditions as they can be controlled (to an extent, obviously I can’t control the sun) I can control the amount of water and I can protect crops from these high winds which are becoming more frequent in summer, I may need another tunnel 😜 The forest garden is coming on but obviously it’s a slow process, the trees and shrubs I planted have not got to a size yet where they are beneficial to the plants around them although the roots will be helping to stabilise the ground, it’s looking more like a jungle than a forest at the minute out there.

The topsoil arrived, it’s pissing down with rain I’m not moving it in this 🤪 I have spent the morning doing various little jobs that have needed doing, it’s still raining, crap day.

John came home and got the tractor out, the rain was intermittent with a bit of thunder thrown in for good measure. He moved the fist bucket load of soil onto the bed, went to lift the second load and disaster, a tractor malfunction 🙄 worse than that there was now hydraulic fluid pouring onto the top soil 🤪 all the efforts we have gone to making sure that we are doing everything the eco friendly way and bam contaminated soil 😡 luckily the tractor was stationary and that bit (about a wheelbarrow full) can be thrown into the skip but not what you want on a Friday afternoon 😟 I called Ken, he came and had a look and the ram (arm thingy on the bucket) had broken so they undid it and John went off to the local hydraulic place to see what they could do. They will have a look at it on Tuesday (I forgot it’s a bank holiday) and let us know how much it will cost 😏 Meanwhile it’s shifting 8 tonne of top soil by hand this weekend 😭 and it’s still raining on and off, some days are just sent to try us, today is one of those days 😂 Oh yes and I had a phone call to say stop the meds the white cell count is down again 😕 back to weekly blood tests, I wish this damn disease would stabilise or at least the meds would stabilise it 🙄 Update: Just had another phone call from the doc and now I don’t have to stop them, it seems rheumatology have a lower threshold count than the standard one 🤷‍♀️ so keep taking them and bloods again next week. I don’t actually mind because as always when my count is low, I feel much better, maybe that’s my level, who knows as it was never tested before I had the disease!

Saturday: I spent today looking after Mia, Lucie and George while Sam and Luke went off to look for a new car that can accommodate three car seats, a double pushchair and a dog easily lol. Charlie was with me for most of the day and I have no idea how Sam does it on her own 😂 We went on a walk, just a short one Charlie said, 3k later and Mia was crying, Lucie was crying but we were nearly home again. To be fair Mia did very well and we had a lovely time most of the way round. We picked blackberries (which she ate later with cheese for lunch) and we stood ‘at the top of the world’ well it must seem like it to a four year old when you can see for miles around 😀 We stood at a five bar gate and saw a ‘magic wood’ all these things you have to tell toddlers just to keep them going lol. I didn’t get back until 4pm by which time John had filled the front border with topsoil and done the birds and eggs.

Sunday: Today seems to have shot past probably because we had a lie in until 7.30. Once we had done the rounds we went off out to get some breakfast (another reason why time seems to be flying past) the morning journey was beautiful, the sun was shinning and coming back along the top road you could see right across the shire, there is nothing better 🥰 Once back we had to get on, John went off to get a bit of shopping, I told you I was sending him in future 🤣 and I did some picking. Every last thing sold in the egg shed yesterday and so I needed to replenish it, tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes, marrow, chillies, beetroot, runner beans and French beans all picked and put out for sale. I did pick some blackberries and raspberries for us that are now in the fridge. I picked a few more eating apples and watered the tunnels and the greenhouse. It has been an odd year for growing veg here, the courgettes that normally appear so fast you can’t keep up have been sparse, the patty pan never materialised at all, the French beans seem to have given up already and the runner beans just went into seed setting mode, I didn’t have a very big crop of those at all this year. I did pick another batch of rhubarb though, it really struggled earlier in the year but has now produced some new tender stems, it’s all arse about face. Everything seems to indicate Autumn already and it’s only the end of August 🤷‍♀️ I still have a few things coming on, butternut squash, pumpkins and sweetcorn but none of it really doing as well as previous years, I can’t say I blame them the weather has meant they have no idea what season it is 😏 John then topped the front paddock, the grass has got longer than we would have liked but with all that rain and not being able to get it cut it’s not surprising.

Friesland Farm

Changeable weather, plenty of produce, especially plums 😂

Posted on August 17, 2020August 23, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 17th August 2020: Up and about this morning get some veg picked, I think I need a bigger basket 😂 loads of tomatoes this morning and the conference pears were ready to pick. After sorting it all out, putting some out for sale, finding homes for the rest of it, I got started on the front area we are creating the border in. There were bramble bushes growing which needed digging out and then shredding any material from the existing bush that I cut back yesterday. I had a go at a few of the perennial weeds as well but there is still plenty more to do. That took me up to about 11.30, that’s when I heard the first crack of thunder and felt the first spots of rain. Honestly we seem to dive from one extreme to another as far as the weather is concerned, I’m pretty sure it ought to be a little more constant than this 😏 A customer arrived to collect the last of this batch of hens, the next batch is nearly all sold already and they are not due in until October 🙄 The rain got heavier but that’s fine as I have a bit of tidying to do indoors, I haven’t done any all weekend and things get plonked down all over the place, I have looked at the forecast for the rest of the day and it’s a washout so might as well stay in.

Although staying in was my plan it didn’t actually carrying on raining and so all I did indoors was the washing up, a quick phone call to Sue and then outside again. I wanted to dig up the rest of the carrots because the rain we are forecast all week will not do them any favours so might as well get them up and into the freezer. I found a marrow that had escaped my eye as they often do, it’s not too big but big enough, some of the smaller courgettes had rotted at the ends so I cut those off and threw them to the chickens and I picked a few berries from the fruit cage and some cape gooseberries from the tunnels. The clouds were intermittent and you know what that means for me, diving in an out of shade areas lol, it’s pretty strong when it makes an appearance 🙄

This mornings haul, under the tomatoes and pears there is a good layer of beans as well 😀

Someone gave me some packets of chilli seeds back in spring, I am not a fan of spicy food as it causes my acid reflux to play up but I grew them anyway and now I have loads of little Thai chillies lol. Not sure what I am going to do with them apart from put them out for sale. It’s the first time I have successfully grown chillies though, must have been the high temps we had back in spring and a decent greenhouse, I might try growing some with less heat next year.

I am running out of available space in the kitchen, there are tomatoes and plums everywhere 😂 I think a good amount of tomatoes will be ripe enough to pick again tomorrow as well, I really need to do something with them.

Tuesday: I decided to make today an ordinary day, that is nothing out on the farm or in the garden except the essentials, a day pottering around indoors, a bit of cleaning, washing, tidying away and anything else I fancy doing. I started off with good intentions and got the boot room hoovered and tided and a few bits in the kitchen, then got side tracked by chatting with customers. One couple I was chatting to come once a year when they are down in their caravan on holiday, they always come and get their breakfast eggs here which is lovely 😀 A bit more hoovering and put the washing on the line though I’m not sure how long it will be out there before it rains 🙄 I am not picking anything today as I have plenty still to sort out before I get more in, I have ordered a food mill/purée maker so that I can purée the tomatoes etc for passata. I made some last year if you remember and I experimented with one jar in the fridge and one in the cupboard to see how they did, well they are still both fine so that’s a year they have kept easily, really ought to use them up lol.

Wednesday: On reflection I should have done some outside things yesterday! It’s 7.30am it’s already raining and it’s set in for the day according to the forecasters 🙄 There are plums on the trees still to pick and there are seeds to collect, none of this couldn’t wait until the next dry day except that there are strong winds forecast after that, the plums will all be on the floor 😦 Hopefully somewhere in between our demented weather I will get an hour or two to do these jobs. They say make hay while the sun shines and I should have heeded the old proverb 😏 Having said that there is only so much you want to be doing or you would be totally submerged in the processes of self sufficiency, maybe you should be, I don’t know. What I do know is that to be totally self sufficient in food you would have to work from dawn to dusk at this time of year. We are ss in fruit/veg/nuts/eggs and that keeps me busy enough imagine if we had a house cow as well, I’m not sure there are enough hours in the day even if I really would love one. Imagine on top of those two you grew your own grain as well and reared meat in what ever form you decided, that’s a very busy, full on life, I salute anyone that manages all of those!

I could bake today, I always used to say, rainy days are baking days but to be honest we are trying to eat healthier and cakes and pies don’t fall into the healthy category 😂

I was delighted to see The Guardian report that the interest in allotments soared during the pandemic, our fragile food security was exposed during those early days and people recognised the need to have home grown food (and by that I also mean UK grown) instead of relying on imports. My aim is always to encourage people to have a go at growing your own even if you just start with a tomato bush and some herbs, it’s something and you never know, you might get hooked 😀 There are so many gardens in our wonderful country, town gardens, country gardens even some city gardens and the potential to grow food is massively overlooked. Even small spaces have potential with the idea of vertical gardening, get creative, you don’t need masses of ground area and the taste is amazing.

In my blog I try to keep it simple and non reactive (on the whole anyway) because it’s a diary blog after all but there are a lot of topics that I research or follow in much more depth than I write about. One of those is the fragility of how we live, not just the climate but our fundamental way of life, which is pretty fragile as shown by the pandemic. That was a disease and on the scale it’s not a bad one either, of course to those affected it is catastrophic but at least it wasn’t airbourne, can you imagine how cataclysmic that would have been and who’s to say that won’t happen sometime in the future with a different disease. Now you are beginning to see why I keep it quite neutral aren’t you 😂 The government stepped in and kept the country ticking over by ploughing money into the system because to them that’s the most important thing and even I was grateful for that. Now imagine that airbourne disease and how it is affecting everyone, people are dying by the tens of thousands and the systems that we rely on can no longer function, what are we going to do? Anything is possible as we have just witnessed, how well are we equipped to manage?, on the whole, we are not and that is the scary part. Electricity & Water, outside of the basic food system, are the two biggies to focus on, at the moment they are pumped to our properties with uninterrupted supply, on the whole. We don’t think about it until the supply stops for whatever reason, but if you really think about it you will begin to realise just how much we rely on it, electric especially. If the power plants closed, because there was no one to run them, EVERYTHING shuts down even your water supply 🙄 If you want to learn more then there are plenty of pod casts out there, Permaculture for the future is a good one to listen too, and far from giving you nightmares I think the knowledge builds strength within you to cope with whatever life throws at you, I hope so anyway.

Does anyone have the address for ‘offmet ‘ I want to write a complaint about the weather 😜 Seriously, this time last week we were sweating our nuts off, today it’s umbrellas and rain coats all day and then we have high winds coming, nothing resembling a ‘normal’ late summers day in sight 😒 I think I need to stop watching the forecast and just be surprised by whatever it is wet get thrown as us, it’s just depressing otherwise.

Thursday: A nice morning so far, not raining and not too hot. The first job on my list was to pick plums, with the high winds forecast later today and tomorrow, most of the weekend in fact, the plums would be all on the floor pretty quickly so needed picking pdq. I now have many kgs of plums to sort and process 😂 I also picked a few other bits, the tomatoes are coming in thick and fast, I picked beans of various variety’s and of course courgettes, marrows and cucumbers. This is where we move from the ‘grow your own’ into the self sufficient realm, definitely self sufficient in fruit and veg that’s for sure and so many things can be made from the basics that we won’t go short for the next few seasons 😀

A snapshot of some of the produce this year 😀

There is still plenty to harvest, the sweet corn I checked today but that’s not ready just yet, butternut squash still growing nicely, plenty of turnips, beetroot, swede and leeks still in the ground, cauliflowers coming on, there are also Oca in the ground that won’t be harvested until after the from and the yacon, I have no idea when to harvest that but I’m sure it will become evident. There are chillies continuing to grow and ripen along with the cues and toms, next will be nuts and blackberries 😀 busy times ahead!

It’s 1.30pm and I am having a sit down, mainly to stretch my back out lol, I have spent the whole morning processing. It’s surprising how much time it all takes but I now have 8 jars of plum jam, and for the freezer two containers of tomato purée, two bags of plums and a tray of French beans, plus two plum breads in the oven. Seriously, that has taken me about 3 hours and there are still loads of plums left to do something with 🙄 Hopefully the plum bread will turn out ok, the recipe was a bit finicky but I just threw it all in a gave it a stir so we will see 😜

Plum bread was delish 😋 After a rest I did more plums then all the washing up, got some bread on the go, sorted the eggs, got the dinner, knackered now, over and out for today, writing anyway, still got to water the tunnels later!

I did spend a pleasant half an hour gathering some seeds from marigolds, cornflowers, love in a mist, poppies and morning glory. I intend to cast theses next spring, along with a few others that have not set seed yet, in a part of the veg garden that I struggle to get round to. Hopefully they will cover it and provide some lovely colour and nectar and save me weeding 😀

Friday: Oh my word they were not wrong about the wind, some of the gusts are savage 🙄 First job was to get the egg shed sorted with stuff for sale as Fridays are proving to be pretty busy at the minute. There was a lady at the gate who’s words were ‘I have a strange request’ that’s fine I said, you wouldn’t believe some of the requests I get 🤣 Turned out not to be that strange, not in my experience anyhow, she was after fertile eggs to incubate, all pretty normal so far 🙄 The embryo would not reach full gestation though as they would be frozen and used to help develop a new scanning system for animals, a cross between an x-ray and a scan, still in 2D but more detailed, I think I got the gist of it. We have fertile quail eggs and duck eggs but not many chicken eggs as our layer flock don’t run with a cockerel I explained. I also explained that what fertile eggs we do have are currently being sat on by broody hens, we went to have a look to see how many they were sat on and guess what, chicks 🐣 they had hatched! She went away with quail and duck eggs and my e-mail and she is going to send me the results of any scans that they get, exciting stuff, she asked how much she owed and I replied, it’s for science, they are free 😀 got to help science along as you never know when you are going to need it yourself.

I had Florence and Josh for a couple of hours this morning while Shelley was busy. She runs an eyebrow/eyelash business from home and has only just been able to start up again after the lockdown and so customers are queuing up. It’s funny really as when she left school she qualified as a beauty therapist but ended up in hotel management for years. It would always be something she could fall back on when she needed to and so once she had Josh and Flo she started up again so that she could work from home, it proved to be a great back up plan 😀

I asked Shelley to pick me up some brandy as she was popping to the shops before coming back here, I think I am going to make some plum brandy, might as well make good use of these plums. It might be a very nice warming, winter tipple if I add some cinnamon as well 🥃 I used the Rumtopf vessel I have as that’s as good as anything, gradually getting through the plums 😋

Plums, Brandy, Sugar, Cinamon, Orange zest, stir and leave for a few months until ready then strain and bottle or drink up 😀

After they went home I went outside to do a bit of weeding and feed the guineas some weeds but although the weather itself is ok the buffeting from the wind is as always pretty exhausting. When Shelley came back to pick the children up she said it’s not that noticeable in town, we definitely notice the weather extremes here because it’s fairly exposed.

I called John to tell him we will need some chick crumb and now I have to work out where they will go, the last mum and babies I moved out because of the holes in the ground if you remember, I don’t want them falling down crevices, not sure where I am going to move them too, I will need to have a good think about it.

I fed the chicks and there are five little yellow fluffy bundles in there 😀

We decided to go shopping, we didn’t need much but had run out of washing up liquid and cheese so off we went. Well I wish I hadn’t bothered, it was hammering down when we left and all the way there, got a soaking getting into the shop to start off with, then of course my glasses steamed up. The whole glasses and mask thing is a pain in the arse, I can’t see the labels clearly without them, they don’t sit on my head (they slip off) and no matter how I adjust the mask they constantly steam up. We were just about done and I remembered that I had forgotten something but I couldn’t think what it was and the bloody music they pipe over the whole place wasn’t helping with my concentration levels. I ended up being so irritated I decided I’m not going again, I will send John with a list and do without whatever I forget to put on it. I know I’m a grumpy cow lol.

Saturday: The weather is a bit on and off today. After doing the animals John got the tractor out to dig a trench for the new border, this will have a low fence to hold the soil in and keep the shingle separate. It was sunny and we were out there discussing the outline when out of nowhere it starting raining, 1st soaking. He got on with that while I went and did some picking, again it was sunny when all of a sudden it started raining, I dived into the poly tunnel before I got a second soaking, by now John was on the tractor digging and he got a soaking lol. No doubt that is how the day will carry on by the looks of things.

We had a busy morning, John on the new border and me sorting out the newly hatched chicks (6) and their Mums. I have moved them into Teds pen, there is a little hut in there and the ground is not full of potential pitfalls for small chicks. Both the mummy hens and the cockerel have been moved along with the chicks. That means Ted will have a new place to sleep tonight and that might be difficult encouraging him to change. I cleaned out Teds pen, sorted out food and water then caught up one hen dusted her for mites, moved her, moved the chicks, then the other hen, dusting her as well, then finally the cockerel giving him a dusting too. Then cleaned out then pen where they had hatched and burnt the bedding, where the hens had been sitting tight and the weather has been hot there were quite a lot of red mite in there, burning gets rid of a vast majority of them. I then used the DE to dust the hatching area and I will leave it a while before cleaning it out completely and giving it a wash down with some jeyes fluid. The pen was never intended for chickens (originally it was for the rabbits) so it’s a bit awkward to clean out. We never intended to have hatchlings, typical, if you had wanted them it wouldn’t have happened and now we have eight including the two that hatched a few weeks back!

While we were both busy patch started yapping incessantly, I could hear John telling him to be quiet but I also knew that the type of yap he was doing meant he was telling us something. Not all lassie like lol, there was no one stuck down a well or anything like that and usually it’s if the horse has got out. I went to investigate and found a large hedgehog, I’m guessing the dogs had disturbed from wherever it was sleeping. I watched it and it was trying to get along the fence line of my garden so I opened the gate and in it went, I turned round to see where it was heading and it was gone, they really moved fast when they want to. I said to John we need to make little hedgehog tunnels so they can move between fenced areas more easily.

Sunday: Another busy morning, the weather has been favourable, for me at least 😜 John got on with the front bed and I did a bit of cutting back in the garden and then some potting on of a few pots of things as well as some pricking out of lupins and huechera seedlings that have grown nicely. After that I went to help John in the front, digging out weeds etc. We are hoping to do the bed without weedkiller which is a pretty big task as it’s very weedy and not just easy to pull weeds either but some real tough rooted ones. I think I have settled on putting flowering shrubs in there and intersperse with some late flowering plants, then scatter some annual seeds for a wispy look. I also have some bulbs which can go for spring interest, hopefully hat will cover all the seasons and be changing all the time. Most of the shrubs I already have growing in pots and once they are in the ground they should tare off pretty quickly provided we can get them in fairly soon.

I took some photos of the flower bed in the veg garden as a few smaller plants have got lost in with the giants, there is a lovely little salmon coloured dahlia that can hardly be seen as it’s behind a much bigger yellow one, all things to consider for rearranging in autumn. The photos are to remind me once the plants have died down, it’s all very well having an idea of what height they grow to but seeing them gives you a much better idea of where to place things.

All looks a bit of a mess as I did just shove it all in this year but come autumn I will re arrange it all a little better 😀

Friesland Farm

Hot, hot, hot, wet, wet, wet & work, work, work 🥵 ☔️ 🏋🏻‍♀️

Posted on August 17, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 10th August: Monday again, it comes round with prompt regularity 🤪 I set the alarm for an early morning as it’s been so hot and I really need to get a few jobs done. I did hit the snooze button three times before I finally got up at 5.30am. The air was deliciously cool outside so I know I made the right decision. A quick breakfast and then straight out into the garden, I spend such an amount of time picking and processing at the moment that little time is left for maintenance aka weeding 😀 I cleared out plants from the greenhouse that were not doing well or that I hadn’t had time to pot on, mostly veg plants and I don’t really need any more veg than I have now. Then onto the weeding, the bean bed first, I got sidetracked on the way to the compost heap and ended up weeding random areas. I really wanted to have a methodical approach so that the results were obvious but it dose t really matter as long as it gets done. I spent an hour and a half at that before onto some picking, a small batch of petit poi, some runner beans, mange-tout and courgettes. I spent a good couple of hours last night watering so I didn’t have to do that this morning. Processing next so back into the kitchen and pod the peas, chop the beans, put the courgettes and some cucumbers out for sale, de stone some Victoria and greengage plums for the freezer and peel, chop and cook down some cooking apples I had been given. Once that was done I took the Apple peelings up to the geese and the other peelings etc went onto the compost heap, nothing gets wasted round here, if the animals don’t it eat it goes back into the soil system 😀

I need to have a good think about the veg garden, I feel it’s too big for me to manage (or at least to keep in good order) I thought about cutting out one whole bed and laying more lawn but that would mean moving the asparagus and it’s only halfway through it’s productive life so maybe not. I’m sure I will come up with some idea eventually 🙄 At this time of year I always think ‘what a mess’ but come Autumn when everything is spent or cut back ready for Winter it dose t seem so bad, maybe it’s an attitude adjustment I need 😜

We have point of lay hens arriving today, as with previous batches since lockdown, these are all sold before they even arrive and most of them will not be on the premises for more than a few hours. In more normal times we buy a batch of forty in at the beginning of summer and gradually sell them on, this summer we have sold 180 in various sized batches and the turnaround times have broken all records here!

I haven’t mentioned the pandemic for a couple of weeks, that’s because most things feel fairly normal or at least the new normal. It’s amazing how quickly we can change and adapt, I am avoiding the shops as much as is possible and everything else just seems like the usual thing to do. If we meet up with family it’s mostly outside because the weather is favourable, if we go out to eat, it’s a little bit different but everyone quickly got the hang of it and now it feels normal, yep I’d say we are definitely comfortable with the new normal lol. The cases are rising again slowly but then with more people moving around that is obviously going to happen, it’s just something we will have to get used to living with unless they find a vaccine.

I cleaned out the fridge, soggy celery, buttermilk I forgot was in there, a dribble of cream in the bottom of the carton. There is now room to put fruit in there because the fruit flies around the fruit bowl are doing my head in. I know they are only around for a short while but the little wafts of them every time you pick up a banana is annoying lol.

The chickens arrived and that meant an evening of people arriving to collect which in the blazing sun was hot work, for John anyway, I stayed in the shade 🤪

Tuesday: Is it only Tuesday lol. I have no idea what the temps are out there at the moment (9.45am) but I am already sweating. Up and at it, not quite so early this morning, I suspect like most people last night, I didn’t get a lot of sleep as it was so warm. As I said it’s 9.45 and I have already first proved the bread I made, it’s now on its second prove, I have sorted dinner for this evening and it’s in the slow cooker, made a plum sponge and cooked that in the oven so we can just reheat it later, put a wash load on and hung it out to dry, gone round and made sure all the animals have plenty of water, fed the torts and the Guineas some high water content bits such as cucumber and apples and slung the hoover round. I am just waiting for the bread to finish proving so I can put it in the oven for 25 minutes and then I don’t need to turn the oven on later when it gets very hot 🥵. I am on my third glass of water, got to keep hydrated especially as I seemed to have picked up a summer cold, fabulous, nothing more sinister than that as far as I can tell 😬 it’s all nasal and sinus. The plan for the rest of the day is to stay as cool as possible indoors. I do have jam to make but I am not even going to attempt that today 😋

The phone line saga: lol you thought it had gone away didn’t you, nope, we were expecting to be connected this Friday but I’ve just had a text to say it’s delayed until 26th August, are you f**king kidding me 🤬🤬 angry does not even come close to how I am feeling now and I have just emailed them to tell them. Bloody joke, if that’s what you get for being a loyal customer of thirty years plus you can shove it where the sun don’t shine!!!!! I went onto the BT Facebook page and I despair at ever getting the correct connection judging by the complaints on there 😏 at least I have the mini hub with unlimited data at their expense I suppose 😋 although we can’t connect the tv or Alexa buy hey!

The thermometer is registering 26c in the kitchen that’s with the windows closed and the blinds shut 🙄 outside a thermometer that is just outside the back door but under a sun umberella says 35c 🥵 We officially have tropical weather, apparently that is when the temps remain above 20c overnight for five days in row or something like that, most peculiar to us Brits no wonder we can’t cope, this time next month we will be moaning because it’s freezing 😂

We had our dinner early as we were both hungry, glad I made the slow cook decision. I had cooked the plum sponge earlier too so just needed to reheat in the microwave, do we have any ice cream left? I asked John, as he has been eating it all week. Yes there are two tubs, one nearly empty and a new one, have you started the new one? I asked, there was a look of horror on his face and he said, NO! that’s more than my life is worth 🤣🤣 37 years of training and it’s starting to pay off finally 😜

Wednesday: Well that was a hot night as far as the air temps go anyway 😜 Apparently there was an amazing silent lightning storm but it seems we were looking out of the wrong window, we have windows on the East and south side not the North and on the west side we would have to go out past the trees to get a view. The North was where it was all happening it would seem 🙄

Again the temps are set to climb and climb 🥵 Most of the birds freely roam around the place and so can find their own shade. The new arrivals that are waiting to go to new homes however are in a pen and most of the day there is shade but late afternoon and evening there is none so I have made a temporary shade shelter for them. Chickens are descendants of jungle fowl and so while they are used to heat, it’s shaded heat not blaring sunshine ☀️

I picked some tomatoes this morning and some cape gooseberries, you may be familiar with these as a ‘flourish’ on top of your dessert but they can be grown in good quantities even in the UK under cover. I say under cover as I haven’t tried them outside, I guess in a year like this they would be successful but they have a long growing season and I’m not sure if they would ripen in a ‘normal’ year. They can of course be eaten as they are or they apparently make good jam 😀

My goodness that got hot today lol, 37c was recorded in the south, we are south east by definition but right on the border of south west, so any way you look at it we are south 😜 Shelley, Sam and the children came over to sit under the shade of the trees in the garden. Who knew you could have so much fun with two washing up bowls of water and a sprinkler 😀 The twins had a mighty time splashing themselves and everyone else and thought it was incredibly funny 😂 Needless to say I did not do anything else except sit in the garden, keep hydrated and trying to keep cool. By mid afternoon it was too hot to stay out any longer, the girls went home and John arrived home and evening indoors was like a sauna, hot and muggy.

The weather finally broke with thunder, lightening and rain, it was so nice we actually went out and stood in it lol, the only time I am happy to be rained on 😕 It was still uncomfortably hot indoors though so I kept going outside to cool off!

Thursday: It’s cooler this morning but I don’t think it’s going to stay cool as the day goes on. I have no idea how people in hot countries deal with this on a daily basis 🥵 and working in it, well that’s unfathomable. I guess developed countries have air con, not many places have it in the UK and generally speaking we don’t need it 😂 I have observed there are two types in this country, those who like it hot, the hotter, the better and then those who don’t, there don’t seem to be many inbetween. There are still thunderstorm warnings for the next two days and some places have had torrential downpours, it’s all very tropical at the moment. The one thing I am glad of is that I don’t need to water the garden 😀

I picked a few courgettes and then sorted out veg and fruit I had already picked before it got hot, I needed to process it all before it spoilt. I made some more Victoria Plum jam, always useful for giving and then plenty for the winter stores. The next lot of plums are looking ready and I haven’t finished picking the Victoria’s yet 😬 it’s been such an abundant year we will be sick of plums by spring lol.

I really need to get back a healthy eating regime, like large percentage of the population during lockdown my habits have slid down a slippery slope 😏 I am trying to re educate myself, I don’t really need to do that, I know what I should and shouldn’t be eating 😂 Two of the biggest problems I have is tiredness, when I cant be arsed to sort something good out and so reach for the easy things which are usually carb heavy 🙄 and the fact that I grow such a lot of my own. You wouldn’t think this was a problem would you but even though I grow a lot the selection is limited (to my mind at least) and I won’t buy anything lol. Things are not always ready at the same time, so a chopped salad of tomatoes and cucumber would look great with sweetcorn but it isn’t ripe yet, do you get where I’m coming from, and sprinkled with nuts, that are also not ready yet, now you are getting the picture 😜 I don’t do myself any favours by being such a purist I know! The other problem is that things come in such gluts they need to be frozen and that’s not much good when you want fresh stuff. I just need to get my head around it a bit I think. As a result of moving in that direction I have some Greek yoghurt on the go, freshly frozen berries and yoghurt make a great breakfast or pudding 😀

I took a photo of a plant I have grown, I grew it because the seeds came in a multipack with morning glory which I wanted to grow for the bees. The other seeds in there were something called Spanish Flag, Ipomoea lobata, I have never grown it or even seen it before but it has turned out to be one of my most favourite little flowers 😀 It is a climber and not a very strong or dominant one, it’s rather delicate, but it is exquisite especially when the sun is shinning on it. It reminds me of festival flags and its one of those that makes me smile when I walk past it.

Friday: I have just done a good mornings work, the weather is soo much cooler and we had heavy rain in the night but it’s not raining now. I cleaned out the quail and then the guineas, then spent ages looking for the animal nail clippers as one of the quail has grown a long bendy nail so it need soy come off. I couldn’t find them anywhere and so I have had to order a new pair and we all know what will happen once they arrive don’t we 🙄 the other pair will miraculously turn up somewhere unexpected 😂 After doing that it was into the jungle, that’s what I have been calling the poly tunnels for the last couple of weeks. The foliage from tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and cape gooseberries has gone mad and I could barely get into the big tunnel. I spent the rest of the morning cutting back long tendrils from the cucumbers/melons and lots of bottom leaves from the tomatoes, I also snipped off the tops of the plants so that they can put all their energy into the fruits that have already set rather than new ones. I thought I didn’t have many tomatoes but once I cut it all back I could see plenty 😀 I don’t hold out much hope for the melons, they seem to have tiny fruits which then die off and the same with the loofahs. It’s a shame as this was the year I was hoping to grow my own washing up scrubbers 😜 I may give them one more go next year but after that I will quit, I have spent far too much time on them already. There are quite few things I will scale back next year I have decided, I just need to remember that I had decided that come seed buying time 🤣 I am going to concentrate on things we eat a lot of, for instance carrots, beans, peas, potato, brassicas, leeks, onions, garlic, root veg and also things that the torts eat, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, peppers but things like chillies, aubergines, globe artichoke I won’t do at all and courgettes I will just buy one plant, pumpkins I will still grow for the children but I might give the sweetcorn a miss as it’s only me that eats it, these are my mullings anyway, we will see what happens next year.

Do you ever think things have a way of finding you, John always says animals will find you if you are meant to have them lol. Anyway this ‘finding’ regards my previous paragraph and the wobbles I have been having about growing my own, if I was waivering about what I am doing and why a pod cast I came across has slammed home the message good and proper. GMO’s Glyphosphate and gut health, some of it I knew already but some I didn’t and it has given me a much clearer picture of how one affects the other. It’s and hour and forty minutes long but if you are remotely interested then do listen, if you are not then you should be because as the saying goes your are what you eat’ quite literally as it turns out 🙄 its The Rich Roll Podcast you can find it on you tube but I couldn’t paste a link sorry 😜

Saturday: A damp overcast morning but despite yellow warnings we hadn’t had any rain by lunchtime. John did the feed rounds and then finished off the last bit of fence. The whole job is not finished by a long shot as the rest of the old fence needs to come down and then start on the shrubbery that will go in front of the fence. He then went on to clean out the ducks and dig up the last few bits of ragwort before nipping out to get some guinea pig food.

Meanwhile I started some picking, beans courgettes, cauliflower, turnip, swede, beetroot and the more Victoria plums and some damsons which are not ripe yet but someone I know wants some and I had a bit of time to do it so I did 😀 Indoors then to sort out bits for putting out for sale and processing the rest. I have two trays of beans peas and cauliflower plus five purple carrots (that’s all that grew from a whole row) all chopped and open freezing. The turnip, courgettes, swede, beetroot, some carrots I already picked along with an onion and a stick of celery have all been chopped and bagged as soup mix for the freezer. Then I chopped loads of veg to go with some locally reared mince beef in the slow cooker for dinner later and finally I put the sage I had been drying into jars for storage and winter use 😀 Morning done sit down and have a couple of hard boiled eggs for lunch and a coffee 😜

Listening to that podcast has really sharpened my thoughts on what we eat and although generally speaking it’s good as far as home grown goes there is considerable room for improvement. I have decided not to waste anything and by that I mean eat even the things we don’t really like very much, hence the soup mixes, they will be a permanent feature as you can disguise the bits you don’t like but still get the goodness.

Sunday: Although rain was forecast it never really arrived and so in the morning we got plenty of work done. John has finished off the fence and we started clearing g the old fence and giving the bushes a bit of a trim. We debated about taking them down as they re very old and parts of the multiple trunks are rotten, however the bees and butterflies love them , the birds use them to roost in the winter and the decay is great for the insects so we decided they can stay 😀 We had the afternoon and evening off apart from doing the eggs, to recharge our batteries for a new week.

You can see the new fence that John has put up and now the job of creating a border begins 😜

Friesland Farm

Lunch in the City 😲 plenty of plums & RIP Benny 😢

Posted on August 6, 2020August 9, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 3rd August: This morning I whizzed around and got a few things done ( made two banana loaves and a greengage and vanilla tart) before going out for lunch in Oxford with Charlie as a birthday treat. We went to The Alchemist, the food was delicious and it all felt very safe and social distancing was well in hand. I haven’t been to Oxford centre for a least 6 years if not a lot longer. The new shopping centre is light and airy and the rooftop terrace where all the eateries are is a delightful place to eat. Afterwards we went on the tourist trails and into the back streets to find lovely park areas and beautiful architecture. A lovely way to spend an afternoon 🥰

When I got back John was already home and had been working on the new fence which is very nearly finished.

Early evening I went out into the paddock John is working in and had a look round. We discovered bees in a hollow of the apple tree, these might be bees that have swarmed and set up home here or they may be native bees but they are definitely honey bees 🐝 happy days, hopefully it will start oozing out lol.

We still have no internet and it’s due to be connected tomorrow, the equipment arrived safely yesterday morning due to the fact that our postie knows everyone so well that he delivers it to the named recipient not the address which is just as well. Trying to bounce off the hot spot on my phone is very tiresome I can tell you and I do find the reliance on the internet more than a little disconcerting. As I have written before in previous blogs, an apocalypse (disaster, pandemic) was always on my radar and one of the worst would be if the internet went down, we would be totally screwed I can tell you that so it would be prudent to look at what you use the connection for and always make sure you have an alternative 🙄 That is self reliance 😀 One other way to make sure you stay connected is the telephone line. We have cordless telephone handsets but I always keep a corded set in the cupboard because if we have a power cut we still have a phone, you may think that’s ok I have my mobile but trust me the amount of time I have no battery when the power goes is nobody’s business 😜

Tuesday: Picking produce was this mornings task, more plums, cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, dwarf beans, beetroot, turnips, snowball radish and a few potatoes, I am quite literally drowning in veg lol.

1.30pm and I’m sitting down to give my back a rest lol, I have spent all this time prepping nearly everything I picked this morning. Beans, carrots and turnips chopped and open froze, beetroots and radish peeled and chopped for a few days of salad meals and greengage plums stoned and made into jam. Lots of the veg were weighed and bagged up to go out for sale and I still have Victoria plums to make more jam with but not today 😜

After a short rest I went out and cut back one of my two sage bushes, the leaves are now drying in the dehydrator ready for putting in a jar and using over Winter. The other bush I will leave for now and cut it back later in the season and continue to use the fresh leaves when I need to. John came home just as I had finished and put the kettle on, I swear he must hear it being turned on as his timing is impeccable 🤪

Early evening I had a phone call from our neighbour, we have travellers in the area and they have been doing what they usually do and targeting work vans. They tried to break into her husbands van and when challenged by her Hubby the person lunged at him with a screwdriver, threw a walling brick at him (which missed luckily) and jumped into a waiting car which drove off. There is a serious problem here at the moment and it seems the police are not getting on top of it at all, I have seen reports on Facebook all day of people/vans/businesses being hit in broad daylight 🤬

Wednesday: Phone saga: So this morning I had an email to say we were good to go, I checked the phone, dead, I looked at the hub, red light, not good to go 🙄 I phoned them (another hour on the phone) and they said the line is live, no it’s not I told them. Another transfer to a different department and to cut a long story short we now have to wait until August 14th for an engineer to come out, meanwhile they will send me a 4G mini hub so I don’t have to use data on my phone. Well that’s good because I am using it as a hotspot and that is painful as I have said before, 3G is all we get and that drops out pretty frequently 🤪

When I finally got off the phone to them I thought I ought to try and get some work done. I can’t remember what else I did but I did make six more jars of Victoria plum jam 😀

We had to take Benny to the vet early evening, luckily I had got him in at lunchtime and shut him in. We put him into a carrier and set off, 10 minutes down the road the cat pooped, 🤣🤣🤣 OMG it was hilarious, I thought John was going to be sick, he was actually gagging, he pulled a mask out of the side pocket and put it on and then we found a safe place to pull over. John held the cat while I sorted it out and we went on our way. The upshot is that it looks like he has been clipped by a car and it has put his hip out ‘Ouch’ this is going to be expensive 🙄 he has to go back tomorrow for an X-ray and they will decide if he needs surgery (possibly amputation depending on injury) 😏

Thursday: Funny kind of a morning, it’s warm but as I was out picking plums it’s started a fine misty rain and just as I am typing the this the sun is coming out and I think it is going to be hot 🥵 (10 minutes later it has gone back in again)

John did the rounds and then went off to work with Wonky Benny to drop him at the vets this morning, I do hope he doesn’t poo again as John is on his own this time 😂

First jobs on the list were watering the pots, the tunnels and the greenhouse as the forecast is anywhere up to 30c+ over the next few days. Then making sure the animals all have got plenty of fresh water just in case, they have fresh water anyway but we tend to double up when the weather is very warm. After finding food for the torts it was on to a bit of plum picking, if I told you the trees are dripping with plums it would be no lie, it’s a bumper crop this year right across the varieties. The Victoria tree is always abundant, the greengage not so much, except for this year, the damsons, never seen so many on there and the new tree (the variety escapes me) is also loaded and very tasty they are too.

At this time of year my kitchen just isn’t big enough for all the produce I am bringing in on a daily basis and I always have baskets and trays of it stacked in various corners until I can get round to sorting them out. At the minute I have cooking apples to be sorted as well, the ones that are damaged will be peeled and cooked for the freezer and any that are in good condition will be stored out the back. This is when I could do with some cool storage as the back area heats up quickly due to the tin roof out there. It would be nice to have a little brick built store shed or at least a heavily insulated wooden shed, but I like the brick shed idea better 😀

So what am I going to do with all these plums? Good question 😜 some will be frozen for winter puddings, some will be made into more jam I think, always good for presents or exchanges, some will be given away to family and friends and some will be sold in the shed. In the past I have made plum sauce and plum chutney and if I get the enthusiasm I may do some this year.

As if I didn’t have enough to do I have come up with another job lol, I have ordered Almond oil as a carrier which arrived this morning and I am going to infuse it with lavender as a quick way of making it, I haven’t done it before so it will be interesting to see how it turns out. You can then add the oil to the bath or use it on your skin.

I harvested some lavender and tied it in bunches to dry on the rack in the kitchen ready to use when it has dried out.

The phone rang and it was John, I figured at 11am it’s not good news and I was right. The vet had called him and Benny’s hip socket was smashed to bits, they couldn’t amputate because they would need to remove too much. The next option was a specialist and even then there was no guarantee he would walk again and so John made the decision to put him to sleep which is exactly what I would have done. The vet said she couldn’t believe he had been walking on it and she had never seen any bone that smashed 🙄 So RIP Benny, I am so very sorry that your wonderful life as our farm cat was cut short and I will miss your very vocal presence. I am done with cats for a while, we still have Diesel (who is getting on in years) but we have been through a few other cats over the last few years, they either get hit by cars or disappear never to be seen again! Molly was the only other cat that saw her last few years out here and died peacefully.

Pretty sure patch will miss you annoying him as well 🥰

I am waiting patiently for this 4G mini hub to turn up from BT it comes with a sim and unlimited data until the problem is sorted. I have tried uploading last weeks blog but like the photos there is not enough umph to do it.

We went over to Sams late afternoon and took Mia out for ice cream and a play at the park just to give Sam a bit of a break from three children to two 😂

Friday: Today the temps are set to rise well above 30c not hot for some countries but not what we are used to here in the UK 😜 I opened the windows early to let the cool morning air in and then shut them as the sun came round, closing the curtains at the same time to hopefully keep the worst of the heat out 🙄 I was up early and outside picking first thing, marrow, beans, peas, mangetout, carrots, cauliflower and a bucketful of eating apples from a dwarf tree! As soon as the torts were fed I was off inside to start prepping. The veg have all be cleaned chopped and open froze, and the apples have all been wiped over sorted into perfect and blemished piles. The perfects will store nicely for a few weeks and the blemished (which won’t store well) will be either used in chutney etc or fed to the animals as a treat. The marrow I am undecided about, many people eat stuffed marrow, I can’t see the point personally 😂 my Dad always told me to make marrow rum, your pour rum into the marrow, hang it for a few days and then let the liquid out from the bottom, again I can’t see the pint, just drink the rum! I will say that I have never tasted either of these so I may be missing something wonderful but I somehow doubt it 😜 Why grow the marrows you may ask, I had the seeds, it’s as simple as that, and if nothing else the hens will enjoy a good feast on them 😀 They will store for weeks mind you so I may decide to have a go at a curry or even use them in a chutney, I don’t have to decide just yet.

I have just received notice that my 4G mini hub will be delivered today thank goodness, it’s a hub supplied by BT (when you have connection problems 😂) that has a sim and unlimited data (free of course) so I should then be able to upload pictures etc. Last weeks blog randomly uploaded while I was typing this up, I have been trying to upload it for days and gave up in the end 🙄

I made plum chutney, love a bit of chutney in a cheese sandwich 😀 Apparently the temps at Heathrow are already 31c and it’s only lunchtime, however Charlie has just sent me a video as she is on the way home from Devon and it’s pouring with rain, ah gotta love the extremes of our climate, it’s not like it’s a big island in comparison to some but the difference in weather from one end to another is hilarious sometimes 😁 It’s nearly 1pm and still pretty cool in the house hopefully it will stay that way 🙄

Yay the mini hub arrived, very mini, not much bigger than a business card in size I was expecting something bigger lol. I now have full WiFi signal 😀 hopefully I can now upload photos.

Saturday: Set to be very hot today so we were up early to get a bit done first thing, John went off to get a few and al supplies and order some bits of fencing he was short of. In the afternoon we went over to my brothers for the first real birthday BBQ this year. John came back mid evening to put the birds to bed and then came back and we stayed until late evening with the fire pit lit and watching the stars, lovely day. Luckily there was a lot of shade and a good breeze so it was t too u comfortable.

Sunday: A bit late up today lol, 8am which is late for us. After the feeding rounds John cracked on with the last remaining bit of fencing and I went out to pick plums and do a bit of weeding. It was overcast for a good part of the morning and although it was still warm it gave me a chance to get some things done. Mum and Ken came over after lunch to pick some plums , I gave them a bagful of dwarf beans a marrow to go home with as well. It is at that stage where I have so much produce I either don’t know what to do with it all or I am sick of processing it all so start giving it away by the bagful 😜

Friesland Farm

Plums, Lammas & plenty of produce 😀

Posted on August 2, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Apologies for the lateness of this we are still having problems with the landline and internet and uploading is difficult 🤪

Monday 27th July 2020: It’s wet this morning and we have had some terrific downpours over the weekend, great for the garden not so great for getting outside 😜 The phonline saga still continues because as it was left, we were to be disconnected in order to reconnect the cottage and then we could place a new order for a line. The disconnection was supposed to happen on the 28th which is tomorrow and we couldn’t put in an order until that had been sorted out BUT I have received messages from BT to say our order was going through and would be connected on the 5th August? I wait to see what actually happens here as I am convinced this is all going to go t**s up as well 🙄

Tuesday: An mixture of weather, overcast sometimes but warm and then when the sun comes out it’s pretty hot! I did a bit of cutting back, a lot is now going over and looking quite scruffy, time to tidy it up a bit, I always think that at this time of year the garden has the ‘morning after’ effect, the oomph and brightness of the party has gone and you are left with the clearing up 😂

Shelley messaged to see if I wanted a ‘shake shack’ ooo yes please and she came to pick me up, we sat in the car with our shakes watching the world (well the town anyway) go by, a lovely distraction from the norm.

I had a wander round to look at the plum trees today, they are laden with fruit 😀 however they seem to be nearly ready to pick which is about 4 weeks earlier than normal 🤔 I can only assume it was weeks of wall to wall sunshine earlier in the year. Plums can be picked and then ripened off the tree but they do need to be ‘on the turn’ as it were.

Wednesday: A warm and sunny day ahead and you know what that means for me 😀 get on early and avoid the uv rays later 😂 I had a definite job in mind this morning, picking plums, but first I had to get the other bits of picking done. The photo shows the haul today and to be fair I could do that every day now for a good few weeks, I also spotted our first cauliflower that is almost ready to harvest. But as I said the plums are my main focus at the minute, ripening earlier than usual, they can be picked and ripened indoors. Two reasons why this is a good idea, number one, wasps 🙄 the riper the fruit gets the more the wasps feast on them and the more likely you are to get stung, number two, you can pick in succession so I don’t have to pick them all at once, I will do it over a couple of weeks, by the time I get to the end of that time the plums will be ripe and I will be competing with the wasps but by then I will have plenty in store or in the freezer. They are looking pretty good this year too and by that I mean no damage, no sign of plum moth so the pheromone traps have worked well 😀

Once all the picking is done it’s indoors to prep it all, the beans, peas and carrots all chopped and ready for open freezing, I don’t blanch them, they turn out just as good if not better because they have no excess moisture on them which causes frosting. The potatoes will store readily enough for a while, the beetroot got roasted and then they will be frozen ready for use when required and the fruit is for pudding later. I was given some windfall apples (also earlier than usual) so I have peeled and cooked them and will make a sponge mix to go on top as we have plenty of eggs at the moment. The produce is coming thick and fast and it’s always a decision as to what to use that day, tomatoes and cucumbers don’t keep and don’t freeze so it best to use them first while all the veg can be frozen so they can be frozen and used another time. Some of it I will put out for sale, as I say, it covers the costs of the seeds so effectively apart from my time, the food is all free 😀

The phone line saga continues, I have had messages from BT to say our order is in and we will have a line on the 4th August all good except that as I understood it the last order was cancelled and I was going to have to make a new one once the cottage up the road had their number back. That was supposed to be yesterday but we still have it and today openreach called to ask what the problem was as they were at the junction box, so who knows how this will pan out now!

Sam, Mia and the twins came over for a couple of hours, we had a wander down to the paddock to give biscuit and brush and pick out their feet.

Almost immediately after typing the paragraph about the phone we lost the line and consequently the internet connection and even I had forgotten just how much runs on WiFi 😂 It’s a bit of a warning to us really about how dependant we become on some things and that we should always have a back up plan 🙄 We have now lost touch with the rest of the world until next Tuesday unless I can pick up 4G outside but we are rural and so that is not always possible. Luckily I can still type this up it will just be the upload that I need a connection for.

Thursday: It’s my birthday 😀 John had asked me if I wanted to go out for lunch or dinner and I said I prefer breakfast and I had just the place in mind. So we were up early and off out for waffles by 8am, they do lovely waffles, bacon and maple syrup and I was glad they were open again. The rest of the day was spent with visitors coming and going, Mum and Ken came round for coffee and cake late morning, then Sam, shelley and the children arrived, my niece and her little one came shortly after, then Charlie arrived. We had a short interlude before a chap came to give us a price to take down a few trees, then my brother and his wife called in, they went and my sister and her husband arrived and also my youngest sister popped in. By 9pm I was pooped 😜 I have had a lovely lot of presents befitting a smallholder/gardener from butter making equipment to garden solar lights and a beautiful hand drawn picture of the grandchildren, I’m very lucky.

I did do a few little jobs inbetween all that, picked the pears from my tree as it did have masses but something has been eating them and there two big ones on the path that had been half eaten. I don’t want to lose all of them so I had picked them and they will continue to ripen off the tree. I sowed a few flower seeds and repotted a plant but that’s about it.

My new winter wellies arrived, I buy Aigle wellies they are expensive but they last much better than any other brand I have tried over the years and so they are cost effective.

Friday: It is supposed to be a scorcher today 30c + 🥵 I got all the outside jobs done pretty quickly including hanging out the washing, might as well make use of the heat. The wood delivery arrived for a new fence out in the front area, it will be the same as the fence by the egg shed and hopefully discourage the hens from coming in the front as eventually I want to plant large areas of it up and don’t want them constantly ruining it.

I have just had an email from BT saying they have dispatched our equipment for the new landline and broadband connection, they have the right mobile number for me, the right email address, the right name but they still have the wrong address. No problem just give them a call and sort it, oh no not that simple as I appear to have no mobile coverage at the minute ffs I just feel like crying 😭 I am not worried about the equipment getting delivered because the cottage will just send it here if it goes there, what I am worried about is that after all we have been through they still don’t have the correct address and this will all start again with trying to connect the wrong line!

Bloody hell that was hot today 🥵 good job our place is nice and cool inside, the bathroom is the coolest of all so in desperate times I can always lie on the floor in there (I haven’t ever done it but I could if I wanted lol) I spent the day inside doing not very much, I did have Mia for a few hours and she wanted to play under the sprinkler but got bored with that quite quickly I’m glad to say. It’s very close this evening, I have watered the two tunnels and the greenhouse, there were a few spots of rain but as yet they haven’t amounted to very much. I do hope we get a storm it will clear the air and water the garden at the same time 😜 I had a lovely bunch of sweet peas given me today, they smell divine and have cheered the kitchen up no end 😀

Saturday: Soooo much cooler this morning and a lot fresher thank goodness 😀 We have both been very busy this morning, me picking, there is an awful lot to pick at the moment, it just keeps coming but that’s what this life is all about and the reason why we didn’t have or don’t have any fear of lockdowns 😜 After picking everything it was on to prepping, mostly for the freezer but I also made plum jam with some of the Victoria plums. I have my eye on a greengage and vanilla pie recipe for the beautiful sweet little green plums 😀 If you have never eaten them and think they don’t look ripe, they are and they are one of the sweetest tasting plums you can get. I am very proud to have a 50 year old proper Cambridge greengage tree here. The plums look amazing this year if a little on the small side but the plum moth traps have worked wonders and from 1.5kg I only found three plums with the grub in so that is good going. Meanwhile John has been very busy digging holes and put up a new fence in the front area. We watch the gardening programmes and laugh when they dig easily into their soil for projects, here on the edge of the Cotswolds it’s brash and that is hard going when you want to dig 🥵 not to mention the remains of footings from the old RAF buildings which without fail seem to be just where you need to dig as well 😂

Wasp season is well and truly here, the minute there is sweet, sticky jam about the wasps home in on it 😜 actually just one little wasp but it just would not let go of the spoon rest 😂

It’s August the first today and so it’s Lammas, the celebration of the first of the harvesting, last year I grew enough stalks of wheat to make a corn dolly but I didn’t grow any this year, I should have made a loaf of bread but I didn’t do that either, not doing too well am I. I could do an altar, I know lots of people do but I tend to just acknowledge the day and the turning of the wheel instead 😀

Sunday: An in between day today, when the sun comes out it’s hot but not as hot as it has been and we have intermittent cloud as well. John did the morning rounds and I got on with cleaning the house. Then John went out to continue the new fence which is progressing well 😀 I just hope it deters the chickens from coming in the front area as they are digging up my pots and anything I have planted in the ground suffers from their scratching around. It’s not like they don’t have enough other space to forage in 😂

We have two problems today, one is the water pressure, I have noticed that for the last few days it has been down, we needed to check that we didn’t have a leak on our side of the mains. We couldn’t see anything anywhere but best to check at the meter, when we have everything turned off the meter does not move so that’s good, we are not losing water we are paying for but the pressure is still down 🙄 The second problem is Benny the cat, he had been gone for 5 days and turned up last night but he is not walking right. He does not seem to be in pain, I have had a good feel and he does not cry when I touch him but it’s still not right. The other thing was that he was starving, he ate and ate and ate, he was pretty chunky when he was last here so I imagine he has got stuck somewhere, lost a bit of weight and wriggled out from wherever he was. At the moment he is in the boot room but we need to get him to a vet tomorrow, as I said he is not in pain and he is eating well but just not walking correctly and he won’t jump up or down either, I think he may have pulled or torn a muscle or something 😏 At least he’s is home and secured in the back for the time being 😀

I made butter today 😀 Last birthday my sister bought me a butter churn and this birthday she bought me some butter paddles and some cream so I thought I better try the churn out. It’s quite concerning at how many people (youngsters) don’t realise butter is made from cream 🙄 You May ask why bother, well generally I don’t but if there is cream that has been reduced in price I like to have a go, it’s not cost effective otherwise but the butter you get is far superior to the blocks you buy in the shop unless you are buying quality butter that is 😀

I am sorry about the lack of photos, I have taken plenty but I am using my phone WiFi to connect the iPad to and am barely getting 3G at the best of times so uploading them is failing miserably 😏 Hopefully when we are connected again all will be well 😜 It all takes me back to the days of dial up and how bloody frustrating that was!

Friesland Farm

A pick ‘n’ mix of a week 😜

Posted on July 13, 2020July 19, 2020 by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

Windy weather, picking and freezing & John returns home.

Posted on July 5, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 29th June 2020: It very windy today, I’m sure we don’t normally have winds as strong as this in June 🙄 yesterday was the same, strong enough to damage plants and whip bits off of trees 😏

I spent the night on my own here which is only the second time in 11 years I think. I can be pretty scary as we are a bit out in the sticks but to be honest I was so tired that I went straight to sleep anyhow. This morning I was up early, showered and out to do the animal rounds, I walked round the garden thinking I would do a bit outside but the buffeting from the wind soon put me off 😂 I decided to get a few bits done indoors and at 9am John called to say he could come home. I arranged with Shelley to go and pick him up and by 11am he was back home again. They are not sure why it happened and not sure if it will happen again 😏 but in the meantime we go about life as normally as possible. John had something to eat, a cup of tea, a nice bath and at the moment is having a sleep, you know what it’s like trying to sleep in hospital so he is a bit tired today.

I am still doing the glacé cherries they take 10 days and I had missed a couple of days, which doesn’t matter as long as you continue the process for the number of days rather than in succession, I should be on day 7 but am only on day 6 in the process.

The last topic in last weeks blog was the link to the grow.foodrevolution.org and I did say I would come back to the subject. In my opinion anyone who eats 🙄 has children, grandchildren or cares about their future generations really ought to be looking more closely at how food is grown, what the processes are and why it should change. Remember way back in my blogs I always said I was prepared for an apocalypse of some kind and then the pandemic came. Up to that point even I thought maybe I was a bit barmy but it happened and life was not how we had always known it to be, to me it just confirmed that we shouldn’t be complacent, never mind being alert during a pandemic, we should be alert at all times, or at the very least awake to the problems in the world.

Declining soil fertility is a real worldwide problem, one that you should be aware of, the over use of pesticides, weedkillers and artificial fertilisers has depleted the soil of its vitamins and minerals and turned the vast growing acres into dust bowls with no nutrition in them or at least only enough to last a few decades longer. Years ago farmers would spread muck back onto the fields (and some still do) but the bigger the farm the less likely they are to do this and of course it’s the big farms that provide a vast quantity of the crops we eat in one form or another. Mono cropping is also an issue, vast areas with one crop do nothing for biodiversity, which should be all part of a healthy system. The fruit and vegetables you buy from the supermarkets, that you think are giving you a good healthy diet, are not providing anywhere near the amount of nutrients that they used to 50 years ago because of the reduced soil fertility. What can you do? It’s my firm belief that as individuals all doing our bit we make a strong collective, and that goes for any issue. You don’t need to be an activist or an ‘alternative’ or join a cause, all you need to do is understand the issue and adjust your thoughts and actions accordingly, in my mind it really is that simple.

Getting the fertility back into the soil is relatively easy on a small scale and should be done even in the flower garden, composting your own green waste rather than sending it to the council to compost is a great way to ensure that you know what is going back into the ground. With communal composting schemes they don’t ask you not to put waste that has been treated with weedkiller or pesticides in, that means there is a possibility that residue is left in the end product, the product which is then bagged up to be sold or sold in bulk, makes you think doesn’t it. Even organic compost only has to be organic in origin not organically treated. Once upon a time every garden owner would have had a heap and that would all eventually go back into the garden, it’s my belief that every garden over a certain size (a size that can accommodate a small compost bin) should not be allowed a green bin 😏 (and I did write to our local council to suggest that idea) I’m not sure where it all went wrong when as a nation of Gardeners’ we forgot the basics of gardening!

Tuesday: Not raining, not windy, not sunny, happy me it means I can get on. John did the rounds with me but he was tired afterwards and so went in for a sit down. I got on with some picking, mangetout, peas, carrots, rhubarb, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, blackcurrants and cherries. I wasn’t going to pick any more cherries but the urge to gather is irresistible 😜 The peas and carrots are for dinner later, the strawberries, blueberries, rhubarb, and raspberries are going into a mixed fruit crumble for pudding 😀 After doing a few other bits we went to town to get a little bit of shopping, but they still don’t have any jam sugar on the shelves, I will have to see if I can get a bulk buy. When we got back John had another rest lol and I prepared a shepherds pie and the crumble for later on. A quick rest and a cuppa and I got on with making some blackcurrant jam, I had some sugar in the cupboard already but will need more before the season is out.

Be careful what you wish for lol, remember I said I was hoping to get some cherries, well the morello tree is loaded with them and although the black bird is having some there are hundreds 🙄 I have already picked quite a lot and today I couldn’t resist picking some more. The problem with cherries is they do not continue to ripen once picked and you can’t leave them to get the very dark colour (the birds get there first) but they are ripe at the cherry red colour so that’s when they get picked. I have some cooked and in the freezer, the glacé cherries are still on the go and now I have about another kg to do something with. I have told Mum to come and pick some tomorrow if she wants some, I hate to see them wasted.

You can see why they use these vibrant cherries to glacé 😀

Wednesday: First it’s hot, then it’s not, then it is again, one of those days when the jumper is on, off, on, off and sometimes a raincoat is needed too 😜 John did the morning rounds and I got on with some picking, as well as the things I have already been harvesting, I picked peppers, some small courgettes, some beetroot and a very small handful of dwarf beans. The beans were cut up and frozen along with the peas I picked yesterday and I also froze the mixed fruit. I still need to do something with the beetroot, I was thinking of grating it and freezing, that would be quite useful I think. The courgettes and peppers can wait and I may use them tomorrow or put some out for sale. One job I wanted to get done was to repot the yellow raspberry, it was getting a bit big for the pot it was in. When I took it out of the old pot the soil was really dry, even though we had the rain this week so I gave all the rest of the pots of raspberries a good soak. I grow them in pots because the runners take over the garden otherwise although you do get far more berries if they are in the ground, I think I should identify a raspberry patch and let them romp away lol. Mum and Ken came up to pick some cherries and blackcurrants, the timing was not great as it started to rain as they got here and slowly got heavier but with Ken on the cherry tree and Mum on the blackcurrants they soon had enough to be going on with 😀

Thursday: Busy morning for me again, John did the morning rounds then went to have a lie down. I have been working on the decorative side of the garden instead of the growing side. I edged all the lawn and then gave it a cut, cut back some overhanging branches, potted up some self sown plantings and put some bits out for sale. John bought coffee out mid morning and we discussed getting some fence panels for the decking area as the wind blows right across there from a westerly direction. He went off to get some now that the suppliers are open but had to get someone to help him lift them in as he didn’t have the strength on his own 😏 It takes a lot longer than you think to recover from something like that.

The rest of the day was spent pottering, some of the time in the poly tunnel where I dug out the flat leaf parsley, it had got huge and was taking over, I managed to save a root to pot up. I seem to be lacking momentum at the minute, I am ok in the mornings but by mid afternoon I’m flagging lol.

One thing I forgot to mention is that John saw a hedgehog the other night, I know we have them but rarely see them and then you wonder if they have moved on but nope they are still here, all part of my lovely little eco system 😀

Friday: Not sure what kind of a day it’s going to be weatherwise, at the moment it’s overcast and dry but the sky is moody and looks like it is threatening to rain. We could do with a bit, the wind that we have had has dried the ground so quickly and we have stronger winds tomorrow apparently 😏 What happened to summer? I am certain the seasons are shifting, the ants are on the move and they don’t normally start until the beginning of August but I think the next lot of warm sunny weather and they will be flying.

I have been doing various things this morning, picking mangetout and broad beans, then some sour cherries to put out for sale. I picked a big bunch of basil which is now in the dehydrator and smells amazing, I prepped everything I picked ready for the freezer, I am only getting small quantities at the minute but they soon become a big batch if you do it daily. I find open freezing the best way to do them and I have started mixing up the veg and fruit as I think I would be more inclined to use it like that besides it makes it easier for soups and stews. I pulled a few baby turnips, one I grated along with beetroot and carrots chopped a baby pepper and that with a hard boiled egg will be my lunch, all home produced 😀 I potted up a few bits I dug up in the polytunnel yesterday, some bits of mint, flat leaf parsley and aquilegia which had been growing in there for a couple of years. I seem to have a few things that have self set or have been sown but got huge and are happily growing in there but I really need to have a clear out as there is less and less space for the things I want to grow. I want to have a go at pak Choi (I have sown seeds which have come up nicely) this winter and also get some more salad leaves sown to take us through the end of the summer and into autumn. Looking at the weather forecast there is less than 50% chance of rain, much less at times, so I’m thinking I will have to water some of the veg growing outside, the courgettes and patty pan seem to be taking ages to get going so a bit of extra watering might help boost them along a bit. Really I should weigh everything I pick and add it up at the end of the season, that would give me more of an idea of how much is actually produced I think. Picking it daily and then freezing some, eating some or putting some out for sale, it doesn’t seem like a lot bit it probably adds up to much more than I think.

It struck me when eating my lunch that we probably eat as well as folks who dine in a fancy restaurant, without the price tag 😋 The presentation isn’t as good I grant you that, but it’s all fresh, hand picked and prepared, organic, yep we feast like kings here 😀 It also occurred to me that the phrase, you are what you eat, is not strictly true 🙄 I, we, have eaten fresh homegrown produce for 11 years, the ten years or so before that I bought organic and yet I ended up ill, I would probably be worse if it were not for the good food but it means that environmental factors play a part as well, in that I would include stress. Stress plays a very large part in your health as far as I can see, I was the person who worried about things, even little things and the big things, well they sent me into overload lol. These days I am more of a ‘couldn’t give a toss’ type 🤪, I learnt not to worry about things that hadn’t happened (nor were likely to) and only to worry and then deal with things that did actually happen. That’s a far better way to live and certainly better for your health, so if you recognise yourself in there take a tip from me, stop worrying. Be kind to others but be kind to yourself as well, Life is too short to spend it worrying.

Rain stopped play in the afternoon but at least I won’t have to water tonight 😀

Saturday: I have done very little outside today, picked some greens for the Guineas and clean out the water buckets for the horses and that’s about it. I spent a lovely morning with Charlie at a wedding dress shop trying on dresses, Charlie not me obvs lol. She was the shops first appointment since the lockdown and it was by appointment only 😀 Afterwards we went to a local independent coffee shop where the new normal is to give your details, when ordering for sitting in, so that they can track and trace if necessary, social distancing in place and it all seems to work well. Considering more shops and the pubs are allowed to open today, the town was still not very busy, I feel this is all going to take longer than we first thought to get back to the old normal 😏

Sunday: A very windy but dry day today. John put up the fence panels around the decking area, it was to hopefully reduce the wind but it has still blown the chairs around 🙄 I did some picking again this morning, rhubarb, mange tout, broad beans, dwarf beans, courgette and a few blueberries, blackcurrants, raspberries and strawberries. The it all had to be sorted and either put out for sale or prepped for the freezer. We went round to see Mum and Ken and have a coffee, not sure what else we have done today lol. I need to organise myself a bit better to get jobs done as I have slacked a bit lately. One job is to sort the freezers out, with the picking prepping and freezing I tend to just find any space for it to go but then everything is all over the place and I have no idea what I have. I usually use sacks in the bottom of the big freezers, one for veg, one for fruit at least that way I know which sack to look in, I might not know what is actually in there, but I know if it’s one or the other 😜 The white woven sacks (from the builders merchant) are ideal if anyone is thinking of doing it as they don’t stick to the side of the freezer at all.

Have a great week, I think the weather is going to improve, hopefully this wind will do one 😋 Stay safe, stay alert.

Friesland Farm

Lemon curd, routine jobs and another fox problem 😏

Posted on June 8, 2020June 14, 2020 by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good week and stay safe x