Tag: poly tunnel

Posted in Friesland Farm

Work, rain & grandchildren.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday August 7th 2023: I was rather annoyed with myself yesterday evening because I could have got a good amount done but I didn’t bother lol. So this morning I was determined to make a bit of a dent on the front driveway mess. Circumstances meant I couldn’t do any of it for months and now it is getting on my nerves, the constant rain hasn’t helped and I probably couldn’t have got much of it done anyway but still. I have hoed, weeded, mown, raked, cut, shovelled and still only half finished at lunchtime. In my head I thought it would only take a couple of hours 😂 Because I couldn’t do much with my hand and arm for the last three months I am very out of shape, I should have done a lot of walking but in the beginning even that was painful so now I am paying the price. The sun is out, I started at 8am to get the cooler part of the day but it has got too hot unless it clouds over a good bit I will leave it until later. Once I have stopped sweating I will find something else to do a little less energetic.

I think I spent too long in the sun and felt a bit ill for a short while 😏 so had to have a sit down, fml sometimes 😜 Fed up with the limitations my body seems to want to put on me because my mind is having none of it and wants to get on 😂

I had flowers to make up for collection mid afternoon, I am also watching my flowers closely as I have two lots of jam jar collections to do at the weekend. Normally I say that I can’t guarantee colour choices but will accommodate them where possible and one lot is for pink and white (baby shower) and the other lot is purple/lilac, sage green and white (wedding) so I am going round identifying what I think will be looking good enough to use at the time of cutting.

My goodness that was an epic workout 😜 5pm finish and John helped me from 3pm, looks better but still can’t make a silk purse from a sows ear 😂 The driveway will be 80 years old next year so it has seen a lot of comings and goings, it was laid by the MOD though so lasted longer than a council one 😬 The whole place was built specifically for D Day so I know roughly how old the drive is and there are some boot prints in it and I often wonder whose boots they were. The tree roots have moved and cracked it in many places so the weeds take hold easily, some of the edges are breaking up so the weeds take hold easily and we no longer weedkiller so the weeds take hold easily 🤣 But as I said to John, at least it looks as though someone lives here now rather than a derelict entrance, just have to work hard on the rest of the place (once the mower is back) and get some fencing done. The trouble with fencing is that it comes way down on the list for the farm contractor, lambing, ploughing, harvesting, hay making, flailing all come first it seems and so they get round to it eventually 🙄

The apple tree is out of control and the problem with that is it’s getting to the wrong time of year to cut it for size control. There are hundreds of apples on it this year, last years apples were huge but this year a lot smaller and a gazillion tiny ones. The crows keep raiding it but the trouble with that is once they peck at an apple and it falls on the floor they just move to the next one rather than go down to the ground and finish the one they started. So before I could even cut the grass under the tree I had to rake up apples and the grass is long so you can see what a pig of a job it has been. I put some windfalls by the egg shed for people to help themselves, I have picked a bucketful for myself to store and asked people to come pick some if they want some so if you are reading this and you want any just pop up with a bucket and get some 😁

Tuesday: I had Oscar today so mostly what my time was spent doing was playing, singing, feeding lol. But while he was sleeping I looked up lots of recipes for Aronia berries or chokeberries, I have three bushes in the garden and this year they are loaded with berries. Too tart to eat raw but these berries are one of the best kept secrets when it comes to antioxidants (more than any other fruit) they pack a big vit c punch and are great for circulation, urinary tract health (5-10 times more effective than cranberries) they are very definitely a superfood. So why don’t we see them in the shops 🤷‍♀️ no idea, not as saleable as blueberries I suppose, maybe something you would find in a specialist shop or a health food store (dried). I will be making a syrup with them and freezing it in ice cube sizes, then they can easily be added to all kinds of things for that superfood extra. They freeze well whole and apparently are sweeter once frozen, you can use them exactly the same way you would with any other berry and they have the added bonus for wildlife in that they stay on the bush well into autumn.

Wednesday: The sun came out whoop whoop, I have got wet cutting flowers that many times over the last few days I was getting pretty bored of it 😂 Still I have had the opposite problem where it got too hot at times to be outside, can’t win. I got the washing on first thing and out into the line but someone somewhere decided a bonfire was a great idea on the first sunny (washing drying) day for a while 🙄 I had flowers to cut and going round it was evident that the rain had affected some of them but hopefully once deadheaded they will flush with more blooms. I read that if you think you have deadheaded enough you probably have more you can do 😂 deadheading is vital to keep those flowers coming, disbudding is another one and of course cutting back.

Sam popped in with George and Lucie while Mia was off playing with a friend, they like to go looking for berries, cucumbers and eggs. The eggs we found had been eaten by the hens already 🙄 we couldn’t find many berries but we found a cucumber which I cut into lengths and they eat with gusto lol.

Thursday: Another nice day thankfully, I cut lots of flowers and foliage for orders yesterday and today I needed to get them made up but first I had to get some washing done and household bits and pieces. I did make some Aronia syrup to keep in the fridge too.

I went into the flower hut to make up 22 jam jars which take a lot longer and more flowers than you think. The customer had said that although I don’t do specific colours this was the colour scheme so said I will do my best to accommodate. However after putting them all together I wasn’t happy with how they looked and spent a while trying to sort them out. I came to the conclusion that limiting colour is ok if you have an abundance of that particular colour which I don’t at the minute. As it stands it is mid afternoon and I am planning on cutting some different colours this evening when it’s cooler to add to them. One of the problems is that anything I do have in that colour has thin stems so the posies are look as though they are lacking (to me at any rate) You leave and learn I guess.

We went to watch George and Lucie at their very first swimming lesson, Sam (and me ) was worried that George wouldn’t listen and just mess about but actually he was really good and did as he was asked. Interesting to watch and see how confident Lucie was compared to George considering generally in life it’s the other way round. We watched the end of Mia’s lesson and she was awarded her green hat so she was very proud and rightly so. I love the traffic light system of the swimming hats, red (can’t swim) orange and then green (swimmer) ideal for the lifeguards I imagine.

Once back home I got the dinner and then cut some flowers for orders before going back to the jam jars and tweaking them until I was happy with them. A little bit of deadheading, watering g and weeding before deciding that was enough for today.

Friday: I got the washing on the line first thing as the forecast showed 0% chance of rain and an hour later guess what, it bloody rained 🙄

I had more flowers to cut for orders today and then pack the jam jar order up ready for collection. It is tricky transporting these but each time I do it I learn a little more. I only fill the jars half full with water they can then be topped up when they reached the destination, I pack them in low sided boxes or veg crates and use paper to stop them jangling around or clanging against each other and then we drive slowly 😂 I have seen a great method of holes cut in squares of flattish polystyrene but have yet to try it out.

All boxed and ready to transport.

Saturday: I had an order for flowers this morning, I cut them yesterday evening so I needed to get them ready for collection mid morning. Once collected we popped to a local plant sale and then a quick trip to the garden centre for cake and coffee. At teatime Charlie came to pick me up as I was going with her to babysit for Sam and Luke, a great chance to get a take away curry which I never do as John doesn’t eat curry 🙄

Sunday: John has been busy strimming and mowing when the weather allows. The rain was on and off today and so I spent the morning creating dried flower things 😊 At lunchtime Charlie dropped Oscar off, she was going to a baby shower and Macca was on his way back from a cycling trip and was picking him up when he got home. When he arrived Oscar was fast asleep and slept for at least another 45 minutes 😂 Once they went home I went back to the dried flowers for a while. We popped round to see my sister and happily stayed for something to eat when it was offered.

Dried flowers in Oak bars
Posted in Friesland Farm

Gathering the (tiny) harvest in, botanical dyeing & still plenty of rain.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 31st July 2023: The whole of July we have had rain every day, sometimes heavy, we have had hardly any sun but at least the temperature has been ok on the whole. It is topsy turvy at the moment, I am not complaining too much though as I have not had to water the garden at all this month 😂

I have had some pretty busy weeks with the flowers but this week is much calmer so it gives me chance to catch up with all the other jobs that have been neglected. I started off with tidying things away indoors, finding the right places for ‘stuff’ to live 🙄 Then outside into the greenhouse to sow some foxglove seeds for next year (lovely apricot ones) and pot on some brassica plants. They ought to be planted out really but I need to reorganise the garden and so no point planting them until they can go into the final place. They are curly kale and purple sprouting broccoli which I love to be able to pick fresh in the new year, it’s worth the wait when nothing else is around. I also sowed some carrot seeds and some perpetual spinach. Then I picked some purple French beans and some Logan berries and took those indoors to prep. The beans were blanched and drained then bagged up ready for the freezer and along with some apples from the tree the berries were cooked in honey ready for crumbles. I made two lots of crumble toppings, one traditional for John and one healthy one for me, oats, nuts and cinnamon. Both lots can be frozen for using as and when needed but the oat one will need coconut oil added to it before cooking. I made two crumbles for dessert later so I will see what it tastes like, John won’t like just honey in his apple and berry mix but he can add sugar if needs be whereas I prefer mine on the sharper side so just honey is fine. At this time of year I start to think about stocking up and making things for winter use, it’s that primal side of me again 😜 I will continue to add goods to my dried and frozen store and if we ever have to hunker down I am all in 😂

Had a visit from Sam and the kiddies in the afternoon, they have just come back from their caravan holiday in the New Forest and were full of stories of their adventures 🥰

We have lamb loin for dinner tonight with French beans, johns potatoes are sliced and roasted in the oven plainly while mine are made into a gratin with stock, crème fraise and Parmesan cheese. I have no objection to this while John is still doing all the washing up 😂 he is beginning to realise that when cooking everything from scratch you use a lot of bowls and utensils. He made himself scrambled egg at lunchtime and normally would not give the dirty pan another thought, I told him he would have to wash it up because I need it to cook the beans for dinner and as I still can’t do the washing up (shame) he would have to get it done sharpish 😜

I have Oscar all day tomorrow from early morning as it is Charlie’s first day back at work so I need to get tomorrows dinner sorted tonight. Slow cooker meals it is then, a chicken stew for John I think and a dhal for me, I will make extra portions of botthat can be frozen for another day

Tuesday: Oscar day 🥰 all went fairly well, takes a bit of getting used to having a little one all day again 😜 I did take him out for a walk in the pushchair when he clearly didn’t want to sleep in the cot, I foraged some cherry plums while I was out 😁 Hoping to go back for some more later this evening, I’m pretty sure they are early this year 🤷‍♀️ I have had conversations online with other country folk, there seems to be an awful lot of blackberry flowers this year to, we are wondering what the winter has in store for us 🙄

I have been stocking up my pantry with various dried goods and some tins, the news is full of doom and gloom about wheat at the minute. Wheat coming from Ukraine (or rather not coming) and the wheat harvest here because of the rain in July. My take on this is that we can (and should) adjust what we eat, be more resilient, more flexible but so many people are not which is a worry I think.

After dinner I went outside to cut flowers, they are not for orders but because the forecast for tomorrow is horrible, thunder, lightening, possible heavy downpours and high winds. I don’t want the blooms that are almost ready to get damaged and so it was a damage limitation exercise 🙄 I will use them one way or another, new orders might come in and I will have flowers good to go or I will see what can be dried or I can just use them to practise something new. I only have one Lily and I don’t even know where it came from but I cut it and ended up with pollen on my cheek. It was quite difficult to remove the stain and so I thought that the stamen might be useful for dyeing the silk ribbons 🤷‍♀️ nothing ventured nothing gained as they say.

Once that was done I was determined to get some more cherry plums from the side of the road, if tomorrow’s weather is correct most of them will end up on the floor and there are hundreds of them. I would have liked to get a lot more but the general rule is to take only as much as you need or can use and so I behaved myself 😜

Wednesday: The terrible weather that was forecast didn’t arrive 😜 so I spent my time making up some flower bunches with the flowers I cut. There are a lot of pinks around at the minute so with the Barbie movie current at the minute I made very pink jam jar arrangements and a pink bunch. Then I decided to colour code the other bunches until I had a rainbow of flowers 😁

No idea what else I did that day, (writing this up on Saturday) I think Sam and the children came over for a couple of hours in the afternoon. John has been off a fair bit this week so he has been tidying up the stable block and re boarding the walls. He tried cutting grass but the mower is broken, two of the blades won’t work so it has to go in for repair and is being picked up on Friday.

Thursday: Still not much of a clue as to what I did except I have been doing a lot of dyeing, it’s addictive 😂 Finding plants that I think will work well as a dye, researching so that I understand what I am doing with it. So far I have tried cold dye with no mordant to see what effect I get, loving the berry dye colours 🥰 I have used avocado skins, sage, mulberries, lavender (not much colour but the ribbon smells lovely) calendula, coreopsis, indigo powder and turmeric.

The one on the right hand side is the original colour of the raw silk.

The twins came over for their weekly session with me while Mia goes to swimming lessons. We played tig with Grampy outside in the garden and then got dinner for them. This is the last week we will have them on Thursdays 😔 as they start their own swimming lessons next week 😁

Friday: I had a phone call late afternoon yesterday for a large celebration bouquet to be collected this morning. It was a big one and I had to make three bunches and put them together to make one large bouquet as my hands are pretty small lol. I made that first thing along with another order that was being collected in the afternoon. John was off today so was working in the stable block some of the time and harassing me about shares the rest of the time. He has had shares for a while and just left them where they were but has now decided to shuffle them around, the only problem with that is it is me that has to do it because he doesn’t know how (and doesn’t do technology 🙄) He watches them on his phone and comes to find me when he wants to buy or sell them 😜 fine except that he expects me to drop what I am doing there and then to get the best price 😂 I did suggest he gets his own iPad (phone screens are too small at our age to see everything in one go) and do it himself but secretly I rather enjoy the thrill of buying and selling at the right time when possible.

Saturday: Started off in the early hours with torrential rain and basically has not stopped all morning, everything will be a washout today 😏 We went to get some shopping 🙄 drives me nuts going as I am quite sure we don’t need anything but if the biscuit tin is empty John thinks we need to go. I am definitely getting more tetchy as I get older either than or everything is going to the dogs. The shop (Morrisons) was flipping freezing and I know it’s cold for August but seriously I was so cold near the fridges I couldn’t concentrate on what I wanted to get. Last winter it was Baltic in there and I said to John (and the lady in the till) I am not shopping in here this winter coming it’s too cold. I have no idea what they are trying to do, save money I guess but it will backfire, if you are too cold to concentrate then people just won’t stop long, counterproductive if you ask me. Second bugbear is the bloody loyalty card system, it’s supposed to be geared to you personally, it is not, I will never be buying ginsters sausage rolls so don’t give me a discount, it seems more like they are trying to lead you to buying what they want you to buy and I am not that customer. To be honest I do not want to be a customer but John insists on going there, I am going to do my best to either avoid it or write him a list so he can go in future 😂 Johns shopping list is cheese, butter, bread, biscuits, crisps , jam, chocolate and ice cream oh and spring onions as a nod to something healthy 😜 If he doesn’t have those then we have ‘nothing to eat in the cupboards’ 🙄

We spent the rest of the day binge watching tv because the weather was so appalling it was not even worth stepping outside 🌧️

Sunday: I had flower to do this morning and so got straight on with those. The weather is better, dry at least but it’s still a tad on the colder side of summer. We are stuck in a weather dump that is going to move this week sometime but that has been nearly six weeks of crap in summer like weather we were stuck in 😂 the only consolation is that I haven’t watered outside at all 😁 Charlie walked over with Oscar first thing, he had his breakfast here and then they walked back, he was asleep before they even left the driveway. I then watered the small tunnel with the tomatoes and cucumbers in before cutting back a lot of the bottom foliage from the tomato plants so that the tomatoes can begin to ripen, even they are a bit slow this year.

We went out for lunch with friends midday which is something we rarely do, in fact I think it may be a first 😂 I lunch or have dinner with my friends or we do the same with family but not usually both of us out with friends. We had a lovely lunch in a lovely old Manor House that I didn’t even know was there but will definitely go back again.

In the evening I had a wander round the orchard area to see how the plums are doing this year. Not so good as last year but they can’t produce masses every year I guess. The plums trees really need some attention they are getting a bit straggly, it is difficult to get the pruning right on those as too late in the year and they could get disease but they are not looking great anyway then probably nothing to lose. The walnut tree has got huge this year and nuts are already dropping but I cracked one and it is still soft so no idea what is going on with that, they seem to be shedding early but not ready and the same with the hazel trees. It has been a most peculiar year mind you so anything is possible. I walked into the front paddock and was dismayed to find that when John had done some strimming he has strimmed a pussy willow whip I had been growing 😔 That is the third year in a row I had tried to grow something there and he has strimmed it down 😡 He has left a runner from the plumtree growing nicely though 😬 There was metal wire on the ground he said, yes I put that there to protect the roots from the chickens who like to scratch in dug over soil, ffs I give up sometimes, flipping trigger happy with that thing. We really need an odd job man to come once a week and do some of the jobs I think 🙄

Posted in Friesland Farm

It is still raining 😂 a trip to Diddly Squat & my birthday 🥳

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 24th July 2023: A rainy start to the day and week, I am a little annoyed with myself because yesterday was dry and I could have got a fair bit done outside and now it’s soggy. Goodness knows what has happened to our weather lol we are stuck in a cycle of rain but I am not complaining as parts of Europe are literally burning 😏

I am waiting for the rain to stop so that I can go out and cut the echinops. I have been watching them carefully waiting for them to colour up, the trick is not to let them go into flower if you want them for drying as they will start to fall apart once dry otherwise.

This patch started off a one small plant a couple of years ago! It has now got huge and needs dividing in autumn, it is swamping everything around it 😂

Although it is only the end of July I have already started taking bookings for Christmas wreath workshops so I need to be thinking that far ahead. I am also going to do a pumpkin arrangement workshop and all those dates are firmly in the diary but I do have the flexibility to add more if necessary. I need to do a post to advertise them but it seems a bit too early yet 🤷‍♀️

As it kept on raining I gave the pantry a tidy up, I still have a few apples but some of them have either shrivelled now or gone soft but the ones that are ok I will start chopping and freezing so I don’t lose any more. Our apple harvest was huge last year, this year not so many eating apples but still plenty of cookers on the tree providing the crows don’t eat them all that is 🙄

Cleaning it up made me start thinking about winter storing and prepping, we have seen that you never know what is round the corner these days 🤔 In the event of something catastrophic happening the food chain would break immediately and I like to be prepared 😂 it’s the primal side of me 😜

Tuesday: Dry today whoo hoo, I cut the echinops first thing along with some eryingyum they are so different to most things that are growing at the minute so they add texture to flowers. I then spent the rest of the morning doing some proper gardening, weeding, hoeing, deadheading, planting, potting on. I think if I ever get to a point of taking anyone on the first job would be for a gardener 😂 or at the very least, a weeder. I have potted on plants that have been waiting for weeks and now hopefully they can put on good growth before planting in autumn. I have a lot of re organising to do come autumn, I made some errors when laying out the cutting flower beds so they need turning round. I planted some things in places that, it has become apparent, they are outgrowing already 😜 It is all a learning curve.

Wednesday/Thursday: Forgot to type anything up and have no idea what I have been doing 😜 Working here is all I know as I haven’t been anywhere else, trying to catch up on all the weeding and tidying plus cutting anything that needs cutting. I did deliver flowers on Thursday I remember that much.

Friday: I had a fair amount of flowers to cut today for orders and for the flower workshop this evening, it started raining around 7.30am, wouldn’t you bloody know it 🙄 Nevertheless I had to get it done and so off I went out into the rain, it stopped raining almost as soon as I had finished 😜 We had the ride on mower collected this morning as the belt has broken plus it could do with a service. That is one thing John has been trying to do, get the front paddock cut but the grass is very long. It would seem that many are in a similar situation because of the constant switch between rain and sun and the chap has plenty of belts to repair 😂 I spent a good part of the day in the flower hut sorting it out and getting ready for later. The flowers are not drying as well as hoped in there and I am not sure if it is because of the humidity outside all month long. I can’t leave the door open because all and sundry will be inside before long, cats, dogs, chickens, geese 🙄 so I have rigged up a metal grill that can be tied to go across the open door to try and get some airflow in there. Schoolboy error not having a window up high!

I have decided to have a go at dyeing natural silk with plant dyes. Trying to find eco friendly ribbon is difficult and expensive so I thought I would have a go at making my own and see how they come out, you never know it could be another string to my bow 😁

Saturday: It started off sunny then clouded over and drizzled 🙄 I had the flower room to tidy up and social media posts to do and then mid morning deliver some flowers to a customer. It was near to Mums so we popped in for a coffee before heading back home. In the afternoon we decided to take a drive to Diddly Squat Farm which is only around 15/20 minutes away. It was heaving with people, seriously the car park was rammed, the other car park (field) was rammed and the queue must have been about an hour long just to get into the shop and then another similar queue for the food wagon 🙄 So we took the obligatory photo and left lol, we decided to call into Burford on the way back and grab an ice cream. Not a parking space to be found anywhere so we headed for Bibury instead, same story there 😏 We drove home through some lovely little villages and rural back lanes and grabbed an ice cream in Carterton instead 😂 Where exactly is the cost of living crisis because it is not here I can tell you that much 🤷‍♀️ You can no longer just walk into a pub and ask for a table for food as they are always booked up, you need to book in advance. The roads are clogged up with cars so no one is worried about how much fuel they are using, the shops are always busy, so much so that I can’t even be bothered to go into them these days unless absolutely necessary.

In the evening we had booked a table in the next town along for a meal out instead of our usual fish and chip night. We ordered fish and chips 😂 it was delicious though.

Sunday: It’s my birthday 🥳 Up and out for an early breakfast at one our favourite places, they start serving at 7.30am 😂 which is great for us as I think breakfast at 10am is halfway through the day 😜 Once back home we had a relaxed day, not sure why John was relaxing it wasn’t his birthday 😂 Plenty of visitors throughout the day, we had birthday cake and chocolates and I had lots of lovely gifts for which I am grateful 🥰 This just about sums me up, a goldfinch whistle, a giant cookie, a medieval cooking pan, plants, gardening gloves, essential oils, a book and a new top plus a few other things. In-between cups of tea, cake and visitors we watched a couple of films, perfect relaxing day.

Posted in Friesland Farm

A lot more flowers again this week 💐 a small harvest & what lies ahead 🌍

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 17th July 2023: Monday again already 🙄 I have been out already this morning and cut flowers for tomorrows orders, hoovered the house and now having tea and toast before I go out and check on my seeds and do any other jobs I spot that need doing, it won’t be hard to spot them 😜

Once of the biggest disappointments for me this year was not being able to get many seeds sown, flower or veg. This is the time I should be harvesting plenty of produce, so much that I never know what to do with it all! This year that is not happening but I have managed to get a tiny yield even despite this and I still have plenty in the freezer which is lucky. This morning I have picked a few broad beans and some dwarf French beans plus a fair few berries 😁 The berries have been cooked down and some have been allocated to a crumble for John later the rest will be compote for my yoghurt 🥰 The beans have been blanched and frozen and the cucumbers will be used up or given to the family for them to use. One of the things that crossed my mind today was more perennial veg, you can get perennial onions, kale, asparagus, artichoke, chard will grow happily for a couple of years before needing to be redone (if it doesn’t seed itself everywhere) fruit bushes are perennial as are fruit trees. It is definitely worth thinking about if you are short on time, have mobility issues or for when life restricts your growing ambitions.

Merge harvests today but still 100 times better than anything you can buy 🥰

I looked after Oscar for the afternoon so playing and blowing raspberries was the agenda until nap time. John came home early and made two people in the house napping 😴

Watching the news and the breakthrough in dementia medication which is great news. The bit that is worrying me is the dementia test, I can’t count backwards taking seven away each time when I am fully compos mentis so I said to John, make sure you tell them that if I ever have to go 😂 Seriously I have many strengths, numbers is not one of them especially odd numbers and taking away 🙄 words, yes, numbers, nope 😜

Tuesday: First job make up the flowers orders going out later. John always asks me ‘what are your plans’ when he is home, I don’t make plans because you never know what will come up and interrupt those plans. I usually do what I did today and think, that needs doing, I could do that, and then I have to do something different. I had a couple of notifications come through about van and car break ins in the immediate area 🙄 I had said previously to John that I need to cut the apple tree back because I can’t see down the driveway when people arrive, so that became a more important job to address today. It means I have a clear line of sight and can see what is going on, that may be customers arriving, deliveries or just randoms mooching around 😜

A bit of gardening for the rest of the day , so much that needs cutting back at the minute to encourage more flowers.

I have so many orders to get through tomorrow, Thursday and Friday and then a last minute order for flowers first thing tomorrow morning. By this time it is raining quite well and so an hour before dark I was out in the rain cutting flowers and getting soaked 😂 Back inside and change out of my wet clothes and into my pjs and a cup of tea before bedtime.

Wednesday: Up and out to cut flowers again this morning and then get the orders ready for customer pick up. Out mid morning to deliver an order then back to get the rest of the orders done. Customers arrived to collect various orders and then I had a two hour sit down around 1pm before cracking on again. More flower cutting in the evening plus watering the poly tunnels and finally sit down around 8.30pm. I have flowers to cut tomorrow morning and then orders to make up for afternoon collections so another busy day and I have had to say that I have no more availability because I literally do not have enough time to do any more😜

Thursday: Up and out to cut lots of flowers this morning, practically everything I have growing at the minute for the last orders this week. I will be having the weekend off from flowers 😂 Once they were cut it was time to make the first lot of todays orders that are being collected later on today. A short rest, then the twins and then I will will making up the last of this weeks flowers ready for collection tomorrow. I have a Oscar from early in the morning so I need to be done and ready.

I have been trying to think if I have actually left the farm at all this week, apart from a delivery of flowers (straight there and back) I think the answer is no not since last Sunday 🙄

Thursday evening was the time I needed to make up the last three bouquets for this week, I have Oscar from 7am tomorrow so won’t be able to do it then and they are being collected at lunchtime.

Friday: Looking after Oscar all morning until early afternoon, he was a good boy and we played and sang and he napped and fed, all good. In the afternoon I gave myself some time off, I needed it after that week which was fabulous but full on.

Saturday: Back to the rain and I hope it’s not too much today as one of my customers is getting married so I will keep my fingers crossed for them 🤞 I needed to tidy up the flower hut because a week long of arranging had left a bit of a mess to clear away plus I have left over flowers to deal with. They are now hanging up to dry for a different use later in the year. I had oak blocks to mark up ready for drilling as I will be doing lots more of these ready for selling as soon as I can get them done.

If you take time to really look and listen all around you there is another level of activity going on while we are all getting on with our lives. Yesterday I was stood by the back door and saw a leaf cutter bee with a piece of leaf, it disappeared next to the shed and when I looked there was a bamboo cane which is holding up some netting, I guess it went in there to make its little nest to lay an egg. It was a tiny thing but lovely to witness, this morning I saw and heard a fight going on 🙄 Again I was in the kitchen and heard birds making a right racket, normally it’s because the cats are around and we have blackbirds nesting close by as well as wrens. I looked out of the door and saw a sparrow hawk on the ground under the hazel trees trying to get the fledgling blackbirds 🥲 So I opened the door and stepped out, off flew the sparrow hawk closely followed by Daddy blackbird in pursuit, he was brave. I couldn’t see any sign of fledgling bodies so hopefully I foiled the plot.

It is not exactly an inspiring day today, rain, colder than average for the time of year and not at all like July. Saying that, John and I both agreed we would rather have this than be frying in the temps they have in Europe at the minute. I typed a whole paragraph early in the week on my thoughts about what is happening in the world climate at the minute, I read it back and thought, that’s a bit heavy and deleted it but I do think it needs addressing or I need to say it, one or the other. The problem is that a large percentage of the population think that it is geeky or whacky (just like they did with the then Prince Charles) It isn’t, it is far sighted that’s what it is, it’s being able to look further ahead and see what is coming and not burying your head in the sand, not living for today without thinking about the tomorrow. We are in for some difficult years ahead with the climate and it is happening faster than anyone expected. How do we deal with it? I don’t have any answers but we do need to start thinking about it PDQ. One question I posed to John before bedtime was, how do we prepare for living with extreme heat? What practical things can we do to make sure our house stays as cool as possible ? To be fair our place stays fairly cool, we have plenty of insulation and we have UV glass in the windows (more for the Lupus but coming in useful now) What else can we do? Maybe shutters on the windows 🤷‍♀️ The next topic was about water supply, all very accessible while things are running normally however I see problems in the years ahead so we should think about how we prepare for that. We already catch a lot of water and we have tanks to install which will catch more but that only works if it rains. What about drought, that will cause big problems for everyone eventually. We need to make sure that anything we are growing holds onto as much moisture as possible for as long as possible, mulching is the answer to that. We will need to change what we grow to eat, we are all going to be eating differently because some things we are used to eating just won’t grow in extreme heat, although we will be able to grow more exotic things probably. We were talking about exploring options for a bore hole. It is crazy to think that most villages and towns would have had plenty of wells and they have mostly all be filled in over the years. And then on the flip side what about flash flooding and deluges of rain, we have had it all thrown at us over the last few years 😂 we need to prepare for every eventually. I do think that where we live at the minute we are in a good position to cope with volumes of water unlike the folk at the bottom of the hill. So if you are looking to move in the near future I would suggest you get up as high as possible lol, high temperatures are going to cause a multitude of problems and rising water levels is one of them. None of this is fantasy, we are seeing the effects globally every day, it makes the headlines and yet it is not a topic of serious discussion for most people 🙄 You only have to look at the graphs since the Industrial Revolution to see what we have done to the world, that and applying harmful chemicals to every aspect of our lives 😏 We are furiously trying to either backpedal or outrun the consequences but we are not going to be able to so we need a plan. Governments and politicians are too busy trying to outdo each other with their manifesto’s, they are only declarations of intention it doesn’t mean they will get them done 🤔 Those that are not fighting with words are fighting with real ammunition 😡 humans seem hell bent on destroying each other or the planet one way or another, intelligent life, pull the other one!

Do I feel better for getting that of my chest, not really it just opens up hundreds of other lines of thought 😜 But if it gets one person thinking about what lies ahead and how to deal with it then I will be happy enough x

Sunday: Yesterday late afternoon we went over to see the twins, it is their 4th birthday today but they are going on holiday so we went to see them beforehand. We bought back Josh and Flo with us to stay overnight as Shelley and Martin were off to a wedding reception that evening, the weather hasn’t been a great July for weddings and that one was no exception 😕

I had decided to mainly have the day off today, apart from looking after the children until they were collected I had no other plans. I did water the small tunnel though, the cucumbers and tomatoes are growing well in there and I am already harvesting plenty of cucumbers. We did pop out to a local plant nursery as there are still one or two things I am looking for, I didn’t find them but I did get a couple of other plants 😬 We had a roast at Shelley’s mid afternoon and then back home for the rest of the day. The weather was mainly dry and I should have done some work but I was tired and decided to recharge instead.

One of the plants I keep thinking about getting is a smoke bush or continue, I think it would be a useful addition and I wonder how well the ‘smoke’ would dry but I have no idea. If anyone has a bush they wouldn’t mind me snipping a few bits off to test I would be grateful 😁

In the evening Dave bought round a delivery of honey for the egg shed, I can hardly call it that now as the lack of eggs is fairly evident 🙄 We find eaten eggs around the place, that is either birds, the dogs or the hens themselves. The problem once hens get to a certain age is they develop bad habits like eating their own eggs, the months of lockdown don’t help as that is often when they begin with these habits which is why the industry turns them over quite quickly, approximately 2 years and then they are changed. Some of our hens are getting on for 3 or 4 and no longer productive but happily living out their days, as long as the fox doesn’t get them of course 🦊

Posted in Friesland Farm

Hospital, rain, rain and more rain 🌧️

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 10th July 2023: What a way to start the week 🙄 We we’re up early to get sorted before setting off for the hospital for my eye appointment. The traffic can be horrendous going to Oxford so we set off at 7 for an 8.30 arrival, we made it in good time and had a coffee before signing in. Then around 4 hours of our life went past just sitting and waiting to be seen, I finally got called in after three and a half hours. During the ten minute consultation, they examined my eyes and decided they were recovering well 😁 The doctor was wrapping up when I reminded him about the referral to the outpatient clinic that was mentioned during Fridays consultation, he looks at my notes, nothing on there so he emails for a referral appointment, all good so far. I then remind him that I don’t have enough steroid drops for the prescription they originally gave me on Friday taking 8 drops a day in each eye for seven days, dropping to 6 for the next week, 4 the next and then 3, 2, 1 you get the idea. You can’t just whack steroids in and then come off suddenly it has to be a withdrawal, I know that much and besides they told me that at my original appointment back in April. So he gives me a prescription and off I go to find the hospital pharmacy as they don’t have any in the department. I look at my piece of paper, that’s not my name and address, he has given me the wrong label, I go back and tell the nurse it’s wrong, he says, go and tell him 🙄 This is the same nurse that came in during my consultation to have short words with the doctor for sending another patient for some tests that the nurse had already sent them for previously 😳 So far, not so good and it doesn’t get any better! I go down the pharmacy and am given a pager, a pager 😂 it should be ready in an hour, sure enough just under an hour later the pager goes off and I go to collect my prescription. The pharmacist says ‘one drop in each eye, six times a day for six weeks, there are six bottles in there’ well at this point I know that is entirely wrong but we have now been there getting on for 5 hours so I take the prescription and run, well walk back to the car. I know what I am supposed to be doing even if the doctor doesn’t and thank goodness I do, someone elderly or not quite up to speed would get in a terrible pickle over that 😏 We pay for the parking which by now we are outside the 4-5 hours and into 7 hours and stay as long as you like bracket 😆 In the hospital I couldn’t get any phone signal or internet so the messages are suddenly pinging through, one (at 10.30) is from Charlie to say they landed safely after being on holiday. I message saying I have just finished at the hospital and she replies we are just going past the hospital turning if you need anything, we pull onto the ring road and they are two cars in front of us. What significance does this have you may ask, well they took off from Ibiza, landed in the UK, got their luggage, drove through the London traffic and made it to Oxford (near the hospital turning) in approximately the same amount of time I had been up the hospital for my appointment 😂😂😂🤣 FFS!

By the time we get home that is the best part of the day gone although I did receive a text to say I have an appointment at the outpatient clinic at the end of August so something went smoothly. I wasn’t planning on having to go back up Friday or Monday so that threw a spanner in the works with the jobs I needed to get done. I have lots of flower orders going out tomorrow plus more flowers to cut (which I will have to do this evening now, hopefully it won’t rain) and an introduction to beekeeping course which is happening here tonight and I was hoping to get everything ready during the day, nope lol, so I scort about for an hour or so once I got home and had a cuppa.

By evening the workshop was all set up and ready for the Introduction to beekeeping, we had seven participants tonight which is fabulous. Dave from Bradwell Bees teaches and I just do the meet and greet, admin and the refreshments so it works well. If you have experience in something then workshops are a great way to pass on knowledge and earn extra income. If anyone out there fancies teaching a workshop of any kind that is classroom based do get in touch to discuss, I have a room available and you may have the skills 😁 Once everyone is here and settled in with H & S, toilets and refreshment options covered, I get to go off for an hour and do other stuff, such as type up my blog.

A successful workshop, everyone seemed to enjoy it and were enthusiastic asking plenty of questions and even, when is the next one, which is fabulous.

Tuesday: Start the day with cutting flowers for orders and then straight onto making 12 thank you box posies for an order being collected this afternoon. I had a bit of a blip when the paper started drawing up water so I had to change the wrapping on the first four but once I sorted it out all was well 😁 They were collected later in the afternoon and the customer was really pleased which is what we like to hear, she took a handful of business cards with her, good sign. I spent the rest of the afternoon tidying up the office/craft room which has been a place that has also ended up with lots of flowers stuff in. Now I have a dedicated room I moved it all over there and threw out rubbish and recycled anything else.

As I type this it is chucking it down, belting down even 😂 we appear to have reached the rainy season as for the last week and a bit it has rained every single day, no idea why I was so worried about the lack of it 😜 I do need to cut flowers this evening for tomorrow, normally I do them in the morning but it was a bit wet so I did half and thought I will wait till everything dried out later 🙄

Wednesday: I had posy boxes to arrange again today for collection this afternoon as well as a couple of bouquets. I also sowed some biennial seeds ready for next year and a fair bit of weeding though you would hardly notice as the weeds are pretty much out of control with all this rain. In the evening I had some oak bars to drill out and arrange for an order.

Thursday: A dry start to the day so far, it’s 10am and I have just sat down for some tea and toast before starting again. I have been cutting this morning for Friday flowers but also a big order that came in yesterday. It takes a good hour and a half to cut a few buckets of flowers and foliage. All the while I am looking at what else needs doing, weeding, staking, dead heading and cutting back or pulling out. There is never enough time to get anything substantial done, we have discussed how we will rearrange this for next year but of course that cannot be done until this seasons flowers are gone over. Not all of the garden need re jigging, some of it we have already done but the area I initially dedicated to growing has not worked the way it is so re organisation is on the cards which will involve moving all the soil out of the beds, repositioning them and refilling before replanting or covering for winter. The other thing that we really need to get on top of is the staking, there is nothing worse than spotting a beautiful flower only to find the main stem is down on the ground and the flower is bending up off from it, fairly unusable in a bouquet but always considered for drying so all is not lost.

The amount of rain we have had has been great but it means the flowers have put on a lot of soft growth which also means they flop over, not enough strength in the stem or too heavy at the top. I often have offers of help the trouble is that people want to do the nice stuff and around 3/4 of it is hard, dirty graft 😂

I went out, weeded, hoed, laid weed membrane, and sweated then came back in and it was noon already. I don’t like weed membrane but it is the lesser of two evils at the minute. You might recall I trialled jute but that did not even last the winter into spring and so not cost effective.

1.30pm and I went straight back out after some lunch to crack on, I have my mojo and enthusiasm back the trouble is my stamina is still lacking 😜 that and every three hours I have to put drops in my eyes which means it is blurry for ten minutes 🙄 I have been weeding the pathways and non flower bed areas and am making good progress finally.

The twins arrived for their Thursday session at Nanas lol, John was home and they had great fun eating any raspberries they could find then a cucumber and finally their dinner out on a blanket on the lawn which they thought was super. Roly polys, hopping races, hide and seek, and handstands, not sure who was more tired them or us 😂

After dinner I went back out to do a stint in the big tunnel, weeding the path (one of the adjustments I will make in winter and then put the water on in there while I went and staked some of the taller plants. We are due rain tomorrow so staking is a priority otherwise they will fall over. After that it was into the flower hut to get Friday flowers ready, although some are already sold before they even go out 😁 Hopefully the rain will hold off first thing while I cut more flowers for Saturday, a rest day on Sunday before lots of flowers and grandchildren sitting next week. Tonight I am very tired 😴

Friday: Two showers this morning 😂 one nice warm one, one cold wet one from the rain. First I put out the Friday flowers although most have been pre sold I still had a couple of bunches to go out, not expecting any customers today mind you 🌧️ Next I had to cut for tomorrows orders and thats when I had my second shower 😜🌧️ I had looked at the rain radar and heavier rain is yet to come so I got out there while it was not pouring down but still raining. It feels like spring or autumn not high summer 🙄 In Europe they are reaching temps of 40c and we get the cold air meets warm air rain lol.

I had a look at the cucumbers yesterday and was surprised to find three or four full sized ones so I picked those, the twins munched on one while they were here and I sent Sam home with two more and then Martin took one home with him later in the evening. There are plenty growing which is great as the torts eat a fair few of them through the season. Last year I had so many I hardly knew what to do with them all so I peeled them, whizzed them and froze them in ice cube trays for adding to smoothies/juices.

Omg the weather is awful, truly awful, it hasn’t stopped raining yet and it’s now 1pm and we have worse weather coming tomorrow it would seem with high winds and rain together 🙄 There are quite a few big local events supposed to be happening this weekend, the Royal International Air Tattoo for one which is going to be a wash out, a few local festivals who probably thought mid July was a safe bet 😏 This time last year we were literally baking in record breaking temperatures and we’re on the verge of a drought 😜 I have put a beef stew on for dinner later 😂 and I think I will abandon everything and watch a film this afternoon 🤣

Flowers all cut and tied ready for delivery to one customer tomorrow morning.

Saturday: First job of the day was a flower order delivery, a nice big order all for one customer 🥰 Then once back home a few other jobs before Josh and Flo arrived at lunchtime. They were staying over night and so no more farm work for me today. The weather was shocking anyway 😂

Sunday: Up and make Josh and Flo pancakes for breakfast 😁 Once they had been collected and gone home John and I went out for some lunch and then back in time to watch an epic Wimbledon Men’s final, not much else got done today either 😜

I have a lot of flower orders this week coming 🥰 The sales are getting more and more which is fabulous.

Posted in Friesland Farm

No rain, lots of rain and back to the eye hospital 🙄

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 3rd July 2023: I am beginning to think there is something wrong with this place, well not beginning actually as I have thought it for years 😂 Desperately waiting for some rain I have watched the rain radar for weeks now and each time we seem to be in the void, seriously. I have been out weeding all morning, the wind is blowing, the sky is a moody grey and heavy clouds, Shelley messaged me at lunchtime asking ‘have you got this rain’ nope, no we haven’t and I sent a photo to prove it.

I started off this morning cutting flowers for orders going out over the next couple of days, I have steady orders coming in which is fabulous though I did actually have to hold back these next orders to wait for the blooms to be ready. Then onto watering the pots at the front which suffer terribly but they hide an eyesore so they have to stay there 😜 air started weeding and you know what that is like, once I start I have an urge to keep going and get as much done as possible. I did think I would like to plant some things up but the ground is too dry and hence too hard so it will have to wait, the trouble is I seem to be always waiting and waiting.

I noticed the other day that to the side of our place which is where the growing garden is, is very windy. When you then walk from there into the front area where the raised beds are, there is hardly any wind. I definitely located things in the wrong place all those years ago, mind you no matter where I put things there always seems to be a problem of one sort or another. The only problem I haven’t had this year is a plethora of green/blackfly, I have had some but not inundated like previous years. I put this down to not being able to do the weeding, the weeds are everywhere but they are providing natural food sources for them instead of my flowers and produce. I have also watched lots of birds constantly picking any I do have off of the plant stalks so hopefully after quite a few years we are getting to that golden balance 🙏 We have baby sparrows in the bird boxes on the front of the house, this is the second lot they have hatched and this morning I could see all the little beaks at the entrance waiting for mum and dad to feed them. We have plenty of Jenny wren babies around to, they love the oak tree and are always darting around in it. I disturbed a devils coach horse beetle while I was weeding, it didn’t bother with the threatening tail stance though. I swear it just looked at me and thought , do you mind madam I was sleeping’ before wandering off. Nice to know they are around, they eat all kinds of things including slugs and snails and it was quite beautiful in its own way.

It did rain, well if you can call it that, rather a splurt that turned to fine mist that then stopped, it didn’t even wet the ground beneath the nut tree canopy so that will give you an idea.

Look at that lovely rain that is all around and nowhere near 😂 we must have got a whip end of one section and that’s all.

I thought I would watch a bit of Wimbledon in the afternoon, Djokovic was playing and I have always championed him, don’t know why but I like to watch him play. Then we lost signal due to……..the rain lol. We always lose signal when it rains or is very windy, I can’t have everything can I and I would rather have the rain at this point in time. Actually a new satellite dish arrived today because I think the problem is with the ancient dish that we have had for probably 20 years 😜 bits fell off it and have been duct tapped back on and fallen off again so time for a new one and hopefully no more lost signal 🤷‍♀️

Tuesday: Happy 4th of July to all my American readers 🇺🇸 😀

We had a bit more rain overnight not sure how much I really need to get a rain gauge. I have pondered a fair bit about the weather as we British do 😜 There is a valid reason for it though because todays temperatures will only reach around 15c 🙄 we have gone from sweating our nuts off in temps reaching 30c and plummeted down to this 😂 we have no idea what to wear, next to nothing one week and back to multiple layers the next week and if we layer up and the cloud breaks we will be boiling, it is as chaotic as is sounds which is why it is always a big topic.

I must have had plenty of thinking time yesterday because another subject I pondered on was AI making GP’s obsolete (apologies to any GP’s reading 😘) but if you can just input your symptoms and AI can deduce what exactly is wrong with you or what tests you might need then that has to be the way forward, it certainly seems more effective than the system we have at the minute which is a guesstimate over the phone 🤔 This is me overthinking lol, it’s because these days you get an assessment form emailed to you, you fill it in and they write back and say, it all sounds fine we will ring you in six months to see if you are still alive 😜 It’s a bit harsh because I know if I phone up and say I think I have this that needs looking at then I will get a swift response but that’s only because I am immune suppressed, what about those that are not and have genuine concerns. I know for a fact that people are just not bothering either because they can’t even get through on the phone or even if they get through they can’t get an appointment. It’s not just medical either, it’s every service you try to contact, dentist, veterinary, electric, gas, broadband, logistics, suppliers, the systems are broken. There are those that would say, well that’s Brexit for you, but it’s not just the UK, there is turmoil inside Europe too, that leads me to believe it has to be the global pandemic that sparked this disconnection and we have no idea how to recover from it 🤷‍♀️

That’s enough brain ache thoughts for today 😂 I have flowers to cut this morning for orders tomorrow and I have deliveries to make later.

Wednesday: More flowers to cut for collection later today so that was this morning first job. It is day three of Wimbledon and day three of rain 😂 we might have known it would arrive in time for this fortnight 😜 I am not a sports fan generally, I will watch England matches in whatever sport it is (not cricket though 😉) and I will watch the Olympics when that is happening but I do like to watch the tennis well Wimbledon specifically. I don’t know why I like watching it 🤷‍♀️ when I first started watching it years ago I had no idea of the rules or terms or anything but over the years I look forward to it being on. I would never go and watch it live because there is no shade if it is sunny 😂 and I would fry.

In between rain showers and tennis matches I have been doing some cutting back of things that are starting to go over. Some can be given a new lease of life although the stems tend to be shorter, some have done their thing for this year so it’s goodbye until next spring.

In the evening it was flower club and a demonstration this time, there was a competition but I didn’t really understand what they wanted and I wasn’t there last time to ask as it was on Johns actual birthday evening so I didn’t do it. I was a little disappointed to hear the demonstrator praising the virtues of floral foam 😜 I guess we still have a long way to go to convince people who feel safe in what they know even if there is an environmental cost. I did learn some things though, there is always an opportunity to learn and I did win one her pieces in the raffle which was lovely (even though it was in floral foam).

Thursday: More flower cutting this morning, it is Friday flowers tomorrow so I wanted to get a fair bit cut. I am also cutting for drying, I feel compelled to keep drying lol, no idea what I will do with it all but if I have it at least I can use it or sell it. I also had a flower delivery of my own from another grower, these are for drying too. They are not things I have grown this year, or not grown enough of, but I definitely will next year depending on how they dry of course.

Mid morning someone arrived to put up the new satellite dish which took slightly longer than they expected it too but they got there in the end.

Then some more cutting back and weeding before trying out a small posy for teachers presents. I wanted to find a way to have flowers that would not die on the desk while waiting to be taken home but also keep the cost low. Back in my day, and even when my children were at school, the teachers didn’t get presents (maybe the odd apple 😜) but these days it is very definitely a thing. These will be in their own water source and rested inside a small box for stability, I will even hand stamp the teachers name to personalise it if required.

These have been a real hit 😁

Afternoon: Sit down and watch the tennis 🥰 My hand is still giving me a bit of jip especially if I have been using the secateurs all morning, I think it is week nine now and who knew it would take so long. People have told me it can take months and then last night I was talking to someone who has had it and she said that if she gets ill she gets pain where she had the shingles previously, oh joy so much to look forward too 🙄 It is a good excuse to stop and rest anyhow.

Sunday: I have been doing things but unable to write about them because I have had to go back to the eye hospital 🙄 On Thursday my left eye started aching and got worse as the day went on, it was watering and quite red so first thing Friday I rang them and they said come straight up. The wait was not so long this time but it was still a couple of hours, my actual consultation was quite long too, the decision in the end was to inject steroid straight into the lower eyelid and then I am also back on the steroid and dilation drops. I have to go back up first thing Monday morning and also attend the uveitis clinic. To be fair I knew that it hadn’t quite cleared up after the last lot of steroids and it had been flaring up slightly and then going down again but I should have gone up earlier I think.

Yesterday John and I spent time in the flower hut putting up more hooks for drying flowers, shelving and worktop space. Now I have a place for most things which feels more coordinated. I have had a flurry of orders for end of term posy boxes plus new customers that have heard about my flowers or seen them on social media. Its fabulous and I love it, I am always looking at other ways to use or present flowers it is nice to have the room to be creative with them 😁

Had a little play with a missed frame which could be used as a photo prop at weddings.
Flowers flowers everywhere 🥰

John has also been busy tidying the paddocks, burning rubbish, cleaning out the birds we have left. It is Wimbledon week and so of course the rain has been here all week 😂 Rain = growth which is great but also weeds 😜

Because my eye problem is Lupus related and part of the chronic inflammation problem I decided to jump straight into an anti inflammatory recipe book. We all know what we should be doing but life is busy sometimes and meals are often an afterthought here because I can’t wait to get on with flower things. I made a good shopping list, went shopping and made sure I have the ingredients I need to make nutritious meals that will help with inflammation. This was a curry, I made this for my sister and I while John and Shane ate fish and chips on our fish and chip night 😜 w
I served this with wild rice and a reduced fat mascarpone cheese and mango dip plus baked sourdough fingers, delicious 🤤

Tonight I have chicken, cauliflower, spinach, mushroom and cream cheese bake and I am looking forward to eating that 😁

Posted in Friesland Farm

Flowers, strawberries & the ying and yang of life.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 26th June 2023: A new week and a fairly busy one too as far as flowers go. It is British Flowers Week and I have the intention of doing something for it but not sure what yet. I was up early to get a bit more watering done, I did have the irrigation hoses on in the front beds last night and just wanted to get the pots watered properly. Each year I think, it can’t be as hot and dry as last year can it? and the answer is yes, yes it can 😜 After doing the watering I had a shower and breakfast, did the eggs, put on a wash load and then went out to cut some more lavender. I also cut some fairy roses for drying, they dry beautifully and are always worth doing. The lavender I have plans for once that is dry but I have sold a few bunches too. Then it was onto social media updates as you have to keep those going constantly for the algorithms 😂 plus it’s good to update customers or potential customers as to what is going on or what is available. I had the undertaker to ring for the funeral flowers on Friday, I just needed to know what time they could be delivered, then answer a message from my doctors surgery who wanted a blood pressure reading. That was not great, it is on the high side (even though I feel better today than I have for ages lol) and I now have to do morning and evening readings for a week to see what it is doing over time or if it was because I have been up working since 5am 😜 After doing that I planted up two roses that we got for our anniversary, one is called rambling Ruby and the other is called, As Good as it Gets ( a compact floribunda) now both planted and watered in. Next a sit down to do a few modules of my online course, which is mostly just watching at the minute to be honest so it is not taxing my brain. Then onto making up the flowers to be delivered later today and google the address so I know where to deliver to. It is not even noon yet.

We have geese and we have approx 4 acres they can roam in and sit wherever they like in those 4 acres but guess where they have decided is best 🙄 Right outside the door of my flower workshop, yep let’s sit and crap here all day, not even to the left or the right of the door but right smack bang in front 🤦‍♀️

The ducks have also decided they would rather like to come in the front drive, climb up on the raised beds (flattening everything with their flat feet as they go) and lay eggs there instead of in their hut. John says the ducks are not laying many eggs, I say they are laying them somewhere else, he says no I don’t think so, I find a pile of eggs in my flower beds 🤔 At the minute they are confined to their run, which is a pretty big area but they are not free ranging all over the place and especially not on my flower beds 😜

Tuesday: The whole blood pressure thing is not great, I have to send in readings and they are still up this morning. This is likely to be related to my medication although I will be making adjustments to my diet 😂 On the whole I don’t eat or do things that are bad for my blood pressure, I don’t smoke, I rarely drink and I cook most thing from scratch so salt is limited. What I have been over the last couple of months is sedentary due to the shingles and I do eat more biscuits and chocolate than is necessary 😜 but not big quantities. I was actually feeling pretty good yesterday until I took the first reading 😂

This morning I have been doing lots of different things starting with giving the flower room a clean, tidy, sweep and wash the buckets plus hang any unused flowers up to dry. Then onto some weeding in the garden, the weather is ideal for me today but I am really hoping we get some rain again soon it is very dry.

Wednesday: I planned on doing one thing and then did something entirely different 😜 But first I cut some foliage for a funeral sheaf I am making for Friday, this requires strong foliage such as a tree branch and they need as much conditioning as possible to take up plenty of water and stay looking good. Charlotte came over with Oscar before going to baby group and also to collect some flowers ordered by her friend, she delivered them for me on her rounds. Then I had planned on doing some gardening but instead I did the rest of the online course and then went I to the flower hut to do some practice 😁

We had dinner in the evening and after I went outside to pick a bowlful of strawberries for dessert 🍓 yum. I then spent an hour in the flower hut making a fresh lavender wreath which will now hang to dry as it is.

Thursday: We had a bit of rain early this morning, not much but again it will freshen everything up in a way that watering can’t do. I had some more flowers to cut, the rest of them for the funeral sheaf I will make tonight and then some for other orders.

After that I decided I really ought to do some cleaning. Initially the girls came and do it for me, changing the bed sheets etc as well but eventually I was able to help and now I am able to do it on my own again yay 😜 I did a deep clean of the bathroom the other week and then with Shelley’s help the same in the living room as I was not able to move the sofas by myself but now I need to do the bedrooms. Move everything, dust, clean, hoover and put stuff away that has been sat around for far too long. Same with the spare room where everything gets dumped, everything is now lovely and I will wait for the sun to move round before cleaning the windows which also have not been touched for a good few months lol. I still have the office, boot room and the kitchen to tackle but that can wait for another day as my hand is smarting a little so best not push it too far.

Knowing my luck the minute I hang the sheets out on the line it will rain 😂

It didn’t rain and the sheets dried beautifully 😁 In the evening it was to make up the sheaf of flowers for tomorrows funeral. It is always delightful to do flowers for people to receive but there is something profoundly humbling to be asked to do flowers for someone’s final journey.

Friday: After breakfast the first job of the day was to cut flowers for a wholesale bucket customer this tomorrow and while I was doing that Charlie and Oscar arrived. They had walked over and Oscar had his breakfast here before they walked back home again before it rains. The forecast says rain, the rain radar says rain and it looks like it will rain but as yet nothing has fallen from the sky 🙄 I did the final touches to the sheaf before delivering it to the funeral director in Witney. The flowers I do are as always fully compostable except the little cellophane cover on the message card and that is only there in case it rains so as not to smudge the writing. Natural, sustainable, seasonal, compostable 🥰

Once back home I made a cuppa and sat down, I have just had another order come in and have had to delay until Monday or Tuesday (which is fine with the customer) as I have pretty much used or will have used most of what I have growing this weekend. The flowers are at a switch over stage, the early summer flowers are still blooming but desperately need some rain and the showy summer flowers are in bud but not quite out yet, they need some rain too!

I went back outside and got on with some cutting back and weeding, the lupins and delphinium have had their first flush and I can see new growth at the base, cutting them right back will hopefully produce a second flush in a couple of months time. Cutting back plants that are going over also means that you let more light into those that are yet to bloom or have got overshadowed by the stars of the show. I cut back the nepeta which gets unruly and the campanula which grows tall then flops everywhere, the tall daisy’s are getting a bit unruly too so they got thinned out. I have the biggest patch of echinops growing, once they start to colour up I will be cutting them and that plant will need dividing, I should get some good plant material to pot up from it, grow it on and either plant elsewhere next year or sell some or both.

Early afternoon I had a delivery and not one that I had ordered this time. This was a gift from friends who came to our anniversary party, it was afternoon tea from the Cornish company 🥰 freshly baked scones, Cornish jam and cream, tea grown in Cornwall and Cornish biscuits, delicious so thank you very much Sally and Ian x

As John was 60 this year he knows a lot of 60 year olds 😜 so we are off out to a 60th birthday party tonight , the theme is 1920’s or black and white, we opted for black and white 😂

Early evening and still no sign of the rain they have been forecasting all day 🤷‍♀️🙄😏 probably pour down just as we step out of the door later 😂

Saturday: Started with cutting this morning for orders tomorrow, put the watering on in the small tunnel for the cucumbers and tomatoes, then the twins came to stay for an hour while Sam took Mia to her riding lesson. Shelley and Flo popped in and Shelley helped with a bit of technology that had me flummoxed 😶 Customers arrived to collect their orders and then I pottered around doing I have no idea what for the afternoon. Meanwhile John has been busy digging up dock and a few bits of ragwort from the bigger paddock, he did the small one the other day, then dragged it and topped it and that is looking good.

Popped out for a few hours early evening to visit my sister and on our return found a card and some strawberries in the shed for the ‘hen humans’ how lovely was that. While getting the washing in I was thinking that the universe/cosmos must listen and for every Ying there is a Yang. Just lately I have felt that some humans have no thought for anyone but themselves 😏 couple that with the loss of hens, we started with 70 when we came back from holiday and are down to 25 and it can feel quite depressing at times and then out of the blue, a lovely gesture which restores my faith in my fellow humans 🥰 thank you 🙏

Sunday: A new day and a better frame of mind today, still no rain mind you 🙄 I had flowers to get ready for customer collection mid morning but then I pottered around doing the usual, watering, weeding and watching lol. Watching to see what is about to come out, I have plenty in bud at the minute they just need a burst of rain or sun or both to chivvy them along. Once the flowers were collected we went to get some food shopping, I keep telling John to go on his own as it is mostly stuff for him, I can mange with the garden and the freezers 😂

We went over to Shelley’s for a bite to eat mid afternoon then once back I got the hose connected to do some more watering. I then wandered round and did some cutting for drying, nice red colours today which will hopefully be nice for winter arrangements. John was going to put a lot more hooks up for me but he has been doing the paddocks and changing the broken pump on the water tanks so I guess they will have to wait.

Grown not flown, natural, seasonal, local flowers 🥰
Posted in Friesland Farm

Fox attacks, summer solstice and our Ruby wedding anniversary.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 19th June 2023: After the bit of rain last night everything is nice and fresh this morning and it’s not so hot that it all just evaporates. My first garden job was to cut some of the taller stems that I will need later in the week, the reason is that we are expecting much more rain tomorrow and I don’t want them bashed down by any heavy rain. These are flowers that are perfect for cutting now with just a few buds open, the rest will continue to open in time for making up the bouquets. I am cutting flowers daily and not always for orders but because in order to keep them coming they need cutting otherwise if they go to seed they will stop producing and I don’t want that. It is one of the reason that a cutting garden is not filled with flowers as people expect, quite the opposite as they have been cut for using one way or another, fresh or for drying.

At lunchtime I had some customers arrive to talk about wedding flowers for the end of the year, a small wedding which I can easily do 😁 The afternoon was overcast enough to get some cutting back and tidying up done.

The evening was again spent getting watering done, the bit we had the other day was good enough to freshen up but not much else, we need some prolonged rain that will soak right into the ground. I was right last year when I said we need to catch as much as possible going forward, two years running now we have had prolonged, hot weather with no rain. It doesn’t help that our pump burnt out on the water tanks at the weekend and as yet John has not replaced it, I am sure he will if I keep in moaning enough 😜 I cut yet more flowers this evening after watering the beds they were growing in, flowers are coming thick and fast and I keep cutting them. I also walk around thinking, I need to change this or that, there will be plenty to do come autumn. Having done a full year and a bit I can now see what I did right and what I did wrong, I also know which flowers I like and what is not worth growing. The annuals were pretty much a no go this year due to me being ill and I have found I can do without most of them, yes they are lovely but there are other flowers that are just as good and perennial, saving me lots of time and worry.

Tuesday: I can’t function today, I tried but I cannot. Almost 8 weeks since the shingles broke out and I am still getting pain on one side of the wrist, hand and fingers. The skin is healing and the new skin is tender, the stinging feeling never goes away, never dulls even with painkillers, consequently it is very tiring, on the up side my eye seems to have got better by itself 🤷‍♀️ I would just like a day when I wake up in the morning and feel full of beans and ready to get going, not too much to ask is it?

We have had two daytime fox attacks today and lost around 10 birds, I heard the first commotion around lunchtime, went out and there were hens upon the egg shed, up on the fence and all making a racket. I walked round the front paddock to check it over but couldn’t see anything. An hour later another commotion and a similar scenario, we are down to 30 hens, half of those don’t lay anymore either so we will be very short on eggs and resigned to the fact that we are coming to the end of our egg selling days. Yes I know people love our eggs but we do not love the constant battle that it takes to provide them ☹️

No watering tonight as we had a good load this morning and I am glad of the rest.

Wednesday: Solstice. A better day functioning 😁 so I got on with lots of flowery things, I know I should have done cleaning but hey that can wait 😜 I started my online course and did two modules and then John came home at lunchtime. After a cuppa and a quick sit down we went out to try and find something I wanted to do flower things in, couldn’t find what I was looking for but I found a few plants instead 😂

Back home and after another sit down, John did some weeding in the driveway. I keep telling him he is wasting his time as he is doing it by hand, by the time he finishes one bit the last bit will have grown again but it falls on deaf ears 🤷‍♀️ He did stop to make me some wooden boxes to fit jam jars in, I was trying to find plastic wallpaper paste troughs earlier but can’t find any so wood will do, actually they are probably much nicer. Dinner eaten then back out to get some watering in the tunnels done, do the horses water and that basically is the end of the longest day. There was no spectacular sunset, indeed no sunset at all otherwise I would have taken a photo.

Thursday: Mostly I have been doing flowery things 😂 well there is something new 😜 Cutting a bucketful first thing this morning and then to the online course which is soooo good I keep doing module after module. I did take a few break to go and cut some drying material after every three or four modules because I needed to move around a bit.

I spent the evening making up two living vase bouquets for delivery first thing in the morning, plus flowers for Friday.

Friday: After delivery the flowers this morning we set off for a day out to Stratford on Avon, Shakespeare country. When Sam and Luke got married last year they gave us and Luke’s parents the gift of Afternoon tea and a river cruise which was lovely of them. We booked it a couple of months ago and today was the day that we got to go and enjoy the gift. We met Luke’s parents there and enjoyed a delicious afternoon tea at The Arden Hotel, the service was impeccable, the sandwiches, cakes and scones were delicious and the surroundings had a relaxed elegance. The day was very relaxed as it often is when you are next to or on the river I think, the only downfall was the volume of traffic on the journey home 😜 The weather was perfect for me to be able to wander round, overcast but warm

Saturday: I had an early night last night so that I could get up early and do some watering this morning. Pyjama gardening early in the morning is one of my favourite activities lol. Again it was overcast and so I was able to spend quite a few hours getting some gardening done including weeding, planting and harvesting berries and lavender. I was also able to wear a short sleeved t shirt which is rare for me in the summer.

1st of the lavender harvest
Juicy redcurrants full of lycopene and so good for you

I had a phone call mid morning and unbelievably I have an order for flowers from Aberdeen 😂 to be delivered locally obviously but how amazing is that.

After bundling up lavender to hang for drying and de stalking red currants it was time for a quick sit down before having a shower and getting ready to go out again. The girls are taking us out for our 40th wedding anniversary which is tomorrow.

Forty years! Where has that gone 🤷‍♀️ we met on a blind date at the Masons Arms in Brize Norton, we got engaged on my 18th birthday party which was at Bradwell Grove (when it was still a hospital) social hall, we had our hen and stag do in the Rose and Crown in Shilton and then we got married in the Holy Rood Church at Shilton. We haven’t traveled far have we 😂 not in terms of miles anyway.

The life road we have navigated has been scenic, lots of hills climbed and plenty of freewheeling downhill, we have hit plenty of pot holes and bumps on the road. The travellers we have met along the road have been many, some travelling with us and some travelling in the opposite direction but all have enriched our life journey in one way or another. At times we barely had enough fuel to keep going or the means of buying the fuel and at other times we have had enough to propel us many more miles than we ever thought we could get. We have taken turns in navigating, when one is tired or just can’t, the other takes over. We are as different as chalk and cheese and you would think that could never work but actually it works very well, I would say we are both different pieces of the same jigsaw 😂 We have accumulated some fantastic passengers on our journey, our three amazing and beautiful daughters, they invited their own passengers along, three fabulous husbands and six adorable children between them so far. Would I do anything differently, of course I would, maybe some of the turns we took were wrong turns, maybe some of the ones we didn’t take, we should have 🤷‍♀️ but I wouldn’t change who I was travelling with, on the whole considering we have travelled all that way without a map I think we are doing ok 🥰

STOP PRESS: We thought we were going out for a meal with the family, turns out they had organised a surprise party 🎉 It really was a surprise I can tell you 😂 Friends and family were waiting to greet us, a table laden with food, old photos, cake, music and a bar, what a lovely afternoon we had (once I got over the shock) We had lots of lovely cards and presents which was very kind of people, just a lovely thing to do and I can’t believe nobody gave the secret away.

Us as fresh faced teenagers 😂 our life map is now recorded in wrinkles 😜

Sunday: Another scorcher of a day ahead, at 8am this morning when I was putting out the eggs it was already very warm, normally at that time of the morning it is a pleasant temperature still but not today.

Today is actually our anniversary day but we dont have anything planned so the usual jobs got done first thing. I then had flowers to cut for a delivery tomorrow and John has been digging out docks from the paddocks. Biscuit broke out of her paddock the other day but as there is not a lot of grass around due to lack of rain we have left her in with Jack. That meant John could then top and drag the small paddock while she is not in there, meanwhile I gave the kitchen a bit of a clean. My hand is just about at the stage where I can manage most things now, though I still can’t make a fist at least the pain has gone and I am just left with an constant uncomfortable tingling which will hopefully go soon. Our plan was to get done in the morning and then nothing for the rest of the afternoon but stay in the cool of the house and hope that some rain comes our way 🙄 We also have cake to eat 😂 so invited anyone who wants some over for a cuppa.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Flowers, foxes and a bit more rain.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 12th June 2023: After the rain last night it is set to be another hot day again though I think more storms are in the pipeline. Seeing as I didn’t have to water today 😁 I got on with cutting flowers straight away. The flowers need cutting regardless of whether there are any orders or not, you need to keep the blooms coming and so either dead head or cut to achieve that. I do have some orders so that is what they will be used for and any that can be dried successfully will be hung up.

Once it was too hot to do any more (which was pretty early today) I came inside on was on a mission to clean the bathroom. Everything needs a good clean really as six weeks of not being able to do it has left a build up of dust and dirt. The place has has a quick hoover and a whip round with a cloth but not a real clean and I did contemplate getting a cleaner in. I mentioned it to John in the hopes he would say don’t worry I can help you but all I got was ‘it’s fine’ we’ll it’s not fine not to me anyway and so I set about cleaning the bathroom from top to bottom with my left hand and a small amount of use from my right hand. I can’t use hot water so that was out of the question, wipes it is then, not that I like using them but needs must in my current situation. I have one of those dust mops so that went around the walls first, then hoover with the brush attachment to pick up any debris and cobwebs, clean out the cupboards and wipe down all the walls, the units, the towels rails (painfully slowly I might add) use the limescale cleaner and a toothbrush on the China and the shower cubicle, wipe everything over, hoover the floor, wipe the floor over and voila about two and a half hours later I have finished 😂 A quick sit down and decide if I can do the same in the living room now or if I will run out of steam and do a half hearted job 🤔 This is really my spring clean which I was not able to do, probably not the greatest decision to do it on a very hot day but it’s either that or leave it and I don’t think I can as it’s driving me nuts 😜

I did start the sitting room and Shelley came over to visit and gave me a hand which was useful as I can’t move the sofas on my own at the minute, moved, dusted, cleaned and hoovered everything and I even got three loads of washing done. I watched the rain radar very carefully so that I knew when to get the washing in before the rain came, not a huge amount but still enough for me not to have to go out and water this evening.

Tuesday: This morning I got outside early and did some planting up which was actually a bigger job than it sounds. The bed that had been growing tulips and narcissi needed weeding and the bulbs all lifting so that they can be dried. They won’t be used as cut flowers again next year as the flowers are likely to be small but they will still be added to the front bed with shrubs in and over a couple of year will gather strength and maybe even multiply. Once it was cleared I could plant some dahlias, coreopsis and a penstemon I had been growing, then once watered in well it was given a good mulch with the old woodchip (not the new stuff as that needs to break down before using on growing beds) Thinking it must be nearly lunchtime I came in to find it was only 10.30 😂 So the next job was to go and make up a bouquet for an order that John would be delivering at lunchtime. I also needed to get the flower room tided up ready for a workshop this evening, not a flower one this time but an introduction to beekeeping workshop which will be taught by Dave from Bradwell Bees whose honey we sell in the egg shed.

I had a visit from Charlie and Oscar at lunchtime and then my hairdresser came to give me a hair cut. After that I had a sit down for a couple of hours, busy morning, rest in the afternoon, busy evening that’s how it goes on hot days for me.

It feels very close again now, I can’t see any rain on the radar so it will be an uncomfortable muggy night I think 🙄

I spent the evening outside watering, weeding and planting, I also saw a hedgehog, not sure if it was Hilda but lovely to see.

Not sure what happened to Wednesday 😂 much of the same I suspect.

Thursday: Up at 4.45 this morning to get some work done outside before it gets hot again. Watering mostly but some cutting of flowers for tomorrow’s Friday flowers. indoors once it got too hot and I ran out of shade, I did manage to prick out some seedlings in the greenhouse though 😁

After school the twins came but George was not very well and I had to send John out to get some calpol as I didn’t have any left.

In the evening I made up some jam jar flowers and some market bunches. While I was working the dogs started barking, I checked outside and couldn’t see anything. Then I heard Patch yapping in the front paddock so I went through the garden so see where he was and why he was barking. I whistled him and he came back, I told John I thought the fox had been about which is why the dogs were barking. When John went to shut the hens away in the front the bloody fox was in the hen house, somehow it had got in and the gate had shut behind him so he couldn’t get out. We have lost quite a few hens lately and can’t get anymore until September and I am not sure we will even bother. When we first came to live here the hunt was still allowed and the fox population was controlled or if you had a problem you could call them in but now there is no control and it is relentless. Couple that with the rise in feed prices, avian flu lockdowns and you wonder what the point is anymore, it’s pretty soul destroying.

Drying petals
Practising a foam free arrangement
😡 we will not have many hens left soon and we have said before that it will take some serious thinking through to decide if we bother to get any more or not as each year we battle against last years cubs fending for themselves and mother foxes feeding young, they are always out and about during the day which is difficult to protect free range hens from. With little control over the fox population the problem gets worse year on year but I guess what will happen is once the population gets too big they will begin to starve or turn to other food sources 🙄

Friday: Up early again, did a bit of pruning and cutting back and then cut flowers for tomorrow’s orders and workshop. Then Charlie picked me up and we went to Witney for a mooch round and some brunch, a very nice bagel at Coffeesmith and then pistachio ice cream a little bit later on the way back to the car. Shelley messaged and it was Josh’s turn to be poorly and she asked us to pick up a thermometer, we dropped it round on the way back and Josh was running a fever ☹️

John and I went out to get some shopping and called in to see how Josh was on our way home, he had perked up a little since the afternoon which is good.

Back home and straight on with more work, a couple of flower orders to make up for collection tomorrow afternoon and also a memorial heart for Father’s Day also being pick up tomorrow. Tidy up the flower room and sort the flowers for the workshop tomorrow morning, change all the water and snip the stems of all the flowers. With the weather so warm the flowers are struggling a little bit so I need to keep them in top condition. Sweep up and I am done at 9.30pm. John did the animals and also gave the lawn a trim for me, if I am showing people round it’s one thing that can look tidy 😂

Saturday: Plenty to get sorted before this mornings workshop, watering, cutting, weeding etc. Workshop at 10am and it was a lovely couple of hours, I really enjoy teaching (who would have thought) and each time the dynamics are different, the questions are slightly different and peoples experiences are different which makes it interesting. Once the workshop was over I had customers coming to collect orders in the afternoon then a well earned rest 😁

Hand tied bouquet workshop.

Except I didn’t have a rest, I remembered that I went back out to the workshop to do some practice with a hand held posy. I gave it to my sister in law later that evening as she has had a difficult week 🥰

Sunday: Father’s Day here in the UK so we went out for breakfast with Shelley, Charlie and their families to The Old Shed, fabulous full English for the menfolk and Josh, I opted for pancakes with bacon and maple syrup, Flo had pancakes with berries and maple syrup, Shelley and Charlie went for the scrambled egg and avocado option. The place was seriously busy but the service was quick, the food was hot and delicious and we had a lovely time. We had a meander through the attached woodland afterwards, found the zip line and of course the men and Charlie couldn’t wait to get a have a go at that though they had to wait for the kids to have a go first 😂 Suitably fed and entertained we made our way back home 😁

Waiting and hoping for some more rain to arrive today, temps are still higher than average for the time of year and we really need some precipitation.

I need to call the eye hospital as my eyes have flared up again, actually what I think it that they didn’t quite heal and I should have continued with the steroid drops a little longer 🤷‍♀️

I signed up for an online course with Bex Partridge, a full dried flower course. I have her books and I have watched a workshop with her through one of my flowers groups before but I thought I would like to see her whole process as I can definitely learn more and it’s good to learn.

It rained in the evening, not much but enough to please the garden and me 😁

Posted in Friesland Farm

Flowers, ducklings and thunderstorms.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 5th June 2023: We have had wall,to wall blue sky over the weekend but today it was overcast, great for me because it means I can get on 😁 I had plenty flowers to cut this morning for quite a few orders tomorrow and Wednesday so that was the first job after the usual morning jobs.

Bucketfuls of flowers ready for making up bunches, bouquets and jam jar flowers for orders tomorrow.

Once I had done that I sat with a cuppa to practice making an animated motion post lol, I know, I had no idea what this was either but when I looked it up I thought it looked easy enough so I gave it a go.

Not a masterpiece but not bad for a first effort, hopefully you can play it 🤷‍♀️

Then as it was still overcast I thought I should work in the poly tunnel so I soaked the soil, dug in some blood, fish and bone and then planted up chrysanthemums and zinnia. The zinnia LOVE the heat so provided they get enough water they will be fine, the chrysanthemums not so much but I am trying out different planting places on things to see what happens. I tried delphinium in the tunnel to see if they would flower earlier than the outside ones, initially they started to flower but the cold early on in the year took them even though I tried to keep the flowers out of any draught. The plants were still fine themselves and continued to grow flowering at the same time as the outdoor plants so those will go back outside at the end of the year. No point pampering something that is going to do what it wants when it wants 😂

Inside them for some lunch and then back out to cut some flowers and foliage for something I want to have a go at, something different from my usual style. If it works out see picture below, if not it won’t be there 😜 Once those were cut and conditioning nicely it was time for a sit down for an hour.

The scent of this was amazing!

Tuesday: It is positively not June weather today 🥶 I give up wondering what our weather is doing it has a mind of its own, flaming June, more like flaming cold. I think I rather over did the weeding and planting the last couple of days as my hand was pinging away last night, it is a little better this morning but I was up later than usual at 7.15! I had plenty to do this morning as well so I more or less got straight on with making up flower orders that were being collected later today, I also have an order for tomorrow which I have already made up. Then I spent a little time doing something for myself, practising different flowers like the picture above. I confess I did it then had to take it apart and redo it before I was happy enough with it but it turned out nicely in the end I think.

We have been losing the odd hen every day to the fox, they will be feeding cubs and so more likely to come out in the daytime to find food. I heard someone not far from us lost around 60 in one go when the fox dug in 😏 At the minute we are unable to get new hens there is an all round shortage of point of lay hens, we have customers waiting and we will need some to replace the ones taken but not until September we are told 🙄 We may end up cutting our egg selling days shorter than we thought if we lose many more, we are at the point where we are not too worried about replacing them and continuing with egg sales anyway, this might force our hand. With the cost of feeding, watering, housing (and egg box costs even though we get returns we still have to buy more) the hens we just about break even, if you add in our time we definitely don’t so basically we (and by that I mean John 😂) is working for free and let’s face it who is really prepared to do that 🤔

Once all flowers had been collected it was time for a sit down but first dig something out of the freezer for dinner tonight. If anyone has a foolproof way of organising a chest freezer please tell me 😂 I know I had some lime and chilli chicken in there somewhere but I cannot find it 🤷‍♀️ The task was even more difficult than usual because my hand is not good with temperature extremes hence why I am still not doing the washing up. There must be a skill to it somewhere, bear in mind that often I have small packets of various bits and pieces that I have saved or picked and frozen for later use so not bags and boxes at all. I did find that using sacks in the bottom worked well, one with frozen fruit one with veg and one with meat but that does not cover a plethora of other oddities like frozen herbs (tiny portions) fruit cubes, passata, hazelnuts, cheese, eggs and even chocolate I think 😂 Knowing what I have in there is not the problem but finding it definitely is 😜

Wednesday: Johns 60th birthday, initially he was going to go to work but I said I don’t know why you don’t have the day off so he did. He did the morning jobs then had a shower and changed into his best clothes, meanwhile I still had work to do and he ended up following me around wondering what to do 😂 I was waiting for a delivery at lunchtime and once that arrived we took flowers down to the pub and had lunch while we were there. Back home just in time for a free delivery of woodchip, love free woodchip 🥰 I am on a database for anyone doing tree work in the area, they get in touch and ask if I want it once it’s chipped, then they deliver it. This was all willow and poplar so great stuff, he asked if I wanted laurel and holly, not chipped I said but if you cut it off whole I will definitely have it especially nearer wreath making time lol. It’s been a good day as Shelley took some flowers to her friend who was working, the manager saw them and asked where they were from, he then contacted me and wants weekly flowers plus extras now and again plus interested in me doing activities with the residents from time to time, brilliant 😁 Various family came and went over the course of the afternoon and evening and John has some rather nice events to look forward to including an F1 hospitality day and Dr Who escape room experience 😂 the second will push him outside of his usual boundaries 😜

I have had to put the sprinkler on the garden this evening, it is so dry the ground is starting to crack up and we have temps of 26c coming at the weekend apparently. It might bring thunderstorms and rain with it but you can bet your bottom dollar if we need it we won’t get it!

Thursday: I have a few orders this weekend as well as Friday flowers so I needed to get flowers and other material cut first thing. Once that was done I really needed to tidy up the flower room a little, some flowers I haven’t use or have gone past their best either get composted or the petals removed for drying. Some I had already decided to hang up to dry I just needed to get and do it so those jobs are all done and I am ready for the next lot. I need to be cutting every other day now to keep the flowers producing and if they are not being used fresh they get dried. Charlie came over with instructions and some of Oscars things as he is staying over tonight (not sure how that is going to go 😂) Shelley is having him this afternoon then bringing him after tea and Charlie and Macca are going to a wedding. I have the twins first though so I will quite possibly be knackered by bedtime 😜

It is all very well having an irrigation system set up but we really really need some rain, there is nothing quite like rain to saturate the ground and give things some oomph again. I am at the point where the things that survive stay and the things that don’t do not get replaced as I think this is the way things are going to stay, possibly (probably) even get worse 🙄 We can only do what we can and there is no point fighting against it we have to work round it but watching the news and the pollution in the USA from wildfires in Canada ought to make us take better notice of what is ahead. And just as I type scientist’s have confirmed that ‘el Nino’ has begun 😏

Friday: Oscar was a superb guest and I even got smiles in the morning, he was up at 5ish had pre breakfast, played, pooped and then went back to sleep at 7.30 for another 45 mins. That gave me just enough time to dash out and water the front and put the eggs out. Once he was awake again I put him in the pushchair and we went out to the paddock to do the horses water, take the rubbish down to the bins and feed the torts. A not of playtime and then Charlie and Macca came to collect him, he had been fine but on seeing them he suddenly realised they hadn’t been here and burst into tears 🥰 Sam and the twins came mid morning for an hour or so and then once they had gone I had to get on with making up some flower bunches to put into the flower shed for Friday flowers.

In the evening we went to get a bit of shopping and on our return a wild duck and lots of ducklings were in the driveway. Last year a duck, and I assume it is the same duck, walked all the way along our lane and down the hill to the local pond with her ducklings, it’s over a mile and she was escorted by a local lady for some of the way. This year after she left our drive she decided to go across the fields, I hope she made it. The evening wasn’t over and I had to make up a tribute heart for a customer collecting in the morning, a bit of watering and finally it was bedtime.

Saturday: Up at 5am and outside to get some watering on and cut some flowers for more orders and market bunches. The next job was to make up 20 jam jars for an order to deliver this afternoon and then a flower arrangement for the local church. It was very hot today and I was hoping for a decent thunder storm and some good rain but what we got was plenty of noise and a wetting. Everything is seriously dry, I put in soaker hoses for irrigation but didn’t bank in no rain for weeks and then temps of 30c in early June 🙄 Being on clay the water gets sucked up so quickly even on raised beds that it barely helps the plants when it is so hot and dry. Once the jam jars were delivered we had a couple of hours rest before getting on with other jobs. Back into the flower room to make up bunches of flowers and jam jars to put out for sale and also prep flowers for drying. All the while I have had the sprinkler on and moving it round every hour or so, I can’t rely on waiting for rain or I will have no flowers left.

Tribute flowers, seasonal, local, compostable, Shilton
Heart tribute flowers for a grave
Jam jars boxed and ready to deliver

It seems after talking to a few people that we missed the downpour that was happening all around 😂 literally we had a wetting that was it, no downpour that would soak the ground, barely enough to make any difference whatsoever 🙄

Sunday: Up early and gardening in my pjs 😁 watering, some cutting back and some weeding before it gets too hot. I have come to the conclusion we are in totally the wrong location to try growing anything 😂 no wonder it is always a battle 😜 The rain moves round us, the sun beats down on us, the clay and brash soak up all moisture it’s surprising I can grow anything really!

Once we had dropped off the flowers to the church we went to a nursery to look for some specific plants. I found a few but there were still some eluding me so we set off for a garden centre. We got a bit lost in the country lanes but it was a nice morning and eventually ended up where we wanted to be. As we pulled up I spotted my brothers truck and found him his wife and my mum having breakfast lol. We ordered coffee and cake as we were five mins too late for the breakfast menu. I still couldn’t find the plants I was looking for, salvia amistad seems to have dropped off the face of the garden centres this year 🤷‍♀️ I lost mine in the winter wet and cold, I had some on order but the order was cancelled and despite looking I have not been able to locate any as yet. I also wanted some white astrantia which is proving to be difficult to find in stock anywhere. Nevertheless I did come back with a few plants so I satisfied my wants for now 😜

It was hot in the afternoon so we stayed inside and relaxed, it is Sunday after all. I spent my time watching the live rain radar and was thrilled when I realised we were actually going to getting some rain, we also got thunder and lightning galore, love a good storm and the smell is fabulous. A strange thing happened when it started thundering though, John started sneezing, loads, I mean 20/30 sneezes so I looked it up and it is a thing, who knew 🤷‍♀️ it is called thunderstorm asthma, you learn something new every day. I am hoping we get a fair bit more rain as I need those tanks to fill up but I will take what we have had so far, it will energise the plants at least. I think we are a very long way short of restoring ground water levels though but I am happy for now.

I am still having a little trouble with my hand but no where near as much as I have had. I still don’t have full grip and I still can’t tolerate temperature extremes and using it for any length of time starts it jangling but hopefully day by day it gets back to normal.

Have a lovely week x