strawberries – Page 2 – frieslandfarm (flowers)

Windy weather, picking and freezing & John returns home.

Posted on July 5, 2020 by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

Ladybird larvae, picking begins & pyramid orchids.

Posted on June 21, 2020 by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friesland Farm

Lemon curd, routine jobs and another fox problem 😏

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good week and stay safe x

Friesland Farm

Rain, Dads funeral & getting on with it.

Posted on May 3, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday again! 27th April 2020, not a year we will forget in a hurry, a worldwide pandemic that has had massive impact on the way we live. There have been negatives but I’m hoping there will be some real positives that will change the way we do things both for the benefit of the environment and for our metal wellbeing. Time will tell but one thing is for sure we are living through one of the biggest historical events that will be written and learnt about for centuries to come.

Meanwhile I have been busy this morning doing a bit in the greenhouse, there are always plants to water and move round so they get a fair share of the sun, I potted on the peppers, they will continue to grow in the greenhouse as they did so well in there last year. I did a bit of hoeing to keep the weeds down on beds that are waiting for plants to go in and mulled over where things will get planted, I think I have a good idea of where everything will be going now. The sweet corn will be planted and underneath them will go pumpkin and butternut squash, they grow entirely differently, the sweet corn straight up and the squash will sprawl so double up the use of space. The same applies to melon and cucumber in the poly tunnel, the cucumbers are happy trailing along the ground, the melons like to climb so they will be planted together, the trailing plants will shut out the light and prevent weeds, another bonus. John has done a sterling job of clearing and cleaning out the back area which had yet again become a dumping ground, at least we have a space to dump everything I suppose but a lot of it is again stuff that we have collected and never used so it’s gone in the skip.

I feel like I’m just marking time, anyone else? I am trying to read articles I wouldn’t normally get the time to do and I really need to get back into listening to some podcasts, I think that would be a good idea. We are forecast a few days of rain so maybe that will be the time to chill a little.

Tuesday: Today is Dads funeral but before that we have the usual jobs to do and today because it is raining and likely to rain all day I am getting the horses in. Two reasons, one it’s not nice standing all day in the pouring rain and two the rain will make the grass ‘flush’ this is not good for them as the sugar content in the grass will go up and this could cause laminitis. If the horses were in work this would not be such a problem but because they are not using up that energy it would cause issues. I had a few other jobs to keep me busy, paying the end of month suppliers bills, John went to the chemist to pick up my prescription and then it was time for the off.

The funeral was a simple affair and I did reflect that Dad would have loved it, a few songs that were right up his street and a short eulogy and prayers, then we had a whisky toast at the grave side and said our goodbyes, we shared a few memories in the churchyard after the event and then it was time to come home. What is sad is that we could not have that all important wake after, a time to chat and remember with family and friends, many of whom lined the route but when the time is right we will have that get together as I suspect will may families around the country.

It has been raining all morning and when we got back we lit the fire and took the rest of the day off, well until feeding time later that is.

John did the feeding and egg collecting and I sorted them out ready to box up. The eggs sales are steady now, not manic like before thank goodness.

I had a lovely FaceTime session with all my brothers and sisters but mainly spent time just relaxing until it was time to go and and top the horses up with hay while John put all the birds to bed. Then I did something I never do and that is come back in and get into my PJs, normally I wouldn’t do this as you never know what will occur after dark but today I am making an exception and besides it will save time later when I can fall into bed and hopefully get a good nights sleep as last nights was a bit restless.

Wednesday: Raining again, good for the garden, that’s what I have to remind myself although it’s a tad chilly with it after the hot days we have had recently. This morning I turned Jack back out into the paddocks but at the moment Biscuit is still in and we will be making her a pen so that she does not gorge on grass once it starts growing. I then fed the rabbits/Guineas, turkey, light Sussex and quail and I was supposed to let the geese out but forgot and only realised after we returned from getting my bloods done, ooops schoolboy error. I did a bit more seed sowing in the greenhouse, some strips of peas, sweet corn and dwarf beans these will be for putting out for sale when they come through. I potted on some cherry tomato plants that Shelley had grown as well. Then it was time to go and have my blood test and on the way back pick up a few essential items from the shop. We probably won’t do much more than the usual today we have got into the habit of watching the lunchtime news and then the afternoon easy watching programmes 🤣🤣

This morning I noticed feathers under the hen coop and said to John that a hen must have been out over night and the fox had got it, when he went to clean them out later he discovered that actually the fox had chewed the legs off of a hen that was inside the coop. There are slats which let the poop fall through and onto the ground and normally the hens roost up on poles but this one obviously sat on the floor of the coop and that is what can happen. The mains electric was on but we need to watch out as this could be a problem fox.

I turned Biscuit out to be with Jack overnight and tomorrow Sam is coming to set up a strip for her to graze in.

Thursday: I had a bad night again last night and I just can’t figure it out at all, it starts off with me feeling the cold which turns to shivering and I can’t get warm all night, I get up in the night and take ibrufen and then I’m sweating. The doctor called with the results of the blood test and my platelets are still low, they have come up ever so slightly but nowhere near enough so I’m still off the methotrexate and still on the steroids bit a lower dose. I did say to her that it’s not like a normal flare up and that’s the difficulty of this disease it doesn’t really follow patterns, it’s different for everyone and even for the same person the flare ups can be different and random.

Sam was here bright and early and used the stakes and tape to set up an area that Biscuit will have to stay in for most of the summer now, she has a field shelter and some trees for shade and we can get in and out of the gateway without having to go through any other paddocks which is useful. If you have ever had a pony or horse you will know that they are on the whole not very respectful of fences 😂 but Biscuit is a real sweetheart and when Jack breaks out she will just stand there knowing she shouldn’t be following so I don’t envisage too many problems there.

It’s mid afternoon and it’s been peeing down all day, I have been inside cleaning the kitchen and doing a bit of baking and John has been in the stable block giving that a tidy up. I had some melon plants arrive which I had totally forgotten that I had ordered way back at the beginning of the year.

Friday: Mayday 😀 the beginning of a new month, a month of plenty to do and this morning I have been planting tomatoes and melons in the big tunnel, I did a bit of weeding in there and then a bit of watering, the strawberries that I put in last year are doing really well with plenty of fruit setting on them, I will look forward to eating those. With the rain comes plenty of weeds bit I can’t hoe until the ground is dry again and it’s supposed to be dry and warm again next week.

Meanwhile we caught the fox and had that dealt with and John has been edging the last bit of the lawn that needed doing (for about 5 years 😂) Then it hammered down, hopefully it will blow over and we will have a nice afternoon, fingers crossed🙄

Sunday: No idea what we did yesterday but it was probably similar to every day! Today has been pretty productive, we have cut a few areas of grass before it gets too long including the front paddock. We also spent a good couple of hours digging out patches of nettles that have sprung up in the front paddock, I don’t mind nettles but not when they begin to invade the middle areas, the edges they can stay as long as they don’t encroach too far. Nettles are probably one of the most beneficial plants you can find both for humans and wildlife, they support a huge range of insects and are supposedly good for many human ailments including chronic inflammation but as yet I have not tried them and of course you can make string and clothing from them though the process is long and hard going, but if we ever find ourselves in a situation (and never say never 🙄) nettles are the one thing you do want growing 😀

We have done plenty of other jobs inbetween, some hoeing/weeding, sorting out more plants lol, I have also weeded an area in the front that is looking scruffy and I have popped a few plants in to brighten it up a bit. It’s in the front compound area and the weeds tend to get a good hold so I have put a few thuggish plants in, if there is an area that is difficult then thuggery is the answer, the shasta Daisy is one such plant, things like periwinkle and lemon balm, borage, calendula, they will all grow no matter what you do to them and hopefully smoother out the weeds plus give a bit of colour against the drab fence. I always wanted this area full of lavender but the dogs we had when we first came trampled everything so I gave up on the idea, the dogs we have now are not so clumsy but still they do manage to tread on stuff and break it so lavender just won’t cut it.

John spent an hour or two metal detecting again and no we can’t retire on his findings, a few bits of twisted metal isn’t going to get us anywhere lol.

I found some duck breast in the freezer this morning so we have had those pan fried with crushed potato, purple sprouting picked fresh from the garden and a red wine gravy, tasty 😋

I am beginning to see and feel the steroids working albeit slowly, I do feel better than I did this time last week so hopefully it will be onwards and upwards, that is always the plan sometimes is jumps track 😜

John has gone back out after dinner to move the chicken fencing in the side paddock so that the hens are on fresh ground. We have another delivery of chickens tomorrow but we will be keeping some of these to add to our laying flock as the demand for eggs has not eased much, it will be good to be able to provide eggs for everyone that wants them.

Gosh, reading back it’s hard to believe that Dads funeral was at the beginning of the week it seems a lot longer ago, time feels like it’s dragging somewhat now but I guess we all have to hang in there and hopefully there will be light at the end of the tunnel. A customer said that her elderly Dad had died of the virus but actually that is the only person I know of, we don’t seem to have been hit too hard here or maybe once we get back out in the wider world we will hear of a few more 🤷‍♀️

I am sorry about the lack of photos, I keep saying that I know, must try harder Dawn, I can tell you that the fruit is all beginning to form, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, apples, pears, cherries, there are tiny broad beans on those plants and plenty of foliage on the potatoes, the carrot tops are getting bigger so hopefully underneath is as well and the garlic I planted last Autumn is huge. The root veg seeds I sowed at the beginning of the week are already up (well some of them) so all in all the veg garden is coming along nicely. I did think about planting out the more tender stuff this week coming (sweet corn and squash) but we are due to have a temperature dip next weekend so I will leave it, there is nothing worse than nurturing plants for them to be ravaged by the cold or the wind so I must be patient a little while longer 😀

Have a great week, stay safe x x

Friesland Farm

Sowing and growing, reading & Easter 🐣

Posted on April 12, 2020 by frieslandfarm

Monday 6th April 2020: And here we are again back round to Monday 😜 The weather is fair to good and so we were again working outside while we can.

I spent the morning watering the greenhouse, moving things around, potting some bits on etc and then planting the first lot of mange-tout out in a bed. I put a load of manure on the flower plants I put in the other week and then I did some watering because although we had a bit of rain last night it wasn’t nearly enough and the ground is really dry. Who would have thought that after weeks and weeks of endless rain we would be complaining 😜 Meanwhile John was cutting wood lol, burning some of the stuff that is no good and separating some of it, there are some big pieces that will make good raised beds but they are attached to ply and each other as they were from some type of shuttering. The nails I’m told are a right b*****d to get out so it’s kept him busy.

You may have noticed that I have slowed down a bit from the first week we were off, mostly this is due to the fact that I have had to stop the meds and it plays havoc with my systems, I feel tired a fair bit, my muscles get stiff and I’m am bloody freezing even when the sun is out lol, to the point I am sat writing this with three layers on 🙄 I generally do my work up to about 1pm and that’s it for the day, I have lunch, I read for an hour and then I have a nap if I’m really tired. Good job John is here though to be honest when he is not (in more usual times) I still do the same if I am not feeling up to it but everything has to wait if it can.

The turkey hen is still with us and I’m hoping she recovers fully, at times she must feel like me and does a lot of sitting around and then there are times when she is wandering about, I still can’t see anything that is physically wrong with her 🤷‍♀️ The torts are enjoying the warmer temps and have started to eat now, I’m picking any dandelion flowers I find as they love those.

Tuesday: Another nice day weather wise, not too hot but warm enough. We’ve done the usual jobs, I made bread and hovered and polished this morning then outside to water things in pots and the young veg plants, water the greenhouse and the polytunnels. It’s crazy all the rain we had a month or so back and now I’m watering because the ground is so dry. John meanwhile has been….you guessed it chopping wood lol, we have slipped into the easy routine of working till around 1pm and then lunch and a gentle afternoon which consists of a nap or some reading before egg collecting and feeding around 3pm ready for putting out at 4pm. After that we usually come in grab a cuppa and watch the update from Downing Street, of course we are all wishing Boris well and hope he makes a speedy recovery, whatever your politics are it’s not nice to fear for someone’s life at a time like this especially when he is the Prime Minister 🙏.

I have had a phone consultation with a friend that knows all about birds in the hope he can shed some light on what might be wrong with the turkey hen. She has no neurological symptoms, no respiratory problems, no mucky bum, she is not crop bound and she is not egg bound so I am struggling a little to work it out. She is pooing dark green and he tells me that’s because the stomach is empty (at least I learnt something new in all this) He suggested checking her over for ticks and mites and so John and I went out and picked her to check her over, she is a big bird and to double check she wasn’t egg bound and to get a look under her wings we carefully tipped her upside down. At this point clear fluid began to run out of her beak so I massaged her crop some more and more fluid came out, one of my suspicions was that she had a blockage further down which seems to be borne out by the fluid emptying out. The blockage must be further down possibly in her intestines and if that’s the case I won’t be able to do much more for her, I have given her a fair bit of vegetable oil in her water in the hopes it can help to move any blockage and it’s possible that gravity may have dislodged something, we will try again tomorrow and see what happens. Its such as shame as she was going great guns laying her eggs, and all of a sudden she stopped so it makes sense as nothing else fits the symptoms.

Wednesday: Another fine, dry day and we got a couple of jobs sorted, I started off by watering g the greenhouse and the newly planted stuff, I don’t know what John was doing but I couldn’t hear him cutting wood lol. Then I roped him into helping me, I had an elder tree that had started growing in one fo the beds, Mum tried to get it out last year but the roots were quite big so got John to dig it out 😜 The next job was to build a frame for the runner beans to grow up. For the last few years I have grown them the same in a dedicated bed up wigwam hazel poles but each year they grow well and then the wind blows them over eventually. This year I have decided to move them and I had a plan, this needed some muscle so John was on hand. We now have long lengths of wood leaning against the side of the fruit cage and stock fencing nailed to it, this will do three things, first, the wind can blow as much as it likes they won’t blow over, second, they will give shade to the raspberries and stop them drying out too much and third, the beans should hang down inside the frame so that I can pick them more easily 😀 It doesn’t look pretty but it is strong and functional and eventually will be covered by foliage 😀

The other job was to re cover the fruit cage with netting, quite a task which takes two of us and gets caught up in every single pokey thing around 😝 It has a few holes in which I will have to mend and sadly a bird had got tangled up in it at some point and died 😢 But it is now up and secured which is great because the Bush cherry I bought last year has flowers 😀😀😀 so I may get cherries this year.

I’m enjoying my ‘book hour’ it’s so quiet and totally relaxing. I sit and contemplate for a while after I finish reading and It occurred to me that if ever there was a moment in life to stop and re evaluate your life or areas of it, then this ‘situation’ is the perfect opportunity to do so. It has pushed to the front those that are considered lowly in their work and those that were taken for granted by many, and rendering useless those that are put on a pedestal or consider wealth/status to be the aim of life. I have always looked to the past to consider what is important in a ‘society’ take a large estate for instance, the people sat in the ‘big house’ on the whole were always mindful that without all the, ever decreasing in size, boulders underneath them they would be bought crashing down in an instant, they are nothing on their own, we are nothing on our own, we all need each other and each other’s skills (mostly 😜) for life as we know it to run smoothly. Long gone are the days when we each held all the skills needed to get by in life, those skills are now spread among all of us, we should remember this going forward.

Thursday: This morning began with a Group FaceTime call to our nephew in Australia who has his birthday today, they are practising social distancing but his friends came to the street to sing happy birthday and have cake, at a safe distance from each other of course 😀

Yesterday afternoon I had a FaceTime call from Mia and she cried and said ‘I miss you’ damn near broke my heart and definitely made me teary. So this mornings mission was to do a video of the farm and the animals so that the grandchildren know that everything is as they saw it last, I walked around chatting and showing them everything including Grampy cutting wood and then I tried to send it lol, too long apparently so I had to cut it into sections and send it and hope they came through in sequence 🤣

After that I got on with doing some bits in the garden, water the greenhouse had moving stuff around, it’s going to be hot today and I need to make sure everything gets it’s chance to grow well. I did some potting on, the squash family are doing really well and needed re potting. After that I planted a row of petit poi outwice, might as well get them out while the weather is good. I’ve just realised I haven’t sown and runner bean seeds yet so I need to do that later, I like to get them going inside as the mice usually eat them otherwise. I picked a couple of bunches of rhubarb to go out for sale and by that time the air was really heating up and I could feel the sun started to make my skin itch so it’s time to duck inside. Sometimes I hate this disease, just when I could really be getting on outside I have to go in, then I think the weather is bound to break eventually and I will be able to spend longer outside. Yesterday it was warm but cloudy so that was ideal, not many clouds today though so too risky for me. Had I known I was going to end up with this I would have sited the veg garden more in the shade but then you have the problem of what to grow as some things really would struggle.

I am in the middle of making hot x buns, well trying anyway the dough doesn’t seem to be rising 😏 at the moment I have the dough in a low oven to see if I can activate it a little, shame as the dough smells amazing, fingers crossed it rises a little other wise it will be hot x flatbread 🤣

Friday: Easter weekend, bank holidays, lovely weather, normally everyone would be over the moon but this year is very different, we need to stay home and help the NHS to save lives, I seriously hope people are doing just that.

I’m struggling a bit today, I can always tell as I go out to do some jobs and tend to end up just looking at things that need doing lol. This, I’m sure is because I am off the meds and normally I would take some anti inflammatory but I’m not quite sure about the information that is flying around about avoiding it at the moment 🙄 I came indoors and sat for a while and then decided to make a chocolate cake for the weekend, I hope it turns out better than my flat x buns which were a disaster, I baked it anyway and we have eaten a slice of it this morning, it tastes fine but is heavy.

Saturday: I have decided to take ibrufen, it’s definitely inflammation due to coming off the meds and as my blood test is not until next week I have to do something inbetween and with the ibrufen at least I can carry on. So this morning I have been very busy, watering everything and then I looked for my runner bean seeds and couldn’t find them anywhere, I am without runner bean seeds 😳 I looked online and some places are charging three times the amount they normally cost, my regular supplier haven’t even got any nor any seed potatoes and demand overall for seeds is huge. Two conflicting things I feel about this, one, I’m obviously delighted that people are growing their own, after all I am always banging on about it, two, I’m a bit peed off that I can’t get what I need lol. That will teach me to save far more seed in future years, it’s part of food security and I need to observe it more closely. So I have sown extra peas and dwarf beans, some basil, cauliflower and purple sprouting plus some seeds I saved from the welsh onions. I have planted more petit poi’s out and earthed up the potatoes I have growing in sacks. I sent John to get some more compost, luckily they sell it at a farm just up the road from us and I will carry on sowing and planting just in case we need it, if we don’t it will feed the animals so nothing lost there.

By 11.30 it was too hot for me to work on the garden so I came inside and to be honest didn’t do much inside either 😝 At 5pm I decided it was ok enough for me to go out and cut the grass on the lawn and the driveway. John offered to do it which is rare as in the thirty something years we have been married he has hardly ever been the one to mow the lawn, he thinks I’m stupid and don’t know that he was hoping I would cook dinner while he did it 🙄 Nope I can manage now you run inside and do the dinner, something else he has rarely done over the years, we had boiled eggs 😝

Easter weekend, definitely different to all the other Easters we have ever had and the same for everyone else I’m sure. Still the main thing is that we are staying home, protecting the NHS and saving lives, though many have lost the battle already 😢

I must include this in my blog, it was written by my middle daughter and it’s just so lovely 😊 and totes approp. Written by Shelley Silver 🥰🥰

Nana, when you watch the sunrise, we also watch it too, we also feel the same spring breeze that passes over you.
The buzz of the first few Bees, we know you hear the same, and in the sky when you look up we see the same grey plane.
Even though it’s been too long since we have played at yours, know that we are still connected through the great outdoors.
When you go to bed tonight, just look at up the moon and keep forever in your heart that we will see you soon.

Sunday: Easter Day, we have decided to have a day off apart from feeding the animals of course but the rest of the day we have done nothing but sit around enjoying some leisure time. I could get used to this way of life very easily except for not seeing the family bit. We did pop out to see if we could get some bananas and some carrots, had to go to two different places but both were fairly quiet and there was hardly anything on the roads. We also went to de bunk the theory that we might be the only ones left in the world as it is soooo quiet 😜 I have a leg of lamb in the oven for dinner later, then we will have it cold tomorrow, I found some pastry in the freezer so will also be making a pie, living it up today 😂

The weather has been amazing, very warm, very dry but to be honest I’m looking forward to it cooling a little so that I don’t feel so tired and can get on and do some more in the garden and if we could just have a little bit of moisture so that the rhubarb and asparagus come on a bit, that would be perfect 👌

As always have a good week and stay home, stay safe x x

Friesland Farm

Picking, Strawberry jam & feathers everywhere.

Posted on July 7, 2019 by frieslandfarm

Monday 1st July and the weeks keep rolling on 😏 A nice morning as far as I am concerned, overcast, dry and not to warm 😀 John did a couple of the bird pens before going to work and I did the rest and picked greenery for the torts and rabbits etc. Then once I had done the ‘housekeeping’ bits I got on with putting out some plants for sale and digging up some self set plants and potted them up ready for sale in a couple of weeks. After that I picked blackcurrants and gooseberries, you can tell they are ready when you disturb the blackbirds foraging underneath the bushes. I do leave enough for the birds, taking some to put out for sale and some to either freeze or make jam.

The girls and the grandchildren came for a couple of hours in the afternoon and after they went I made the blackcurrant jam.

After getting the dinner I went outside to do some more picking and the watering, I picked broad beans and rhubarb and found a courgette I had missed previously which was on the way to becoming a marrow 🙄 Everything I s coming on nicely, the tomatoes have started to form as have the peppers, there are tiny melons, no sign of cucumbers yet though. Dwarf beans are flowering and there are some squash forming, I am keeping an eye on the cherries so the birds don’t get them first, the brassicas in the cage are romping away and the potatoes are abundant, looks like a good year 😀

Tuesday: Another lovely looking morning, the sinusitis was getting better, I thought, but it had come back with a vengeance this morning 😐 thick head and all.

After doing the rounds I then collected greenery for the torts and rabbits/guineas, the rabbits etc had mainly trees and herbs this morning, lilac, hazel, willow, mint, lemon balm, fennel and a few dandelion types for good measure. The torts love the yellow flowers of all dandelion types so I went round and collected those for them today.

I noticed this morning that my nut and fruit trees are absolutely covered with ladybird larvae in different stages, fantastic 😀

I took some blueberry cuttings, I need to do something with the blueberries they are not thriving like they should and therefore the yield is not great, in fact an overhaul for the fruit cage interior is very much on the cards. I have ordered some weed membrane and intend to plant the raspberries that are in pots into the ground, it was a job I was going to do last year but didn’t get round to it, the membrane will hopefully keep most of the weeds at bay and the moisture in the ground so it will be less work in the long run.

In the afternoon, Sam, Mia, Shelley, Josh, Florence and I went to a pick your own farm to get strawberries 😀 I do not have enough of my own this year to make jam so off we went to gather some, a few kilos later and a fun afternoon and this evening I have made strawberry jam 😀 I wish I could let you smell the divine smell of it bubbling away on the hob, amazing smell 😀 A word of advice if you ever buy homemade jam, if you are dairy intolerant just check with the maker that they haven’t put butter in it. Some recipes advise a knob of butter to disperse the scum, personally I haven’t found it makes a difference and I prefer to use the back of a metal spoon to lift it off, it sticks readily to the back and can be scrapped off into a bowl. If I am making jam that is purely for our own use I don’t even bother, it looks unsightly but there is nothing wrong with it, it’s just froth really.

Normally I would make a dessert or two with the strawberries but the last two weeks John has come home with cakes made by his customers, not little cakes, full size cakes, last week a chocolate one and this week, from a different customer I might add, a lemon one. So we have cake to eat and no point making anything with the strawberries except jam lol.

I sold three more ducklings today, that’s 27 in total so not bad, I am planning on keeping 15 so have another 9 to sell.

Wednesday: Up and at it early, did the rounds then onto watering things that are in the shade, the ground is dry again due to lack of moisture. I spent a good hour or so watering things and I will have to do the rest tonight, especially the raspberries as they are small and dry not plump, so lacking in water even the ones in the ground, I never used to have this problem, only in the last couple of years. By 10 I had come in, I was feeling tired, the steroids stopped a couple of weeks ago, and once I’m tired I know I’m not going to achieve much so time to recuperate with a coffee, some cake and a sit down 😀

Blue skies mean I don’t get outside much more today, I did go back out in the evening once it had cooled down a bit and did some more watering.

The fox had a hen in the side paddock, she was out when I fed them at 4pm, I had tried to catch her but couldn’t and forgot to tell John when he came home, at about 8pm the dogs barked, but they do that a lot so we didn’t take much notice and then when John went to put the hens to bed…..feathers everywhere ☹️

Thursday: Another blue sky, sunny day on the cards so I set my alarm for 5.30, the early morning air was fresh and cool, delightful, I got plenty done before I had to come in. I didn’t water as I had done that the night before but I did a bit of weeding in the polytunnel and I harvested some potatoes, these were some I grow in a large square crate, and I leave the tiny potatoes that come off in there to go again, so in essence they are self set and I always get a good haul from them, touch wood they have never had disease either, I have been doing this for about 4 years now, maybe I should just do it for all my potatoes?

Contemplating what to do for dinner tonight, I found some frozen pizza dough I made and some passata frozen from last years tomatoes, I have mozzarella in the fridge and fresh basil, a drizzle of chilli oil that Shelley bought back from Italy so I’m good, that just leaves what to cook for John 🙄

With some of the strawberries I have left I made a simple strawberry sauce to bottle up and put in the fridge, this can be used on ice cream, in milkshakes, on pancakes or in yoghurt, whatever you want to put it on really lol. I made a batch of Greek yoghurt at the same time then I will have both things to use at the same time. I use an easiyo maker which is VERY easy to use and makes great yoghurt, one day I would like to make my own yoghurt from scratch but as only I eat eat and not that often it’s not something I have tried doing yet.

I’m getting paranoid about the crows stealing my cherries 😂 the minute I hear them out there I go out to check they are not raiding my trees. The year before last they stripped everything, cherries, pears, gooseberries so I am determined to get some this time round, I can’t imagine how farmers feels when they strip a whole crop!

Friday: I went to Josh’s sports morning first thing then we went to the new shake shop that has opened in town 😀 I’m writing this Sunday and can’t actually recall what else I did that day apart from probably watering 😜

Saturday: Overcast today, whoop, so I did a fair bit of weeding and sorting out plants for sale, generally speaking all day in the garden doing stuff. In the evening we went to a Memorial walk and family fun event, I didn’t do the walk but joined them later for the bbq and raffle. It was in aid of the Eve appeal which is a charity for research into gynaecological cancers, a very special lady, Julie, our cousin died from Vulval cancer and the event is to raise funds and awareness. Here is the link to their website if you want to know more

https://eveappeal.org.uk

It was raining when we left there it just about 4/5 miles away and when we got home, nothing 🙁 could have done with a small shower for the veg garden.

We came back with My sister and brother in law who were having a ‘quick cuppa’ a couple of hours later, we had booked a small break between us and it was time for bed lol.

Sunday: Overcast to begin with so I did a lot of picking, carrots, peas, broad beans, raspberries, turnips, potatoes. The raspberries are getting more numerous now so it makes them worth picking 😀 We are having lamb later with all our own veg seasoned with homegrown rosemary and garlic, then we will have the raspberries for dessert.

One of my cherry trees has already been raided, not the crows en mass this year but the blackbirds in covert operations from underneath, and now they have started on the morellos 😕 The problem is that they eat them just before they ripen and as cherries do not continue to ripen there is no point me picking them early, so the decision I have made is to let the birds have them, I have plenty of other fruit and I can’t keep rushing out there to shoo them off because they come straight back when I go in. Netting won’t work for the smaller birds as they go under and up, it would keep off the crows mind but they don’t seem interested this year.

The tomatoes are turning red 😀 I always feel that it’s the pinnacle of the main growing season and I have a strange sense of fulfilment 😀

The geese are moulting after their egg laying stint, it looks like a fox attack as there are feathers like this all over the farm 🤣

Friesland Farm

Garden produce, borage & hot weather.

Posted on June 30, 2019 by frieslandfarm

Monday 24th June: It’s very humid today, no Sun so that’s great for me but, sweating and glasses steaming up hinders work 😂 On top of that my cold has now turned to sinusitis, bloody brilliant 🙄 I can’t breathe through my nose very well and that even makes eating difficult lol. Having said that I have been working (and eating) I did the morning rounds as usual and then tidied up the front flower border outside the gate, then I went into the brassica cage and weeded all of that, a trugful of weeds divided between the torts, the rabbits/guineas and the young chickens. I picked some peas which we will have with our dinner tonight, some rhubarb which I am planning to make jam with and some artichokes which I have no idea what I will do with! Artichoke is a delicacy and we are not that kind of eaters, they are also a bit of a faff if I’m honest but they make great architectural plants and if there was nothing else available I’m sure we would eat them, I must try the torts actually as they might like them. The easiest way to eat them is cut in half, remove the choke, then use garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper, plus herbs if you like to coat them and roast them in the oven, they are delicious but as I said a bit of a faff even to eat them lol.

It was trying to rain when I came in at lunchtime and we have these thunderstorms supposed to arrive but as yet nothing.

I’m sorry a couple of the photos didn’t upload correctly on last weeks blog so the pic of the kittens wasn’t there, nor the greenhouse, I will see if I can fix that this week.

Update on the kittens, Benny is getting a little braver and will have a stroke now and again, Sam bought them some dreamy treats and they love them so it’s a good way to get him to come to me, however when I say love them, I mean love them, addictively 🤪 so much so that I have had to limit them and be careful when giving them as TC bit into my thumb last night because I was holding one, his needle like tooth went straight through my thumbnail, ouch, very ouch 😲

We finally got round to getting the fridge out, it’s an integral fridge so everything had to be unscrewed, we found a mouse nest at the bottom and it had chewed the lagging off the cooling pipe which had then frozen with solid lumps of ice. Unfortunately we also found a hole in the top and water leaking from it, goodness knows how it got there, anyhow we weighed everything up, the fact that it is over six years old and if we got someone to repair it, if they could, it would start to cost the same amount as a new one. The fact that it’s integral means it is quite small, goodness knows what I was thinking when I decided on it in the first place, and I have always complained that I can’t get much in it, so we decided to buy a new one, not integral but freestanding. I opted to have it taken away and recycled and to have the packaging taken away and recycled so I feel better about it slightly, but things ain’t what they used to be these days 🙄

Watered the poly tunnels and a few other bits, no sign of the storms yet.

I decided not to make rhubarb jam in the end instead I cut it and open froze it for use in the winter.

Tuesday: It’s raining this morning, it seems the thunderstorms that were predicted have abated a little, I’m glad of the rain it means I don’t have to water the garden but the temps are set to climb high this week. I say high, probably not by some countries standards but they are by ours.

Today is our 36th wedding anniversary 😲 where did all those years go.

It’s 7.30am and I am waiting for a break in the rain before I go out and do the rounds, I don’t fancy getting too wet this morning 😂

After braving it and not getting too soaked, I made some bread and a mixed crumble with the rhubarb, strawberries and raspberries, did a bit of cleaning, then got soaked when someone came to buy some ducks lol, some you win, some you lose 😜

Wednesday: Another good day for me weatherwise, overcast which means I can get out and about easily and do some stuff. Mum came over in the morning (with a bit of homemade Bakewell tart 😀) to give me a hand so we weeded the front area which looks better now 😀 I am not sure what to do about it long term, it’s a huge expense of gravel and normally I weedkiller it but I’ve been trying to avoid that, however the weeds are growing like billio 🙄 and it looks scruffy. One idea is to cast seeds from love in a mist, foxglove, poppy etc so that it’s supposed to look like that lol, what ever I decide it has to be the least amount of work possible to keep it looking ok.

Sam arrived and took me food shopping, the new fridge also arrived and I didn’t want to go before that came so that I didn’t have too much to unload when the time came but now I can fill it up 😀

After a short rest I went out and cut the lawn and the front driveway grass while John pulled up a forest of stinging nettles. The farmers are out busy cutting the hay so we know we are in for a good few days of sunshine, great for everyone, not so great for me 😂 I shall be up early (hopefully) to crack on before the temps climb too high.

Thursday: A sunny morning, feels like it’s going to be hot 🥵 I did the morning rounds, discovered John had turned on the ICB tank at the back last night, forgot to turn it off and now it’s empty! Great just what we needed 1000ltr of rain water gone and no rain forecast for a while 🙄🙄 I went for routine blood tests today and on the way back along the lane a hare ran across the road in front of us, that made my day, week, month 😀😀😀 I have a particular love for hares.

We had lamb for dinner tonight with carrots, kale and potatoes all from the garden, and then raspberries and strawberries for pudding also from the garden, delish, the taste is amazing especially the carrots, John said ‘I don’t know what they do to the carrots in the shops but they have no taste compared to these’ I take that as a compliment 😀

Friday: Another fine day, I often wonder what other countries use as an icebreaker conversation, here in the UK it’s always the weather lol, mostly ‘it’s, hot, cold, wet, horrid, today isn’t it’ but occasionally ‘it’s a beautiful day’ and today is one of those 😀

After doing the morning rounds and collecting forage for the torts I made coffee and sat and watched them to see what they prefer. For both the rabbits and the torts it’s always dandelions first, especially the flowers for the torts they love them. I gave them some borage flowers today, I had picked some along with the raspberries and strawberries which I will eat alongside each other. Borage, just in case you didn’t know is the starflower, all parts are edible but the root is not palatable, it’s contains gamma linoleic acid which is anti inflammatory and helps to build muscle rather than fat, besides that it is a beautiful plant, though it self seeds readily, and it attracts pollinating insects by the score.

I am always interested in what is edible both conventional and wild, John says that I can’t wait for an apocalypse lol, I can, I don’t want one to happen but if it does and the supermarkets run out, I want to know what we can eat 😜 and if that ever happens in our lifetime, he will be grateful too.

I am beginning to get a fair few courgettes, I can feed them to the chickens and I do make the yummy chocolate/courgette cake but as a general rule we don’t eat them, I would like to know how others use them in their cooking please 😀

The baby robins have fledged so I can now rummage around in my plant pot stash without fear of disturbing them, unless of course Mum and Dad come back for a third batch!

I was watching the ‘dead stick pile’ the other morning and the amount of birds that use it for cover is amazing, all the fledglings feel safe flying into the piles and there are obviously nests in there as well so I will definitely be using these for the wildlife. I thought I had hit upon something new but apparently they are called dead hedges and I can see how they would be totally useful in a very quick time to ‘fence’ off an area, I intend to use the idea round newly planted trees to stop the geese from stripping the bark and the hens from scratching up the disturbed soil.

I made a lemon and courgette Madeira cake, simple enough recipe and tasty enough, at least it’s a way of getting some of your 5 a day 😜 I’m not actually sure it counts to be fair but it uses up a courgette and they are coming thick and fast now.

The recipe is from thecrazykitchen.co.uk

For dinner we had roasted new potatoes and peas from the garden with steak, I roasted the potatoes and steak in the oven with olive oil, crushed garlic, Parmesan cheese, salt and pepper, simple but delicious 😋

Saturday: John went and did the rounds while I cleaned the boot room where the kitty’s are and then cleaned out the rabbit/guinea run and collected leaves for them and the torts. Picked a few courgettes and some raspberries and by 9.30am it’s already hot out there, I can feel my skin beginning to prickle and itch, I can see I won’t be outside for very long today. The Lupus makes it difficult to get out and get some work done on days like this because I don’t want to end up with another flare which is what will happen if I was stupid enough to work out in the Sun, the antibodies would have a field day and I would be back in a place that is not good, so although I would love to be out in it, I will hide away inside for most of the day 😏

I was able to work in the shade until about 12.30 sorting out the area around the greenhouse, by then bumps started to appear on my hands so it was time to go inside. Days like these are when I am grateful for the insulation as it’s wonderfully cool indoors 😀 we had lunch and then rested on the sofas for the afternoon waiting for it to cool down again.

The dogs are laying in the shade, they have a great life, they don’t go for walks but have free range of the place from early in the morning to late at night, Mia spends a lot of time trying to round up ducks 😂 patch doesn’t bother choosing to lay and watch 😜

Charlie and Macca invited us for a bbq in the evening, their garden is shaded by that time so it was nice and cool 😀

Sunday: I had set the alarm for 5am this morning in order to get some stuff done before it gets too hot, John got up at the same time and did the morning rounds then cleaned out the hens, I watered things that were flagging from yesterday’s heat and then picked courgettes, broad beans, raspberries and rhubarb. It was lovely and cool at that time of the morning and easy to get on with things. I potted up some peppers that I had been growing in the poly tunnel but moved to the greenhouse, even though they are late they should do ok in there and produce something. Then we went for breakfast at Shelleys, they returned home from a holiday in Italy yesterday so we went to hear all about it, sounds wonderful and they fell in love with Italy 🇮🇹

As it happens it’s about 8 degrees or more cooler than yesterday and cloudier so we probably didn’t need to get up early but it’s a great time of the day 😀

I tried the gooseberries but they need a little longer until they are sweet, I will be keeping an eye on them and the cherries as the crows strip them as fast as anything once they know they are ready.

Friesland Farm

Rain, rain & that’s it, just rain 😏

Posted on June 16, 2019 by frieslandfarm

Monday 10th June: An ok morning as far as the weather goes, not sunny but not raining, yet, and not cold although colder than we expect for June. We are stuck in a weather front with the jet stream coming down from the North and the warm air coming up from Southern Europe, result, mostly rain 🙄 We do need a bit of heat now to move the veg along a bit, well those veg that need it any way, the melons for instance in the tunnel are not putting on as much growth as they should be and the tomatoes/peppers like it warm, still we have a couple of months left yet so all is not lost.

After doing the animals I went into the garden and picked peas, broad beans, rhubarb and some kale, I will use all these for dinner later, I did put out some broad beans for sale. The pea plants were put in last autumn and they have nearly finished now so I have pulled them up to make way for something else, the nitrogen nodules on the roots were huge so I pulled them off and put them back into the soil 😀 the leaves and stem I will leave to wilt a while before putting them onto the soil to rot down naturally and feed the soil.

The number of bees, I have noticed is great as are the ladybirds but so are the aphids 😂 I guess that’s what you call a balance of nature!

My soft fruit is a bit dire this year and needs an overhaul, when we had to replace the fruit cage at the end of last year, I think it was, I dug up the raspberry canes (most of them) and put them in pots, I thought it would be good to leave them in there but I was wrong. The problem with raspberries is they send out runners underground, lots of them, but on hindsight it’s easier to just hoe them down than to maintain the plants in pots. The blueberries are struggling yet again and these are new plants, the old ones got wind rock during the winter before last and died off, these are alive but not really bearing many fruits, I need a good think about where to site them as they don’t seem to like it where they are even though they have been cosseted with ericaceous soil and feed. A couple of years back I was picking kilos of strawberries then I changed things about and since then I have not had more than a meagre picking so again I need to sort that out.

The rain came 😏 I took the opportunity to watch the new series of The Handmaids Tale, I know it goes far beyond Margaret Attwoods original novel but I’m loving it.

Omg we have had some torrential downpours! Sam and Mia arrived I could see the car in the drive, Sam waited for an interval in the rain and got out to get Mia out but just as she had fully committed herself down cake another torrential pouring. I grabbed a towel and opened the back door but they were soaked by the time they got in, clothes off and in the dryer, electric fire on, and soup on the go.

OMG what a horrid day, rain, rain, rain, get a soaking, dry off, get a soaking, dry off, get a soaking 😋 peed off 😝 I wouldn’t mind if it was autumn or winter I’d be expecting it but not bloody mid June 😏

Shelley also came over in the afternoon, she has just done a threading course and needed victims er I mean volunteers 🤪 Now not being one to keep up with my beauty regimes I actually had no idea what this was when she said she was going to do it, I thought it was something like weaving hairs into your eyebrows 🤣 I found it fascinating to watch this ancient technique being applied and it didn’t hurt that much 🙄

7.45pm stilling pissing down ☹️ to add insult to injury John was working just two villages over and he said it hardly rained there!

Tuesday: Another grey, rainy morning, yesterday we had about 2” of rain judging by what has been captured in the various buckets around the place. Great because we really needed some rain but really it can stop now and bring back the sunshine 🙄 It’s going to be a long day today, Mia day and no chance of getting outside by the looks of it 😏 looking at the forecast we are not going to get any let up until Friday. Lol I’m aware that I am moaning if it’s too hot and moaning if it’s raining but seriously we don’t seem to be getting much ‘in-between’ weather anymore, just a regular day would be lovely.

I watched Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall on ‘The war on plastic’ last night, it’s shocking stuff to be honest, we really have to make a massive effort to get rid of single use plastics, not just recycle them as clearly it’s just a problem being dumped in someone else’s back yard, but get rid of them totally. I am always appalled at cucumbers, swede, cabbage etc shrink wrapped in plastic, there is no need, when I shop, on the whole, I put the items loose in the trolley if I can. The more I try to avoid it the more I realise just how much is out there, everything is packaged in plastic🥺 I use brown paper bags to sell produce, I do also use plastic fruit containers as I have found it difficult to source cardboard ones at a reasonable price but I do ask people to bring them back so that I can wash and re use them, the same goes for any plants I sell, there is a notice to say plastic plants pots are welcome so that they can be re used.

Wednesday: Hopefully the weather is going to start to be drier from here on in 🙄

I did the morning rounds and cleaned out the ducklings and the hens in the stable, picked some herbage for them and the rabbits/guineas, in between that, put on some washing and drying and checked the garden over. The colder than usual temps are having an effect as nothing is really moving forward and overnight we have lost some of the younger chicks ☹️ A couple of weeks back it was flaming and they were fine but last night they had obviously got cold, gone under the bigger ones and got crushed, bloody weather, although my bad as I should have preempted the situation really. I have a drake missing, I noticed yesterday he was not around, I can’t see any evidence of him being taken but I have no idea what has happened I him.

Now I am coming right down on the steroids I don’t have as much energy as I had before which is a bummer 😏 the difference is very noticeable, I get a bit done and then think, I need a sit down, and could even manage a nap lol, it’s rubbish but it is what it is.

On the plus side the water tanks are all full 😀 even the new IBC tank at the back and I haven’t had to spend hours watering everything, every cloud and all that.

My plan for the rest of the day is housework 😝 might as well do it while the ground is too wet to work on.

I was watching a lecture on regenerative culture and about 2 thirds of the way through I encountered an enlightening moment, really quite profound, SUSTAINABILITY IS A NEUTRAL POINT! WOW, just WOW, I had never thought of it like that before which is why I guess it was such an interesting statement to me. I know it seems that all I do here is potter around with the animals and plants, bake things, make things etc but my aim has always to be self sufficient as far as possible, I’m missing the mark by a mile, I’m aware of that but I’m doing what I can, or am I?

The future of the planet and humanity is dire, it really is, if you having been living with your head in the sand you will not have noticed but when you read, listen to and take note of scientists, ecologists etc you begin to understand what is happening. I am not into activism as such but I’m glad there are groups out there, they are not fanatics or tree huggers or fringe livers they are people who understand ( on the whole) and are trying to get others to take note. Back to the sustainability issue, is it by fluke or is it progression that I had taken onboard the whole forest gardening and tree planting thing because that is the next step forward from sustainability, I can see that now but I had to watch an obscure video to have it spelled out to me!

Do yourself, your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren and so on, a favour and start thinking about your accountability to this planet before it’s too late. Make changes for the better, better for the environment, better for the country, better for the world, you know what they are and if you don’t then learn the information is out there.

I had a hankering for cake so instead of housework I baked 😀 Two fruit loaves and two small date and nut loaves, using our own nuts 😀. I made that many because as I was turning the oven on I might as well get good use from it. I have started doing a few things that can help with saving water, we don’t have a dishwasher so I wash up at the end of the day, just once instead of many times, unless I have a mountain of dishes of course lol, and I don’t flush the toilet every time, every other time or three times, obviously if there is something bigger than a wee in there I will but I figure it all helps even if it’s just a little.

I need to explore the areas that I am not doing well in, John is the biggest one 🤣 he is just not environmentally inclined and it’s difficult to change a lifetime of habits, some things he gets, like not using weed killers and contaminants and after watching the war on plastic he is beginning to realise how ingrained it all is in society but he doesn’t apply that to the things he likes to eat that come in plastic so he won’t change it which is why it has to be a big turnaround from the manufacturers because I think that is how a lot of people think. I have been actively seeking out things that come in glass bottles, things that are cardboard, paper or wax wrapped rather than plastic but some things are difficult and I don’t want to avoid them altogether. I remember a time when toilet rolls came in paper and now it’s all plastic outers 😕 why?

I did do some cleaning, hoovering and polishing in the end, thought I had better 😋

Fed the birds, collected and sorted the eggs, sat down for a cuppa with a slice of cake, I thought the rain had finished as it has been dry all day but it’s just started again 😐 the temperature is warmer today mind you, the wind from the north east has gone.

Thursday: Another day in paradise, in the rainy season that is! According to my forecast it was supposed to dry up but nope it’s still peeing down which means nothing will get done on the veg garden and the weeds will be romping away, after spending last week trying to get them under control it seems futile 🤪 I have just looked at the forecast again and now rain is on the cards for the next few days 😏 Vegetable gardening in these constantly changeable conditions seems like harder work each year, honestly you never have any idea of what is going to be thrown at you and for how long, our seasons are out of whack! Oh well short of putting everything under cover there is not much I can do about it except moan 😜

Doing the rounds this morning I noticed that all of the geese came out and left the area so I quickly grabbed a torch and went to see what was happening with the eggs they are sitting on. Four nests, one with one egg that looks viable, one with two eggs that look viable, one with four eggs that mostly look ok and one with three eggs that are clear so not viable. I took out the unviable ones and swapped in a couple from the other nests, the reason being that typically the goose who has sat the longest is on the dud eggs! The geese may be getting fed up of sitting now which is why they have all come out and I’m not too worried about them hatching anything except for their own good. After I made a coffee I looked out and could see that two of the geese had gone back so we will see what happens, a couple of the eggs are close to hatching by the looks of it, once they do they will abandon the rest of the eggs anyway, they are pretty fickle lol.

I have seen a few pics of wildflower meadows lately and my sisters neighbour has even done it on her front garden in town, now that the grass is not being eaten off I was thinking I would like to do this in some form. I missed the boat a bit because I could have easily turned the front paddock into wildflowers while the hens were not on it but left it a bit too late to think about it.

Prolonged days of rainy weather like this mean the egg numbers will drop from the hens, they hate the rain and are reluctant to get out in the grass and forage naturally, they stay huddled under or in the coop. You would think the opposite would be true for the ducks and to some extent it is, of course they love the rain but they don’t lay any better 😂

Oh it’s horrible out there lol, Sam, Mia and I went for cake, I mean what else can you do on a day like this 😜 When I got back I did the hens and eggs, as I was walking up the back the sun tried to peek through but the rain soon got the better of it! I went into the poly tunnel, I could see large, dark black clouds looming, I had some late tomatoes to prick out and was stuck in there while the heavens opened, everything is soaking, dripping, puddly yuk, yuk, yuk it’s supposed to be summer.

I found a flower in the driveway, I think it may be an orchid (update, it is an orchid, possibly a pyramid orchid) but I’m not sure yet.

Then I remembered that one year we had them in the back paddock so I took a walk and found a bee orchid 😀 delightful.

Friday: Guess what? It’s raining 😝 we are at saturation point now, previously because the ground was so dry it has been soaked up but now we have standing water in areas. We don’t flood as such, we have a corner in the front paddock where all the water runs to which is flooded for a while but soon runs away and if we have volumes of rain and it can’t get away fast enough we have areas that get very wet but not flooding as such which is lucky. I had a wander round the veg garden, everything is doing ok, we could just do with some warmth to push it on a little bit now.

And then the electric tripped 😏 luckily I’ve got used to this and know what causes it, the pump for the water tanks, it always happens when we have a lot of rain.

Made some bread, did the afternoon rounds and put cleaning bedding in for the ducks. The sun made an appearance and it started drying up, I want to clean out the little chicks but not if the rain is going to come back as it would be a waste of time.

I picked the few Strawberries I have and ate them all myself with some sour cream lol

If you are interested in the Sun in anyway apart from bathing in it 😜 you may be interested to know that it has an 11 year cycle with solar maximum and solar minimum, we are entering a solar minimum, that is a minimum amount of sun spots and flares, the jury is out on how much this affects our climate but I’d say (though I am no expert) that it has to has some bearing on our weather even if minimal and they say it will be a deep minimum 🙄 which could have effects up to 30 years, though humans are undoubtedly causing more damage to the climate overall.

In the evening the lads came over to get the greenhouse along a bit.

Saturday: I have officially had enough of his poxy bloody weather now, the plan today was for John and I to finish glazing the roof but although it was supposed to be mainly dry it has in fact been mainly wet!!!! In between showers we got four panels of glass up there and then discovered we were one short 😡 so can’t finish it, the the lead sealant nozzle snapped clean off so it’s game over as far as that is concerned today. Meanwhile I still can’t get any bloody gardening done and the weeds will be like triffids, time to find another direction in life maybe?? This one seems to have far to many hurdles thrown in the way 🙄

I did pick a few things early this morning when it was dry and sunny, the first courgette some kale, rhubarb and artichokes and I picked peas and mangetout in the afternoon.

I took some dianthus cuttings and went into the poly tunnel just as the heavens opened again.

I have been watching two melon plants which have been struggling, two more at the other end of the tunnel are doing fine but these two are not. I had a closer look and they have severed at the root, I’m not sure what has caused this, either a cold spot in the ground or too wet or something has eaten them off underground. I found some wood and built a box, lined it and filled it with compost then planted the only melon plant I have left in there along with some Chinese gooseberry and a pepper, hopefully I have covered all bases and it will be fine 😀

The sweet potato I put in water to root is slowing doing so, however the process has been long so I would need to start it off a lot earlier next year.

I woke up with a cold this morning, 🤧 very rare for me, I will blame it on the weather 😛

Sunday: Guess what, it’s raining! John did the animals this morning and finally the ducks have started laying more, I won’t hold my breath though as tomorrow we may be down on numbers again. I noticed yesterday that the potatoes have blight (early blight) ffs, that’s the trouble with all this rain it will cause, fungus of all types, I’m thinking a giant undercover area would be an all round option 🤪 No wonder farmers have developed various methods to get successful crops over the years, even though they turned out to be detrimental to the environment, you cant blame them for trying and it’s very trying at times 🙄

I have come to the conclusion that the way I am gardening veg is not really working for me so I need to tweak it a bit next year, just re arrange a few things and do a bit better on planning and siting. I am finding it a bit too muddly for my organised mind, I am sure there is a better way and I will find it eventually lol.

Friesland Farm

Last of the planting, some picking & Johns birthday

Posted on June 9, 2019 by frieslandfarm

Monday 3rd June: Well rested after a weekend away it’s time to crack on 😜 After sorting all the birds out in the morning it was straight into the garden to see what’s been happening and what needs to be done.

I planted the cucumbers, loofahs, some tomato plants and the dahlias, all a bit late going in but it won’t harm them. I put a few more plants out for sale, picked some buckets of weeds and herbs for the rabbits and hens and picked some veg that was ready. Today’s pickings were rhubarb, broad beans and baby turnips, some of which I put out for sale, the turnips I kept back were washed diced and blanched and will be open frozen for use in soups, stews and casseroles. It’s it easier to do it this way then I can grab a handful when I need them, I am aiming to do this will all the root veg if possible. The dwarf kale is reading for picking but I will pick it as I need it. I also cut some flowers for the table, roses, sweet Williams and huechera , it looks pretty and brightens the place up plus the roses smell amazing.

There are one or two strawberries that have ripened while I was away, might as well eat those while I am wandering around lol, there are also plenty of radish and salad leaves to be had at the moment.

We have plaice for dinner, I keep avoiding it in the freezer because I need to fillet it first but today is the day I decided to do it lol, I will cook it with lemon and parsley butter, potatoes and the peas I picked before we went away, delish 😋

Did the afternoon egg collection then cleaned out the ducklings and prepped the dinner, then time for a sit down and a cuppa plus a piece of banana bread that Charlotte made while she was staying here 😀 I taught her to bake from about the age of seven, she was diagnosed as a coeliac at 14 months and the whole family mostly ate gluten free while she was growing up and so teaching her about food was important. In fact all three of the girls know about food, they understand the different food groups and how they go together, they understand the difference between ‘real’ food and processed food (you’d be surprised at how many people don’t) they can all cook and bake from scratch without a jar of sauce or packet mix in sight (I’m not saying they do all the time, just that they can 😝) and most of all on the whole, they enjoy cooking, job done ✅ there I reckon 😀

I pruned the leader branches from the cherry tree, two reason, one I don’t want it to get too big and the other so that when they start to ripen I can still get a net over it to stop the crows from stripping the tree in no time at all!

With stone fruit you should prune in June that’s the general rule so they don’t get silver leaf or canker.

As rhubarb is still in plentiful supply I made a rhubarb pudding cake for dessert, a self saucing pud, easy peasy.

Tuesday: Mia day 😀 I got all the morning jobs done before Mia arrived and then we pretty much played all day lol, picked dandelions for the torts, sat on a blanket on the grass for an hour or so, then the rain came. We are getting the ideal amount of rain as far as the garden goes because I’m not worrying about things not growing, on the contrary they are growing well including the weeds 😝 I’m not quite sure what to do about them they have overtaken my ability to keep them in order at the moment. I saw some cornstarch weed barrier but the price is rather high for my liking so I will carry on hoeing until I come up with a plan! Once the veg start to romp away it will be fine as they will shade out the weeds but until then it’s a constant struggle lol.

Wednesday: Well the weather is certainly not flaming June! Not that I’m complaining because at least I can work out in it but it a tad on the cold side 😜 After sorting out the morning jobs I set to sorting out the poly tunnel so that I could get a couple more melons and tomato plants in, I did a fair amount of hoeing outside so that I could rearrange pots of plants that I am growing on and organised those. Mum came at lunchtime and did some weeding and it looks great especially the fruit cage and I no longer feel like I’m drowning in weeds so thank you Mum you are a star ⭐️ I had Josh for a couple of hours in the afternoon he likes to come and be on his own at the farm with me and help do the jobs lol, we collected the eggs and did the ducklings, pinched the tops off of the broad beans as they have blackfly, sang some songs with Mum and then had to watch tv as we had worked so hard 🤣 his words not mine.

I did a bit of hand weeding late afternoon, the carrots have been sporadic to say the least, we will get some summer carrot but I think I will need to sow some more for winter use.

I made some bread and some choc chunk cookies and I also picked some elderflower which is steeping in water and lemon juice overnight to extract the flavour, I’m intending to make jam with it 😀

The 75th Anniversary of the D Day landings got me interested in learning a bit more about RAF Broadwell, part of our land was part of the dispersed sites, No3 to be precise. When the weather is dry and certainly last summer you can easily see where the foundations of buildings were and when you are trying to get anything in the ground in the front paddock you always hit red brick lol. It would be great if I could find a comprehensive map or old photos of where we are but although there are many photos online and some sites are detailed ours does not seem to be 😏 If we ever found an underground bunker I would consider that we would hit the jackpot lol, it would be cold storage at it best.

Thursday: Did the morning stuff then popped to town to get a few bits, it’s Johns birthday tomorrow and so our turn to feed everyone 😀 the forecast is heavy rain ☹️ so I am doing pulled pork rolls and accompanying salads.

I finally got the limoncello under way, basically it’s lemongrass (bashed with a rolling pin) and lemon verbena, steeped for a few days in vodka then make a sugar syrup to add to it and voila. I have also got elderflower and lemons steeping in water to make elderflower jam. It being a creative kind of day I picked some roses and I am drying the petals, to start them off drying I have put them in the poly tunnel but I won’t leave them in there as it will be too hot and also the light will fade them too much, along with that I have picked some flowers to hang to dry, I’m thinking I need a drying shed 😜 as I would like to dry a whole bunch of things. I want to be making wreaths at Christmas after my day out last year and so drying things to use seems like a good idea, I will experiment with all sorts and see what turns out the best.

Friday, Johns Birthday: I spent most of the day prepping and cooking food! Starting with the birthday cake first thing in the morning after getting the animals done. John had the day off from his regular work but neglected to tell me he was going to be home, consequently I had arranged to get all this cooking done and have a visit from a friend so he sat around like a spare part most of the day🙄 It mostly rained so doing anything outside was a bit pointless for him, it was a surprise he said, yes guess what, surprise, I’m busy all day 🤪 next time tell me in advance and we will go out for lunch and I will do nibbles for the birthday guests not a full on pulled pork feast!

In amongst all that two new Guinea pigs arrived, I wasn’t expecting them until the weekend and so I hadn’t got anything ready, I put them straight in with the rabbit (who is still fine) and the other pig, later in the day when Sam and Mia came they cleaned out the run which I had intended to do tomorrow morning.

Later in the early evening everyone arrived, ate, drank, chatted, sang happy birthday and then went home, Happy Birthday John 😀

We had a bit of thunder and lightening but not much, I love a good storm.

Saturday: Pouring with rain this morning and looks like it has been from early on, June, such a lovely warm month 😂

We are off out to have breakfast this morning with Sam, Charlie & Shelley as a little treat for Sam as she didn’t want a baby shower, the twins are growing well but she could go into labour anytime and she can’t eat a full on meal anymore, no room 🤪 so breakfast is the lighter option.

Breakfast was lovely, I had waffles, bacon and maple syrup 😋 we went to The Old Shed just outside Charlbury, it’s delightful there, shame the weather wasn’t better or we could have eaten al fresco!

We popped in to see my brother and sister in law on the way back, then home, John cleaned out the ducklings while I got Jacks stable ready to get him in for a day or so, with all the rain we have had the grass is going to grow like billyo and he needs restricting so until we make his field smaller, he is coming in and going on hay, he won’t like it one bit but it’s for his own good.

The sun came out but it’s really windy, it makes moving straw a bit of a futile effort, get a load on the end of the pitchfork, turn around to put it in the barrow and you’d be lucky to get half of it in while the other half blows away!

I decided to call the guinea pigs Boris and Donald 🤣 Josh has named the other one socco? Until now he hasn’t really had a name lol, the rabbit is called Peter even though she is a girl, that’s at Mia’s insistence and she is still very well thank goodness. When we went for breakfast they had animals and I noticed that they had double lined the cage with two lots of wire with a gap inbetween, this seems like a good idea as any wild animals could not get nose to nose with the enclosed ones, an idea I think I will implement on future runs.

Sunday: John did the morning rounds while I went out and picked broad beans and rhubarb to put out for sale which went within minutes!

Yesterday Martin came over and did a bit more to the greenhouse and today Luke came over and we got some of the windows in, just a bit more to do and it will be finished.

It’s cold for the time of year this evening, the sun was nice today but now the temps have dipped a bit ☹️

The elderflower I had steeping, and it said 48 hours, went mouldy so I’m going to have to start that again 🙄

Friesland Farm

Forest gardening, Midsummer and a Harris Hawk

Posted on June 24, 2018 by frieslandfarm

Monday 18th May: The weather looks set to be fair this week, no rain in sight which means lots of watering to be done! I’m pretty good this morning once I’ve taken something to help out so John did half the birds and I did the other half, we have 10 hatchlings in the final count, good strong chicks though so hopefully they will continue that way. Weeding and foraging for the rabbits goes hand in hand so I did some of that, there is plenty for them at this time of year. I made up a cutting compost mix as I have a few bits I want to try and strike, the mix is compost, sand and vermiculite and then the cuttings dipped in root gel and put on a lower shelf in a unheated propagator in the greenhouse out of direct sunlight, nothing to lose really so I will give them a go.

I sold 6 quail over the weekend 5 female and one male so the urgency to find them a proper place is not so bad now, my plan, I think, is to keep a male (and I have identified which one already) with a few females, that way I have two separate flocks and if I want to breed I can swap the males over for new bloodlines, the rest of the males I will probably let go and they can have a couple of days freedom before they become dinner for some other wildlife, it’s a dog eat dog world out there 😩 The POL sales also went crazy at the weekend, we haven’t sold any for a couple of weeks then all of a sudden 20 in one weekend!

Lots of pottering in the garden and a bit of planning for ‘forest gardening’ which I am going to have a go at, to be honest I already have bits of it in place I just didn’t realise there was an actual term for it! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_gardening

Harvested some potatoes from the self setter box I have, it’s a large crate and I have now grown self setters in there for about 4 years in a row with no problems whatsoever ever, basically I harvest as I have today, leaving behind all the tiny potatoes and they grow again, I will probably get some more in time for Christmas and do the same all over again.

Picked a few strawberries and raspberries, not many but I plan to plant strawberries in with the forest garden as I have found that the best plants are always the ones that have self set, I’m beginning to think all this preening, pruning, row growing etc is a complete waste of time, I think I will let nature show me how it’s done 😀

I have noticed a fair bit of ‘June drop’ from the fruit trees, I just hope there is enough left at the end of the season to harvest, one of my plum branches has already snapped under the weight and the plums are pretty small at the minute. I have an apple tree in the paddock that is struggling, it’s been struggling ever since I put it in but this year it’s just not managing at all so I need to dig that up and move it, I think I will plant a sweet chestnut out there instead.

On my down time I am continuously learning, today it’s all about ‘swales’ as far as I can make out, it’s basically a ditch dug out on the contour or slope and piled up on the other side to create a water catchment that is ‘level’ this collects the rain and then filters it slowly or much more slowly at least in the downward direction meaning the plants in its pathway can utilise the water more efficiently. I am definitely going to give this a try, Swales can be large covering a whole field or they can be smaller such as in a veg plot setting, interesting and pretty obvious when you think about it, and obvious that our ‘natural’ Swales run in completely the wrong direction! I have also been reading other bits and pieces that seem obvious but I had never thought of it, I seem to be having my eyes opened just recently to a number of things, maybe I had closed my mind and was just bumbling through. I couldn’t really get my head around permaculture being anything more than lots of people trying to make money out of writing a book about it but I am beginning to see exactly what it’s all about and how to apply it, looking, learning and applying. Sure we are doing the basics, collecting rainwater etc but I am still having to stand and water everything which takes time, and I am missing out on useful water such as the duck pond when it’s emptied just gets tipped out, all those duck poo nutrients going to waste waahh what was I thinking 😜

Sowed a bed of carrot seeds where I had pulled the onions from.

I have spotted, pardon the pun, many, many ladybird larvae all over the garden, on a positive note this is fab for my garden however they are Harlequin larvae so not so good for the native ladybird ☹️ firstly, parasites that attack native ones don’t attack harlequins and secondly if the harlequins run out of food they will eat native ladybird eggs.

Had a dental appointment then dinner then out to cut the front paddock, it’s grown so much since we last did it which doesn’t seem that long ago, while John was on lawnmower duty I did a bit of watering then went to help him, typically it’s now spitting with rain 😝

Ordered a book called ‘Permaculture in a nutshell’ hopefully it will help me see what it is we need to be putting in place, meanwhile I am looking at things with new vision, I also ordered an Alder tree as apparently it fixes nitrogen and will be planting that out near the fruit trees in the paddock, and some horseradish, the last lot I bought as dried foot failed to appear although (I had forgotten) there is some on the side of the road just a bit up from us so I may go and dig a piece up from there as well.

Found a baby bird dead in the water butt, how it got there is a mystery as there is a lid on it, the only thing I can think is that it has fallen down the drainpipe?

Tuesday: Apart from John carrying two feed buckets to the front for me it was, me, myself, I, on morning duties today, I don’t mind telling you I was worn out after lol. Mum arrived fairly early to do some gardening 😀 yay many hands make light work as they say and I am always grateful for extra hands. She did some weeding up on the far end while I did some in the middle, then I potted up a thornless blackberry and some black currant seedlings that had grown in the brassica cage. I cut some broccoli, one for Mum and one for our dinner later.

At the moment I am collecting eggs from the Welsh Harlequin ducks that I separated off they will be the last batch of eggs to go in the incubator this year, I should be able to fit about 12 in there hopefully.

Some trees I ordered have arrived, not any old trees but ‘sacred’ trees, small leaved lime or linden, multiple uses including using the young leaves in salads, linden tea can be made for blood pressure and the bark can be used for rope making if I ever need it 😀 They are small at the moment but will reach a great height eventually, I will pot them up and bring them on keeping a close eye on them for a year, they can be used as coppice for fuel so there’s an option, I will probably use one in my ‘edible forest’ that is the veg garden.

The summer solstice is fast approaching, why does is come so quickly when winter drags on so long, anyhow I have found a recipe for honey cakes which are used as an offering for the ‘faeries’ on Midsummers eve, a pretty simple recipe and something I haven’t tried before so I will be giving them a go.

Wednesday: Ooops totally overdid it yesterday and by the evening I was not too good so a dose of painkillers and a good nights sleep was in order. This morning John kindly did the morning routine before going to work bless him, I showered and by 8.30 I had started to clean the kitchen which has been bugging me for a while. A deep clean, drawers, cupboards, walls etc so at this present time 12.30 I’m having a break and still have plenty to do in there.

I noticed a grasshopper on the wall by the breadbin, thought ah that’s sweet and took a photo,

I thought about putting it back outside but forgot, now I have to live with the consequences because on my, hoovering the tops of the walls round, I found a spider had wrapped said grasshopper up for lunch 😩 so I hoovered up that bastard too 🤪

Went on clean the living room and the bedroom, knackered now and shoulders are killing me ☹️ still it feels nice and clean everywhere, well not everywhere there is still the boot room and the office to de clutter and deweb but they can wait for another day.

After some more anti inflammatory pills and a rest some dinner it was back to work watering, picking etc and I made the honey cake, I use the term loosely and I won’t put the recipe on here because there are probably far better examples out there. Honey cake, well it has honey in it and it’s definitely cake, it also has a fair amount of coffee, I used decaf so we won’t be bouncing off the walls after eating it, it’s edible, pleasant enough but not what I would call honey cake really.

Today I picked a small tub of strawberries and raspberries, 4 heads of broccoli, some beetroot, a courgette, rainbow chard and some new potatoes, most of which I have put out for sale as we have already eaten. The dilemma is what to charge for naturally grown veg, I always check the supermarket prices but I feel that if I priced them like that they are grossly underpriced for what you are getting, something that actually tastes like its supposed to, been lovingly tended, had nothing sprayed on it whatsoever, the best veg you can get to be precise 😀

Thursday: Up in the middle of the night to eat and take anti inflammatory! The trouble is when I feel ok I get stuck into jobs then pay for it later on 😜 Anyhow, John did the morning routine then went off to get feed then take the van for a service, I had some paperwork to do so got on with that as much as I could because for some reason my iPad and printer are not talking to each other 🤪

In the afternoon I used the cardboard, that I had put on the floor in the greenhouse over winter, to cut and place round the squash plants that are growing outside, it’s a start to the mulching I need to get done. Mulch, mulch, mulch is my mantra of the week, we are in for a serious lack of rain and some very high temperatures which won’t do the plants any good at all so best start preparing now. John came home and was on in ‘half a job John’ mode, at this moment we have everything pulled out from under the kitchen sink as he is putting in an outside tap but that’s as far as he has got, then we have tools out in the orchard area where he has half fitted some angle irons at the top of the fencing with wire attached to it to stop the fox getting over, at one point I wondered where he had gone and he was up the garden weeding in goggles due to the high pollen count!!! “There is medication available you know” but you can’t help those who won’t help themselves can you 😩

Just been informed after asking what the plan is, that every time he goes to do a job he needs a tool that is in the van that has gone for a service, I get it now, I thought he was just being unproductive lol.

My bit of bedtime reading arrived yesterday ‘permaculture in a nutshell’ and today I have been making a plan to start the polyculture, permaculture, forest garden approach, I have a pear tree in the orchard that I will start with. I have chosen plants that I already have available:

Comfrey – Mulch/insect attractor

Lavender – attractor

Borage – attractor

Fennel – attractor

Rhubarb – mulch

Solomans seal

Strawberry – attractor/stabiliser

Thyme – soil stabiliser

Peas – nitrogen fixer

I still need to have fruit bushes which will probably be currant and roots which may be onion or wild garlic or chives but this is the basic outline of my ‘guild’ I will observe and see what does well and what fails, either way I will learn a fair bit I think.

I’ve just read a blog on a forest garden hedge so that will be another project to think about, ooo so much to do and so little time 😜 Inbetween that I fancied a snack so I made some raspberry fritters 😀 mashed banana, flour, cinnamon, mash and stir then add the raspberries then fry in coconut oil, rather delish with some creme fresh though they didn’t hold shape too well, still it all goes down the same way 😝

So I asked for an outside tap under the kitchen window and this happened!

Well I wouldn’t mind so much except that John is a time served plumber 😩 there was a LOT of swearing and a bit of a puddle and apparently the kitchen tap (which admittedly we had been having problems with) was f**ked this is why it has been leaking even though John fitted new washers a while back. On the up side I now have an outside tap to water the front plants with 😀

A bit later I asked John if it was connected to the hot, “nope, it’s just a cold tap and before you say anything, a hundred years ago they would have delighted with that fitted” so I said, “a hundred years ago they would have been delighted with rabbit for dinner “ guess what’s on the menu tomorrow 🤪

Mowed the grass and used the mowings for mulches on various plants that are in danger of drying out too quickly when this hot weather hits us.

Friday: By mutual agreement I have decided to take it a bit easier today, I find that I am suffering a lot once I stop in late evening and then the joints seize up over night. Having said that there are a couple of jobs I want to get done, the first is my second ‘guild’ an Apple tree this time. It was growing out in the paddock but it has never been happy there so I dug it up and pruned it back, put in in water to soak for a couple of days and planted it elsewhere this morning. So far I have planted comfrey, strawberries and black currant round it, there is a pumpkin growing close by and some Welsh onions, I need a few other things in there, I will probably try coriander as a quick growing herb and some broad beans for fixing nitrogen. I have some b bean plants that I cut back after they had finished, they are in a pot so will transplant easily.

As I look at things with new vision so much of ‘traditional’ gardening seems pretty foolhardy now, most attributed to the victorians who liked neat and tidy rows but then they had plenty of man power in the kitchen garden which I definitely don’t have here. One of the practices I will definitely adopt is the ‘chop and drop’ I mean unless you want compost to plant into then why on earth spend all that time taking it all to the compost heap, turning it and hauling it back again, chop it, leave it where it is and let nature do the work for you seems obvious now, unless of course there is disease but even then burn it and use the ash on the garden. I am rather liking this new outlook, how can I save time and work but still reap the benefits. Another thing I have taken more notice of is how/where plants grow, one instance is a rogue strawberry plant that had escaped out of the fruit cage and is growing in the path, it’s not watered or fed or tended in any way and yet it is in much better health than the cosseted ones inside the cage? Another observation is of 5 sweet potato plants, 4 of them struggling 1 which is under the tomato plants is romping away, again the 4 had greenfly which I wiped off but the other one didn’t have any, that information will be consigned to memory for future years.

Today I picked raspberries and strawberries, in previous years we had an abundance but I dug three rows of raspberries up last year as they were getting out of control in terms of I didn’t have time to tend or even pick them properly and the strawberries had got in the same kind of muddle so we cleared them, sadly this year I don’t have very many so there won’t be jam!

Saturday: Up early to take painkillers again so that I can get up at the usual time and be able to do some work! I did the morning rounds with John then onto a bit of watering in the shady areas, then I put up a temporary fence in the orchard to let the Welsh harlequins have more room but not get on the veg garden or they will eat the courgettes 😜 Then I planted a lime tree in the duck pen and put some protection round it, we were going to change the duck pen and move it but actually all it needs is some greenery in the form of trees and bushes and preferably ones with berries that will feed them too such as elderberry and currant, they will provide shade, shelter and forage. Then onto foraging for the rabbits, willow, hazel, lemon balm, plenty of plantain, dandelions, clover, thistle and birds foot trefoil and grass. It’s getting quite warm out there now after a cool start.

Charlie is making smoothies with the few berries I have collected 😀 there looks like there will be plenty of black currants and gooseberry and hopefully I will get some jam made with those although John is not particularly keen on those flavours as that’s all there will be he may actually try them 😝

I watched a red legged partridge, that had somehow managed to get in the front paddock with all the birds, frantically running round trying to find a way back out while being chased by all and sundry, it must have eventually got out as peace was resumed pretty quickly. We get a pair visit the farm every year, I presume they are the same pair and it’s always the same time of year.

Picked some gooseberries (I know they are ready because each time I go up there the blackbirds are ferreting about underneath them) topped and tailed them and made some jam with a bit of elderflower cordial in for good measure. I went slightly wrong, don’t know what I was thinking when I put the sugar in at the same time as the gooseberries 😜 no harm done really it just meant I needed to cook them slowly to begin with then on to a boil. While I was waiting I put the contents of the under the sink cupboard back after John advised me to leave it all out and check for any leaks after fitting the new kitchen tap, we now have a proper mixer tap back. I always sterilise my jam jars in the oven, it’s just how I prefer to do it, I know it can be done in the microwave or with sterilising fluid but that’s my preferred method, wash with hot soapy water, rinse and then with the oven set at around 120/30c they can stay in there until the jam is ready to jar up, I use a thermometer rather than a plate from the freezer, mainly because I can’t be bothered to keep going backwards and forwards to the freezer which is out the back! I was surprised how quickly the temperature went up to setting point so I’m hoping it does actually set. It was only after I made the jam I remembered I had bought a proper jam pan last year, I had to search for it but I will definitely use that next time so as not to burn it which can happen in a thinner saucepan. I had enough strawberries and raspberries to make a couple of jars of mixed jam so that’s what I did, in the proper pan this time. This jam had quite a lot of foam, you can remove it with a spoon just before putting it a jar, you can use a tiny amount of butter or oil when you cook the jam or you can do what I do and leave it. It is said that it can shorten the life of the jam but as two jars will probably not even last a month in this house then I don’t worry too much, I prefer to take it off when I open a jar. If you take it off you can heat it in the microwave and it will make a bit of extra jam ready for instant use, the foam is just jam bubbles so nothing terrible. Obviously if you are wanting to give your jam as a present/gift I would recommend scooping it off, if it’s for home use then don’t worry unless you really want to.

I made a pineapple, turmeric and ginger blitz in the nutrition bullet tonight, I need to try and get this inflammation down and I’d rather try and do it naturally rather than continuous pills.

The sunset tonight was magnificent, Charlie took some photos 😀

Sunday: I’m not in very good shape this morning, I will have to relent and call the doctor tomorrow and see what can be done. John did the morning stuff while I hobbled around, had a shower got dressed etc then I did manage to go outside and pick a few raspberries and do a bit of watering of stuff in the shade. Then I heard a peculiar noise 3 times so I was about to go and investigate when I heard somebody shouting hello across the hedge. It turns out a chap who was hawking at the farm over the back from us had lost his Harris hawk, so that’s the noise I could hear. We eventually located it in the top of one of our conifers and he called it down with a tit bit to entice it, her name was Missie and she was a beautiful bird. I invited the chap to feel free to catch rabbits with her here and I hope that he will take us up on the offer at some point as we are getting over run with them.

Didn’t do much for the rest of the day except watering in the evening, John cleaned out the front birds and we had to move a duck that the geese have regularly been picking on for some unknown reason ☹️