Tag: tomatoes

Posted in Friesland Farm

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

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I ordered another radiator, for our bedroom this time.

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

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

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

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

Some torrential downpours 🌧

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still no significant side affects from the vaccination.

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

Jam, asparagus soup & May Day 🥰

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t forget to Boo 👻😜

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

Surprise! Mid week interlude 😀

Posted on by frieslandfarm

I thought I would do a quick round up of the photos of produce I took over the 2020 growing season in date order so you can see how the year progressed. I love how vibrant the colours all are and can’t wait to start harvesting again this year. What I really should do is weigh everything to see exactly how much I get, the photos represent probably 1/2 of what I actually harvest so it would be interesting to have an accurate record.

Posted in Friesland Farm

Darker nights, Halloween and another lockdown.

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chutney making process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardwood cuttings of blueberry, mulberry and olive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

I’ll give the sourdough a miss 😝 butternut squash soup and indigo rose tomatoes 🍅

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Monday 12th October 2020: The pandemic continues though I have to say it seems like it is happening elsewhere and I hope they don’t end up being famous last words 🙄 Seriously though we seem to be in a bit of a bubble here, the last outbreak before and during lockdown didn’t really seem to hit our rural area very hard and hopefully the same will be said for this second wave. Today the Prime Minister will announce new measures to try and curb the virus, we wait to see what those will be 😏

Meanwhile life is as normal as is possible and today I have VIP’s coming for tea, the grandchildren are coming after school for sandwiches, cake and jelly and ice cream 😀 I busied myself with getting things tidied, put away (always seems to be things to put away) getting some washing on, sorting the kittens, then making jelly and cake.

The sourdough starter seemed to have a life of its own overnight, it grew so much that it leaked out of the sides, that’s a good thing 😀 I guess it was due to the heat from the Rayburn in the kitchen as this morning it has calmed back down again although it still has life (bubbles) so I have fed it again. The sourdough dough I had in a bowl which didn’t seem to rise was showing signs of activity this morning so I baked it to see how it came out. I can tell you that if I was about to attack a local castle keep I would consider using it in the catapult 😂 it’s a bit solid, however I cut it and it smells like sourdough though heavy in structure, I tasted it and it has that sour taste so I’d say it’s about 70% successful, just need to improve on the technique now.

The measures have been announced and we are going into a three tired system of medium, high and very high risk with various rules for each of those but not a complete lockdown, I’m not sure if any of this will do any good the numbers still seem to be climbing and climbing 🙄

Tuesday: A cold but dry morning this morning. John did the morning rounds before going off to do some proper work 😂 I spent the morning organising food by various means, first I got some butternut squash soup on the go for my lunch today, that’s basically a butternut squash, onion, sweet potato, chicken stock, black pepper and a grating of nutmeg, I will taste it later and see if it needs a sprinkle of anything else such as curry powder or my new fav thing to use smoked paprika 😀 Then I ordered a box of beef from a local smallholder, hhttps://www.emmasewesfulacres.com I have had it from her before and when she delivers I will probably have a look to see what lamb she has on the van. That will keep us going through Autumn and Winter, we have our own chicken and duck in the freezer already plus some venison, goat meat and fish that I still have to use up. Once I had ordered that I sorted out dinner for this evening which tonight is salmon, I will have mine with a honey, sesame oil, soy sauce and balsamic vinegar marinade, then orzo, bell pepper, broccoli, garlic and ginger stir fry while John will have his with potato and veg, we are worlds apart when it comes to food. In light of the fact he will hate having salmon (but will eat it) I got tomorrow’s dinner underway as well (go me) a hearty oxtail stew in the slow cooker. Oxtail isn’t something that many use any more but it has great flavour, it has gone in with carrots, potato, onion, tomato paste, black pepper, beef stock, Worcester sauce and thyme, again I will give it a taste test to see if anything else needs adding. I will slow cook it all day, turn it off over night and then turn it on again around lunchtime tomorrow, stews taste better if they are made one day and eaten the next, so they say anyway, certainly gives it time for all those flavours to mingle.

Butternut squash soup (no filter) lovely vibrant colour packed with vitamin A, C, E & beta carotene, also contains many important minerals 😀

I have let the kittens out this morning, up to now they have only had the run of the boot room but today the door is open to the back undercover area. To begin with they went out and I couldn’t see them anywhere but the next time I went out, there they were and they came in for some dreamies so that’s a good sign that they will stay close by (for the time being) even if I don’t know where they are. Eventually they will get more adventurous and go further afield but hopefully always coming back for some food.

I have come to the conclusion that the sourdough starter does not do very well in our house because we don’t have a stable constant temperature, it gets warm in the evening after we have lit the Rayburn mid afternoon but we let it out mid evening so it doesn’t get too hot over night. The starter seems to be reacting to these temps, first it grows well during the evening but by morning it’s flat again because it’s much colder. I have fed it again this morning and will see what happens later, I thought about making the bread in the evening but again sourdough takes longer to prove than normal bread so that may not work either. I don’t even eat very much bread of any kind so I’m not sure why I am doing it to be honest 😜 just because I wanted to have a go, I may give up on it though and buy the odd loaf now and again 🤷‍♀️

I have also been busy over the last week or so ordering Christmas presents, who knows exactly what is going to happen over the next few months, might as well get ahead just in case it all goes haywire. It’s crazy when you really think about it all, weeks in total lockdown, who ever thought that would happen, now we are all wearing masks when we go out into town, we can only meet a few people at a time, some places have tighter restrictions than others, as I have said before I can’t wait to see the blockbuster film that will inevitably be made about this lol, not quite as scary as The Walking Dead but just as unbelievable (well it will be when they look back in history) Yes indeed we are living through some very strange times 😏

After lunch I went out to the post box and realised it was nice and warm in the sun, it’s often colder indoors than outside here, so I decided to get my gear on and do a bit of garden work. I spent a happy couple of hours cutting back dead stuff and pulling up veg that has now gone over, digging up comfrey (as it’s seeded everywhere) I did stop short on one patch when I spotted ladybirds, probably trying to find a place to hibernate for winter, better make sure I don’t tidy too much 🙄 Back indoors for a quick coffee and a sit down before the afternoon rounds begin. I have seen no more signs of snakes and also sadly I have not seen any frogs all summer, even in the dank areas, I think the snakes have eaten them all 😢 either that or they are hiding well.

While I was working away I was also pondering on what I had learnt this year in the garden, no matter how much you know there is always more to learn. I learnt that yacon are pretty easy to grow here and that they taste very good, I learnt that often when you think a veg plant is ‘spent’ it surprises you with more offerings (I’m thinking about the loofah here) I learnt that the weather can throw you curve balls ( actually I know that but this years was the biggest yet) and that I need to do more to prepare for weather anomalies. I learnt a bit about myself, I like to grow things in order, I am not good with what seems to be chaos in the veg garden but I know I need to learn to cope with it as it’s a better way of growing 😂

I am hearing more and more worrying reports of people who have had COVID for a second time, that’s just plain unlucky and I think we were hoping that if you get it once you won’t get it again. The ‘Long COVID’ is also a worry, people dealing with the effects of it long after they have recovered from it, maybe this virus is every bit as bad as they say it is, I hope we never find out.

I have just googled to see if there is a general trend towards panic buying again, not on the same scale as we saw before but it is there it seems. This would tie in with the increase of egg customers we have had, there have been weeks when we didn’t have a single customer for two or three days and now suddenly we are inundated again, I have seen customers wearing masks again which had all but stopped so there must be some unease out there. Unfortunately it’s the time of year when we have less eggs than usual due to the shortening of daylight time so there will never be enough eggs to go round 🙄 John and I discussed what we would do if we went into another lockdown as the gate sales were crazy and of course we had people who had never been before and haven’t been back since which was really unfair on our regular customers but we were unable to stop it as it came upon us pretty swiftly. It’s a difficult one to determine because although we do know most of our regulars especially the ones that have been coming for years, there are some that we couldn’t readily identify. I think we would initially just shut the gate and have a think about it 😂

Wednesday: Is it only mid week, seems like it’s been a long week already and we are only halfway there 😏 The sun was shinning beautifully this morning but by 9am when I went out to put the rubbish out the sky was looking moody and five minutes later a rain shower appeared, I think that is how the day will unfold today. I thought that perhaps today was not going to be an outside work day so I set about cleaning out the fridge, not a massive task but it’s amazing how many things get left from week to week and before you know it they have been there months. So out went anything that looked well past it’s date, I will keep and use some things that have gone past the best before date especially if they are still sealed but today was a clear out day. Out went a half jar of mincemeat probably used last Christmas, a half jar of plum sauce I made last year and a half jar of pickled onions also probably last used at Christmas, none of them showing any signs of mould but time to throw them anyway. There were the usual culprits in the bottom drawer, soggy cucumbers and shrivelled apples, any thing half decent will go to the geese and guineas the rest will go for composting. Amazing how satisfying it is to see a clean tidy fridge 😂 I also made the decision to abandon the sourdough starter 😭 things were not going well with it and so time to admit defeat, I think if I want sourdough I will buy it 😂

Another thing that occurred to me was that you may be wondering about Ted’s fate as we move closer to Christmas, rest assured he will not be joining us for dinner 😜 he is now part of the smallholding family and has a name so will continue to live freely here. He is totally oblivious to the fate of his fellow turkians though and as a result is not in the least bit grateful still making John walk him back to his pen each night 🙃

Well it didn’t rain in fact it was very pleasant out there and consequently I have had a very productive morning. At first I had no idea what to do, to be fair we have so much to do that it can be overwhelming at times, in those circumstances it’s an idea to pick a starting point and work from there. Did I do that, nope I flitted from job to job BUT I still made progress , or at least I feel like I did. First I tidied up the egg shed area where I put out plants for sale, then I took down some fencing that was screwed to other fencing that will be coming down eventually. I went to put the plant shelves (that were out by the egg shed) away and the shed they go into was a tip so I cleaned out the shed and threw away a wheelbarrow full of ‘crap’ and now I can walk into the shed easily 😀 After that I had a walk round the veg garden and started clearing some bits away, I picked a few tomatoes and then moved onto the big tunnel. I cleared away the cucumber vine which all but spent, there were about five small cues on there so I picked them first, the skins are toughening now and so I could have kept the vine going but the cues would not be very nice. Then I cut back and pulled out the cape gooseberry plants which have turned into triffids over the last two years and I decided I don’t want them in there any more. I must be in a ‘cleansing’ mood at the minute as it feels good to get it all sorted. At times with many diseases but especially Lupus you get ‘brain fog’ this is a real thing just in case you have ever wondered. Brain fog takes away the ability to be able to focus and think clearly hence the standing there wondering where to begin on many occasions 😜 I never used to be like that, I always had a definite plan of attack and some days I still do but others I just have to muddle through as best as possible and hope for a good result 😀

I collected some seeds while I was going about my jobs, some morning glory, which have been splendid and some Sarah Raven California poppies which are just the most beautifully delicate little poppies (must remember that those are still in my jacket pocket 🙄) Seed collecting is one of the pleasures of gardening and an important part of self sustainability, buying the seeds just once should ensure a lifetimes supply of that plant unless something goes horribly wrong. The same can be said with perennials, once you have them they can be divided over and over and you never need to buy it again. Many vegetables will produce seed if left long enough and again collecting those ensure you will have a crop next year, something I need to make more of an effort to do especially after this year when everyone was buying them and suddenly they were scarce. With that in mind, at my trip to the garden centre I bought some seeds that I had not been able to get hold of this year just in case. Red cabbage was one, I tried and tried to find the seeds but I couldn’t get any, the other seeds I picked up were for an indigo tomato. I bought a plant this year and it has been amazing, you may find this in shops but they would have to be niche I think. These toms are delicious and again because of their colour they are packed with vitamins and antioxidants, they have more flesh than a regular tomato and so do not go to mush when they are cut.

Indigo Rose tomato, a superfood 😀

I need to go through my veg seeds and see what I have left, what I have collected so far and what needs to be ordered. I have some little gem lettuce that are going to seed at the minute so I will be collecting those hopefully. The French beans are drying in the greenhouse and the runner beans are still on the plant, when they look ready I will get them in to dry, I have pepper seeds drying on the windowsill and there are some chick peas to be harvested which grew from just three seeds, I have trebled them this year 😀 In theory I need never buy seeds again but where is the fun in that 😜

Thursday: A bright, sunny morning but a bit of a chill in the air, so far this morning I have just pottered about doing various household tasks. Sam and the twins are going to come over today so we will probably go out for a walk round the village, got to make the best of the good days while we can and also spend time together while we can as who knows what this winter will be like with Covid lurking round every corner.

I hatched a plan last night, in fact it is something I thought of doing this year but didn’t so I am definitely doing it next year. I will use the ménage to grow pumpkins and squash and to make sure I do I have already ordered a good selection of squash seeds. Butternut, spaghetti, banana, acorn, and a selection of pumpkin varieties, this year because the ménage has not been used the weeds have taken hold, if I use it to grow sprawling veg that will at least lessen that problem. It’s a massive area for growing roughly 40 x 20 metres 😮 the surface has always been woodchip and it constantly breaks down so there should be some good loam under there, probably the best growing site on the Smallholding 😂

Just had a news update come through and London is moving to tier two on the restrictions 🙄

Went on a walk around the village with Sam, George and Lucie, on the way back we stopped and saw Grampy (John) who was in the village working. Sam fed the kids their dinner when we got back and she had literally left when Shelley and Florence arrived 😀

They said it was going to be warmer today than yesterday but I don’t think it is, there is a definite chill in the air even when the sun is out.

Friday: Dry, overcast and not too cold this morning. Just stopped for a coffee, we are total creatures of habit aren’t we? I was working outside and thought, time for coffee, without even looking at my watch I find that it’s exactly the time I would have a coffee if I was indoors 🤷‍♀️ This morning I have meditated, had a shower with a blast of cold water at the end, fed the quail, the horses and the Guineas extra rations, put clean bedding in for the ducks and the geese plus all the usual routine jobs. The horses are being given extra feed now as the grass is getting sparse, you can tell by the way they start to hang around the gateways that they are getting hungrier. We are trying to give biscuit a mix of cod liver oil, turmeric, black pepper and ginger as she is getting on a bit and it might just help her with her old bones. The problem is Jack (greedy git that he is) I feed them and have to guard her feed as Jack scoffs his quickly and she takes a lot longer, he is then trying to get to hers 🙄 I spotted one the kittens up a tree while I was out there, they are getting more adventurous but luckily they do come running back if I appear. We see Diesel every couple of days, I have no idea where he disappears to but he eventually comes home, not much good at keeping the mice down round the farm though if he is off wandering.

The garlic, onions and shallots I ordered a few weeks back have arrived so I need to think about getting those in, hopefully I will do that today.

I have been listening to a pod cast that is very funny, it’s Lee Mack and his friend ‘I can’t believe it’s not Buddha’ it’s a hilarious chat about a path they are both following with serious intention, if you see me laughing out loud with my headphones in, that’s what I will be listening to 😜

I spent a wonderful two hours weeding and clearing the bean bed. The top quarter I had already done as that’s where the cauliflower are now planted but the rest of the bed needed doing. At the beginning of the year I had some self seeded yellow daisies growing in there so I let them carry on but I had forgotten how big the plants got as a consequence they over shadowed a lot of the peas I had growing so I won’t let them stay there next year. I pulled out the remains of these daisies, a Swiss chard ( I dug that up and gave it to the guineas) that had self set, hundreds of weeds of all types and the dead foliage of bean and pea plants. I had intended to put the onions, garlic and shallots in here but the side of the bed has collapsed and needs re doing (cue John 😜) so I will wait until I get that sorted before planting them. I am glad I have cleared it all as there were a lot of white fly probably settling down to overwinter, they tuck themselves right down in the foliage near to the roots ready for a comfy sleep I suspect, not any more 🙄 I say a wonderful two hours because it was lovely, the weather was just right, warm enough, no sun, no wind, no rainy bits and the ground is dry enough to work on without getting very dirty 😀 I still have plenty more work to do out there but that will be enough for today, time for lunch and a sit down before getting on with the afternoon jobs.

The healthy eating is going well (most of the time) I have lost a stone and a half! Impressed, yep me too 😀 I amazed actually 😜 Many years back I started WW and got to goal then spent about 10 years clerking for them but gradually the weight crept back on and then some. I know what to eat I just didn’t know why I wasn’t doing it even though I wanted to shift the ‘back fat’ and the third boob, the girls will know what I mean by that 😉 So when I started seeing ads for Noom I was intrigued by the psychology aspect it was presenting, two weeks free trail, what did I have to lose 🤷‍♀️ The two weeks came to an end and I thought might as well carry this on, so I did, I am. There is no miracle to losing weight, it’s mainly persistence but I think the Noom app helps an awful lot with that, there are lessons and information every single day digging into your own psychology (sometimes you dig so deep you surprise yourself) learning the best food balance for you and your situation, it’s not a diet as such more the re-set of your mind when it comes to food choices. I am obviously not affiliated to them nor do I suggest you rush out and join, just telling you my experience of it, I think it’s a great thing to follow, it took me a while to get my head around it, I thought I knew all there was to know about dieting but it seems not 😝

I babysat Mia and the twins although the twins were already in bed so MIA and I had fun taking photos, dancing and singing 😀

Saturday: Another dry, reasonable day today, John did the animals and then had to go off to do a quick plumbing job. When he got back he began to dig out the last bit of the path, but I needed his help fixing the side of the veg bed that had collapsed. So we sourced some wood, dug it out and put in new sides, I got on with back filling the bed while he went to finish what he started. I raked and riddled the bed, took out as much bindweed root as I could find and then I needed Johns help again 😂 and I wonder why he takes so long over jobs 😝 I wanted to bury the soaker hose in the soil, it was partly buried but over time had come up, it was also too long and curled around on itself in places, first I had to cut it to length which meant the end now had no stop. The stop on the original bit had failed (I always wondered why there was a puddle) so I asked John if he had anything that would work, being a plumber I was pretty sure he would. It did mean filing down the outside of the soaker hose though so the bit could be fitted, once it was done we tested it and voila it works well. He went back to his job (again) and I got on with burying the pipe down the centre of the bed, this will give me a more even watering than I had before. After that I planted all the onions, shallots and garlic bulbs, 20 shallots, 16 garlic and I lost count of the onions after 40 but I think there are about 50 in total. That’s not the end of the job because of course I then have to cover them so that the chickens don’t scratch them all up which given that they love freshly turned soil, is a dead cert. I got some lengths of environmesh and pegged them down this will also stop the birds thinking the tops of the onions are worms and pulling them out, it won’t stop the worms pushing them up and out though 😂 So that’s all done and I probably won’t have to do anything to them until next spring unless it gets very weedy between now and then. Environmesh is great stuff and well worth the investment, don’t use environ fleece as that just breaks up, the mesh lets the light and the rain in but keeps the birds off it also creates a micro climate by trapping any warm air a bit like a string vest 😜

Hopefully there will be more days like these when the weather is favourable enough to be able to get the rest of the beds under control and prepared for next spring. I have done that bed and one third of another bed only four and two thirds more to go 😣 In total I have the fruit cage, the two tunnels, the brassica cage, five very large beds, one long thin one, a separate raised bed and the birds, bees and beer bed, I need to start pulling my finger out I think 🤔

Sunday: Man o man I am knackered 😜 I have spent all day from about 9 this morning, it’s now 4pm, burning wood 🙄 The cladding that came off the front of the building needed burning so that was today’s job, there were a few branches from some trees that had been there a while as well. First I had to sort through the pile as it all just got dumped there, there was a pile of painted stuff that needs to go in the skip, a pile of wood that was ok and would come in handy at some point and a pile of gravel boards. I then sorted the wood into smaller and longer bits, the smaller bits I started off in the burning barrel but about two hours in the side started to give so then I started a pile on the ground. The reason I didn’t do this in the first place was the wood was too close to where I would be burning and I like a controlled burn, John, like most men I suspect, would have just had a twenty foot pile of wood and set fire to it 😜 Also he would not have thought about the insects and any small animals that might be under the wood whereas I do so if I move it then they have a chance of getting away first. In fact I was stood there and a little mouse came creeping out of the ground, saw the fire and high tailed away elsewhere 🐭 Meanwhile John was busy creating next weeks burning load, he has given the hedge, where we had the trees cut down, a good pruning both the top and the sides as the branches had got long and straggly. Come spring they should bush out really well as well as grow higher, they have good big roots on them so that will help.

Next weeks pile of burnings 😜

Charlie and Macca called in for a cuppa before go out for the afternoon, we should do something I said to John but in the end we carried on working 😂

Posted in Friesland Farm

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

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh tomato soup, easy, nutritious, low in calories 😀
I added a teaspoon of low fat black pepper cream cheese 😀

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The iconic Stonehenge 🥰

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

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

Looking good Rosie 😀

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

This green and pleasant land 🥰

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

Sunny days, tidying up and ‘surprise’ x 3 😀

Posted on by frieslandfarm

Sunday Evening after publishing 😜 I forgot to update you in last weeks blog that Diesel returned just in case you were worried. He had a good feed, some extra treats and is fine. He is getting on though so I guess one day he won’t come back but for the time being he is around again 😀

Monday 14th September 2020: A glorious day with high temps and for me that means staying inside or shade dodging 😜 I chose staying in and had already decided to do the cleaning, mainly the kitchen. Normally I start in the bathroom and then do the living room and bedrooms and by the time I get to the kitchen it gets a quick going over. So today I started in the kitchen and gave it a good clean, all the walls, cupboard doors, move everything, clean behind things, I didn’t go as far as cleaning out all the cupboards but I did clean the windows and the grill, probably give myself a B+ 😂 I had a phone call from the surgery and I need an phone appointment with the doc to discuss blood results, crap, that won’t be great then 🙄

We need more trees in this country, I know there are groups that have been saying this but I can tell you from personal experience that we don’t have enough. When I travel any distance in a car or try to go for a walk on a sunny day I note the complete lack of trees for shade. If the climate prediction is anything to go by the world will get hotter, another reason to have more shade available and of course it would be great for wildlife. But let’s not plant any old tree, make them native or food trees, I never understand why new housing estates don’t plant a better combination of trees and shrubs than the non producing, standard type they go for, cheaper I guess, I would like to think it was more than lack of imagination 🙄

I did decide to clean the food cupboards out in the afternoon as well as the cutlery drawer, we only have one small under counter cupboard and a shelf in the other cupboard for tins as most of it is in the freezers or the satire cupboard. At least I now know what is in them and for some reason I seem to have three pots of cardamon, I hardly ever use it so I don’t know why 🙄 Then John arrived home and we did the eggs, had dinner and I went to babysit Mia, Lucie and George while Sam went out for a meal with Luke for her birthday which is on Thursday. That’s Monday finished, as a bonus John is at home tomorrow after a job he is on isn’t ready yet.

Tuesday: As I said John is off today after he has gone to do a small job that is 🙄 I got on with some picking and finally had a decent haul of runner beans, lots of people have been saying how poor they are this year so if yours were good you are in the minority. I picked a couple of courgettes, some raspberries & nuts, did a fair bit of watering as it’s so dry and getting pretty hot during the day (ah that Indian summer 😀) then indoors to sort it all out and decide what’s for dinner this evening. Meanwhile John returned and got on with some more work on the front of the building.

Last night a delivery of bulbs arrived, snowdrops, tête-à-tête daffodils and dwarf iris, these will all go under the newly planted shrubs in the new border. Hopefully they will spread and give a good show in early spring when nothing else is growing, that’s the plan anyway along with some taller willowy drifts of things like verbena, Dierama (angels fishing rods), guara (bee blossom) and red flax.

After school finished I left John to work by himself while Shelley picked me up and took me back to hers to do my nails. I rarely (that is only once ever) get my nails done, I don’t like false nails as they are too thick and I can’t always do things with them on and besides it’s little bits of plastic 😏 and I can’t (or couldn’t) have nail polish because of the UV salons use. Shelley recently did a course to qualify and during the course looked at options for light sensitive skin, LED can also be used and is less likely to cause problems (though you should still be careful) so today was a good day to give it a go. Shelley also bought gel polish that didn’t need curing with light but after applying it all it didn’t work terribly well so we took it back off. Then we tried the proper nail polish and using the LED lights. The base layer was cured with hands under the lights for 30 seconds, the colour layers I kept my hands just outside of the light box for 60 seconds each layer and the top coat was also for 30 seconds inside the light box. This worked a great 😀 the idea was not to over expose the skin to the lights in case a reaction occurred. Nice to have lovely looking nails, a real treat for me so thank you Shelley 😘

Wednesday: Another lovely sunny day ahead 🙄 don’t get me wrong I like the warmer weather rather than the cold but wall to wall sunshine means I can’t get out and about much.

I started off in the big tunnel as it needed watering, while I was in there I harvested about 5 cucumbers, accidentally pulled up some raddicchio (which I will now have with my dinner later) and cut back the monster that is the cape gooseberry. It has got huge so I cut plenty of it back and picked a load of the berries, not sure what I will do with those yet, I might freeze them and think about it. At the back is a wonderful smelling lemon verbena, it’s smell is divine so I cut some of that and will probably make a syrup which I can then use in lots of things. When I finished in there I cut back the lavender in the garden and now have a huge bunch of lavender drying. I pulled up some swede, cut some chard and picked some courgettes which will all be prepped one way or another for the freezer (probably soup mix). I came in and de husked the cape gooseberries and made a coffee. I felt tired just doing that bit this morning which is not a good sign, I have noticed I feel more tired over the last few days, I’m guessing that’s the white cells dropping again 🙄 pants! It’s a condition called Leukopenia and it’s caused by the medication I take for the Lupus which is why they will probably take me off of it so the body can repair BUT the Lupus can also kill off white cells and so they need to be sure which one is doing it and the medication suppresses the Lupus, it’s catch 22 by the looks of it.

Thursday: A lovely morning, sunshine ahead but that lovely fresh September start to the day is something I love. Today is Sam’s birthday, my eldest, 35 years, where the heck did they all go 😜 and now she is a mother of three herself 🥰🥰🥰 I always say being a Mum was the most rewarding and important job I ever had, I loved every minute of it and now I love every minute of being a grandparent too 😀 Happy Birthday Sam x

I whizzed round and got a few things done this morning, picking runner beans and raspberries, grabbing a few hazelnuts along the way. Prepped and froze some bits and pieces that have been hanging around on the side for a few days including some cooking apples which are now cooking down with the raspberries. Some swede, courgettes, chard and onion are open freezing for soup or roasted veg, more swede frozen separately with some runner beans, swede chopped for dinner later along with runner beans. Took all the off cuts and ends to the guineas, other softer bits to the torts, also picked them some lettuce and tomatoes.

Sam and Shelley came over with the little ones that are not at school and we had lunch together. Florence insisted on getting me some flowers in the shop, pink roses for Nana 🥰

Late afternoon we went over to see Sam the reason being that Mia had been at school all day and I didn’t want her to think we had missed her Mums birthday 😀 She had made some little chocolate covered fairy cakes for everyone bless her.

Friday: Another sunny day ahead. I started off getting some wash loads on, picking raspberries and planting 220 bulbs of various descriptions in the front border. Snowdrops, dwarf iris, crocus and tête-à-tête , hopefully that will be lovely and cheery from Jan through to March when not much else is around. I sorted dinner for later and made an apple and raspberry crumble, had a coffee and typed this up while waiting for the washing to finish spinning so I can get it out on the line. The postman came with parcels, cauliflower plants and an expandable hose, hoses are a big bug bear for me as they catch and kink all the time which drives me mad lol. The cauliflower I will have to get planted up ASAP, I need to work out where they will go, I think the best place will be where I had the broad beans, in fact yes that’s defiantly where I will plant them.

The pumpkin patch almost ready to harvest now the foliage has all died back. I need to get them in before the birds start pecking at them 🙄

Just before lunchtime I planted the cauliflower plants, 10 in all which will be all we need. First I hoed the area and raked it over, riddled the rakings to get the stones etc out and then planted the plants. I have covered them with environmesh not to keep off butterflies but to stop the pigeons and chickens eating the greenery. Then I spent a little while husking walnuts they are now drying in the greenhouse.

10 tiny cauliflower plants

Hopefully come late winter, early spring, I should have cauliflower, purple sprouting, leeks, winter spinach and chard all growing fresh, plus a freezer full of beans of all types, peas, swede, turnip and many types of fruit. I have garlic dried and stored, nuts that will be dried and stored, potatoes, butternut squash and pumpkins in store, jars of jam and chutney in the store cupboard, tomatoes/passata puréed and frozen, soup mixes already chopped and frozen, we have a store of chopped and dried wood ready, yep I am all good to go for 10ft of heavy snowfall 😜

Saturday: Martin came over to help John again today and as Shelley was working I entertained Josh and Flo. First we cooked egg and sausage sandwiches for the workers then we went to check on the horses and clean out and fill up the water buckets and then we made raspberry and chocolate chip cakes. After that in between making cups of tea and coffee we watched a bit of tv and played some superhero games, I get instructions from Josh as I have no idea what I am doing having had three girls 😂 Shelley came over mid afternoon and they all went home at 4pm. At 4.30 Sam arrived with Mia, George and Lucie as Mia is staying for a sleepover tonight 😀 John went to the chip shop and got some fish and chips and the it was bath time, we played tunes on Alexa and had fun getting her to burp and sneeze, then story time and bed, I’m knackered 😂 Apart from a bit of painting the cladding first thing this morning I didn’t get anything else done on the farm 😜

Sunday: Mia stayed over and slept well 😀 I did think she may want to go home but nope she was fine. This morning we got up had breakfast got dressed and went out to see the horses, after that we picked raspberries, collected a few eggs, picked up some hazelnuts and found some conkers, those are all for her to take home with her. The blackberries we picked up in the back paddock she ate en route 😜

After Sam collected her mid morning I went out to do a bit of picking, runner beans, courgettes, chillies and tomatoes everything has slowed considerably now. I got three lovely surprises as I was going round, one, the carrot seeds have already started to sprout so I should get some for Christmas even if they are baby carrots 🥕 Two, I have a loofah 😀😀😀 I had given up on these and even stopped watering them, I was watering the peppers and thought ‘that’s a funny shape pepper then realised it was a tiny loofah. And three, my oranges are beginning to ripen 😀😀 whoop whoop, we are moving towards orange season, late winter, early spring so fingers crossed, I hope they taste good.

If you look closely you can just see the carrot seedlings appearing.
My first ever loofah, it won’t be big but it’s an achievement 😀
Oranges beginning to ripen whoop whoop 😀 Also a big achievement in our climate though this year has been ideal for them.

We have had no rain for what seems like weeks, everything is very dry although the overnight dew is keeping things going I do have to water every now and then.

John has been busy again on the front of the house, when it’s finished I will post the before and after pictures. I am reserving judgment on the colour,

Posted in Friesland Farm

Rain, homegrown passata and a broken tractor 😕

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Friesland Farm

Changeable weather, plenty of produce, especially plums 😂

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A snapshot of some of the produce this year 😀

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by frieslandfarm

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

My birthday treat at The Alchemist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My drying corner

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

Pretty sure patch will miss you annoying him as well 🥰

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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