A quiet weekend in the garden

This weekend has been a peaceful, if busy time. Time spent tending my garden, weeding , harvesting and talking to visitors about my work in the Wood and the various renewable energy systems we use to reduce our carbon footprint.

Yesterday afternoon and this morning I have; cleaned out the eglu, cleaned the two large wooden hen houses, the walk in run and all the feeders and drinkers, filled 8 compost bins with assorted stuff, moved 8 wheel barrowloads of an old bonfire pile to somewhere else ( lots of digging involved), hand mowed around the potato patch ( the raised bed ones), tidied the barn and swept the paved areas, watered and fed the polytunnel and picked lots of produce from the garden. I did lots of other stuff as well, but I can't remember the details!

I also did lots of inside, housework...and washed, hung out , dried and put away 3 loads of washing. I love the smell of freshly line dried washing!

Compostgirl went to play at her best friend's house today, and I gave a talk to a group of crop sharers from a local CSA scheme just up the road. They walked across the fields to us, and we had a pleasant hour or so in the wood, where I gave my talk, they asked questions, drank tea and generally had a look around at how we keep chickens, grow veg, make compost and generate our own electricity and hot water and wood products. They were a lovely group of people and it was a pleasure to talk to them.

Then it was time to collect a tired but happy Compostgirl and have our evening meal, which was entirely home grown or home reared.

A good weekend.

View over the veg plot.

 

This is a busy, productive time of year, with the harvest season fast approaching. 

Time to get out the dehydrator, and clear out the freezers of the remains of last years fruit and veg. I shall make soup I think with the veg and fruit crumble or maybe wine with the old fruit!

I am now harvesting new potatoes, broad beans, chard, salads of all sorts, herbs, carrots, courgettes, peas and mange tout, the first of the french beans today and lots of cucumbers. The tomatoes outside ( left over plants , not sold or given away, which I could not bear to throw on the compost!) are also doing really well. Which is a first for me as outdoor toms have never done well, here.

The climbing beans have finally got going, the leeks , parsnips and onions are looking good and I should be lifting the garlic and shallots any day now.

Apples, pears and plum trees are all covered with fruit and we have just started picking the tayberries - yum!

All in all, it is looking good so far, so fingers crossed we have some rain ( but not too much) and sunshine!


How is it with you, all?

Michael Chapman played a gig at our local pub...

we actually went out JUST Compostman and me earlier in the week, to a gig! We went to see Michael Chapman, an amazing guitarist singer songwriter....who was appearing at our local pub, The Walwyn Arms ! Compostman first encountered Michael back in the very early 70's when he played at a folk festival Compostman was doing the PA for...and we have been to see him a lot over the last 35 odd years...(eeek) but since we had Compostgirl we have only been out together 4 times in total. ..and not to see him... :-(

so we really enjoyed ourselves on Tuesday :-) especially as Compostgirl went on a sleepover with her best friend from school!

It WAS fun! to be a grown up again, to get dressed up( a bit, I put on clean jeans and a nice top and some lipstick!) and go out somewhere with lovely Compostman..and talk about grown up stuff :-)

Harvest time!

It was so wet here for most of July and early August! I kept on looking out of the(very shaded by scaffold) windows and despairing at the non stop rain.

Compostgirl needed constant nursing during most of July, then I became not at all well, having caught her very nasty stomach bug (hmmm...thinks....wonder if the shading aspect of the scaffolding made my SAD kick in? That would have made the illness/CFS stuff even worse!)

Compostman was very busy with the roof and getting on with house repairs while we still had the scaffold up, so he couldn't do much in the way of harvesting produce, he had more than enough to do outside!

So things outside were left unpicked or it was too wet to do so. Which really worried me and upset me. After all just think of all that effort and time and money going to waste!

But then the rain stopped and the sun shone and I started to feel better...so the harvest has commenced!



Sunflowers and nasturtiums for decoration, lavender for healing and pot pourri, beetroot, turnips, the very last of the broad beans, potatoes, a huge marrow and some peas...



Tomatoes, courgettes, peppers, various basil's. The tomatoes were washed, sliced, put in the dehydrator and 14 hours later were in jars in a dark cupboard..... some courgettes have been blanched and frozen as well as some dehydrated.





The Rivers Early plums were very rapidly turned into jam and a lot of wine is on the go now....we tend to preserve the earlier plums and freeze the later Victorias for pies or eating as desserts.



This lot was one trip to the polytunnel!



it was dried or frozen by 12 hours later...



and the bench cleaned down and cleared for the next wave of fresh veg. This kitchen worktop is normally a homework table, a dumping ground and a general surface to put stuff on..but at this time of year it becomes "food processing central" and I am ruthless about keeping it clear and clean LOL.

The "Beth" pear tree has been amazingly prolific this year,



Compostman picking some of them...



We picked 70 Lbs and there were still pears left on the tree!



I have graded them, some are fully ripe and are in the 'fridge waiting to be eaten or preserved, some need ripening further and are in the blue stacking fruit trays. I am going to make lots of Pear chutney and some Pear wine and I have sliced and dried a lot of pears. We have also eaten a lot of them as they are juicy and delicious.



We have also lifted the Shallots, Onions and Garlic and despite the very wet weather in July it is a good harvest :-) so when they have dried off fully they can go into storage for use during the next 8 months.



Compostman has finished lifting the potatoes and despite the blight and the terrible weather we have a good crop (probably due to getting them in the ground early AND growing Early/Early Maincrop varieties to beat the blight!)

We have over 210 lb of spuds in store now which will see us through to early spring and a load more damaged ones to eat up over the next few weeks.

Onions, Shallots, Potatoes, preserved fruits, Tomatoes, Carrots and Leeks in the ground, Kale and Sprouts and Cabbage growing well, Courgettes and Pumpkins ongoing, Plums, Apples etc coming on....we have the makings of a good harvest to see us through the winter...

I do feel very tired after a hard week or so of work, but it is a "good" tired, the sort that you get when you KNOW you have done a good job of work.

I think we have nearly caught up, now.. ;-)

Meet the new girls!

I am putting together a post which will catch up with the doings of all the chickens at Compost Mansions, but the latest biggest news is I have 2 new pullets!

We went to Poultry Park a few days ago and I bought 2 POL Warrens, and 3 fertile cream legbar eggs to put under Ruby Dorking (who is broody). Ruby has accepted these eggs so we shall see what happens.

The new girls (still, as yet, unnamed...but I think one will be called Ginger Too) are very pretty and are ensconced in the Eglu and its run for a few days under quarantine. We have made a separate enclosure for them around the Eglu and I have this evening just let them outside the Eglu run, for the first time.



They came from a grass enclosure with no shrubs or soil or leaf litter, so seemed a bit baffled at first




but then started to have a good old furtle around and peck at worms in the sunshine,

making little "quarks" and croons in a contented chicken-y way.





They are both happy to let me pick them up as well, which is nice :-)



I love my hens :-)

I plan to get another 4 or 5 hens and am still musing on breeds....but I am happy to have another couple of ginger hens as to me they are what makes a smallholding! Probably because that's what we had when I was a child.....and it is nice to look at them and remember Ginger doing the same stuff :-)

Compostman is resigned to more chickens, now I think (grin)