Earth Stood Hard as Iron?

All through the recent snowfalls, pretty though they were, we have not had any really cold weather. Under that snow, as your boot heel squeaked down through it, you could feel the mud still yielding and 'fudge' soft. Where we did get a bit of a crunchy surface crust it was very thin and had softened by midday as the sun turned the grass back to green from white. Well, not this time. Over the last few nights the air has gone down to the -4's and -6's and with the wind chill factor it has been bitter-raw.

This is a bit crunchy, Dad! Can we have some wet stuff?

The sheep are OK with their straw shelter (though I did tie some more sheeting to the fence to stop a 'knife' of WNW wind taking the noses off the poor things as they ate from the trough). The birds are all OK in their solid buildings - a bit draughty maybe but not actually windy. I lashed up some of the big 40 kg coal sacks to the North side of the giant rabbits' run to give them some protection. I am also obviously into carrying out liquid water to the anybody whose drinker is solid, the geese in particular. Blue has been able to try out his pond-skating skills again.

That's more like it. The geese make do with a bucket of fresh
indoor water.

The main pond is a sheet of bobbly ice, where falling snow has landed and floated, combining to form the top-crust. I used to doubt those experts who'd look at the sky and say "too cold for snow" (I'm fairly sure it snows at both poles!) but that does seem to be the way of it here, or perhaps it is truer to say that it only gets really cold along this Atlantic margin, when we have high pressure and no clouds. Me personally, I enjoy the fact that it is frozen and 'dry' rather than the sloppy mud we have had some years. I love that stage where the puddles crust over with ice but then contract back into the earth. leaving the top-crust hanging there, above ground, fixed to a few blades of crisp grass.

Frozen puddle.

Our grass remains intact this year and has not been reduced to square yards of brown slop where humans have walked, geese have paddled and chickens have scraped. The exponents of wildlife gardening and helping the pollinators, of course, advocate planting plenty of very early flowering plants so that the bees have something to get at if they emerge early. These lists generally include snow drops, crocus and the flowering currents (Ribes) and pussy willow and hazel for the catkins. We are getting there. We are struggling to source snowdrops "in the green" as we used to do in Kent but have planted some dry and rather unlikely looking bulbs. We have planted a good few crocus each year into the lawn, though the 2014 batch have come up just as the snow hit and are now the must-have breakfast choice for one of the Buff Orp young roosters. The poor things are looking a bit ravaged. However, the bees have also been hunkered down in the hive since 25th January, so they've not needed the crocus flowers.

A frozen wash-out? Autumn sown broad beans.

In Kent, too, I was always able to grow autumn-sown broad beans. I would get them into the ground in October and they would emerge and grow to be sturdy 3-6 inch tall plants by the time the cold weather came. They would then go alarmingly limp and sorry looking at every frost but would bounce back well as the frost cleared and steam on through spring to produce a lovely early crop in May/June before the black fly had even spotted them. I was advised not to bother here and I know that Mentor Anne has done trials and now stopped trying; she does them in early spring now using root trainers and does not bother with the autumn sown varieties.

The rather ravaged crocus.

The plants do not like the constant wet. I suspect they could cope if it was just cold, but the wet, wet, wet has the biggest leaves turning black and falling away so that the poor lads either die or struggle on as a weak looking stem and tiny leaves which never really get cracking in the spring. I had three good rows going into the winter and great hopes for them, but I am now reduced to half a dozen plants and lots of gaps plus a conviction that the advice was correct. 2 failed winters. Life's too short. We always garden to our strengths anyway and never try to force things to grow which need 'the wrong soil' or shade/full sun or what-ever. Every day's a school day.

Purple sprouting broccoli, ready soon.

We do seem to be able to grow all the kales, cabbages and broccolis. I have a lovely stand of purple sprouting broccoli out there at present which has gone through winter with its sprout-buds tightly closed and tiny and is now starting to move; well, it was till these -6ºC temperatures came along. A warm week or two and we will be able to start cutting that and bringing it into the kitchen. The Brussels sprouts are nearly done, with just a few tiny buds left at the tops of the stems and, again, a warm week might let those expand a bit.

Talking of 'frozen', everyone was a winner yesterday when we dug a pork shoulder joint out of the freezer but decided to make a curry of the lean meat having first boned it out and stripped off the skin and subcutaneaous fat. Raw pork bones are our dogs' absolute favourite (and the best for them, it seems; no upset stomachs, that 'lovely' white chalky poo) and there were three good chunks for the three dogs. I skimmed the skin off the fat and roasted it into 'scratchings' for dog treats and the fat, finely diced, was hoovered up by the frosty chickens. The curry was a Madhur Jaffrey "Goan hot and sour" which we served with white rice and home made Naan bread.

Ear tags and pliers.

Finally, our sheep ear-tag 'pliers' and first batch of ear tags turned up. Under EU rules we have to identity-tag every sheep and lamb we 'produce' on this 'farm'  before it leaves (even to the mart or for slaughter) the premises or before it reaches 9 months of age. There are, of course, standard designs of tags you must use and you have to buy them from proper official suppliers who hold the databases of sheep flocks in their patch, in our case the excellent Mullinahone Co-op (Tipperary) who also supplied our pig 'slap-mark' numbers.

As you sign on with them as a customer, they pull up your details and start a sequence of ear-tag numbers; always here, the letters IE (for Ireland), then 04 (species code for sheep), followed by a 5 digit flock ID - I am 55809 and then 5 digits and a random letter for the animal number. You start at 00001 and off you go. Liz spotted a charming coincidence, that our first lamb (so IE0455809-00001F, to his friends) happens to have the random letter 'F' - his name is Feste. Our first batch of tags was the minimum size, 10 tags. It may take us a while to get through them at this rate even if the girls knock out some pairs of twins. We feel all grown up and official now in our 'farming'.

October Peas

This cold and wet, miserable, slow vegetable growing season is coming to the end now but is still managing to give a little. We've had 2 good frosts so far, we've swapped BST for GMT and the shops are full of Hallowe'en stuff but I was out there today in the kitchen garden picking and podding broad beans and peas. The leaves are all starting to turn and the birds are stripping the hawthorn hedges of haws; I see flocks of birds moving through the allotment hedge when I'm down that way doing 'sheep watch' (see previous post) but we are still getting excellent curly kale, chard, parsnips and carrots. The cabbage never really thrived and has been hammered by slugs and sheep but still gives us the best hearted cabbage I have ever grown.

2013 is starting to come into focus too, with the autumn planted broad beans and onions now breaking the surface.

Lazy Beds

With the guests gone and the evidence of their visit squared away, Dad can get back into the garden and check out progress on the vegetables after the week of beautiful sunshine. The warmth has brought on the peas and broad beans beautifully, so we can have a first portion  of peas with supper on Monday night. The broads will be a few more days yet but the runners and French beans are starting to flower profusely. We are also looking at some courgettes soon in the kitchen garden from which we have already been enjoying various cut and come again salad stuff.

The broader picture, though, has Dad needing to finally give in to the local method for raised beds or lazy beds and trenches. It's just been too wet this year gardening on the flat, to hoe or control weeds, so that we have a depressing embarrassing lawn of weeds between the rows of crop so that a mower is sometimes more appropriate than a hoe. The crops sulk in damp, cold misery, succumb to slugs or general malaise so that often 'we' have just given up on them and ploughed them back in.

Way back, when Mike the Cows was tractor-ploughing and tractor-rotovating he did suggest ridging it up (which is quite easy, I now know, with a couple of changes to settings on the rotovator) but we didn't really know what we were about back then and Dad thought he meant into potato-style ridges. We declined the offer, thinking we'd be able to plant rows 2 feet apart and simply walk-behind-rotovate up the rows like you would in Kent to keep the weeds down. Then came the rain for most of May, June and July and the flat rotovated land saturated and could not drain.

It was John Deere Bob who explained what was meant by ridges - three or four foot wide broad ridges (what they'd call 'breeds' in the Fens) with deepish trenches between but with the ridges/trenches aligned down the slope (we'd done our initial rows across the allotment, effectively parallel to the contours). You can either dig the whole site over and then make trenches or use a traditional Irish method which saves quite a few square yards of digging and that's called 'Lazy Beds'. You skim the turf (or 'lawn of weeds in Dad's case) off where the trench will be, folding it over to lie upside down on the edge of the ridge, grass to grass. You then shovel out the trench and use the soil to bury the rest of the ridge and the flipped over turfs. You can also then cover the whole with plastic to further supress weeds. We used plastic sheeting left over from the building project, plus we recycled the ground sheets from Mr Silverwood's thrown-away tent. We have since seen pics of raised beds and Lazy Beds in the Museum of Country Life in Turlough, Co. Mayo, so we now feel very authentic!

Now we're talking. Now the soil in the ridge tops is drying out and does not water-log and Dad can stroll up and down in the trenches easily getting at the weeds even on the wettest day. The rest of the allotment will be converted to raised beds as it comes free after we have harvested the current crops of beans, cabbages etc.

My final pictures on this catch up are just a nice shot of the High Hopes pink rose climbing up the Tígín wall and a nice box of 9 eggs showing 4 dated today (15th Aug) just because all the gals are now in production.

Night Shift

Poor old Dad has to work a night shift. EDF Energy, who supply Dad's work with electrons, need to service the substation, so all the power's going to be off from 0200 to 0600 and Dad has to go in to nurse the computer systems safely to sleep, and then gently wake them all up again when the work is done. So we have to see him off at "last out" and then look after Mum in case she gets burgled in her sleep, till Dad gets home at 07:30.

Dad then sleeps through till midday (as do we, all in a heap) and then gets involved in allotment judging round the town, and a bit of harvesting on his own plot, broad beans and artichokes. It's all go, here, I tell you!

Deefski

Broad Beans

I've been asked why there was a picture of a nightjar in yesterday's post, and no mention there-of. Well, we put the nightjar in fully intending to talk about nightjars, but then got all carried away with tales of heroic battles with bay trees and jasmine arbours.

Dad had done his annual leading of a guided walk with the Friends of Kingswood, this one the Nightjar walk. It was a good one. They'd had a good turn out and not lost anyone in the dark, and the nightjars had done their stuff churring and flapping about. They also saw and heard (via the bat-box) plenty of bats but there was no sign of deer, glow worms or woodcock, which are usually seen on this walk)

Ah well, the jasmine is now all gone, bagged up and lugged up to the tip in 5 car journeys, all in Mum's little Fiat because Dad picked up his brand new car yesterday and didn't want to be filling it with skanky old jasmine.

Up at the allotment, Dad gets a good cut of spinach, a couple of artichokes and the first broad beans. Back at home he pods these out into a bucket and is that a tear I see come to his eye? He's welling up a bit missing Megan. Megan used to love a broad bean straight out of the pod (the gnarlier and older, grey skinned the bean, the better) and used to sit at Dad's feet every time they podded hoping for Dad to occasionally give her a bean, or accidentally ping one out across the terrace. Haggis and I hate beans, so we're no use to him here, and I think it brought it all back.

Poor ol' Dad
Deefski

Greenwich Mean

So sad - we're now on Greenwich Mean time (GMT), so we suddenly don't have any daylight left in the evenings, and we're lucky if we can get a walk before dark. Especially if Dad either stops on the way home to sneak some broad beans into the allotment (good ol' Autumn sown "Aquadulce") or as yesterday gets held by a problem at work.

Still, rumour has it that Bob the Builder (actually John) is on the way soon to start knocking the house about, and that Dad might have some time off work to coincide. Mum has a dream of a "kitchen diner".

...and just in case you're interested, Dad is now blogging in competition to this one, "blogger in residence" to the Cambria Trust volunteers, in which he is involved on a regular basis. Nip onto their website and check out the "news" section for anything that says "Volunteer's Views". Can't promise it's any more exciting than this but it will be different.

Look after yourself
Deefski

Food Miles

I am wondering if food miles count when you buy "local" produce a long way from home and then bring it home when you were coming anyway.

Remember the "Sangliers" post a few posts back, which mentioned a local-produce farm shop near La Chapelle d'Armentieres. There Mum and Dad bought, along with local cheeses and dried salami-type meats and some rillette, some bottles of local apple juice.

Even fewer food-miles has me celebrating the end of Dad's "hungry gap" up at the allotment, bringing home the first of the Autumn-sown broad bean crop. Plenty more where that came from. Big fresh pods and lovely tender beans. Megan and I are sitting at Dad's feet through the podding process - Meggie has always liked fresh raw broad beans even from a pup, and I'm learning. Haggis? No way. He doesn't "do" plants. Ahh beans in the warm sunshine..... Afternoon Delight?

On the Rec a fun fair has been thumping away every night since Friday, and tonight that's joined by a music mini-festival up by the Rugby Club. Sounds of rock music of varying quality drifting across the trees of the old railway line.

Diamond and John (and Rags we guess) over for a bit of lunch on the terrace this afternoon, D+J just fresh back from Poros (Greece).

Broad beans

Dogs, we fondly imagine, are all derived from some ravening wild beastie, living as a hunting pack and roaming the Savannah plains in search of prey to bring down and kill. In Megan's case, she may well have come from a strain which roamed the savannah in search of..... broad beans.

Only this can explain her love for them and her doe-eyed look of longing when seated at her Master's feet while he pods out the latest carrier bag full from the allotment. Every dozen or so he takes pity and hands her a particularly big, greyish skinned, not-particularly-tender looking bean (Mum doesn't like these - if there are too many grey ones she starts to think in terms of blanching them and hulling them, only using the inner (cotyledon) leaves to cook with).

These she chews up deliciously, thoroughly enjoying every morsel. If Dad doesn't give her another bean frequently enough she will go hunting the few which inevitably escape between pod and bowl, and zing off onto the garden, landing hidden between leaves of Knifophia (but not hidden well enough to evade Megan's hunter-killer nose)

Either that or she's from the strain of wilde dogge which exists by barking up at the plastic tupperware box full of pigs' ears till some superior force opens the box and hands her one.

Gotta love that Meggie

Deefer

Donna Noble has been Saved

Ah, the humans here love their Doctor Who. Mum is now all stressed out because the latest episode had the books on the library shelves as the place where the "bad guys' " microspores resided. Mum has lots of books, and you could see her visibly shift to leaning on the left arm of the armchair (the book shelf is on the right) when the Doctor sussed that the books were the problem

As I said, we were down at the Pud Lady's house today for lunch (proper steak and kidney pud - Dad thinks she's been cooking that every Saturday since he was born (1957) with the one exception that when Christmas Day falls on a Saturday we have the turkey on the Saturday and the pud happens on Sunday 26th). Gotta love that generation and their routines of cooking.

Pud Lady is a cause of some amusement. Very church-ified and "proper", she takes a mischievous delight in sneaking a glass of wine or sherry when Mum chooses to lead her astray. Today, we'd all spotted a very unusual spider in her garden - bright white (like A4 paper) but with bright orange Nike "swooshes" down the sides of her abdomen (we kid you not). Mum decided to take Pud Lady out to see it, and off they trotted.

When they got to the garden and the spider, Mum was still clutching her glass of wine, but Pud Lady had left hers behind. "I've not brought my wine" said Pud Lady, all concerned. "Ahhh" says Mum.... "You'll learn".....

Meanwhile, Dad harvests a shopping bag full of broad bean pods from the allotment. This, to Megan, is a sign of Summer. Megan loves her raw broad beans and sits attentively at the humans' feet while they pod them up, mopping up any that fall on the ground and scrounging the odd big one when none are falling. I tried. I really tried. I kept taking them but spitting them out, till Mum suspected that I was accumulating a pile of half chewed beans. It was always possible that the flavour would improve with each new bean. It never did.

Haggis, of couse, was no where to be seen. He doesn't do "plants"

Deefer

Aerobatics

We are looking out of the spare bedroom this morning while Dad's dressing for work, and the Sparrowhawk decides to put on a superb display of aerial manouvring. Starting at the fence down to our left, by the neighbour's pyracantha, she shoots across the garden, then turns hard left and down following the steps line, under the jasmine arbour. She pulls up hard in front of the Paulownia tree, then curves hard left again back into a dive, under the wooden arch with the yellow rose on it, back up the steps line and banks hard right back onto the fence.

It's fantastic to watch - I knew the hawk family were known for their manouvrability, jinking between the trees in dense woodland - all be it she doesn't catch anything this time. Then she sees us looking and is gone - across the garden and the Angel Betty's garden and out of sight. Wish I could fly like that! I'd be able to get those pesky squirrels for sure!

After the Bank Holiday (of course), the sun comes out. Dad's relieved, as he's in the 2CV today (driving 2CV's in the rain = wet knees.). We get a gently walk through the allotments where the rain has swelled the broad beans, so Dad stops to pick a huge carrier bag full, including some for the "Mulchman" (another blogger). While this happens I'm on a "restraining order" (Asbo would be proud of me!), due to my keen-ness fopr trampling through everyone's seed beds (allegedly). For restraining order read "lead tied to a fence post while Dad picks beans"

Have a good 'un

ps I wonder if Ellie has had her trip to the poodle-parlour yet? Oh and rumour tells of Archie being shouted at for being full length down a muddy hole he'd dug in the border on a wet day - only his tail visible. Responding to the shout he ran back indoors and then, thinking he was going to be told off he avoided Old-Dad by running in playful circles round the living room table, scattering half the garden across the carpet. Bet he was popular!

Deefs