Hi folks
Well, we have certainly had our fair share of gales in the past few weeks, the late autumn and winter has seen a few hurricanes and stiff breezes. The weather last winter had very few gales but more snow, we have had some snow but not on the scale of last year. We are certainly using the peats which we cut in April; they dried very well this year and are keeping us warm on these long winter nights.
The croft is very wet at the moment with the amount of rain and snow we have had recently, the ducks are very happy but the hens are not. They like to forage and when the rain is horizontal they take shelter in the hen houses and wait for the storm to subside.
The ram seems to be working well, but he only has a few girls to keep happy. We should have our first lambs at the beginning of April. Hopefully Clarrie the youngest nanny goat is in kid and should give birth in April too.
A new hay and straw shed has recently been completed by Dave next to the byre, making it easy to get the feed and bedding stuffs to the animals more quickly. We were keeping the hay and straw in a friend’s sheep polytunnel but it took a while to gather it and bring it back in the car in bags or in bales, and now the cover has blown off the polytunnel in the hurricane last week so its just as well we have a new storage facility for it.
The ground in the market garden is being prepared for the next growing season using mulches made from our own compost bays, which is a mixture of manure from the byre and vegetable material from the market garden. It helps to stop the leaching of nutrients from the soil and keeps the weeds in check. We have a chicken tractor which gets moved around the beds but now we are letting the chickens free range to forage over the winter. The beds in the kitchen garden have also been cleared and mulched in readiness for next season. Recently we gathered a trailer load of seaweed from the beach after a hurricane so this will get scattered over the beds in the market and kitchen gardens. It brings in extra minerals for the soil.
There are still some vegetables in the gardens, mainly brassicas such as kale, cabbages and sprouts, together with swedes, some leaf beet and a few leeks. The potatoes did not grow very well this year, so we may have to buy some potatoes for the first time in years. In the polytunnel there are lots of oriental leaves which we are still picking and there are a few nasturtiums in the greenhouse which give us some peppery flavour for our winter salads.
We have had to say goodbye to Henrietta, our sow, this year. She was a lovely old girl, very placid and a good mother, but we could no longer get her in pig and without a crop of piglets a year we could not afford to keep her on. That’s the hard part of farming, but we have to be realistic. We don’t keep pets here, everything has to pay it’s way!
'til next timeDave and Jane