50 Days of Harvest - Day One - An invitation to join a celebration!

Today I start a new project and I invite you to join me in a celebration of an abundant harvest.

If you can not view the video on your device, you can watch it on YouTube here.

Wading through jelly

 On Sunday we spent a few hours with my sister and brother in law. We live only twenty minutes' drive away from her home which means that we can see other much more often than we used to. If my sister wasn't related to me, I'd choose her as a friend as we get on so well, share the same sense of silliness and have a similar outlook on life.

I took a box of fresh vegetables from the garden, a few frozen runner beans (because they are amongst her favourite vegetables), some duck eggs, hen eggs, a jar of blackberry and apple jam, a jar of apple sauce and one of the smaller pumpkins that are still ripening.

After we'd caught up with each other's latest news, we gathered some rose hips from a rose that had originally been a hybrid tea type, but over the years suckers had grown up from the root stock and now it is a wild rose with no sign of the grafted rose bush. I'm going to use these to make some rose hip syrup and add a few to some hedgerow wine. While we were picking fruits we found a few elderberries, which I will add to the berries in the freezer ready to make into some wine.

We also came home with some wooden battens (that had been on their roof, but have since been replaced), some other wood off-cuts that may have ended up rotting in a corner of their field, wire mesh, a bale of bedding for the ducks.

I felt that we had a much better deal from our swap until I remembered that, except for the bale of bedding, we had taken away items that they considered to be rubbish and would need taking to the local tip eventually, so we have saved them the trip. 

The wood battens and off-cuts will get stored away until we are ready to use them, but to have some spare bits of wood around is very useful for those days that I say 'can we just...?'.

By late afternoon I had started to feel a bit wobbly and irritatingly I have now spent two days on the sofa feeling somewhat worse for wear. I have booked an appointment with my GP to have my blood tests done again to check the level of hormones for my thyroid, unfortunately the first set of appointments that I can have aren't for another two weeks. My hope is that I will be feeling better long before then and the appointments will just be a routine check-up.

Being knocked sideways gives me little to write about in terms of activity on the smallholding as I haven't been up to walking outside, which means that nothing has progressed in the garden or in the kitchen. I've put all the picked fruits straight into the freezer and will deal with them at a later date when every step feels less like I am wading through jelly.

Mr J has been looking after the birds and of course, this is the week that the smallest chickens have worked out how to break out of their field and head straight for the 'all you can eat buffet' that is the vegetable garden. We have foiled their fun by confining them to their house and large run until we have completed putting up more chicken wire netting to prevent the small birds slipping through the flexible netting that surrounds the chickens' fields. Hopefully Mr J will feel up to doing this when he returns from work today.

I did manage to get outside for a short time this morning, but it didn't last long before I needed to come back in and lie down again. However, I got to enjoy the late summer sunrise for a few minutes. I wish my camera could pick up the intense orangey-red of the sun, but suffice to say that the sun and the pumpkins looked beautiful together.

Moving the ducklings

 

This week I am being the guest tweeter on SmallholdersUK account on Twitter. Each week a different smallholder is featured, celebrating the diversity of smallholders' lives and this week I am taking a turn at sharing my plastic beads of experience (it feels like I haven't advanced to pearls of wisdom yet). I didn't have a grand plan of what I was going to write about, but I did make some notes of subjects I knew I wanted to include.

I am surprised at how much additional energy I have used up in tweeting throughout the day, how tired I am in the evening and how quickly I'm getting off to sleep. Sadly though, I am still waking up at silly o'clock in the morning and lying in bed wondering if it's too early to get up. This morning that process of waking, staring at the ceiling, getting over hot, then too cold, dropping back to sleep and waking up again started at 1.25 am. So by 5 am I gave up and made my way downstairs and, as I often do when it's too early to start rumbling around outside, I put the television on.

I spend quite a lot of time reading and researching. YouTube has become my go-to learning resource as I can find so many really helpful vlogs and films. Obviously I don't take the word of just one person who's posted a film on the internet, I make sure that I watch several (or lots) of films about any particular subject. The more that one certain topic is covered in the same way, the more I can trust it to be likely to be true. But in the end, there's nothing quite like first hand experience. 

The experience has once again been of making compost, raised beds, preserving food for the late autumn and winter and putting in a new fence.

On Monday Mr J banged some fence posts into the ground in the duck enclosure so that we could start to section off part of it for the ducklings to use. The posts were recycled ones from my sister's home. She had replaced her fencing and these posts were of no use to her any more. My brother in law had kindly cut points on the bottom of each post to make getting them into the ground more easily.

I then stapled chicken wire to the posts and used heavy duty ground staples to secure it along the base.

 We hung a gate that I had found lying around on the other side of the of paddock (there have been some very useful bits and pieces that I've found that were left by the previous owners).

 We moved the two ducklings from their outside nursery pen into the new enclosure and watched as they revelled in the additional space that they suddenly had. Frederick was less than impressed at having two new neighbours, but over the last couple of days he has calmed down and now seems more miffed than cross.

The vegetable garden is filling out even more as the squashes make a last ditch attempt to produce their fruit before the days get cold. The purple sprouting broccoli(on the left) is an early variety, I hope that it will withstand the howling autumn and winter winds and flower early next year.

 Mr J and I created the next raised bed late on Tuesday afternoon when the strongest heat of the day had passed. I had put down a layer of cardboard in the morning and we covered it in topsoil and then in composted wood chippings. 

I will plant this up today with some purple curly kale seedlings and rainbow chard seeds (because the chickens like the leaves and we like the stems).

I was delighted to find that the compost pile made in early July is now a deep brown colour and although it's still quite soggy and I think I may move it to around the base of some fruit trees and cover it in composted wood chippings to help feed the fruit trees which have been working so hard to produce lots of apples. I've made another compost heap using chicken manure and wood shavings given to us by our neighbours, grass clippings, kitchen waste (uncooked fruit and vegetable waste), spent brewery grain and straw. I also turned the drier materials from the previous compost heap into the new one. The last heap is starting to rot down, I can still see the individual components but the centre is going brown and I will top the new heap with the partly decomposed material to add microbes to it.

I've made several trips into the field that borders our smallholding to pick blackberries. I've been careful to walk on the scrubby edges of the field to avoid damaging the clover crop that the farmer has growing there. The field is buzzing with the sound of our neighbours' bees, so hopefully there will be some delicious clover honey available later in the year.

  I have also been gathering windfall apples from my neighbours' garden. They have invited me to collect as many as I like as they feel overrun with cooking apples. Their cider apples are also ripe and they will be pressing them in the next week or so. I like it that the neighbours have a surplus to different crops to us and that they make different products to us. We are starting to swap surpluses and produce which gives both of us a wider choice of food.

I have now ordered some bare-rooted fruit trees and more hedging trees to complete the hedge planting from The Woodland Trust, who have a Welsh Farm Tree Pack scheme, which enables those who farm in Wales to buy trees to create more woodland at a reduced price. They also offer help to other parts of the UK. You can find out more information here. 

It's time to put the kettle on.

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