Carrots, carrots, carrots, carrots, carrots...

Read on for details

Growing carrots is surprisingly tricky. They are really hard to get going.

So many times they just don't appear. I should rephrase that. So many times the slugs get to them before you even see them.
Starting them in modules inside where they are more protected is not really an option either.

I have found a way round this problem though. The polytunnel has proved to be a perfect place to grow carrots directly in the ground and I have had a bumper crop from quite a small space.

As for the outdoor carrots, it is the first sowings of the year which are the most unreliable. In fact now that I have the polytunnel option, which also brings the harvest even further forwards, I probably won't bother with the first outdoor sowing dates.

Another problem with outdoor carrots is carrot flies which can smell a carrot from miles away. They lay their eggs and the larvae burrow into the carrots and munch away. The polytunnel keeps the carrots safe provided the doors are shut. Outside I have found the only sure-fire successful deterrent to be covering the crop with mesh.

And so to this year's crop. With the early outdoor sowings largely failing and the crop covered with mesh, I confess I just kept walking past and not checking what was happening. There were plenty enough carrots for our needs being produced in the polytunnel.

Two days ago it was time to sort out the bed where the carrots were sown, to clear it and prepare it for next year's crop which will be potatoes.

To my surprise there was a bumper crop of carrots! Some had grown overly large. Some had slug holes, though not too many. Some had just grown into very inconvenient shapes as I had failed to thin out the seedlings earlier in the year.
I'm not setting a good example here, am I?

I pulled, scrubbed and cleaned up a whole sink full of carrots and more, then went onto the internet in search of inspiring carrot recipes.
I like to cook like this, picking a crop and then having a day preparing all sorts of dishes.

On the menu were soups (fantastic for using up bulk amounts of vegetables), a couple of dip-type concoctions and some frittery type treats.

I worked on three dishes at a time. Most of my effort went into peeling, chopping and grating which left a bowl full of treats for the chickens and geese (as any food which has been near inside a kitchen is not permissible to feed to livestock, I obviously performed the vegetable prep outside).

By the end of the day I had a kitchen full of carroty treats.

Left to right: Falafels with carrots hidden inside; sausage, carrot and cumin hash; roast carrot soup; Thai carrot and lemongrass soup; carrot, cumin and sunflower seed dip; carrot, sweet potato and feta fritters; carrot pate with lime and coriander seed. Spot the theme?

Ran out of time to make carrot and walnut cake. Tomorrow.

All recipes can be found on the internet.

My next day like this will be leeks (if the pumpkins in the hallway don't start going soft).

Talking Turkey. Or... Capital punishment - what could possibly go wrong?

Tuesday 18th December
I don't do Christmas, but I do do Christmas holidays!
It is a time to plan ahead for a new year, to clear the ground and prepare the beds.
In fact when I think about it the winter solstice is what it's all about really.

Anyway on a sort of Christmas theme, while I was pottering about in the veg plot today I could hear the turkeys making more of their strange bubbling calls than usual. This usually indicates that something is wrong. There's a predator or one of them has got out or something else exciting is happening. It doesn't usually require my immediate attention.
But after half an hour or so of endless bubbling I went to investigate.

One of the grey stags was endlessly pursuing the only black stag. It had hold of the strange dangly bits under its chin and was not about to let go. Even when I stepped in it would not let go.
So I made an instant decision. One week to go till Christmas day. hmmmm…

I caught the offender by the leg and carried him unceremoniously out of the turkey pen and out of sight of all the other poultry.
Five minutes later I was plucking our Christmas turkey!

Don't worry. This is not cruel.
He is already dead. 

Wednesday 19th December
I made a great job of plucking the turkey yesterday. It is now hanging in the stables. With the weather not too warm it can hang there a few days.
While I was planting some more willows in my new willow holt today, right next to the turkeys, the bubbling started up again. This time the black stag was the offender!
Was I too hasty yesterday? Did I get the wrong guy?

Sunday 23rd December update
Sue prepared the turkey today. It weighed in at an impressive 7.3 kg or 16lb (this is the weight once gutted and trimmed, as you would buy in the shops).
We don't necessarily aim for big birds and certainly wouldn't entertain the thought of keeping a double-breasted bird. But this was a good weight. The diet of fermented grains, seeds and pulses has obviously been a success.

wwww.Winter Weaving with Willow and Wool

Long, dark evenings
This time of year offers little time for outside work and I am often forced inside by darkness, if not by the weather. I get twitchy on the long winter evenings. I am no stranger to the odd soap opera or two, but I find it hard to sit doing nothing. So winter is a time for planning new outdoor projects and a time for evening crafts and hobbies.
This year I am aiming to teach myself basket weaving. Over the years I have been on a few basket-making courses. Each time I have come back with quite a decent basket and each time I have felt that I could never make another without considerable help from a tutor. But now I have taken the plunge and started to make baskets all on my own. I have only made a couple so far, one from a book and one from a YouTube video. I am still at the stage of trying to blindly follow instructions and mistakes happen. But here are my two efforts.

Not perfect, but still useable.

Basket-weaving is a good hobby for me. I love working with natural materials and I love mathematical patterns. I also have umpteen uses for baskets.

A Holt of my own
So in my usual all or nothing style I have ordered 25 different varieties of willow to grow my own willows for basketry. I didn't know this before but such a willow plantation is known as a holt. At the moment my holt is merely a forest of little sticks lined up and poking out above a sea of landscape fabric. This is a necessary evil to keep competition from grasses and weeds down. I have gone for the thin fabric type rather than the thicker plastic type which shreds strand upon strand of plastic.
The whole is weighed down with old bricks, stones, planks and water-filled bottles. This stops the fabric flapping and tearing or lifting up and damaging the buds of the willow cuttings.

There are over 400 varieties of willow. Those suitable for basketry produce long, straight shoots if grown close together and coppiced every year. Some produce thin rods for fine basketwork, others thicker rods for more agricultural baskets. The range of colours is wonderful, browns, greens, reds, yellow, even blues and blacks.
They are supplied as cuttings, each about 25 to 30cm long. These are just poked into the ground and should pretty much all take root. It will be a couple of years before I am getting a decent harvest.

Until then I will have to purchase most of the willow rods for my developing basketmaking, though I have been cutting back some of my willows which I grow for living willow projects. The thinner sticks and some of the branches rods will be suitable for basket practice. Here they are sorted and ready for drying. Some of the rods will make excellent basket handles or frames for starting baskets.

Short Rotation Coppice
I have also planted an area of fast growing willows for Short Rotation Coppice (SRC). This is grown for biomass, either for burning or for chipping for mulch or to bulk up the compost heap. I should have started all these projects years ago, but I opted for ash trees instead as they are the common local species and are excellent for fire wood. However, the saplings were planted the year before the advent of Ash dieback and have not grown anywhere near as well as they should have, being severely knocked back every year. Unfortunately, tree planting is a long term project.

While I have been working with willow, Sue has been busy with wool. She is a member of the Woolly Crew, a subgroup of Fenland Smallholders Club. Each month they meet and share their crafts. Sue has been using the fleeces from our Shetland sheep for felting and for peg-looming.

There is a very practical side to this as she is busy making rugs for our tipi.

On the left you can see her efforts at incorporating Boris into a new rug design!

Sue has also been preparing a fleece for tanning. This is the fleece from the last sheep we sent off. Sue has been salting the skin for a few weeks and it is now ready to go to the tannery. We could attempt this ourselves but it uses some pretty nasty chemicals and it is difficult to achieve a good result. The tannery we are sending the fleece to is an organic tannery and hopefully the returned fleece will make it all worth it.

Meanwhile winter evenings are for snuggling up warm and cosy too.

Santa makes an unwelcome appearance

Tuesday 4th December 2018
Far-reaching calls through the frosty air
The year marches on. In general it has been mild, but today saw quite a heavy frost which sat around all day.
Birds were on the move all day. Two flocks of Whooper Swans flew majestically over the farm calling to announce their return for the winter. There were buntings and pipits around the smallholding too, but most unusual was a flyover of 21 jackdaws. When even a single jackdaw flies across the open fenland landscape it can be heard way before it is visible. 21 had me looking around for a while before I clocked them heading over the fields.

Where the grass is greener.
Most of today's jobs were minor jobs related to looking after the sheep and poultry. I moved the sheep onto fresh grass. There is still just about enough grass for them as long as I keep moving them, but this cold spell may mean that I soon have to start feeding hay as a supplement.


Turkey escape plans thwarted
Every few days I have to mix up the poultry feed too. Using fermented straights (that means bags of neat grain rather than industrially prepared food pellets) is working well. There's not much difference cost-wise and I won't make any wild claims about glossier feathers or tastier eggs, but I do know that all the birds go mad for it. It also makes me feel more involved with my birds, rather than just chucking processed food pellets in their direction a couple of times a day.
I have also been growing wheat fodder for the turkeys, but it is slower to grow in the cold weather and the turkeys don't seem so bothered about eating it. I'll feed them what's left and then leave it till the spring.
Final job for the morning was to mend the turkey netting for the umpteenth time. There is now more baler twine than net! The trouble is that every time a turkey breaks through a hole in the netting, they walk around on top of it trying to work out how to rejoin the others. In so doing, they create many more holes than the original one.

Santa not welcome!
This afternoon saw an unusual visitor on the smallholding. For drunkenly wrapped around one of the electric fence stakes down with the sheep was Santa Claus! To be more precise, the remains of a foil Santa helium balloon. I do wish people wouldn't celebrate in such irresponsible ways.

A few minutes later another balloon came bouncing across the fields and landed in the dyke. This one was a birthday balloon, but it had a manufacturer's address on. I promptly sent of an appropriately angry and sarcastic email. I did actually receive a reply apologising for the inconvenience. But sometimes an apology just doesn't fix anything.

A palette of willows
Another afternoon arrival was more welcome. A batch of basketry willows. I put them into water ready for planting tomorrow.

More on my willow growing plans in a post coming soon.

Preparing the ground for growing more willows

Another spectacular sunset

Saturday 24th November / Sunday 25th November
I spent a couple of hours fighting with the electric fence!
I am giving over a small part of the sheep paddocks to growing basket willows and short rotation coppice (fast growing willow for firewood / chippings).
Rambo and his harem have done a great job of keeping the grass short so I can easily lay some fabric mulch ready for planting.

I have rearranged the fencing too so the chickens will have access straight into the willow copse. They should do a great job cultivating underneath the willow stools.

Meanwhile Sue has been busy. She finished an experimental circular rug using our own wool which she had dyed, then she turned her hand to Medlar and Rosemary Jelly and Green Tomato and Sultana Chutney.

Sue with Boris, Arthur and Gerry all helping her to make  a circular rug.

Medlars saved from the geese!

Thursday 22nd November 2018
A leggy young Moorhen ran nervously ahead of me down the central path leading to the poultry pens and paddocks today. This is only the third time I have seen one of these on the farm. Hopefully this mini run of notable birds will continue.

I saved the medlars from the geese today. Just a week ago the tree was looking amazing in its best autumn finery. The fruits were still hard and not yet ready for picking.
What a contrast today. The tree was bare of all leaves and the geese had plundered any low-hanging fruit. The fruits had softened nicely, presumably helped by a couple of decent frosts.

This process is known as bletting. Medlars are an old-fashioned fruit, not well-known, but they make for a wonderful addition to the orchard and are well-worth growing with a delicious flavour when made into medlar jelly or medlar cheese.

harvested medlars 

(I make no excuses for displaying them

in my first ever independently made basket)

Woodcock Moon

Wednesday 21st November 2018
The dogs flushed a Woodcock from the path today. We only see these magnificent birds about once a year here on the farm. Is it a coincidence that the forthcoming full moon is known as the Woodcock Moon? (I much prefer this to the Beaver Moon, a name which is not exactly based in British tradition). This individual was two days early though.
Woodcocks do breed in this country, but many more Scandinavian birds winter here. It is a disgrace that shooting them is still legal.

I was thrilled to see a Barn Owl alight in the old Ash tree at dusk too - the first I've seen on the farm for quite a while now. And the influx of notable birds was supplemented by a calling Yellowhammer at the back of the turkey pen earlier in the afternoon, again the first of the winter.

The Very Best of Fenland Smallholders Club

My weekend was devoted to Fenland Smallholders Club.

Saturday 17th November 2018
Our first Beginners Grow Your Own Group
Once a month for the next ten months I am leading a Beginners' Grow Your Own Group. Today was our first meeting.
Before we got started on my tour of the veg plot, the orchard, the soft-fruit area and the nuttery, I had a plan to get our caravan moved. We had parked it up on the gravel driveway and Sue and I just couldn't get it moved on our own. Many hands made light work.
We hope to use this caravan to house volunteers if we can attract them to spend time here on the smallholding with us.

I am initially running the BGYO group as a ten session course and hope to give people all the skills they need to become pretty much self-sufficient in fruit and vegetables (unless they fancy the odd banana and orange!)
There are a range of participants, all smallholders, ranging from complete novices who are about to embark on setting up for growing food to others who have been doing it for years but want to extend their activities.

For this first session I tried to focus on the big picture such as choosing a site, deciding how to arrange beds and where to place perennial and annual beds. We looked at issues such as water supply, placing sheds, climate and microclimate and options for indoor growing.

Time flew past. I fed everybody with a couple of soups I had knocked up using one of my many pumpkins and bade farewell.

I still had some of the afternoon and evening to embark on my first ever basket-making without a tutor to guide me. I started with a basic basket which I had made before on courses. I made a couple of beginner mistakes, but overall the techniques came back to me. In fact, without a tutor to rely on I learned a lot more when I had to figure things out for myself.

It's all coming back to me now

I would dearly love to have another go straight away, but unfortunately the willow needs soaking for several days.

Sunday 18th November 2018
Preserving Day




Sunday was the main Smallholders Club meeting, for which Sue had done most of the organisation. We set off early and managed to get into the village hall in good time to set everything up. The day started with a talk by Sue on using a dehydrator. Her notes for the talk were on the equivalent of an old-fashioned fag packet, much to the amusement of others. Sometimes our teaching skills come in very useful.

After the talk there were about ten tables covering all aspects of preserving which club members kindly ran. There was onion stringing, eco-wraps, fermenting, jam and chutney, freezing, vinegars and cordials, bottling, sausage-making... everything you could want to know. We also had a jam-swap, which with hindsight I should have named the Jam-boree. This worked really well and will become an annual occurrence.

Lastly the pumpkin soup left from yesterday made a very popular appearance on the refreshments stand, alongside cakes, pizza and cheese scones which others had brought along. That one Crown Prince squash, with just a few onions and leeks and a small packet of sweet potato, had made three large pans of soup and provided about twenty five warming lunches. It had made a fair bit of money for the club too. 

One particular nice moment was to see Steve, a professional gardener, mentoring one of our younger members in the art of onion stringing. A bonus for Sue and I too as we got all our onions strung and all our garlic plaited. And that was that. 


A very busy weekend which hopefully lots of people learned a lot from and enjoyed.

Rambo's Big Day

Autumn medlars

Sunday 11th November 2018
One of last year's Shetland ewes went on her final journey today. Next time we see her she will be in a box and is going straight to a customer. We are however planning on getting her fleece back so we can salt it and send it off to a tannery. This is a new departure for us.

Moving the sheep around has meant that Rambo can be put in with the four breeding ewes. He got to work instantly! We should expect lambs early April next year.

While the trailer was still on we made a couple of straw trips to a nearby farm. Straw bales are remarkably cheap round this way, £1 each for conventional small bales which are so much easier for us to handle.

On the subject of sheep and wool, Sue has been experimenting with dying and has achieved some good results. She is using acid dyes as the rabbits made short work of the natural dye plants I was trying to grow. You simply soak the wool in vinegar and add the chosen dye. You then gradually bring up the heat and boil for 40 minutes with no agitation to avoid the wool felting. A gradual cooling and voila! Dyed wool.

The picture on the left shows Boris 'helping' Sue use her new dyed wool to weave a circular rug.

No more digging?

Life has been very complicated lately, but here's a little effort to start catching up.

Saturday 3rd November 2018
4 Muscovies and 2 Pekins gone!
The male Muscovy ducks which were born earlier in the year had reached a good size and were eating me out of house and home. Time for a little trip to the freezer! Bad news for two of the Pekin ducks, as I decided to keep five of them for breeding and eggs rather than seven.
I'll spare you any photos from today.

Sunday 4th November 2018
A fine autumn day outside in the veg plot, preparing some of the beds for next year. I am having a very big rethink, going back to smaller beds but without the network of grass paths which were impossible to keep on top of and gave too many edges for the slugs to hide under.



I don't think any of the no-dig systems I have come across are perfect or practical, so I plan to combine a number of methods, using cardboard, green manure, grass clippings, straw and compost to mulch and top up the soil structure every year.
Preparing the beds for the big change to no-dig has involved a surprising amount of digging! However, it should be a one off exercise.
There'll be much more on this new way of gardening in future posts.

I caught a rat in one of my snap traps today. I am trying to stop using poison bait so am really hoping that the idea of placing snap traps into a bait box (with normal wheat inside as an attractant) will work well enough to stop rats moving into the poultry pens.

Activites for winter nights.

Sue tries to make a carpet but Gerry 

has already decided to sit on it 

before it's even finished!

Tuesday 6th November 2018
I spent the morning fixing chicken houses. Goodness knows why they make the doors so close-fitting. A little bit of damp weather and the doors no longer close. Pulling them hard to open them in the morning inevitably loosens the screws which hold the bolts. So I have put handles onto the doors and shaved the tops so they don't catch. A little air circulation in the chicken house is a good thing.
Sue has been working hard on her peg-looming as she has the winter to produce enough carpets to line the floor of our tipi. Did I mention we have bought a tipi?!

With the nights drawing in there is a balance to be struck between outdoor pursuits and indoor evening pursuits. Winter gives me much more time for baking so today I made a gooseberry custard tart. Gooseberry recipes are hard to find beyond the predictable sponge, pie and fool. I made bread too, the first time using some nice Dove's Farm flour. I don't know whether it was the quality of the flour or the new dried yeast I am using, but the finished loaf was one of the nicest I have ever made.

A Swift End to a Game of Cat and Mouse

The Swift
A lovely Sunday afternoon digging potatoes came to an abrupt halt with news of a rare Swift in Yorkshire.
Initially identified as a Pacific Swift, this would have been rare indeed, but not one to set the panic alarm going as I was lucky enough to catch up with one in Suffolk a few years back.
But the identification soon came round to White-rumped Swift, the first ever record for Britain! It was surely brought up from North Africa on the same unusual southerly airflow that had Holbeach setting record temperatures in the same week - 79 degrees F in mid October.
A quick calculation told me that I could never get there before dark - news an hour earlier and I wold have been busting a gut to get there.

A couple of hours sleep and I was up again, heading through the night toward Hornsea Mere on the Yorkshire coast. I wasn't the only one. In the dim light of dawn a steady stream of birders were heading across the fields to the last known place where the bird was seen as it drifted off in the gloom last night. Our best hope was that it had headed to roost or hooked up with a group of house martins and would return to feed over the mere in the morning.

But birding does not always go to plan. Six hours stood in that field and I finally succumbed to the idea that this rarest of rare birds might just have slipped the net. Reluctantly I returned to the car and began the journey south. I was hoping to be home in time to accompany Sue to the vets with Boris - nothing too worrying but I did want to be there.

I tentatively drove back across the Humber Bridge (I am not great with heights and don't like crossing this bridge), but no sooner was I across than I started receiving messages that the swift had been seen at Spurn, a long promontory off South Yorkshire which funnels migrating birds along a narrow spit of land. Details were sparse, but I had no option but to turn around and head at breakneck speed back over the Humber Bridge, through Hull and along the torturous country roads which lead down to Spurn.
By the time I arrived the sparse details of the sighting had become even murkier. Today was starting to feel like a waste of a day, one to forget. The first sniff of a really good bird all autumn, for it has been a poor one birding-wise, and it had ended up with a disappointing end.

The Cat
As we stood dejected on a windy and desolate stretch of Yorkshire coast, the birding gods looked down and decided to shuffle the pack a little.
Phones and pagers whirred into action as news of a Grey Catbird came through - at Land's End in Cornwall, a mere 8 or so hours away.
Grey Catbird has a certain reputation among twitchers. The only previous record was on Anglesey. It was found on an October Thursday 17 years ago. The bird was highly elusive, but stayed around until the Friday. At that point I was confined to waiting for weekends to see rare birds and so I joined a small army of weekend birders in the hunt for the bird. There were various shouts and alarms, but to cut a long story short most people left disappointed. A compound full of tall gorse had been pretty much flattened over the course of the day but there had been neither sight nor sound (yes, it does miaow!) of the bird all day... except that some people were adamant they actually had seen it - these people became known as the Saturday Catbirders.

And that was it, Grey Catbird into the annals of birding history but not onto most people's lists.

I decided to head straight for Cornwall. The earlier I could get there, the more sleep I could get in the back of the estate car. And so at 1 in the morning I rolled up in a field in deepest south-west Cornwall. There was one other car there but we knew there would be many others arriving through the night. I put the seats down, laid out a selection of coats that live in the car, and tried to get some shut eye.

The Mouse
Well, that was the plan... until I heard scuttling in the roof of the car. It couldn't be, could it? Then chewing and more scuttling. The mouse (though it sounded like there might now be a family) which had been setting my car alarm off for a couple of weeks now, was clearly still living in the innards of the car!
A sleepless night ensued, only enlivened by an unsuccessful game of splat the mouse as it scuttled around in the roof space above my head.

This probably explains my bleary-eyed lack of sharpness in the morning. As the sun rose there were a couple of hundred birders ready for the Catbird show, a couple of hundred birders bearing the scars of that Anglesey bird of 17 years ago. We stared into the bushes where the bird had last been seen. For two hours we stared.
This was turning into a bad couple of days.

Then suddenly the mood changed. People were seeing the bird. A woman next to me was excitedly exclaiming that she was watching it. But the only words that came out were "I've got it. I've got it". My bleary eyes were not seeing whatever she was seeing and pleas for directions were met with "I've got it. I've got it".
Other people had it too. In fact just about everybody... except me. There's always one person who doesn't see what everyone else is seeing. And on this occasion it was me. Not a nice feeling.
By the time the bird flew I was surrounded with people quietly celebrating and congratulating each other. This was not going well for me!

Then another call, further up the line. By the time I got there the bird had disappeared again. This sighting was less convincing and I just didn't know whether to stay put or go back to where I was when the bird was first seen. 

Then another call, from where I had been standing! By the time I got there, the bird had dropped into thick cover, but I was more certain that I was just a few seconds away from seeing the bird.
Time to control the breathing and have faith that fate would indeed be cruel if the bird were never to show itself again. A really helpful birder next to me did everything he could to help me get onto the bird and then up it popped into the middle of a small sallow.
Grey Catbird!
All the effort had been worthwhile. I went from being ready to quit birding forever to enjoying the bird and celebrating with everyone else.
I never heard it miaow, but the Catbird eventually gave itself up and showed very well.

Hopes of more American birds turning up in Cornwall were high so gradually people left the site and fanned out into the valleys of Cornwall to find that elusive mega. I found myself down by Minack Theatre following the coast path. Really I just needed some wind-down time before making the journey back to Lincolnshire.

I was supposed to be chairing an open meeting of the Smallholders Committee in the evening, but it was unlikely I could make it back in time and I would be in no fit state.
And so I slowly headed back across country. My car was almost broken as one of the exhaust brackets was detached and the brake disks were badly warped. The long journey had exacerbated the problems which were combining to make for some very uncomfortable car handling. By the time I rolled back onto the farm I was feeling pretty bumped and bruised myself.

Arthur keeps me company in bed

The next five days are a blur. I don't know whether it was pushing myself so hard (but I've always done that) or just unlucky, but I almost immediately came down with a fever which had me laid up in bed for five days.

Anyway, I am just about fixed now, though still a bit tender. The car is fixed too.
We are raring at the bit, ready for more rare birds!

The Mouse (Part Two)
On the second day of my sickness I heard a dripping inside the wall of the downstairs toilet. We have been looking for a leak as a couple of long-term damp patches and a drop in boiler pressure indicated there was a problem somewhere. The drip was getting worse through the day so we eventually took the decision to call an emergency plumber - not a step to take lightly. Astronomical does not describe it, but eventually we managed to get somebody to come out without having to sell all our limbs.
It didn't take long to find water. As the plumber investigated downstairs, I started unscrewing floorboards upstairs, where the cause of the problem quickly became apparent.



Mr Mouse had been at it again!
As for the car, two trays of bait have been consumed and one field mouse has been caught in a trap.

I Finally Got To An Apple Pressing Day

Saturday 13th October 2018
26 degrees! Holbeach is setting all-time temperature records yet again.
So far as rare birds are concerned, the weather patterns this autumn have meant one thing  - there haven't been any, which is a relief in a way since the car is poorly and might not make too many long journeys. It has also rendered my life somewhat more uncomplicated.

The reason I mention this is that for the last three years I have managed to miss the Smallholders Club Apple Pressing day. Not this year though. I actually managed to show my face.

One of the club members kindly opens up his orchard so even those without their own apples can pick their own windfalls. Others bring along apple presses and scratters (an apple crushing / chopping device).

The whole process was very friendly and many hands certainly made light work. In fact I spent most of my time chatting while Sue got on with turning our bagfuls of apples into delicious cartons of fresh juice. Even the apple pulp doesn't go to waste as the poultry very much appreciate it.

Under the blue skies it really was a very delightful day.

Equipment set up, windfalls collected

Apples going into the scratter

Fruit presses in action

Chickens on the prowl

While we were there we took up a friend's offer of some spare quinces he had along with a few bags of sweet chestnuts. It was lovely to visit his smallholding for the first time too. Like us he started with a blank canvas but his plot has been maturing and developing for a few years longer than ours.

Quince jelly on the boil