Up, Up and Away

Wednesday 24th January 2018
Turkey escape

High winds forecast again so I stayed at home to keep an eye on the place. Good job really, for Boris woke me up barking. He often barks at nothing in particular, but there was meaning in his bark this morning. I threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs just in time to see five turkeys heading past the kitchen window on a mission!

The girls were clucking excitedly.

I herded them back up the land and eventually back into their cage. The heras fencing was jumping around and had gradually jolted the bolt loose on the door. The door had swung open and the turkeys seized their opportunity.
I did my best to secure the fencing but the howling wind made it an uncomfortable task.

Twenty minutes later the turkeys were out again!!! Much as I wanted to retreat inside, I had to make some adjustments to the latch arrangement. I secured everything with baling twine just in case.

Then it was time for a retreat indoors. Arthur agreed.

Up, up and away - the first seeds of the year

I made the most of my incarceration by sowing the first seeds of the year, some rather early tomatoes. Sowing them this early will mean they need a lot of nurturing but if I can get them through they will hopefully be producing tomatoes ahead of the rest and I might get an acceptable harvest before blight strikes. 

On the other hand, the later sown plants might just catch up and overtake. Nothing ventured...

One tray contains seeds scooped straight from Sue's favourite Tesco Picollo tomatoes. Online forums indicate that they are likely to come true.

I've also put some potatoes to chit. These are destined for the polytunnel and should give me a crop at least a month before those which have to brave the big outdoors.

Saturday 27th January 2018
Rainy day filing
Rain all day. I'm not just a fair weather smallholder, but there's no point trudging through the mud doing more damage than good.
So I busied myself sorting the seeds. They are filed by date. For successional sowing, I simply move the envelope to the second sowing date once the first have been sowed.
It's a great system which means that nothing gets forgotten.

It also did my Big Garden Birdwatch, recording every bird that came to the feeders or onto the lawn during the period of an hour. A sharp frost would have made the list more exciting, but I ended up with a fairly representative list of the birds which are regular in the garden.

Seeds for a new growing season

Monday 22nd January 2018
This year's seed order
After yesterday's seed audit, I sat down to think about what to grow this year. I have decided to concentrate on what we know we like to eat and what I know grows.
I am going to finally give up on some crops.

OUT 😢

Celeriac - too unpredictable, with decent bulbs only every few years

Aubergine - I've never had anything more than a pathetic crop in the polytunnel. Never ripens well and fruits are small. Also one of the first plants to host red spider mite. Has to go.

Outdoor peas - only grew well one year, when we were virtually waterlogged. OK for a small plot where it can be watered plenty. 

Kohl rabi - grows well but we're not that fussed

Asparagus pea - great for bees and a pretty plant, but the pods taste less like asparagus and more like cardboard

Hamburg Parsley - a nice idea, parsley leaves and parsnip roots, but I find parsnips give better roots and curled parsley gives better leaves

Watermelon - fails every year in the polytunnel, which is a shame as I love it

Cauliflower - when I have managed to get decent curds, the slugs or the weather have invariably got to them first. I have much more success with Romanesco, which is a cross between cauli and broccoli.

Radishes - I grow them because I feel I should, but we never eat them before they bolt

IN 😊
Celtuce - a cross between lettuce and celery. I'm going to give it a try. More in a later post if it's successful, otherwise it can quietly disappear off the list like so many other experimental crops in the past.

Blight Resistant Tomatoes - Legend, Lizzano, Mountain Magic. Growing tomatoes outside is disheartening when they suddenly get hit by blight a few weeks after it has hit the potatoes. Pretty much the whole crop is devastated and the plants have to be pulled up just as they are beginning to crop. So this year I have splashed out. At nearly £3 for six seeds (yes, SIX) they are ridiculously expensive. They are F1 too, which means the big companies have you hooked in. But a full season's harvest from just one plant would easily repay the cost.

Leek Porbella - I've been getting more and more rust on my leeks, so in an effort to break the cycle I am going to switch varieties to a more rust resistant type. Growing disease-resistant strains is one of the mainstays of organic gardening, but one which I often forget to use.

All go

Entertainment for the day involved the setting up of traffic lights outside for BT to do something to the phone lines. Mid morning my internet and phone went off. It amazes me that, with just three houses affected and about a dozen men on the job, that none of them bothered to knock on the door and politely explain what they were doing and that the service would be interrupted for a while. Just common courtesy and good public relations, but there you go.
So instead I decided to go and pick up some bales of straw. I just had to manoeuvre past the van that was parked half across my driveway and pull out in the middle of the traffic lights. Maybe my house is invisible.

I set the alarms off at the farm where I get the straw. They have been having terrible problems with hare coursers. The level of intimidation, even with the police present, is disgusting. These people are vile human beings and need locking up or worse.

Nuking the Polytunnel
With the straw unloaded, main job for the day was to spray the polytunnel with disinfectant. Not particularly nice stuff, but I need to nuke it every winter to try to get rid of the red spider mite which can devastate the plants. I then blasted every inch with a hosepipe. Most of the water seemed to end up soaking up my sleeve, dripping on my head or splashing back onto my glasses.
Tomorrow I will repeat the whole procedure.
If I could rid the tunnel of red spider mite for good I could begin to use it to hold and grow crops through the winter. As it is, we have to go for a full clear-out every year.

There was just time to take the dogs along the river before sunset. The afternoons are getting longer by the day and it won't be long before we have light evenings.

A Sheep on the Loose (or The Boar who Sat Down)

Friday 19th January 2018
Sheep On The Loose
"JOHN! JOHN!"
Sue's voice woke me up sharply. It had a sense of urgency. Thoughts started to go through my mind of what might be wrong. "One of the sheep is on the drive".

I threw on some clothes and rushed downstairs, still bleary-eyed and trying to get my bearings. Sure enough there was the brown wether lamb confusedly wandering around on the gravel. Panic over. It wouldn't be difficult to drive it round to the other gate where we could let it back in with the others.
With this done I investigated how it had gotten out. The three strands of electric fence were pulled and snapped and the rickety stock fence was pushed aside. The lamb had obviously been trying to reach some out of bounds willow and I guess had got its horns caught in the electric fence. This would have given the poor thing quite a shock and it had obviously blundered its way through the fence and onto the drive. Fortunately the others had not followed.

I had to go to work, but the fence needed mending first. It was just a question of fixing the wire using small metal connectors, but the icy air made this job considerably more tricky than it could have been.

Saturday 20th January 2018
PE One Two Zero launched
Lots of preparation to do to be ready for tonight's meeting, but before all that I had a couple of pigs to pick up. Unfortunately they won't be ending up in my freezer, for they belong to friends of mine. I just pick them up in the trailer and drop them off at the abattoir early in the morning. Although Steve hadn't fed the pigs all day (the standard way to get them to do what you want), they refused to follow a bucket of food up the ramp of the trailer. They got to the bottom of it and then stopped. The boar sat down! After a couple of minutes the young sow decided to take advantage of the food up in the trailer but the boar resisted all efforts to coax him forwards so we decided to gently nudge him in the right direction. But you cannot hurry pigs. They have a sixth sense and their stubbornness automatically kicks in.
In truth, it didn't take too long and experience had taught us to channel the pigs and not give them the option of backtracking, so there was no chasing around in the mud.
I tried the tickling technique but the boar stayed firmly plonked on his bum.
So I informed Steve of the wheelbarrow technique (use your imagination, it speaks for itself). He was dubious that this could work but I assured him I had done it before.
We gave it a few more minutes but there was no change in the situation, so Steve lifted the boar up by the back legs and we both bundled it forwards. Basically the pig goes into forward freefall, a little like the principle of a spacecraft staying in orbit.
Success. We quickly closed the back gate of the trailer just in case the boar decided to reverse and that was it. Job done.

We threw in plenty of straw, for tonight was going to be icy.
When I got home the pigs buried themselves under the straw and went to sleep. Little did they suspect what was in store for them.

PE One Two Zero
At 7pm we were expecting up to 20 people to arrive. I have started a new local group of smallholders and this was to be our first get together. There was no agenda, just to get to know each other, share some good homemade food and good company.

In the end we had sixteen people which was a great turnout. We are all in the Fenland Smallholders Club, but most never go along to the monthly meetings down in Upwell. I figured that if we kept it local people might be more likely to take the time out. More importantly, we could hold the get together in the evening, outside those precious daylight hours when we need to be outside working on our smallholdings. With no-one travelling more than 5 miles on familiar country lanes, there would be no worries about driving in the dark or arriving home too late.

Some of the people I already knew quite well but some I had never even met. It was great to be able to find out more about each other in a relaxed atmosphere. I hope that a good time was had by everybody and that they all come back next time, which will be in about three months.

Sunday 21st January 2018
Snow!
An early start to take the pigs to the abattoir. The drop off went quite smoothly, although the boar sat down again. In the end we had one pulling him from the front and me lifting him from the back - this is easier said than done when you are jammed inside a 4 foot high trailer with two pigs which could quite well squash you!
I had been keeping a close eye on the weather forecast, for there was a possibility of snow arriving about 8 in the morning. For the second time in a week the BBC got it disastrously wrong. After failing to mention the mini hurricane that swept through midweek, they now had no mention of snow for this area on their website. Shortly after 8.30 we had a couple of very light flurries, but about an hour later it started coming down with more determination. An icy surface meant that the snow settled quickly.

I spent an hour or so wheel barrowing the straw from the trailer down to the turkey pen to keep the ground from getting too muddy. I resembled a snowman by the end. I retreated into the warm farmhouse, only to discover that the rest of the family had gone back to bed!!!

The snow continued into the early afternoon, leaving us with a covering of about an inch of the white stuff. Nothing compared to further north, but snow is pretty rare here.
I no longer feel the urge to run outside and play in it. In fact I didn't even venture out to take a photo for you. Instead I decided to start my seed audit for the year, digging out my trays of seeds from last year to see what I can get away with not buying this year.

I sat in the conservatory so I could watch the snow falling from a  position of comfort, sipping a nice hot cup of coffee and occasionally glancing up at the garden birds flocking to the feeders. There is still something quite magical about snow. I could just watch it falling for hours.

Bird flu is back

Thursday 18th January 2018
The Morning After
Last night was the wildest we have had since we moved here. The house was creaking under the strain and I feared for the outdoor structures, the trees, the fencing, the animal houses.
Over the years we have adapted the smallholding to cope with strong winds, but I was fairly sure there would be wreckage.

Everything was a bit rushed in the morning. It was hard getting out of bed after a restless night. I needed to check everything, let the poultry out and get to work. A quick survey of the house revealed no missing roof tiles (unlike at least a couple of the houses just down the road). The TV aerial was still up, the telephone wire was still hanging  (it came down once before, aided by a fallen tree), the solar panels were all still in place. A metal bin had disappeared and some of the netting in the garden had gone on a bit of an adventure. The fir tree at the back of the pond was leaning at an awkward angle.
But apart from that we had survived.
Down at the poultry pens, a few things had blown over but the main houses were fine. The recently constructed turkey pen was just about intact, though the heras fencing was leaning and the netting was all over the place. A few minor adjustments should secure it better for next time.

The weather was calm now, but the journey to work, just 10 minutes on rural roads and never any traffic, was not as usual. A few branches still laid at the road edges but the traffic was heavy. Our general area had been hit hard by this unnamed storm. Fallen trees had diverted the traffic off the main roads onto some of the most treacherous fenland roads.


On the way home from work I captured a pretty dramatic sky interrupting what for most of the day was most definitely the calm after the storm. It was straight back to the smallholding for a more thorough check, although by the time I'd taken the dogs along the river darkness was approaching.

Challenging News
It was on that journey home that I received a message informing me that a bird flu Prevention Zone has today been put in place across the whole of England for the second year in a row.
I have strong thoughts about this, but I'll save you them until the situation worsens. I get the feeling I'll be repeating them on a yearly basis.

For now my concern was to rearrange the order for 226 ducklings which I have coming in late March. They are all booked to go straight off the farm to other smallholders, but none of them will want to collect them if the restrictions are still in place.

My plan for a chicken polytunnel might have to come into place a bit sooner than expected too.

A Fire, An Explosion and a right Battering by The Storm With No Name

Monday 15th January 2018
A full scale drama and we didn't even know about it
The chimney sweep came today. After Christmas there was a strange boom in the woodburner. The next day we found the back flu cover on the floor.
Well it turns out we must have had a chimney fire which caused the small explosion (without wanting to sound too dramatic), shearing the metal lugs clean off.

Tuesday 16th January 2018
Wintery weather for lots of the UK today, but here we had a gorgeous winter day. The polytunnel clearance continued with my team of fowl helpers. I was intending to disinfect everything too but have decided to give the chickens a week to scratch around. They will clear the soil and it is good for them to be able to find somewhere to dust bathe at this time of year.

The water butt now acts as

a water reservoir to feed the

rainwater from the stable roof

to the wildlife pond and bog

I am giving up having a water butt in there as I have concluded that it probably makes very little difference to night time winter temperatures. Instead I will insulate the young seedlings using propagators within mini greenhouses within the tunnel. For extremes, bubble wrap and fleece should do the job.
I think too that a big water container in the middle of the polytunnel didn't help with air circulation in the height of summer.


Seeing the chickens enjoying the polytunnel has given me an idea. I have an old polytunnel frame sitting outside, probably not good enough for a second growing tunnel, but hopefully plenty good enough to build a covered area in the chicken pen. I may even be able to have one in the turkey pen too.

Blue eggs have started appearing in the stables again.

For the moment we know where they are being laid.

(Brown one made of wood as a decoy)

The afternoon was dedicated to my resolution to cook more this year. A lamb casserole, pulled pork and lentil dahl with five-spice soda bread, using the buttermilk left over from Sue's recent butter making. There was also parsnip, ginger and orange soup.
The lentil dahl scored 20/10 from Sue. I was more conservative at 6 stars (out of a possible 5).

Wednesday 17th January 2018
A Storm with No Name
A dash back from work today to take the dogs for a walk along the river. All was still, but little did we know what was in store.

A forecast of high winds on Wednesday night was somewhat understated. I was awoken just before 4am by a creaking roof, buffeted windows and wind outside which sounded like a high speed train. It's fair to say we experience our fair share of windy weather here on the open fens, but tonight was something else. I was genuinely worried for the structure of the house and feared what I would find on the smallholding in the morning.
At about 5am I ventured downstairs and peered through the windows into the moonlit darkness. It was just like a hurricane, with trees and bushes getting an absolute battering.

I managed to retrieve the wind chart information. Pure numbers hide the drama, but a 45mph wind with gust upon gust at close to 70mph was actually quite scary.
Next up... what I found in the morning.

Asparagus put to bed

Saturday 13th January 2018
Sheep stuff
I was rudely awoken by Sue with the news that the three ewe lambs had pushed through the electric fence and got in with Rambo and the breeding ewes! Normally they go nowhere near the fence so I don't know if something spooked them. Luckily Rambo did not seem to be showing much interest.
The lambs were overdue their monthly worm treatment anyway, so we herded them all into sheep hurdles and got the syringe loaded up with the drench (oral medicine).

With that accomplished, we separated Rambo and led him up to the top paddock to spend the next few months with the other two ram lambs. So now all the girls are together and all the boys are together.

Asparagus put to bed
A rare dry couple of days and just about warm enough for the fingers not to go too numb.
Sitting on the to do list for a while now has been to clear the asparagus bed. The ferny tops had yellowed and dried out but needed chopping. This helps keep the asparagus beetle down. With the stems cleared away I could get to the weeds. Asparagus is an absolute pain to weed, as its fleshy roots run shallow. So it is a hands and knees job. I piled a good layer of sand and manure on the bed last year which helped inhibit the weeds and improve soil structure. Most of the weeds were easy to remove but couch grass roots had encroached from the edges and needed carefully forking and teasing out.
I then lightly turned the soil in the trenches and let the chickens in to pick out the slug eggs. Early in the spring, when the chickens have been banished from the veg plot, I'll mound up the ridges again and add more manure. There's no point doing it now as the chooks will just scratch it all over the place.

The chickens taking advantage of turned soil and doing me a favour too.

Even better, with the lengthening days they are starting to turn the extra protein into tasty eggs.

I didn't quite finish the whole asparagus bed but there's not much left to do. I had to call a slightly early end to the gardening today as the evening was set aside for a meal out with the Grow Your Own group. The Fens is a big place and we had a bit of a journey to The Lamb and Flag in Welney.
We had a lovely time and a very tasty meal (generous portions and they let me have custard and ice-cream with my bread and butter pud!)

Sunday 14th January 2018
Pruning the apples and pears
With the weather holding fine I decided to get all the apples and pears pruned. However much I read and watch videos, this is a job I am never quite sure if I am doing right. The trouble is that the trees don't often grow like they do in the books.
However, I've been doing it for a few years now so feel as if I am getting the hang of it.

I have to hold off on any stone fruits (plums, gages, damsons, cherries, apricots) for a while yet, until the sap is rising.

Let's hope the weather conspires for a good fruit harvest this year. Each year one crop or another catches a frost at the wrong time and one year I lost all the apples and pears to hail damage mid June. I'm not expecting that to happen again in a hurry.

Garlic and Shallots - Divide and Conquer

Tuesday 9th January 2018
The final order for ducklings from fellow smallholders was 226. I look forward to the day they all come.
Garlic and shallots in the ground
I got the garlic planted today as planned. The cloves are planted just below the surface. The more space you give each one, the larger the final bulbs (within limits). The main choice is whether to plant on a square grid pattern or in rows. Either way, you get roughly the same number in the same space. I prefer rows as it's easier to cultivate in between the plants later on when the weeds are running riot.
They should still catch a few heavy frosts which they need so the cloves divide later in the year.
Garlic gives a fantastic return, with approximately a ten-fold increase on your original investment in just half a year. If I had replanted all of the offspring from the original three bulbs every year I would be growing 300000 bulbs this year! I think I'll stick to the usual 100.

I got 30 shallots planted too, ones I saved from last year. These grow in a similar way to garlic, one set dividing into maybe 5 or 6 during the year. It's like free food every year.

The geese have been keeping the grass short in the orchard and have been wandering further up the land. It is nice to see them feeding in the young woodland.
There was a treat for them today as I discovered a few missed carrots in the ground as I was clearing one of the polytunnel beds.

The chickens 'helping out' in the tunnel.

The polytunnel is usually a strict no go zone

for the chooks as they can wreak havoc,

but I like them to scratch around when I'm having my annual clear out.

That's all for this post. Thanks shallot! (sorry, but it makes me chuckle every year)

2018 Veg - All Systems Go Go GO!

Sunday 7th January 2018
Poultry losses
We lost one of the ducks on Saturday, the male Cayuga. He just wasn't there when I went to put them away. No feathers, no blood, no body. I count my blessings really that whatever took him just took one. It rarely happens and always at this time of year, when food is short for predators.

And today one of the commercial meat chicks. I didn't count them in last night, but only 7 emerged this morning. I searched everywhere before the gruesome find of the poor little thing encased in ice in the paddling pool. This is the first bird we have lost in there, as we have placed bricks around the edge and a wooden ramp to aid escape.
Losses are always sad, but sometimes they are unpredictable or unavoidable. It's part of the price of letting the birds have more freedom.
Monday8th January 2018
Turning the soil
Onto more positive things.
I took advantage of drier and frosty conditions this morning to finally get the bed ready for the garlic cloves. They'll be going in tomorrow when the soil is a bit softer. 100 cloves to produce 100 garlic bulbs. This will be the fifth year I've used my old bulbs with no negative effect on harvest. Not bad considering I ignored all the advice to buy specialist stock and instead brought them originally from a small Asian supermarket in Harrow.

Mr Rotavator comes out for the first time in 2018. I love to see the chickens and robins grabbing the opportunity to rid my soil of creepy crawlies. I'm sure they eat some good ones too, but so be it. As long as they get the slug eggs.

Sue picked up some Early potatoes for me too yesterday. They are to go in the polytunnel immediately, to start the new potato harvest early.  So after I had rotavated the garlic bed I set to clearing out the polytunnel. I'm tight for time for a spring clean, but if I can get the tubers into the soil I can get the spring clean done before the leaves poke through the surface.

I need to plant my polytunnel mangetout seeds too - which means auditing what seeds I have and completing my vegetable seed order for the year.

Wow! All of a sudden it feels as if the 2018 growing season is upon us. It gives me a spring in my step. Between now and February half term I'll try to take advantage of any fine days when the soil is not sodden to work all the veg beds, emptying the compost bins and incorporating it into the soil.

This year I plan to stick to the basics. No fancy crops that we don't really eat. Besides, I've tried just about every exotic vegetable there is to try.

I have some major smallholding projects planned for the year, so I am going to try to make my veg growing more simple and organised.

Rhubarb Resurrection

Sunday 7th January 2018

The somewhat strained look on my face is because

I was trying to hold the trophy, the whopping great mangel

and take a selfie!

This was taken a few years back.

I didn't grow mangels one year, but every other the

Jeff Yates Mangel Shield has sat proudly on my mantelpiece.

Mangel disaster
Mangel or Mangold Wurzels are a traditional fodder crop, a member of the beet family. They are hardly grown for that purpose these days, but I like to keep the tradition going. Pigs, sheep and chickens all love them. They are an easy and attractive crop to grow.
On top of that, the Smallholders Club has an annual mangel growing competition. Participation is sadly less and less each year, but I still take great delight in seeing the trophy sitting on my mantelpiece.
But the last online supplier of the variety I have always grown, Brigadier, has ceased trading on line and no longer stocks the seeds.
I've even emailed the committee of the mangel hurling society to try to source them, but it is increasingly looking like I will, at the very least, have to change varieties. I'm not sure the sheep are going to be too happy.

Rhubarb awakes from its dormancy
While I was pottering about today I noticed that the rhubarb bed was coming back to life for the spring. The soft new growth will get knocked back a few times by the frosts. This happens every year but it doesn't seem to harm the plants. I could trying mulching them with straw, but that would just harbour slugs and the chickens would scratch it away anyway.

I might try forcing a couple of plants this year, just using inverted black dustbins.

Mud-dling along

Saturday 6th January 2018

A few dry days would be good so the water has time to drain

There is a fine balance between muddy and not muddy at this time of year. With the colder temperatures most moisture does not escape upwards but needs to drain down. Our land is not too bad compared to many, but well trodden routes can still churn up a bit.

So far 2018 has seen rain every day. Bizarrely Storm Eleanor did us a favour as the winds drove the moisture off the surface, but daily downpours since then have topped it back up.
On very well trodden areas, such as the entrance to the chicken feed shed, I have laid down paper feed bags so we are not splodging around too much.
The moles are doing their best to help with the drainage which is a good thing.

I still haven't got my garlic in. I am waiting for a frosty morning so I can turn the soil. It will still be a muddy job, but the sooner it is in the better. It needs to experience some low temperatures in order for the cloves to split later in the year, so I can't delay much longer.

Pekins here we come!

Friday 5th January 2018
Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck! Duck!
I received a lovely message in my inbox today. A company who supply hatching kits for schools and care homes contacted me as they obviously end up with rather a lot of unwanted young birds. It seems someone who takes their meat strain Pekin ducks off them has let them down so I have arranged to take some off their hands at a very reasonable price. This presented a great opportunity to share this fortune with fellow members of Fenland Smallholders Club. I whacked a message on Facebook and, as I write, I have orders for over 100 ducklings. We will take a dozen or more with the aim of rearing some for the table and possibly some to keep, as long as they don't get so fat that they can't waddle! They will keep the slug population down and maybe give us meat strain birds to hatch out in the future.


Meanwhile, do you remember we were given some commercial chicks to rear? Well they have been lovely so far. They are very tame and run over to see us when we go in the chicken enclosure, though I think this is more greed than affection. So far we have seen no signs of problems caused by their breeding. They are now about 9 weeks old. I suspect that would be that if they had stayed on the farm. But living with the other chickens and allowed to roam their growth has been good but not ridiculous. They will be around for a while longer yet.

Dairy Diary - Cheese and butter making

Wednesday 3rd January 2018
Eleanor breezes through
Storm Eleanor howled her way through overnight. I was pleased that her only visible impact was a displaced dustbin. It took me a while to locate the lid.
We are used to wind here on The Fens and have learned what needs tying down. A winter storm is much less likely to bring down any trees.

Thursday 4th January 2018
Sue is trying her hand at cheese-making again. She was lucky enough to be given some unpasteurised milk direct from a dairy farm. It's a lot easier to make a basic cheese than you would think. I don't know the exact details, but they are easy enough to find on YouTube.
I did see her heating the milk, taking the temperature and adding some rennet. She then strained the whole lot which separated the curds from the whey. The curds are basically soft cheese. Pressing them in a cheese mould turns them into a basic semi-hard cheese.
I looked up what to do with the whey, which basically looks like thin skimmed milk, and was surprised that you can add a little whole milk and basically repeat the process, using cider vinegar instead of rennet, to make ricotta.

Unfortunately we started with such a small quantity of milk that the amount of Ricotta produced on the second splitting wasn't worth bothering with.
Hopefully we'll be able to secure a larger supply of unpasteurised milk in future. Either that or we get a cow!
There is now a Cheesemaking group within the Fenland Smallhollders Club an Sue has joined. Some of the cheeses on their Facebook page look amazing. I can see a cheesy future for us!

Sue also received a Kilner butter churn for Christmas. Unfortunately at the moment we have to purchase the cream to use for butter-making which makes it not cheap, but with butter prices almost doubling over the last year it becomes more viable and the butter produced is super creamy. We also get the bonus of a bowl of buttermilk for baking soda bread or scones, which of course we can have with our own butter and our own jam.

A Turkey is not just for Christmas

Monday 1st January 2018!
New Year Resolutions

I don't really do New Year's Resolutions, but if I am making one this year I guess it will be to cook a lot more from scratch. And I never thought I would ever say this, but I would quite like to shed a few pounds too. Hopefully one will help the other.

It's not a question of not having time, more about planning ahead and using my time wisely. So gone is slumping on the sofa tucking into a supermarket pizza while watching TV.
And in is baking, cooking and developing other hobbies.
We'll see how it all goes.

I don't intend to turn this into yet another food blog, but I have long held the position that using your produce properly needs just as much focus as growing or rearing it in the first place.

Even at this time of year there is fresh produce for the picking in the veg plot.

So what better way to spend New Year's Day than knocking up a couple of curries. The luck did not last for one of Christmas's survivor turkeys as it got caught up in the New Year's Eve cull. Turkey is an excellent meat and should not just be consumed once a year. In fact this annual massacre leads to turkeys being kept in terrible conditions as the industry tries to produce 10 million birds all to be oven ready on the same day.
We split the turkey into 2 breasts, 2 drumsticks and 2 wings. Each breast and drumstick is enough to cook up one big pan of food. The drumsticks are difficult to get the meat off raw, so I roast them up and then pick off the meat to be added last minute to dishes such as curries or stir fries. The tasty dark meat makes a perfect addition. The breast meat is easier to cut into steaks, to cube or cut into strips and gives endless opportunities.
Todays recipes were both taken from the internet.  Turkey and Potato Curry and Spiced Turkey Curry with Spinach (substitute Chard or Kale)

The first of these called for using 'a curry paste of your choice'. We always have plenty of spices in the store cupboard and I prefer not to purchase ready made concoctions. I found in one of my many cookery books a page for whipping up 5 quick curry pastes. It was in Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food but can be found online too.
I opted for the Jalfrezi version and was very impressed with the result. At least as good as any I've tasted in a restaurant.

Tuesday 2nd January 2018
Rain stopped play
I had a weird dream last night. A class of 5 year olds were lined up at my classroom door with their parents ready to come in and I had no plans for what to do with them, nothing set up and no idea how to actually teach them.
This is a sure sign that the holidays are coming to an end.
We had one last lye in, with the intention of getting up and worming the sheep, planting garlic and pruning fruit trees. But as has happened so may times this holiday, rain stopped play. I am not just a fair weather smallholder, but none of these jobs was suitable for a wet day.
Instead it was blogging and baking so my time was not wasted.

The pumpkins and squashes were very late to fruit this year

so are not storing well. But we still have a good selection and enough for our needs.

Today I was making a Galette of Butternut Squash, Bacon and Parmesan, something for our packed lunches when we are back at work. I knocked up a loaf of bread too. Fresh bread is so good.

Galette of Butternut Squash.