Bloomin' Lovely!

 

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do anything you can to oppose barbaric aggression.

Spring is here! The daffs are trumpeting symphonies of sunshine. Hellebores are in full bloom, fountains of hyacinth blue bubble from the ground. And I am feeling poetic!

At this time of year the almond tree is a riot of pink profusion. On a sunny day it literally hums with the sound of contented honey bees foraging for pollen. With no hard frosts this year and calm weather while the blossom is out, I am anticipating a bumper crop of almonds this year.

Bloomin' Lovely

A quick update.

We've had some spells of windy weather lately but the almond blossom managed to come out at just the right time so hopefully the bees will be getting a good chance to pollinate the flowers. In fact the garden has been full of contented buzzing this week. The willow catkins are alive with bees, the mirabelle plum hedge is in full blossom for the first time since I planted it and the ground is covered with the hue of red dead-nettles.

I have decided to embrace
red dead-nettles

The mirabelle plum hedge is in blossom for the first time

For the first time we have frog spawn in the pond too which is very exciting news.

I planted my onion sets this week and my first early potatoes. There's not much to look at right now but it won't be long before the veg plot is full of crop plants again.

I've been busy in the polytunnel too, preparing poles for all the climbers. As well as tomatoes and cucumber, I want to grow squashes and melons vertically this year. I also have some sweet potato slips coming and a couple of more exotic climbers, groundnut and Madeira vine. It's time for another go at Yardlong beans too now that hopefully (fingers and everything else crossed) the red spider mite is on the retreat. I am using willow poles harvested from the pollard trees.

The big news is that Sue and I are old enough that we have had our first Covid vaccines but it doesn't quite feel like we can relax yet. A rare visit to Peterborough had us aghast at the sheer volume of people. I did manage to find two versions of eddoe in one of my favourite Asian supermarkets. 

Talking of eddoes, the bulbs I showed you last time have now been potted up and are doing really well. The ginger is growing too so the polytunnel should have a tropical feel to it this year.

On a sad note, the cat which appeared on the farm passed away. Sue found it under the straw store and at least made it comfortable for its last few hours..

Our turkey stag has gone into the freezer too. It seems he lost a battle with the young male and was looking very sorry for himself.  He was quite a size and I struggled to even carry him. We will miss him and the new turkey king will have to step up.

It is now the start of my Easter holiday and we have a few days of hot weather forecast. With the  equinox past, it will be a fortnight of hectic seed sowing and veg bed preparation. There'll be plenty to report on in my next post.

The Almond - A Tough Nut To Crack

Tuesday 21st November 2017

Almonds driving me nuts
I was making a gooseberry tray bake today which required ground almonds in the base and flaked almonds in the filling. As we grow our own almonds and harvested well over a thousand this year, I decided I should really try to use our own ones.
Almonds are one of the toughest to crack.

As an experiment, I shelled 150 nuts, which weighed 100g before shelling and yieded 35g of actual almond kernel! The recipe called for 150g of ground almonds and 50g of flaked. Alas, it made sense to purchase the ground almonds, though I begrudged paying £1.87.

I shelled another 100 almonds and did the flaked almonds myself. This is a job for doing in front of the TV with an efficient nutcracker.

The tray bake was lovely. It's always good to find a new way to use gooseberries. Pie, sponge and fool can get a bit tiresome but gooseberries are such a wonderful fruit.

Shaking my nuts

A brief sojourn on the farm in between autumn birding trips and there are plenty of jobs to catch up on.
A while back I harvested all the cobnuts. For those who don't know, these are the cultivated equivalent of hazelnuts which produce a crop much earlier in their lives than their wild ancestor. The crop is heavier and the nuts larger too.
I planted my cobnuts six years ago and I have been getting an ever-increasing harvest for several years now. For the first time this year my red cobnuts have produced nuts too. They are not so prolific but the trees are beautiful with their maroon leaves.
People often ask when to harvest cob/hazelnuts and I would say to harvest when they start dropping to the floor, unless you have hungry squirrels or jays in which case go earlier. They are delicious eaten 'in the green' but should dry well enough to store for longer.

Cobnuts are experts at hiding under leaves, so much of my harvesting is done by feel. However many times you go round the tree, you always find another one hiding away.

This year I went for the shaking method too, giving the whole tree a good old rattle. This dislodged maybe a third of the nuts, falling all over the ground and my head!

In all I collected two large baskets of nuts, then I disappeared off birding and left Sue to sort them all out as usual. She spent a couple of long evenings taking off the outer husks. At this stage they begin to look like the hazelnuts we buy in their shells at Christmas. Some have almost dried whereas others are still quite green.

A night in the dehydrator drives off any moisture to prevent them rotting. Alternatively you could spread them out on a mesh in a dry, airy place (easier said than done).

Sue also picked most of the almonds as their soft husks were starting to open and some had already dropped to the ground.

And so to this last week and my return from my birding exploits. I had a long list of harvesting and tidying jobs, but this was interrupted when I found a whole load more almonds under the tree. There were more still on the tree, so a good old shake of the branches had them clattering down around me. I then collected them up - over 500 in all.



Taking off the hulls was pretty easy and they went to the sheep who devoured them with gusto.

Next on the harvesting list were the beans for drying but, half way through collecting, news came through of a bird of hen's teeth level rarity on North Ronaldsay - an adult male Siberian Blue Robin.

Only the 4th Siberian Blue Robin ever

recorded in Britain (and the first adult male).

Two were dead and all the other three failed

to do the decent thing and hang around

till the second day (including this one).

Harvesting was abandoned as I embarked on a flurry of phone calls. Sue put a pizza in for me to replace the slow cooked lamb which she was lovingly preparing.
An hour later I was heading off into the night. 588 miles to the Scrabster ferry!

Kirkwall harbour, Orkney - as close as we got

30 hours later I was pulling back onto the farm in the middle of the night. Mission failed!
But some opportunities are so few and far between that you just have to take the chance when they come up. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If I didn't have that attitude I would probably still be stuck in an unfulfilling life back in London.