Meanwhile, back on the farm

In between my autumn birding trips I have actually spent a little bit of time on the farm. So here's a few of the bits and bobs which have been happening.

A New Potting Shed
We are splashing out on a new conservatory - I haven't told Sue yet that I will be using it in the spring for raising all my seedlings. The base has gone down and we are waiting for it to be finished in a couple of weeks time.
Gerry decided to enter The Hall of Fame by leaving his mark for eternity in the concrete floor. I'm surprised he didn't just write "Gerry woz 'ere"!


The builders found the old well, but unfortunately it's now under the conservatory floor! Shame.

Lady Penelope lives on
Having given up on Lady Penelope the Peahen, she has reappeared in the field margin across the road. She still has one chick which is growing fast. With the loss of Captain Peacock, this may be her one and only chance to be a parent.
On a similar vein, our guinea fowl numbers have gone down to four... or so we thought, until Sue found one sitting on eggs in exactly the same spot where Lady Penelope laid eggs last year. Why do guinea fowl wait till so late in the year to incubate? The chicks will have no chance in the long, wet autumn grass, Our plan is to catch the whole family once hatched and to confine them in a stable for their own safety.

Barn Owl and Badger road casualties
While the builders were here doing the conservatory base, someone appeared at the gate clutching onto an injured barn owl. It had been picked up by the side of the road. I tried to place it on one of the beams in the stable but it fell off and started running along the floor - nothing wrong with its legs but its wing looked pretty plowed.

I put it into a cat carrier and took it along to Baytree Owl Centre - they keep captive owls, which I don't really agree with, but they would have access to a wildlife vet and were listed on the Barn Owl Trust site.
The man there informed me that the owl was a male and that it had good levels of body fat. Surprisingly, he also said the wing had been broken for some time, but it was very badly broken. I left the owl with them, not expecting to hear any more. It had a ring on its leg but it was impossible to read the number.

On the subject of road casualties there was a young badger dead by the side of the road not 100 yards from the farm the other day. Sad that it came to such an end, but good that they are around.

A Carrot Harvest
I was determined to grow carrots this year. After successive years of poor germination and then any crop I did manage to grow being ravaged by carrot fly, this year I took the step of purchasing a vegetable net.
The carrots grew well, though I was guilty of underusing the fresh crop. However you net, it always adds a level of inconvenience to weeding and harvesting.
I had entered into my spreadsheet to harvest all maincrop carrots by early October. However, birding got in the way and I only got round to it yesterday. The good news was that the carrots had grown very well and were free of carrot fly. Bad news was that the voles had found quite a few of them and the slugs were starting to move in.
However, I still managed to salvage enough to fill quite a few bags in the freezer. Next year I'll definitely be using the netting again, but I'll have to give a little more thought to voles and slugs. I'll make sure I harvest them in good time too.
One other lesson - the final sowing was a bit late going in (by about three weeks) and has come to nothing. Next year I think I'll sow more earlier in the season, not too early though or they don't germinate, and harvest them earlier.

An Unexpected Glut of Carrots

I wrote this post several days ago, but forgot to publish it!
So any keen followers may notice a few errors in continuity!
Here goes...

Buoyed on by my successful digging yesterday (last weekend), I decided to spend today (last Monday), my last day before school term starts (I've actually been back a week), digging.

Now that all the weeds have died down, a few carrot tops had become visible. I know I should have harvested them ages ago... Long story ... which I'm about to bore you all with.

Despite all my attempts, for several years I have been outwitted by a very, very small fly. I've never even knowingly seen it, or its grubs, but whenever I dig up my carrots they are spoilt by a mosaic of dirty tunnels. There are two blunt-ended solutions which I could adopt. One is to erect a two foot high barrier around my carrot beds. The other is to cover them with fleece throughout the growing season. Neither of these is very practical on my site, though not impossible. There is a third option too. Not to grow carrots. They are cheap in the shops, taste nice and are always perfect. But I just like the idea of growing my own. I know that they are chemical free, I've got the land and you get thousands of seeds for not a lot of money.

To be fair, the first year I grew them, in London, my carrots did well and only a few were affected by carrot fly. And the first year I grew them here it was a similar story. But it's been downhill from there.

Last year I couldn't even get my carrots growing at all, repeated efforts at sowing being defeated by cold, waterlogged ground and a plague of slugs.
This year I came up with a cunning plan to defeat the carrot flies. I decided to grow my rows of carrots in amongst mixes of annual flowers. The theory was that the flies' sense of smell, which they use to search and destroy carrots, is confused and distracted by the bountiful floral aromas of the blooms. In practice, I couldn't tell which seedlings were weeds and which were pretty flowers. Conditions for growth, apart from a cold start, were good this year and all of a sudden, before I knew it, I had beds of thick growth towering high and covering the ground. The only problem was that the poor little carrot plants, slow to germinate, got swamped, lost. To make matters worse, the bed never ended up looking very pretty anyway.
I had long given up on a crop of carrots, but as the annuals and weeds died down, there were the lines of carrot tops, a bit patchy but some had made it through. But it was now very late in the season and the voles had been at work - the same voles which have been helping themselves to my potatoes, attacking from underground, and the same voles which have gnawed away my celeriac bulbs, cleverly leaving the foliage still growing to hide their crime!
I knew that the carrots had been in too long now and that the carrot flies (and probably a few slugs) would have been attacking them from  underground too.
So, to paraphrase this tale of woe, I messed up on the carrots and abandoned them...till today. Today when, for some unknown reason, I decided to salvage what I could of the crop. I knew that hardly any would be suitable for storage and I wasn't wrong. But with a bit of peeling and a lot of chopping, I did manage to get quite a pile of carrots. Nowhere near as much as I should be able to get, but at least it was something.
Next problem - what to do with them? I could just slice and dice, blanch and freeze, but this really seemed quite a pointless exercise. I might as well just buy them from the supermarket.

Carrot and Coriander soup, Carrot and Cumin soup,
Carrot Cake, Carrot, Lime and Ginger juice.
All delicious!

So I came up with a three point plan.

Carrot soup. Carrot cake. Carrot juice.

I considered carrot wine, but thought better of it. Besides, I could probably make this just as well from cheap bags of 'horse carrots'.

A few hours later, et voila!

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.



Monday 30th April 2012
April finally comes good



A sunrise!!! A nice day! And a 14 hour day in the garden to make the most of it.

Daisy and the piglets have quickly turned their grassy enclosure
into something more akin to the trenches of WW 1!
Not long till weaning now.

Buzzing

The bees came out in force today and it was fantastic both to see so many filling the air and to smell that heady aroma of wax and honey which surrounds a thriving hive. They allowed fairly close approach, though my stripy jumper seemed to annoy a couple of them at one point, not even when I was close to the hive.

Mauled by a Guineafowl

But prize for brazen attack of the days goes to Guinea Guinea. The sunshine brought out his macho side and, as I plucked the flowering shoots from the sorrel bed, he was making a right racket. I realised after a while that, behind me, he was puffing himself up, spreading his wings, running madly in circles and making false charges at me! I tried to explain that I wasn't a threat and that, if this behaviour continued, he might end up in the pot, but all to no avail.

I decided that ignoring him was the best strategy. That was until, crouched down attending to the sorrel plants, I suddenly felt a guineafowl on my back!!! And I don't think he was being friendly.

Outwitting the Carrot Flies.

The root beds were almost ready for sowing and planting when the rains came. I never thought it would be this long before I could reasonably get any seeds in.

I have ridiculous numbers of carrot seeds, each packet containing seemingly enough to fill a field. There are early ones, late ones, short, fat ones, long, skinny ones, orange yellow, white, purple, even some which promise resistance to carrot fly.

Ah yes, carrot fly.

I've never knowingly seen one, but I have seen the damage caused by their larvae, burrowing round the edge of carrots like a helter skelter, then going through the middle rendering them pretty inedible - though the chickens and pigs don't mind such imperfections.

Carrot flies find their favourite vegetable prey by smell, so it is important to sow the seed thinly to minimise the need for too much thinning later on. There are other ways to counteract these seek-and-destroy tactics, primarily by disguising the smell of the carrots, not with Febreze or Lynx, but with onions, spring onions, garlic and coriander. So my carrot beds tend to consist of rows of carrots interspersed with onion sets, garlic cloves and lines of spring onions. I like to plant coriander, probably my favourite herb / spice plant, in clumps at the edges too.

But even all these attempts at disguise do not always work. So this year I am introducing another tactic, mixing the carrot seed in with packets of mixed annual flowers. Hopefully a pretty way of confusing those pesky carrot flies.

All the text books say, too, that carrot flies are incapable of flying above about 2 feet off the ground, so surrounding the carrot bed with a barrier to this height is supposed to work. I have yet to find a practical or attractive way of doing this.

If all else fails, I am also planting resistant varieties, imaginatively named Resistafly and Flyaway. Hopefully they do what it says on the can.