2021 Week 5 - Pruning and Zooming

You've got to retain a sense of humour.

Pruning Orchard Fruits
This week's big job has been pruning the fruit trees and bushes.

These two apple trees (a juicer and a cider apple) form part of the canopy in the new forest garden.
They've had a good haircut!

You leave stone fruits alone at this time of year, but the apples and pears needed their annual trim. Pruning is always presented as somewhat of a science and for several years I would accomplish the task with my trusty fruit growing book with me. Unfortunately the trees didn't always grow as they were supposed to in the book.

As I have gained experience, I have come to understand how trees and fruits respond to pruning. I have realised that pruning achieves various purposes. Firstly, there is pruning to take out damaged or diseased wood. Then there is taking out any branches which cross as the rubbing of the bark leaves a route in for infection. Once these fundamental steps are completed, there is pruning for the sake of producing fruit and pruning to keep the shape of the trees. 

As far as fruit production is concerned, I have realised that if you cut back the small side shoots they will eventually, over a year or two, turn into what we call fruiting spurs. To put it another way, what would have grown into branches is stopped and produces blossom and fruit instead. 

Pruning for shape is not just for aesthetics either. You need an open structure so that air can circulate and you need to make sure you can reach the fruit for harvest. Increasingly as our weather turns warmer and wetter fungal diseases are becoming the biggest problems, those and problems associated with alternative periods of drought and excessive rain, so thinning branches and thinning fruit has become more and more important.

This year I felt confident enough to show another couple how I prune. I concentrated on a holistic understanding of how the tree responds and what you want to achieve. I hope it was useful.

Pruning the Soft Fruit Bushes
All the soft fruit bushes needed pruning too, blackcurrants, red and white currants and gooseberries (a prickly subject!).

You need to understand how they fruit and how pruning affects new growth, but the principles are very similar to those that apply to apple trees. 

Fruit pruning days provide a very special treat for the Shetland sheep.
They really appreciate all the cuttings, even the spiky gooseberry twigs.

The soft fruits have been festooned with berries and currants for the last few years. New plants are ridiculously easy to propagate too. As a result, I've actually ended up with too many bushes which have expanded leaving no room to get between or for airflow. So this year I have pruned them quite heavily (pruning is not a science and subjective decisions need to be taken). I thinned out a few bushes too. The only problem with this is that the open ground becomes a haven for grass and weed growth. However, since I want this area to become part of my forest garden, I shall put smaller herbaceous perennials in the gaps which hopefully will require little attention and give us some novel crops.

Imbolc

The week's weather has been generally good, typically late January weather, some days cold, some warmer and wetter. The bees ventured out on a couple of days and I've heard robins, great tits, blackbirds, a song thrush and skylarks in song. This made pruning a pleasant task.

I've seen much talk of Imbolc on social media. It seems to have become very trendy to acknowledge these ancient festivals. Imbolc is allegedly a Gaelic festival to mark the start of spring. I am all in favour of appreciating and marking the passing of the seasons, but come on! I think it's a tad optimistic to be talking about the beginning of spring so early in February. There is sometimes a gap between reality and hope. 

One of my favourite plants at this time of year is mahonia or Oregon Grapes. Ours has split into two plants and become quite statuesque. It flowers and fruits really early and is an important food source for the bees when they venture out of their hives on warmer days.

I won't say that spring is quite here yet, but there are hints of its approach. To brighten things up in future, I had ordered a whole load of bulbs to go in the hazel coppice as I have now moved the strawberries on from that area. Hopefully they'll survive and we will have the delight of snowdrops, aconites and bluebells coming through. Planting them all was a lovely job to do with Sue and the dogs helped by enthusiastically digging up some lawn.

The garlic cloves I set in the ground a few weeks back have all come through strongly now. Once they get their roots in I'll take the netting off. The birds do like to tug at them though.

But the week ended with more heavy rain and the water has come higher than ever before. There comes a point when wellies become standard wear and you give up trying to go round the mud and puddles. 

Covid update

It's been my week to teach from home so I have almost no direct contact with the outside world. This makes me feel safe. School staff are now taking twice weekly lateral flow tests. These are notoriously unreliable but they do give a little reassurance despite being pretty uncomfortable to self-administer. We now look forward to gag-tastic Sundays and Wednesdays!

I also received an oximeter in the post. Both Sue and I have been feeling unusually breathless at times but the oximeter showed a normal oxygen level so I guess it must just come down to getting old and maybe carrying a bit too much weight around the middle (me, not Sue).

I received my Google timeline update too.

124 miles travelled in the whole month and never further than 8 miles from home. I think this was 6 trips to work, one drive out for fish and chips and one trip to the hardware store.

A sign of the times.

Don't ignore the red light on the freezer!

Sunday 19th November 2017

A Prickly Job
While Sue was inside making medlar jelly, I continued the job of pruning the gooseberries. Today I was thinning out the top growth, cutting the leader branches back and cutting the laterals (side branches) back to two buds. Gooseberries form on old wood and where last year's laterals meet the leader branch. The cut back laterals will hopefully form into fruiting spurs in the future.
If it all goes well, I'll get plenty of large, easy to pick gooseberries.

This took me quite a while, but Sue was kept busy by an unexpected mini-emergency. The red warning light had been glowing on the fridge freezer for a few days, seemingly for no reason... until today, when a small puddle of water appeared on the kitchen floor. Somehow Sue managed to squeeze most of the food into the other already full to bursting freezers.

With those jobs done, it was time for a long dog walk along the river. We went further than we ever have before. I never understand how the dogs are happy to laze around all day yet they have such limitless energy when it suits them.

Raspberry management
There was still time for me to tackle the raspberry canes when we got back from the river. I just needed to tidy them up a little and to take out the old stems from the summer fruiting varieties. These are easy to identify as they have the remains of flowering stalks on them.
The remaining stems are those which grew afresh this year and will produce fruit next year.

Autumn fruiting raspberries are treated differently.
All their growth is cut back over the winter (best done later in winter) and their new canes spring up next year, fruiting later on in the same year.

The light was falling as I finished this job and I was interrupted by a strange squealing sound. The closest I could think of was the squeal of a rabbit when our cat has caught it, but Gerry and the dogs were inside. Maybe it was a stoat kill?
An unlucky blackbird
As I approached where the strange commotion was coming from, somewhere near the bee hives, a sparrowhawk exploded from the ground carrying a still struggling blackbird. The poor thing had probably just flown al the way over the North Sea only to meet an untimely end when it was looking for a safe roost for the night.

Monday 20th November
A New Car - sort of

A dreaded trip to the dentist. And bad news. My dentist has left and I have someone new. This is a lot for me to cope with.
When I made it home safe and sound, I decided to clean the car to take my mind off things. My car must have wondered what was happening to it. Layers of dirt and moss and lichen which had been protecting the paintwork from the elements were gently wiped away.
By the end I felt almost as if I had a new car!

Winding down for winter

Monday 13th November 2017
A birdy day
The gorgeous, crisp weather continues.
I spent the day cleaning the chicken houses and liberally applying diatomaceous earth to keep spider mite and lice at bay.
After that I topped up the bird feeders. They've been empty for a while as I didn't want to be feeding the rats, but now that the annual incursion seems to be under control I can revert to feeding the needy birds.

Tuesday 14th November 2017
Thank god for Kevlar gloves!
Most of my day was spent pruning gooseberry bushes and I didn't even get the job finished. I was on my hands and knees clearing under the bushes and clearing the lower branches, many of which had drooped and started to root in the ground.
Last year we got very few gooseberries. Let's hope my efforts are rewarded this coming year. The rather messy looking cardboard you see on the ground is how I keep the grass down between the soft fruit bushes. It doesn't look too pretty but it is very effective and the soil underneath is kept in excellent condition. I mulch on top of the cardboard and it just disappears.
I had plenty of help from the chickens who enjoyed scratching about in the newly disturbed earth and litter. They do an important job clearing away bug eggs and larvae from under the bushes.

Rambo goes into action
For the first time today I actually saw Rambo getting it on with one of the ewes. Number 3 it was. We should really use a raddle, which I swear is a made up word from ram and saddle. It is basically a coloured marker so you can see when the ram has done his job. We don't bother with this as we are fairly laissez faire about it, but I have to admit it would be nice to know more precisely what to expect in 145 days time. Note for next year.

Welcome return of the Tree Sparrow

With the recent cold weather, winter bird numbers are starting to build up on the smallholding. There were 6 Reed Buntings today and 14 Meadow Pipits.

I was delighted to see a Tree Sparrow back and a Greenfinch (both sadly scarce birds now). Presumable they have already been lured by the freshly topped up feeders.

Wednesday 15th November 2017

Fog

Not much to see.

This was about as good as visibility got today.

Friday 17th November 2017

Fire in the sky

These days I have to dash home from work to take the dogs for a walk and give the chickens their afternoon feed. Today there was an amazing sunset, gone as quickly as it came. Unfortunately the phone battery went dead just as it was developing, but you get the idea.

Saturday 18th November
A New Dust BathHere's the special dust bath which I built the chickens. The paddling pool is full of dry sand with diatomaceous earth mixed in, so that when the poultry decide to use it for dust bathing it will kill any lice and creepy crawlies hiding in their feathers. Unfortunately the chickens don't quite know how to use it yet. In fact, Arthur is showing more interest.

Sheep moving day
Main job for the day was sheep worming which went very smoothly. After this we separated the ram lambs from the ewe lambs as the paddock up here is not large enough to keep five sheep going in winter time.

Maybe some good news for the turkeys

With this completed so easily, there was time to move the chicken pen. I thought this would be a four person job, but it was surprisingly easy (once I'd removed the ground pegs!).

This gives the Ixworth chicken trio some new ground to go on, but more importantly makes space for a new turkey enclosure. The turkeys will appreciate the nettle growth. They are about the only livestock which effectively deals with these.

My hope is that I might be able to let a couple outside the cage each day and that they will hang about because the other birds are still there. I can't do this at the moment as their housing is too close to the boundary fence and next door's dogs. It would be lovely to let them free-range again, at least in a limited manner.

Frozen Frog Spawn

12th July
Elvis did not come out with her ducklings this morning. As I suspected, she is stepping back and letting them get on with growing up... which they are dong very fast indeed. They are a pretty bunch and it will be a shame to eat them later in the year.

Today's main job was a dangerous one, summer pruning and harvesting gooseberries. We've not got a bumper harvest this year, but I'm not complaining. Every year is different. The red gooseberries all needed picking. They are small but very sweet. The standard green Invicta gooseberries were well swollen. Some were ripe enough to eat raw, the rest I left on the bushes.

The whitecurrants were easier to deal with. Their summer prune just involves cutting back the sideshoots. In previous years the ducks had enjoyed more of the currants than us, but this year they showed no interest. To look at the bushes from outside you would think there was hardly any fruit to be had, but the currants hang on short stems hidden by the leaves.Delve a little deeper and there they are.

In fact I managed to harvest about 3kg of whitecurrants. I just need to decide what to do with them now.
Picking the whitecurrants took an age as I patiently worked along each branch. But there was still time to prune the redcurrants. These are just starting to colour up and there are absolutely mountains of them hanging on the bushes. It won't be long before a redcurrant bonanza. I might try using the steam juicer to make a cordial this year.
The birds find redcurrants easier to spot than their white cousins and last year we lost them all just about the night before I was intending to pick them. So today they were netted, using the net which has just come off one of the cherry trees which Sue picked.

23 eggs have been in the incubator for 18 days now at a temperature of precisely 37.5 degrees Celsius. We tried to keep the humidity at 45% but with the ambient air at over 60% most of the time this proved impossible. (Hence 23 eggs. We started with 24 but one was replaced with a sock full of rice in an attempt to reduce the humidity. It worked a little, for a while!) Humidity is important since it dictates how much liquid evaporates through the shell of the egg and therefore how big the air sac is for the chick to breath when it comes to hatching time.
So today was Day 19. Time for the eggs to come off the roller and to increase the humidity further.
If all goes well they will start hatching in a couple of days.

13th July
I open froze the currants and berries in trays. Today I scraped them off the trays to go into freezer bags. The whitecurrants, to my evil eye at least, look like frozen frog spawn. There could be a marketing idea here for a healthy Halloween treat. I also discovered by accident that it may be an awful lot easier to remove the stems when the currants are frozen. I'll bear this in mind next time.


A surprising proportion of the rest of the day was spent picking blackcurrants and raspberries, especially given that I was supposed to be at work for the afternoon.
But for the second week in a row my car refused to start. After replacing the starter motor last week, it looks as if it was the battery after all. I won't ever be going back to Whizzywheels in Wisbech again. It's the second time they've taken the proverbial in the last few weeks.
On the bright side, it did spur me into finding a more local mechanic.

So engrossing myself in the fiddly task of picking and de-stemming blackcurrants was a welcome distraction from my thoughts. The raspberries have enjoyed the wet weather too and are starting to produce a bumper crop. I've finally worked out that I've pretty much got all summer-fruiting canes and that all the healthy canes which came up and didn't fruit last year were in fact what would bear this year's fruit. I hadn't expected them to come up so early and so made the mistake of thinking they were autumn-fruiting canes which failed to crop. Doh!  I know now.

14th July
Car fixed. New battery installed.
While the mechanic was here, this arrived. Care to guess what it is?

It's a chicken plucker. You scold the chicken, attach this contraption to a drill and the spinning rubber fingers take (most of) the feathers off the bird. I imagine these end up literally everywhere. Anyway, if it works even half as well as I hope then it will save a lot of time when it comes to processing a dozen chickens at a time.

I did actually make it to work today, though I owe them quite a bit of time now and will try to make most of it up next week before the summer holidays start.
After work I hitched up the trailer and drove to a field in the middle of nowhere where a smallholder acquaintance (who just happens to be one and the same mechanic as fixed my car this morning) was baling his hay field. What a lovely activity on a fine day under the endless fenland skies.




I slalomed between the bales on the field before pulling up and loading fifteen bales into my trailer. Back to the farm to unload, then back again for another fifteen.

This winter was so mild that the Shetland sheep got by without any hay whatsoever. Buying thirty bales now is probably a good way to guarantee another mild winter.

As I was stacking the hay in the turkey stable I discovered yet another secret hoard of eggs furtively tucked away. I'm reorganising the stables in a couple of days, but I'll try to move the nest so that hopefully the hen keeps laying in it. That way I know where they are when I want to steal the eggs. I'll mark a couple which I'll leave so she keeps coming back.

One final job for the day.
I abandoned the coriander crop in the polytunnel - it just hasn't grown leafy enough this year - and sowed another few rows of carrots which so far have been doing very well under cover. Hopefully the carrot flies won't discover that the polytunnel has doors.

Prickly subjects

The rabbits are back. Not many (yet), but one is in the soft fruit patch and one is making the occasional scraping in the flower borders. I'm sure there are in reality a lot more than two, or there will be soon.
As I let Boris out for his early morning constitutional this morning, a faint mist masked the rising sun and hung low over the fields. A barn owl flew from the hollow ash tree and a bunny hopped across the lawn. Boris watched it, but was more interested in facing out the guinea fowl. He did evenutally go bounding through the long grass in the general direction of rabbit. Gerry, on the other hand, went straight into stalking mode.

Anyway, those cute little bunnies are in fact pesky little blighters which cause untold damage. So the rabbit traps have come back out. I've only ever caught one baby rabbit in a rabbit trap, but I live in hope. So you can imagine my surprise yesterday morning (Boris got me up at 4:10am!) when I noticed that something had caused the rabbit trap door to close. With my eyes still bleary and the early morning light dim, I went over to investigate and there was indeed a creature inside the trap.



trapped

But it wasn't what I expected. Rather too prickly. For I had caught a hedgehog! The first ever hedgehog for our garden. Fantastic news!




released

Now onto the second prickly matter. Gooseberries.

This year the gooseberry bushes are raining gooseberries

I got to wondering who put the goose into gooseberry, but Wikipedia gave no good reason. I did however find two interesting facts.
The French for gooseberry, groseille a maquereau, translates as mackerel berry, which seems even more off the wall than gooseberry. Though come to think of it, aren't gooseberries supposed to be good with oily fish? Perhaps, once upon a time, they were considered a good accompaniment to goose.

The second fact?
"Gooseberry bush" was 19th-century slang for pubic hair and from this comes the saying that babies are "Born under a gooseberry bush."

That thought will make the task of gooseberry picking even more toilsome than it already is. For gooseberry bushes are armed with vicious thorns. However well they are pruned into the traditional open goblet shape, the berries themselves do a very good job of hiding and are often best located by feel, which requires a very gentle and tactile approach. One false move and your fingertip is impaled.

But the annual task of picking the berries is still a joy. For gooseberries remain something of a luxury in this country and are not widely available. Presumably they are not mechanically harvestable. So to be able to go into our garden and harvest a plentiful supply is something to be celebrated. Our nine bushes are now in their fourth year and are producing very well, especially now that I have learned to prune them properly. On top of this, I took cuttings last year to multiply them and the new bushes have produced a few berries already. So here's to a prickly future!



Boris relaxes under a gooseberry bush

Growing Gooseberries

When we started setting up the smallholding, I planted a few soft fruit bushes. They were very small and took a while to develop. Among them were nine gooseberry plants. Three Invicta (green), three Hinnomaki Yellow and three Hinnomaki Red.

We have had a pretty good crop from these for the past two years, but one thing has become clear. We do not have enough soft fruits as, even with freezing, we run out of them halfway through the year.

So last year I decided to try something completely whacky. When the gooseberries were fully ripe I planted them, just as you would with seeds. I planted them about 2" deep (5cm in new money) in rows 12" apart, kept them watered during the driest part of the summer and left them to it. I've not heard of anyone growing gooseberries in this way before and I wasn't expecting any great results. However, in theory the gooseberries are fruits containing seeds so there is no reason why it shouldn't work, unless somehow the fertility had been bred out of them.

Well, by late August about 60% of them had germinated. I even had to thin some of them as multiple seeds from within the gooseberry had sprouted.

I pretty much forgot about them during the winter, as they were in a 'spare' bed a little away from the other crops. Weeds grew up amongst them and they sort of got lost.

But last week I remembered them while I was transplanting the more conventionally grown currant cuttings (black, red and white).



More conventional cuttings. I put these in at the beginning of winter.
They will be ready to transplant in early spring next year.

The weeds had died down over winter and the gooseberries had grown into decent sized little bushes with healthy root systems. I was really quite pleasantly surprised.
















I have now moved them in with the older gooseberry bushes and already, in just their first year, they do not look out of place. I'd be surprised if I don't get a half decent crop on them this year. If I'd taken cuttings, I'd be looking at an extra year till cropping.
I also had enough new plants to dot others around the smallholding.

The new plants
looking at home with the more established bushes.

It seems that nature's way is best after all.

It looks like this year there'll be plenty of GOOSEBERRY FOOL!

Harvest is upon us

OK, we've already had the rhubarb and the asparagus. And most welcome they were too.

But for the last couple of weeks harvest has been well under way. In fact, some crops have come and gone already and the freezers are starting to groan.

It all started with the soft fruits. Punnet upon punnet of strawberries, enough to share a few with the guineafowl. It's been a good year for them.

Strawberries in preparation for freezing.

They lose their texture when frozen, but still make excellent jams and sauces.

The gooseberries weren't far behind. The Red Hinnomakis were the first to ripen and the most prolific. This variety is incredibly sweet. Close your eyes and you could be eating a grape.

Meanwhile some of the veg were responding to the warm weather. Turnips swelled nicely, both outside and in the polytunnel. The courgette plant in the polytunnel - I never meant to grow one in there, the labels must have got mixed up - started throwing out its offerings, closely followed by one of the more advanced plants outside. A night of heavy rain magically transformed skinny green fingers into fat, foot long giants.

Elsewhere in the polytunnel, hidden amongst the jungle of leaves, I came upon a wealth of French beans. I am growing the climbing variety Cobra in there and it is yielding a huge quantity of beans. Unlike some others which I've grown previously, Cobra's beans don't seem to get tough and stringy if you miss them by a couple of days.

The Borlottis and Pea Beans are producing pods too, but these will be saved for the beans rather than eating the pods.

And the potatoes have finally swelled. We've made a small dent in the Earlies, Arran Pilot and Red Duke of York, as well as starting on the Charlottes.  

I pick a little from each crop and suddenly
we have enough to more than fill our plates

Peas are ready too now. I have grown Sugar Snaps, Mangetout and normal peas. Unfortunately I seem to have a problem with the Pea Moth in my garden, which means that each pea in each pod has to be checked for the tiny caterpillars which burrow into individual peas. A complete pain, and it means that the Sugar Snaps, whose pods I would usually eat whole and raw, have become a bit useless. Still, the Mangetout are still OK as long as I catch them before the peas swell.



You can't get this freshness and crispness in the shops.



The broad beans have done exceptionally well this year. I wasn't intending on freezing any, but we've hardly even made a dent in the harvest and I don't want the beans inside to get too big and leathery.

 

But I've saved the best till last. For on the way to the chickens I get to pluck fresh raspberries every day. The varieties have got a bit mixed up now, but the tastiest are definitely the smallest ones, the most difficult to pick and definitely not the ones you would ever find in a shop. Imagine a ruby with exquisite taste. No. Imagine hundreds of rubies, then more and more every day, for the raspberries have been very fruitful this year.

Not every crop has fared so well this year. It's been a very poor year for dwarf beans and, as I've mentioned, the Sugar Snaps will be going to the chickens. But it looks as if we'll have plenty enough to keep us extravagantly supplied in delicious fresh food. And when that runs out there'll be a freezer full of produce and a pantry full of jams and preserves. If my planning goes right, there should still be some more hardy veg coming through the winter and there'll be a store of root crops in the ground or packed in boxes in a cool, dark place. Oh, and there'll be mountains of pumpkins too.

The greatest delight about all this is that we've put all our efforts into it and now we are reaping the rewards. And what a reward! For what you can buy in the shops just falls flat on its face, both for choice and most especially for freshness. The crunch of a carrot pulled straight from the ground, the juiciness of a strawberry ripened by the sun while still on the plant, the bite of a gooseberry teased from the prickly branch, the freshness of a peapod plucked straight from the plant, the earthiness of a potato fresh from the soil.  

All these things make our harvest special.

An eventful birthday

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

Another computer gave up on me!

But I've got it back now.

Problem is, I go a couple of weeks without blogging and there's just so, so much to catch up on.

Let's start at the end. Today. My 47th birthday.
Wild celebrations don't really happen any more, I'm just happy to have a quiet day with Sue.

It was someone else's birthday too, Thorne's Beekeeping Supplies. A full 53 years older than myself. They had a centenary celebration on today and we had pre-ordered some sale goodies. So we headed up to their rather grandiose home in the Lincolnshire Wolds .

Thorne's shop

Even the oil drums had a bee theme!



Can you believe this fool is now 47?



Inspiration for bee-friendly plants

The museum was fascinating, as was a look around the factory.
All the machines are made for purpose, some being 80 years old.

We returned to the farm late afternoon. I was severely tempted to divert to the North Norfolk coast where a most unusual arrival of several Two-Barred Crossbills from Scandinavia was occurring. But none stayed long enough to tempt me. So instead I spent an hour of my birthday picking the last of the red gooseberries. Prickly!

 

I nearly forgot not to feed the pigs. For this evening we had the job of cajoling two rather stubborn pigs into the livestock trailer ready to go on a little journey in the morning. We are quite well practised at this now, but it always has its stresses. The basic plan is to keep the pigs hungry so they follow the bucket of food down to the waiting trailer.

This works well for about a minute, until they discover the lush grass which grows outside their pen. But we know this will happen, so we bring Daisy with them. She knows the way and they will stick with her.

Today we managed the first part of the operation with incredible smoothness. One pig was left in the pen - this is the lucky one who gets to reach its first birthday before it goes off, in the winter, as a baconer. There was no selection process. Just the last pig to go through the gate.


A stay of execution for this girl.



These two follow Daisy and Sue toward their fate.



   

From there it was a race up the land to the stable area and into the (very) small yard, where the trailer was waiting, door open and ramp enticingly covered in straw. I strewed it with food, but to no avail. This was no surprise. Getting them to make the final climb into the trailer is always a stressful experience. 

The sticking point.
That ramp is a no go area.



We didn't really want Daisy in there too, so we led her back to join the other piglet.

Daisy heads back to her pen,

leaving two worried and

tetchy piglets behind.



But, as has happened in the past, this was the cue for the doomed couple to get a little tetchy. So  much so that they broke through a fence and headed back down toward their pen,

There followed fifteen minutes of fraught efforts to get back to where we had been already been (no photos, too fraught!)

The fence was reinforced (Well, I leaned a couple of sturdy pallets up against it) to prevent further breakouts and we patiently edged the piglets up the ramp and into the trailer.

I make this sound easier than it actually is!

So tomorrow morning we'll be off to the abattoir bright and early. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get them to leave that trailer when we get there. Not that they know what's coming.

That just left enough time to top and tail those gooseberries ready for the freezer before sitting down to a late birthday dinner with Sue - lasagna made with our own lamb and vegetables, including the first of this year's courgettes - oh yes, the glut has already started.

Then a celebratory cake, topped with today's picking of raspberries and a rather OTT firework display thingy-me-jig from the pound shop, complete with sparklers, candles and a rather metallic version of happy birthday which repeated several dozen times until we finally managed to break the device!

So that was today. And after all that, I have to say I actually do feel a year older.

Over the next few days I'll be bringing you up to date with everything that's been happening - hot, hot weather, swarming bees, broody chickens, egg-straw-din-ary goings on with the guineafowl, the start of the harvest, the arrival of a most unexpected new member of the family and, as if I wasn't busy enough, another trip to the Hebrides chasing birds. It's all been happening.