Ten years of geese and a (meteorological) Spring clean

Ten years ago a friend phoned to say someone had dumped five geese on her front lawn. We had no experience whatsoever of keeping geese, but I proved rather adept at catching them and they came back to ours in the boot of the car.

First Goose Egg of 2022
Ten years to the day since then we have the first goose egg of 2022. Valentine's Day is the traditional date for this but it varies from goose to goose and year to year. 

Over the last decade the geese have given us quite a few eggs, a few goslings and they have done a lot of grass cutting for me, as well as spreading a good amount of manure.

Garden Spring Clean (meteorolical refers to The Spring, not the extent of the clearing up!)
The problem with going on holiday in February (not that I'm complaining) is that I am already a little behind schedule and at the mercy of the weather. We are now officially in meteorological Spring and it began with one of those gorgeous spring days we love so much. 

After finishing taking the breasts off the pigeons we were gifted, I devoted some time to weeding out perennials from the veg beds. The war against grasses, docks, nettles and creeping buttercup is a never-ending one, but it does get easier with persistence and if you pick the right soil conditions to perform the extraction.

New growth is coming up rapidly now so I have been tidying up the overwintered dead stems. These provide important food and habitats to wildlife during the depths of winter and plants such as teasel, cardoon and fennel give visual interest too.  But now it's time they contributed to the compost heap. Before too long they'll be unrecognisable and back on the surface of the veg beds as finished compost.

From Sombreros to Pigeon and Potatoes

I've just got back from Mexico! It was a birdwatching trip with friends, well timed to avoid all the storms. The smallholding was left in the capable hands of my wonderful wife.

The only sombreros I actually saw in Mexico were the cheap ones in the airport. I did however take a great interest in the plants of the volcanic highlands. Many were familiar to me, either as garden flowers or forest garden plants. There were tree lupins, Mexican tagetes, salvias and lobelias.

This gave me a new idea for livestock
on the smallholding!

Esculenta, Taro, Dasheen, Eddoe, whatever you want to call it,
growing wild along a stream

Of even more interest were what appeared to be yacon plants growing wild - I never got round to digging up the roots to check. There were small-scale farmers growing very much in the style of a forest garden, melons draped over flowering bushes visited by the hummingbirds I was really there to see.

I even got to watch a farmer harvesting his oca, which was obviously unaffected by early morning light frosts in the highlands.

A farmer harvesting his oca

Back to Icy Blighty

Now I'm back I need to get back into the swing of things PDQ as blossoms are starting to appear, bulbs are shooting up and seeds need to be sown, among many other jobs.

Waste Not Want Not
Today we headed off to a friend to pick up 50 pigeons shot by a farmer in the morning. We'll prep some for ourselves and the dogs will enjoy them too. Waste not want not.

Spudulicious plans for 2022
I also went to pick up this year's seed potatoes. 1kg each of ten varieties. I was going to try one new variety this year, Homeguard, but it was not available, so I am sticking with familiar old favourites. These pretty much select themselves. Primarily they need to cope reasonably well with blight (though the resistant varietis I find disappointing in taste). Next, they need to be relatively unattractive to slugs.

Some do better in wet years, others can cope with drier conditions. That's unpredictable and one reason why I grow so many varieties.

Going back to blight, this year I plan to grow my spuds in smaller patches as I have sort of abandoned the strict rotation system. Hopefully this might help to control the spread, Secondly, I intend to use a milk-based spray. Even if you wanted to use them, there are no sprays available to the small-scale grower now, so hopefully this harmless solution will help. (Large-scale potato farmers spray up to 30 times during the lifetime of a potato plant. I'm not sure I'd want to eat that! I know they can't risk blight destroying the nation's crop and people don't want scabby potatoes full of bugs and tunnels, but there must be another way.)

For now I'll be planting a few early potatoes straight into the polytunnel and rest rest will be set to chit on a windowsill, the process whereby you encourage them to form strong young shoots without exposing them to potential frosts and cold, wet soil outside.

To finish, here's the list of potatoes I'm growing this year.

FIRST EARLY: 

Casablanca, Duke of York, Home Guard, Red Duke of York. 

SECOND EARLY: 

Charlotte, Kestrel, Blue Kestrel

MAIN CROP: 

Cara, Desiree, Kerrs Pink, King Edward, Pink Fir Apple and Valor.

Actually, that's 12!

Dry January

January 2022 has brought us some beautiful, crisp weather
and hardly a drop of rain.

This time in 2021 we were very much waterlogged. The ducks enjoyed it! As did the birdwatcher in me, though not quite so much the smallholder.

This year the contrast couldn't be greater. I can't actually remember a drop of rain in January - if there was, it was very early on. 

The ground is delightfully dry. It's so nice not to be squishing, squashing and squelching, slipping and sliding around the smallholding. It's such a treat to be able to work the soil and have it crumble rather than sticking in giant clods to the soul of your gardening shoes. 

I've been cutting back on of my wildlife hedges. These are cut on a three year cycle so there is a variety of stages of growth. It also means they give me more hedgerow fruits.

When we moved in there was not a hedge in sight. Now they are home to all sorts of wildlife. Nests are buried so deep inside that it is only when the leaves drop and I cut the hedges back that I notice them all. One was even used by some type of mouse as a rose hip storage basket.

Cutting the hedges back produces a surprising quantity of cut material. Without a chipper, this would be impossible to manage. But I am able to turn it into valuable woodchip which covers the ground in the forest garden. Any spare is used to ease the way over any muddy stretches of path or goes to bulk up the compost pile. Nothing goes to waste here.

Orchard haircut

Pruning is a dark art which I don't want to go into in much detail (mainly for fear of showing my ignorance). Through Fenland Smallholders Club I've been lucky enough over the years to meet a few people who could show me the basics. 

For the first few years I would tentatively approach the orchard trees, RHS fruit book in hand, and try to figure out how the living creature in front of me was supposed to match the diagrams in the book. After a while I learned the difference between leaders and laterals (main branches and side shoots). 

And after a few years I began to understand how the trees respond to having their branches cut, where the fruit likes to form, what happens if you cut too much, or too little.

And so I have reached a point where my RHS fruit book lives a comfortable life in the bookcase, only coming off the shelf for a new variety or when I need to revisit. 

The time to prune orchard trees (not stone fruits) is winter, when the trees are dormant. I like  to wait for dry conditions and ideally a nice, sunny and crisp day, you know, when you can actually imagine that spring is on its way. If not over my Christmas holiday, this is often between mid January and mid February.

It is one of those rituals which marks the passing of the seasons, clearing the debris of last year and preparing for new growth and new harvests. Every year I take a picture of a couple of trees, mainly as this crops up in my blog on an annual basis. 

The same trees, 2022 (top), 2021 (middle) 2020 (below)

Bramley apple tree in the chicken pen

One form of pruning which I was not so happy about was what confronted me one frosty morning this week. A Pixie apple tree which has just come into its fruiting prime has been completely de-barked. It will take a miracle for it to survive. The culprit was one of  the Shetland sheep which must have hopped the electric fence under the cover of darkness and proceeded to wreak havoc. A couple of other trees were damaged too, but not fatally. Not only have I probably lost a good tree but I'll have to invest in a stretch of proper fencing to discourage such unruly behaviour.

Meli-Arnaki of Spalford.

Meli-Arnaki of Spalford

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Or a gift ram, for that matter.

A smallholder friend gave us the heads up that there was a pedigree Shetland ram on a Facebook site for free. The ram had belonged to her before the current owner.

We've never actually owned a proper pedigree animal as we only keep them for utility. However, our current ram needs to move on, as ideally do four of our older ewes. So this new opportunity came at just the right time.

A couple of messages later and we had arranged to travel to the north of the county to pick up our new boy. We had also confirmed that he was indeed being offered for free and that he was quite a friendly and gentle chap.

And so I present to you Meli-Arnaki of Spalford. His previous owners called him Arnie but we're still deciding what to call him. For your information, as far as I can work out, Meli-Arnaki is Greek for honey-lamb! Maybe his new name should be Honey. 

Meli-Arnaki spent a week on his own getting used to his new home but it was always our intention to give him a companion. And so today we gathered up the other sheep, penned them so we could worm them and check their feet, then moved our wether (castrated male) up towards the farmhouse to share a paddock with our newcomer.

There was some excited air-sniffing, lip-curling and chasing to begin, but it wasn't long before peace broke out.

The easiest way to treat the sheep is to pen them tightly.
I go in with them and Sue administers medicines from the outside.

New companions

Some welcome cold weather has arrived early in 2022.
The air is wonderfully crisp on days like this.

Well that's 2021 out of the way! A Review.

Who'd  have thought  I'd be sitting here in 2022 with the world in such a strange place?

Just for a while it seemed like everything was getting back to normal but the Covid waves just keep coming. I think there's room for optimism for 2022, though I'm not sure the world steadily reverting to its old ways is really such a great thing.

Blog-wise, I've  been very quiet for 2021. It's not that I've been inactive, quite the opposite in fact, but it has on occasions needed a steely resolve to keep optimistic. But as ever I have been very much looking to the future, researching, learning, trying new ideas and moving forwards with our self-sufficiency. I find that making plans for the future is a great way of dealing with the present when it's not going too well.

2021 - An overview.

LOCKDOWN. FLOCKDOWN. DELTA. ZOOM. FOREST GARDENING. A NEW PUPPY.  HAYMAKING. POOR HARVESTS. APPLE PRESSING. TWITCHING. NEW FRIENDS. FLOCKDOWN. OMICRON.

A bit more detail, if you want.

My life is split into three parts: Teacher; Smallholder; Twitcher. 

So here are the three stories of 2021:

School Report, 2021
We began the year in lockdown, teaching by Zoom from an improvised office in the living room. The world was a very uncertain place. Along came vaccines and by the summer all felt back to relative normal. But then we jumped from Delta straight to Omicron and insecurity returned to take us to the end of the year. 

School has been very tricky and was finally hit by Covid in a significant way right at the end of 2021. Even Zoom briefly raised its head again! Fortunately it was inconvenient, stressful but never quite felt as life-threatening as pre-vaccine and pre-booster times. The children have been absolutely brilliant and, with the help of some very caring and hardworking adults, have as ever been inspirational with their resilience and adaptability. For the most part they have come through and bounced back in style, hopefully to become a wiser generation than what has preceded them.

For the time being though, masks have made a comeback and the twice weekly tests seem more important again.

Smallholding 2021
The year started with lockdown and flockdown. Add flooded fields to the equation and it really was a bit of a struggle. Spring put in a brief early appearance to raise hopes but from there - and I don't want to put too much of a dampener on it - the growing year really failed to ever get going.

In fact I have never managed to produce so little from the plot. We somehow managed to have precisely the wrong weather at precisely the wrong time all  through the year. By October I was already looking ahead to 2022.

It wasn't all bad though. A major new venture began with dipping my toes into the world of perennial crops. Before I knew it I was diving headlong into creating a full-scale forest garden. I needed something to get my teeth into to distract from what was metaphorically (and sometimes literally) a year of trudging through mud.

This has been a wonderful journey and I have created the beginnings of a very special food-growing area, a kind of forager's supermarket. Being almost all perennial crops, it will take a while to establish which is all well and good as it's going to take a while to learn to make the most of all the new foods, most of which even I had not previously heard of.

One reasonable success in 2021 was the orchard, particularly the apples. We finally acquired an apple press and quite fortuitously managed to get hold of an unused second hand pasteuriser for the juice.

I also got quite distracted by the acquisition of 160 paving slabs, which were quite an effort to transport in several journeys along Fenland's bumpy roads. This came after being gifted a boot load of rather smart edging stones.

As a consequence the polytunnel has undergone quite a transformation, as has the herb garden.

Early summer saw a new arrival on the smallholding. Meet Monty, a real bundle of energy! Despite their shared Dachshund genes Arthur took a while to accept him. Boris on the other hand has been rejuvenated. Monty absolutely loves  him.

Into the summer holidays and I got into full-scale practical mode. A protracted spell of dry weather tempted me into producing some of my own hay using the scythe. The actual grass cutting was hard but honest work, but the process of turning and drying the hay was lighter work than I had anticipated. For me, producing our own hay by hand is one of  the holy grails of self-sufficiency. I know it's a bit romantic and nostalgic. I know it would be easier with machinery, but scything is a magical activity. Not just good outdoor exercise, but it is somehow quite meditational, a great mindfulness task.

With the decision that scything and haymaking will be firmly on the calendar in the future, I decided to make a hand baler. This developed into a labour of love and I have created a truly beautiful monster!

Spurred on by this, I decided to refurbish all the chicken houses and to put them on wheels - not just any wheels though, wheels which can be raised and lowered. Woohoo! It looks simple but believe me it was quite a learning process. We now have three very mobile chicken houses as well as a mobile bird hide (ex rotting shed) which is currently residing halfway down the land.

We have cut down on poultry numbers this year, mainly because bird flu and winter confinement seems to be an annual occurrence now. So we brought in meat chicks and meat ducklings at  just a few days old and raised them 'for  the table'. This way they have a short but happy life and we cut down on housing and feed costs over winter, when the daily routines of looking after livestock do occasionally lose their appeal as you trudge around in the  mud breaking ice with numbed hands.

The turkeys however have different ideas. They have been intent on taking over the smallholding. Our two experienced hens found fantastic places to sit on eggs and produced 21 youngsters between them. Two younger hens shared a nest and managed to produce three. We raised some of the young for meat but sold quite a few as young birds to fellow smallholders.
But then, while I was away on Shetland in early October, a presumed lost female, one of the experienced hens, appeared with 16 more poults for us!

We did not breed the sheep this year. We had quite enough stress without lambing to add to it. The older ewes need to go on a journey now, as does our ram who is related to all the girls. So they have spent the year as lawnmowers and are currently eating their way through the world's supply of hay.

We have always been very involved with the local Smallholders Club, but 2021 was a very bumpy year. Somehow I have gone from dropping my involvement early in 2021 to standing again as Co-Chair with Sue for 2022. Just don't ask!

We did manage a couple of meetings in between the waves.

I have met some fabulous smallholders this year with a wealth of experience and a huge spread of knowledge. We have enjoyed learning form each other and planning the self-sufficiency revolution. I have even learned how to use my chainsaw and am now not quite so scared  of it!

So that's my smallholding year, not a hugely successful one but one where many acorns have been sown (not literally). I am full of optimism for 2022.

Twitching 2021
It was an odd year for birds but as usual it gave me some great excuses to disappear off to far flung corners of Britain. We had a few absolutely mega rarities, including a real crippler from America which had us tiptoeing around Covid regulations early in the year and a first for Britain which earned me a speeding ticket in a race to Devon for an evening charter boat to Lundy Island. It was worth it as the bird did an overnight bunk. An albatross settled on Yorkshire cliffs for the summer and proved very popular. 

But the autumn migration, what we all wait for, was almost non existent on the East coast, hardly a bird to be seen. Every few years I make the pilgrimage to Shetland for a week in the autumn. This year our accommodation was grandiose, a lighthouse nonetheless. Birdwise it was quiet, with bird of the trip going to a butterfly, a Monarch all the way from across the Atlantic. 

For my second trip in a row we found ourselves scrambling to get off the islands with news of a rare bird back in England. An unlucky combination of weather and school holidays meant we were slow to find a way off but all  turned out well in the end as we connected with  a Long-toed Stint in Yorkshire, a bird so overdue that I was beginning to doubt I would ever see one.

The year ended with a bird which left me incredulous when I first saw the news, a Varied Thrush from America found on Papa Westray, one of the Orkney Isles, only the second ever in this country and a bird which many doubted would ever turn up again. Quite a stunner too!

So that was 2021. If you've got this far, sorry if I've left you depressed. 

The year ended with balmy record temperatures on New Year's Eve. The bees came out for the day and we spent the day in tee-shirts. 

And to finish, a couple more doggy pictures for those who like them.