A Solstice Tree

Last week at the Green Back Yard Christmas Fayre I was inspired by this:

Tuesday 19th December 2017

My Own Solstice Tree

So today I embarked on my own tree, for solstice of course, not Christmas. I don't do Christmas.

First step was to harvest the willow and sort it. I needed about 30 rods for the verticals and some thinner but long ones for the weaving.

I then tried to figure out how to actually make the thing. I cut a silver birch branch, choosing one that was straight and nicely white and pushed it in the ground. I then used a brooder ring to mark the circle and set about poking the willow rods into the ground all around it. There was a fair bit of trial and error to get all the rods to the same length and the ground got muddy as I worked round the tree but I ended up with this (the tree, not the dog):

I was very pleased with my afternoon's work.

Wednesday 20th December 2017

Natural decorations

I do the construction, Sue does the decoration. And a fine job she did of it too. By noon on Wednesday our solstice tree was adorned with ivy, rosemary and conifer sprigs. Colour came with a splash of hawthorn berries and a dash of class was added with artichoke and teasel heads. The whole was topped off with a star of allium seedheads.

Thursday 21st December 2017
Happy Solstice!
So this is it. The shortest day reached. The sun rose at... well, it was misty most of the day! I was busy in the kitchen all day since I'd invited the Grow Your Own group over for a special solstice celebration meal and I was really pushing the boat out, as you can see from the menu.

The evening went very well indeed. The food was delicious with the soups and the roasted butternut being the stars of the show.

From now on the days get longer.
Hopefully the chickens will realise and start laying again very soon.

A Pointless Twitch, a Solstice Tree and a Supermoon

Saturday 2nd December 2017
A bird in the bush...

An early morning start up to North Lincolnshire and a housing estate in sunny Scunthorpe. Why? To see a bird of course. A White-crowned Black Wheatear, potentially only the second ever in this country. Turned out to have come all the way from... its cage two roads away, where an 80 year old man kept a bewildering array of bird species, none of which belong in a cage.

It was not an entirely wasted journey as it was a good chance to catch up with lots of my loonier birding friends.

Sunday 3rd December 2017

Bit of a lie-in.

Overnight we lost one of the monster chicks. It was much smaller than the rest, so no surprise really. The others are going strong. They eat and drink constantly! Have now opened their pen so they can wander a little and meet the other poultry - they'll have to learn to stand on their own two feet a bit more.


And now for the big surprise. We have a Christmas tree, a real one, a 10 foot whopper of a one!
Well it was sold to us as a Christmas tree, but I view it firmly as a Solstice celebration tree. I don't do Christmas.
I'm not sure Sue will let me take it down on 22nd December though, or let me open my presents on 21st 😉

Even better we got it for a tenner straight from the ground and only a couple of miles down the road in our nearest village. A couple had recently moved in and wanted to convert an area over for their horses. Hence the need to get rid of the trees which a previous owner had planted as foot high post-Christmas pound-a-tree items from the local garden centre.

The journey home was a bit dodgy but we made it.

I have to admit that decorating the tree was actually quite good fun and it will bring joy and celebration to the farmhouse as the shortest day approaches. Here is the final product.

The day was capped off with excellent, cloud-free views of December's Supermoon.

It was too big to fit on my blog properly!!!

You CAN have your cake and eat it.

Friday 24th November 2017

Black Friday.

I don't often get political on this blog, but I am actually a person with very strong beliefs.

Here's my tweet about Black Friday.

Black Friday is so depressing. Is the whole world now indoctrinated to consume endlessly until the earth is completely screwed? Exponential 'growth' is not sustainable.

As I write this, I'm still getting promotional emails informing me Black Friday isn't over yet. It's Wednesday now!!! As if the concept wasn't bad enough in the first place.

Saturday 25th November

A Sliding Carrot Cake
Finally got round to making my solstice cake today. I don't do Christmas. Solstice is pretty much where it all came from anyway and seems a much more relevant celebration given my lifestyle.
The cake is a spiced orange rich fruit cake.
While in baking mode I made a carrot cake with some carrots freshly harvested from the veg plot.
For tomorrow is the Grow Your Own group get-together and I need something to take along for bring and share food.

During the day news came through of an interesting bird at Staines Reservoirs in West London. I decided to go for it first thing in the morning 'on the way to Lakenheath' where I was due at the get-together at noon.
So in freezing temperatures and a cold northerly wind I gingerly carried the carrot cake to the car, hoping it would survive the extended journey. It didn't even survive the walk to the car as the top layer insisted on sliding off the lower one.
There was only one solution to this. Just take one layer and keep the other for myself!
Seems you can have your cake and eat it.

Sunday 26th November

Lakenheath, via Staines!
Grow Your Own Group at midday in Lakenheath.

Just time to nip to London first to see a Horned Lark at the oh so salubrious Staines Reservoirs

and then Santon Downham in Breckland to see a flock of Parrot Crossbills.
At Staines we had to peer through the railings as the Horned Lark grovelled around quite distantly on the concrete bank of the reservoir. In the UK these are known as Shorelarks, a bird which appears in small flocks on our sandy shores every winter. They are a delightful bird worth a special trip to see every winter. But this individual was one of the North American races, a solitary bird on an inland reservoir. It is a potential tick in the future in the rapidly developing world of DNA and species assignment. But for now it was just a very nice bird to see. Apologies for the photo quality. It never came very close.



Then it was on towards Lakenheath for the Grow Your Own group get-together. I just had time for a short diversion into Breckland to Santon Downham where a flock of Parrot Crossbills had been seen a couple of times. I only had half an hour to spare so was lucky when, just a couple minutes after arriving, the whole flock flew noisily over my head. It was several hours since they had been reported.

They just carried on going over a clearing and disappearing over the trees, but fortunately three birds had split from the group and were perched at the top of some pines. They are like a cross between a Crossbill and a Parrot, hence the name. They snip whole cones off the trees to extract the seed with their secateurs like bills.

Then it was on to the get together and a very pleasant afternoon with friends. I started the group four years ago and it has proved most successful, but today I handed over the reins. I will still be part of the group but I have a couple of new ventures in development. More later.

Monday 27th November 2017

I can do cold.

I'm not a great fan of wet.

I've learned to quite like the wind - I think putting on a few stone in weight has helped with this one as it makes me more stable.

But I don't do cold, wet and windy.

So today I mostly stayed in and caught up with stuff on the computer, like my blog posts!

The chicks we got are still going strong. They have survived a few frosty nights now, so fingers crossed for them. They eat ravenously and make a lot of mess, so I think at the weekend I will let them out of their pen to wander more widely.