The summer time of my life

20th July 2016
50! How did that happen? I am 50 years old!
I used to say I still felt 20 in my mind and about 70 in my body but I think that's changed a little now. I think I think a little more old these days, so maybe 30 in my mind, though some would say more like 6! And that's partially true too, which is why I am such a brilliant teacher. I am also starting to benefit from the confidence of age.
As for the 70 in body, to be fair there are days when I feel I can do anything and days when every single inch of my body seems to ache and groan.
I have done a lot in my 50 years on this planet (not that I spent any time before that on another planet, though again some would disagree). I don't intend to do quite so much in the next 50 years, but I do intend to savour and enjoy most of it.
I don't really do birthdays, or any celebrations for that matter, but especially not birthdays. My preference would have been that it pass by largely unnoticed. I got as close to this as was probably possible and celebrated with a quiet meal out with Sue in the evening. I splashed out and went for almost the most expensive thing on the menu but there was no way I was paying an extra £2 for a sauce to go with my fillet steak! That would be too wild a celebration!

There was a better reason for celebration today, for I finished work at midday and I'm not due back in till 1st September.

21st July 2016
Back to normal today.
One of the young chicks in the broody box was clearly not well today. I tried gently holding its beak to the water trough, I placed it under the electric hen to warm up, but as usual when a bird is ill it did not respond. After a couple of hours I decided to end it quickly. Better for the chick and better to remove it from the others too. Five years ago I would have struggled to do this and put it off, but I have hardened up now. I still quietly say sorry and I still have a sad feeling in my heart. Compassion sometimes means being decisive.

The turkey family picking through the cut grass

With the protracted spell of summer proper, I took advantage and started mowing the lawns. They've got out of control again and the mower needs a new blade so it was slow work. I just mowed paths through the sward to allow the air in and the grass to dry a little.

This year's lambs in the foreground

Next job on such a fine day was another chemical attack on those nasty nettles and thistles. I've left a few patches for the wildlife, but any others that spring up need to be dealt with harshly, particularly since I seem to have become very reactive to nettle stings, an almost daily occurrence which needs nipping in the bud. I resprayed the electric fence line too. This tactic seems to be working well. I'd rather not use any spray but needs must. Physically controlling the weeds and the growth under the fence are not possible on this scale. I use minimum sprays and just about everything else I do on the smallholding is pretty much for the benefit of wildlife.

That's shallot of shallots!
Last year's stored onions have come to an end now and this year's are not quite ready. It's not looking like a great crop coming so thank goodness for the shallots, which were ready to harvest today after a few sunny days to dry them out.

Lady Penelope, Single Parent
There was still time to lop some of the trees along the boundary. The branches go to the sheep who love stripping off the leaves and the bark. Nothing goes to waste here. It was while I was doing this that I spotted Lady Penelope Peacock and she was accompanied by a single poult, now large enough to be showing a clear crest. I had not seen her for a couple of weeks and was fearing for her.

The days are long now so I can get stacks done when I'm off work. But darkness still comes in the end and todays dusk brought with it a calling Little Owl in the old ash trees and a calling Barn Owl, a nice combo.

22nd July 2016
Chicken in a basket box
Every day now I move the Ixworth chicks outside into a large dog cage on the lawn and every night they go back into the garage under the heat lamp. The accommodation en route is cosy!

Bad service
I finally managed to get through to someone to order a spare rotavator belt and mower blade. It's taken three phone calls and two ignored emails to finally get someone who didn't pass the problem on to an empty phone extension. It took 18 minutes on the phone and I'm not confident I've moved much further forwards despite the promises. It's a shame as Abbey Garden Sales have provided me with good service in the past but I am now starting to see the reasons for other people's bad reviews.

Harvest news
The first tomatoes are ready in the polytunnel and they are looking good! These are Black Cherry, Gardener's Delight, Golden Sunrise and Honybee.

There were more raspberries to be had today too. It really is a good crop this year. Delving a little deeper in the polytunnel, I came across a couple of yellow courgettes I'd missed. Here they are dwarfing the first cucumber of the year!



Some crops are already over though. Sue went out to do one final pick of the yellow mangetout plants but they were going over so the geese got a few. We've got  loads in the freezer already along with the green ones from the tunnel. Fortunately I managed to stop Sue in time to leave a few plants still standing. These are a heritage variety and I want to save the seed.

You know those jobs you keep putting off because you just know something's going to go wrong and you wish you'd never started? Well today I plugged the ride-on mower into the charger. If the battery charges up then I've just got to persuade it to start for the first time this year and to keep going. Reliability has never been my Mountfield mower's strongest point. If it had a name it would be called Flimsy!

And finally my nature note for today.
There have been strange calls coming from the ash trees for the last couple of days. In the past these calls have had me stumped, but now I recognise them as the calls of young Green Woodpeckers. Today I was lucky enough to see one of them perched out in the open on a branch next to its parent. They have timed it incredibly well, for today was also the day the ants came out. Every year they find their way into the house and swarm all over the windows. The delights of countryside living.

23rd July 2016
Harvest speeds up
Minipops
Some of the sweetcorn in the polytunnel is going absolutely bananas. In fact it actually resembles a banana plantation in there. The outdoor crop isn't far behind either.
Surprisingly the biggest plants belong to the variety Minipop. This is a corn grown for its baby cobs. You don't get a huge harvest but it adds variety and is a high value crop.
It is ready to pick as soon as the tassles appear. No need to wait for them to be pollinated. In the polytunnel I am also growing normal sweetcorn, so I actually removed the male flowers from the top of the minipop plants today so they wouldn't cross-pollinate the other variety. Hopefully this won't stem the flow of min cobs.
A word of caution here. Parts of the plant would appear to be razor sharp! A couple of slashes across my fingers are testament to this.



Anyway, after much dehusking (great material for the compost heap) I ended up with 26 baby corns to go in the freezer. There are a lot more to come too.
Gooseberry gazumped!
I moved on to harvesting the last of the gooseberries ... except they were all gone! Something had got to them first. Oh well. Not to worry. Next year I'll pick them all when they are harder and sharper. That's the best quality about gooseberries anyway.
Champion.
I moved on again, this time to the peas. I've not grown conventional peas for a few years now because of the pea moth which has a nasty habit of depositing maggots inside the pods. But this year I am trialling an old-fashioned tall pea, Champion of England. I sowed it late, at the end of April, in an attempt to avoid the period when the moth lays its eggs. Today the first plump pods were ready for picking. As ever with fresh peas they tasted amazing, little globes of summer sweetness. As this is a climbing variety they should crop over a longer period which means I can graze them rather than harvesting the whole lot at once.

Saving the Tomatoes
Another of the outdoor crops is under serious threat though. For it was only a matter of time before the potato blight spread to the tomatoes. A couple of the leaves were showing the first signs of attack today. It was time for another major prune of the toms anyway, so I removed all of the lower leaves and any sideshoots. I weeded thoroughly around the plants and tied them to their supports. The whole idea is to reduce the amount of foliage through which the blight spores can attack the plant while at the same time maximising air flow around the plants. I then mixed up a bicarbonate spray and thoroughly soaked every plant. I will repeat this once weekly for a while and with a bit of luck I might just save my outdoor tomato crop.
Outdoor tomatoes are always a huge risk and more often than not they fail. It doesn't matter too much as there are plenty coming from the greenhouse, but a bumper crop once in a while is good for stocking up the freezers with tomato sauce.

With daylight still left I started painting the garage, beginning with a first applicaton of creosote to the wood. Proper creosote is wonderful. I love the smell. It is not as nasty as people make out. In fact, one of the main reasons it's use was severely limited by the EU was to do with a very low cancer risk under specific circumstances. I get the feeling this is more about protecting large corporations rather than for any environmental reasons.

Today's nature notes
The swallow's nest in the chicken feed shed is wonderful, for it is at head level. I can raise the phone above my head and get a great view of the inside. It has been empy for a while now, but today I noticed two eggs inside. It seems they are going for another brood. Wonderful news! I counted another four active nests inside the stables today too.






Dark Daggers
Down in the chicken pen I found a small group of rather splendid caterpillars on a plum tree today. I took photos and then scoured the internet to identify them. I eventually identified them as belonging to the Dark Dagger moth. It has a great name but is actually very drab, unlike its glamorous larvae.

In between Unst and Uist

Finally back from Unst, Shetland, two days after seeing the Green Warbler

I missed basket weaving at the weekend but

Sue made this lovely fish to hang over the veg patch pond.

You can see too the reflection of one of the

willow dragonflies she made.

17th May
Mangetout picked again. Growing it in the polytunnel has been brilliant. We get a basket full every other day. I've underplanted it with sweetcorn and squash now, so once those get bigger it'll be whipped out just in time to continue harvesting from the outdoor plants.

I separated the last two lambs from their mums this morning. Weaning the lambs is a big step for them but they all seem to be doing ok on their own, there's just quite a lot of loud bleating at the moment! The one looking up at the camera is Rameses. He's given up asking us for his bottle feed now.

Finally we have a third gosling. I don't get goose nest sitting strategy. Unlike other birds, they seem to lay in each others' nests, all sit on each others' eggs, sometimes two on one nest and the eggs seem to hatch one at a time and very unpredictably. I did find one egg rolled away from the nest which had a full grown chick inside. There always seems to be a major issue for goslings cracking their way out.

18th May
I don't often moan, but today was a really crappy day. Work things. Best forgotten about. Maybe if the government set an example and valued teachers (not to mention doctors, nurses...) then parents might too. At least I've got things like this to come home to.

and this...

19th May
Lawns mowed, flower mixes sown.
The hen we put on ten chicken eggs a while back has done a hopeless job of sitting. Today I found her with yolk on her feathers and when I looked in the broody coop there are now only five eggs! What's more, they seem to have rolled all over the place so I'll be surprised if we get any hatch at all.
We'll start collecting the Ixworth eggs and try out the new incubator we bought a while back. It's more intensive for us but should give a bit better result.
20th May
I really struggle to grow sunflowers. Occasionally they spring up randomly round the garden, which I like, but when I sow them straight in the ground they either don't germinate or get eaten before they get a chance to get going. So instead I plant them in modules and plant them out when they're about a foot tall. I planted some at the back end of last week in amongst the mangel wurzels, where I also planted my sweetcorn today. But something ate most of them! To be honest, I suspect the peacock, as I know last year I had to protect my sweetcorn plants from the girl.
Anyway, it's a slower process but I've put tree protectors round the sunflowers and then netted the whole bed until everything gets growing really well.

On a different note, I'm pretty sure we have Ash dieback on the farm. It'll hopefully take a long time to impact on the old trees but some of the young saplings have completely died. Others though, are shooting healthy branches from the base again, so we'll see what happens with that one. I'm currently planting lots of quick growing trees and shrubs such as elder and willow as well as allowing hawthorns to self seed.

21st May
Sue was busy with her bees most of the day. She had to check if the rape honey they've collected had begun to set, as if you leave it too long it turns concrete. In the afternoon she attended another of the West Norfolk group's excellent training courses.
I meantime had a big day in the veg garden, only interrupted several times by the odd one of Sue's angry bees. Mostly I just got pestered but I did endure one sting to the head. I knew this one was going to sting by the buzzing which was more than just inquisitive. Hopefully next month Sue will be able to change the queens and passify the buy little Amazonians!

Back to the veg. I sowed all my climbing beans in pots - Borlotti, Armstrong, Gigantes, Kentucky Wonder Wax, Cobra and Pea Bean. I prefer climbing beans as they use vertical space and give form to the garden. They are also easier to pick, don't hang on the ground getting dirty and chewed by slugs, and crop over a longer period. They also dry better at the end of the season.

My carrot bed had completely disappeared beneath emerging marigold seedlings! But once I did some careful hoeing, there was actually a visible line of carrots and one of spring onions. Carrots seem to be extremely unpredictable so ay crop will be deemed a success. I've got them growing in a fleece frame this year so hopefully I'll get to enjoy my crop rather than simple feeding carrot fly larvae. The unpredictability of carrots is summed up by the fact that the line of Atomic Red I planted outside seem to have failed yet in the polytunnel the same seeds have all come through. It can't be that conditions outside are terrible as the other variety has come well. I just don't understand it.
Anyway, I have optimistically sowed more line of carrots and more lettuces to keep the succession going.

While I had the hoe out I uncovered the turnip and kohl rabi bed. It is apparent that all the seedling have been munched by flea beetles. The two plants which had got past them I decided to hoe up so I could start over. Maybe sowing later will have better luck, but just in case I'm sowing I modules tto so I can transplant when the plants are large enough to outgrow the chewing little insects.
I've also interplanted the rows with tagetes seedlings (French marigolds) as this has worked in the past. These pretty flowers smell strongly and are avoided by most creepy crawlies. Unfortunately they are tender, so I raise trays of them in the polytunnel to plant out about now when we should be frost free. This does mean that they can't protect early sowings though.

And lastly, I've taken my first harvest of new potatoes from the polytunnel. Here is the product of just one plant in the basket I made last week. They're not as small as they look - it's a big basket!

We literally stopped using the stored potatoes last week - they have started to soften and to sprout a lot. This means that our potatoes now last us right through the year.

Coming next: Going Completely Cuckoo on North Uist

RIP Terry The Turkey :-(

I've decided to try a slightly different format for my blog posts from now on. At this time of year I'm incredibly busy with sowing, mowing and growing... and that's not to mention looking after all the animals. At the end of the day I'm often just too whacked to keep up with the blog. So I've decided to go over to a diary style blog with occasional longer posts devoted to one subject. That way I get to keep a record of everything I do on the smallholding (and you get a true sense of everything that is involved). Hopefully I'll catch up with myself within a week or two.
22nd April
The broad beans are finally up. I used seed collected from last year and it's always an interminably long wait for them to poke their heads up. I don't plant in the autumn like many do as I don't see the point in such an early start. Besides, if the cold and wet didn't get them, the chickens sure would!
One of our Muscovy girls has started sitting already. I did read that they were very prolific, but she can only just have had time to lay enough eggs before plonking herself down on them.
She's in the corner of the big chicken house.
Two nights ago I got fantastic views of a Short-eared Owl hunting down in the young woodland I have planted. This is an infrequent visitor to the farm and must be on its way back to its breeding grounds. Anyway, tonight it was back again, swooping into the grass hunting voles. Unfortunately I've not seen the barn owls for a while now, not since the farmer who bought the field grubbed up all the scrub in the corner where the barn owl box is. As he did this during the breeding season, it's odds on the owls will have abandoned their nest. Let's hope they return.

23rd April
I'm trying Mangetout outside again this year, but I've bought a variety called Golden Sweet which has yellow pods. Hopefully they'll be easier to spot when harvest time comes around. I constructed a frame for them to grow up made of bamboo sticks interwoven with semi-dry willow which I harvested from around the farm during the winter and I planted them out this morning. I raised them in pots in the polytunnel and have been hardening them off for a couple of days. I prefer not to plant straight out as I've lost them all in the past, either to voles, slugs or pigeons. I've planted them close to a large water butt too so I can prevent them becoming too dry.
I also sowed some Salsify and Scorzonera today. Closely related, these plants have very different roots. The scorzonera has been sown in some of my new 'mini-permaculture' beds as this plant is a perennial and if the roots don't develop enough in the first year they can be harvested at the end of next year instead. If they were sown in with the root crops, that space would be needed by potatoes next year.
Next to them I sowed some Sokol Breadseed Poppies. These should give a harvest of white poppy seeds, as well as a fine display of flowers. The seed heads don't have holes around the edge so the seeds are easily collected.

24th April
Time to sow the sweetcorn. This year I have 100 sweetcorn seeds. I am growing a supersweet variety again. The past two years my sweetcorn harvest has been disappointing after rats moved out of the fields before the corn was ripe enough to harvest. So this year I'll be growing some in the polytunnel and some further from the field edge in my main vegetable plot. I'm planning to undersow it with my prize mangel wurzels!
I'm also giving Minipop another go. This is harvested for miniature cobs before the tassels develop and hence before pollination. Therefore it shouldn't cross pollenate with the maincrop, which would risk spoiling it.
25th April
I have started some cucumbers off earlier than normal this year and this evening I took the plunge and planted three seedlings into the polytunnel beds. I grow Burpless Tasty Green - it's the bulk standard variety but serves me very well indeed when grown in the tunnel. I have tried others but found the yield inferior and the skin tougher. I will grow my cucumbers in two or three batches to extend the harvest period.
26th April
Mangel Wurzels and Finch Seed Mix.
Today I got a very big sowing job done. I have a 'spare veg patch' away from the main one, where I grow tougher crops which require more space. The soil is heavy clay here and pretty compacted, having been arable in the past. One quarter of this area is reserved for fodder crops. They only make a small donation to the animal food bill, but are a top up treat in the winter. I grow mostly Mangel Brigadier, but have sown some Yellow Eckendorff too. In all I sowed 1400 seeds, two every 15 inches or so!
Another quarter is, for the first time this year, reserved for the wild birds. I have sown a finch and bunting seed mix which should help out some of our disappearing farmland birds during the winter and early spring. Luckily this mix was simply broadcast and lightly turned in with the rotavator.
27th April

Hail and snow today and some pretty tasty thunderstorms. So I spent much of the evening in the polytunnel. I potted up all my tomato plants. These are the ones to go outside, always a bit of a gamble in our climate but I'm determined to manage them properly this year, taking off lower leaves and nipping sideshoots to give them the best chance of ripening and avoiding blight.
While I was potting up, I pricked out the celeriac seedlings too. Some of these won't be ready till late next winter so I don't want to hold up their growth even one little bit.
The storms obviously grounded a few migrant birds as my first Whitethroat for the year was calling scratchily from the dyke and a Chiffchaff was calling from the ash trees.

28th April

What a terrible start to the day. Sue was up at a ridiculously early hour and came back in to tell me that she thought Terry The Turkey had been killed. Terry is, or was, our turkey stag, a gentle giant who followed me everywhere. Only yesterday he had been stomping around in the kitchen with me. Up to now he had led a charmed life, firstly surviving Christmas and now settled with a wife and poults on the way. I went outside to investigate, but it was clear from the trail of feathers that something awful had happened. We had given up putting the pair of turkeys in housing at nights since they started roosting in random places. I often got a face full of flapping wing when I tried to move them. We've only ever lost one goose and a couple of guinea fowl to the fox, so this was a bit of a shock. He may even have died trying to protect his hen, who has been sat on her nest in the planter at the front of the house and only has 2 days to go until the chicks hopefully hatch out.

One Lonely Sister - Disheartened by the Sweetcorn

I have written about the Three Sisters system of growing before.
For those who missed it, here's a quick resume.
Grow sweetcorn, squashes and climbing beans together. They all have different needs for light and nutrients and all help each other. It is a system used by Native American Indians.

Of course, it is very trendy, especially when you select Cherokee Trail of Tears beans to grow, for this makes it sound even more authentic. While Cherokees are, reportedly, a good bean to grow, so are many other French beans. I prefer Cobra, which sounds pretty authentic in a desert context, though it of course inhabits the other India!

But this system of companion growing is designed to use the same land year after year in a completely different climate and soil type to what we experience in Britain. I have tried it and it does not work for me. The beans never do well, or if you plant them too much earlier than the corn then the corn never makes it. So I have been sticking to Two Sisters growing. Small groups of corn with pumpkins and squashes rambling in between. It has worked well, except that in cooler years, or if the sweetcorn gets off to a slow start, the cobs are not ripe before the wheat field next door is harvested.

The result is disheartening to say the least. I'm not sure if it's the rats or the field mice (I suspect a bit of both, and maybe a bit of rabbit thrown in), but they devastate the crop before it is ripe enough to harvest. They even have the nerve to chew through the husk material to see if the corn is ripe. If not, they leave it till later, irrevocably damaged.

Looking on the bright side, at least we've enough sweetcorn in the freezer from last year that we won't run out. Even if we do, we've plenty more vegetables to choose from. That's the nature of growing your own. Every year some things go mad while others disappoint. Just look at my courgette failure this year for a good example.

On the other bright side, Rambo is enjoying the corn leaves and the stem and roots will go back into the soil and give it body.

And on the third bright side, the squashes seem to be coming good and nothing seems to eat them.

But next year the already depleted Two Sisters will be going down to One Lonely Sister. I am going to experiment with a new variety of sweetcorn, allegedly a supersweet, non-hybrid variety which ripens early. But to be on the safe side, I shall again be growing some in the polytunnel and the rest in my mixed vegetable beds outside, away from the field and in the more protected environs of the main veg plot.

Sweetcorn at risk from a plague of rodents?

Every year I give you a photo of a huge combine harvester looming out of the dust and rumbling past the edge of our garden. Well not this year, for the air was still and the combine was for some reason much quieter.
Before I knew it, the wheat field next to us looked like this.

 The very next day it looked like this.

Nowhere to hide

Last year this spelled curtains for my sweetcorn crop. We quickly harvested what was ripe, but the rest got devoured overnight by field mice and/or rats, which flee the openness of the freshly cut field dodging the watchful eyes of kestrels and buzzards, and head straight onto our farm.

A kestrel and a rook captured in the skies above the
newly harvested field. Rooks are uncommon on the farm.

Last year five traps in the polytunnel caught five field mice the morning after the straw was baled up. It's not nice and they are beautiful creatures, but I have to do something to protect my crops. So two days ago had me rushing about setting mouse traps and laying rat poison (if you hit them hard straight away, it saves much bigger problems later on and minimises the amount of poison getting into the ecosystem).
This is not pretty stuff, but it is part of the reality of rural life.

So this morning I rushed out to check the traps and to check my sweetcorn, for it has been slow this year and none of it is yet ready for harvest. Just one vole in the polytunnel, which may explain the nibbled carrot tops I found yesterday and so far no damage to the sweetcorn. We'll see what happens over the next couple of days. Fingers crossed.

Sweetcorn decimated

Just a quick one. Thank goodness we harvested these when we did.



192 sweetcorn cobs in a wheelbarrow

For, although some of them had not had sufficient time to properly ripen, they certainly ended up better than these....

















As predicted, the harvesting of the fields drove the rats across the dyke, with catastrophic results for the sweetcorn. Fortunately, they don't touch any of the other crops. Besides, they've started taking the bait I put down, so the problem should soon be eradicated.


Sweetcorn Salome

The sweetcorn this year has performed slightly oddly. The cobs have swelled and ripened well, but the plants themselves are rather stumpy. The result is that many of the cobs are low down on the plants, within reach of anything that decides to take a nibble.

In the past I have grown my sweetcorn in a 'three sisters' method. This involves growing three crops in one area, corn, squashes (including pumpkins and courgettes) and climbing beans. They are supposed to complement each other in terms of nutritional needs, light and shade. That may work perfectly well in the desert climate where the native American Indians used it, but here in the fens the beans don't seem to do so well in this system.
So this year I tried three different methods of growing my corn.

The first was to grow them in blocks - it is important not to grow sweetcorn in single rows as it is wind-pollinated.
The second was to grow them in stations, 4 sweetcorns, squash, 4 sweetcorns, squash...
The third was to grow a square of 9 corn plants under a wigwam of beans, surrounded by several courgette plants.

In the end, the first two methods did the best. For some reason, those in the third system never got mature enough. Looking back on it, I think they may have gone in a bit later than the others. The beans got nowhere.

So, the conclusion to my experiments is that it does not really matter which pattern you grow it in, as long as it is not in single rows! It does make sense, however, to grow squashes underneath, as the plants quickly creep along the ground between the corn plants and their leaves shade the ground nicely, keeping in the moisture and shading out the weeds.

One reason why my sweetcorn plants were a bit stumpy this year may be that I kept them in modules a little too long. I also used a different supplier, as my original seed supplier stopped stocking my favourite variety, Sweetcorn Lark. I doubt the change of supplier had much to do with anything.

So, when the field next door was harvested a few days ago, I was keen to gather in the corn cobs, for the invading rats are more than capable of climbing a corn plant to reach the succulent cobs, not that they'd need to climb very high this year.
Most of the cobs were nicely swollen and the tassels had turned brown, so in theory they should be ready. However, in this country sweetcorn needs a long growing season to get enough sunshine and I had squeezed this at both ends of the season. I sent Sue in to test one of the cobs and it was deliciously sweet and ripe.

192 sweetcorn cobs in a wheelbarrow

We then set about the task of harvesting 192 sweetcorn cobs. Some plants had two or even three cobs, but others we left unharvested in the hope that they would swell and ripen further.

Not many to go

I lugged the wheelbarrow full of cobs up to the house and set about stripping (the cobs). To be honest, some of them could have done with an extra couple of weeks on the plant as they had not fully ripened, but we had to balance that against the risk of them being nibbled. Also, if they are left on the plant too long they can go too starchy. Harvesting on a large scale becomes more tricky once the summer holidays are over too.
Some of the cobs had developed patchily. I guess this is down to not being well pollinated.
In the end we got nearly 150 cobs though. We put them whole into the freezer. No blanching. This has always worked well for us and should keep us supplied with delicious corn cobs throughout the year, until next August and the next harvest.

In fact, we've got enough for Sue to make some sweetcorn relish and the rejects, the unripe and patchy ones, well let's say that the chickens were very grateful indeed.

Stripping back 192 corn cobs, the mind wanders. So I leave you with a somewhat quirky version of the dance of the seven veils. Sweetcorn Salome!